Once a Venue for Fantasy/Role-playing Games, Muds, Moos, and Muses Are Now Environments for Collaboration in Education, Business, and Research.
Michael Swaine
YOU'RE IN A COLD, DANK ROOM -- the kind of room only a game designer could love. The floor is littered with cast-off swords and amulets dropped by a thousand game-obsessed college sophomores. The smell of burnt CPU cycles pervades the space. Through the archway ahead, you see new environments for collaborative work, and through the casement window, you glimpse innovative models of education.
You have entered the world of MUDs, Internet-based games in which players explore an imaginary environment by typing commands such as "go north" and "examine scroll." Against all logic, these MUDs have become popular locations for business meetings and electronic classrooms.
Beyond D&D. Initially, MUDs were just fantasy/role-playing games, in which players scored points by solving puzzles and killing monsters. Many still are (you can learn about game MUDs in the rec.games.mud newsgroup hierarchy).
But MUD means multiuser dungeon (or dimension, today). Many people can play a MUD simultaneously, and when two players are in the same room, they can interact by typing phrases to one another. It's this possibility for social interaction that has lifted MUDs above their roots in gaming, leading to today's social MUDs, in which the game has (almost) disappeared and the interaction is the whole point.
Meeting in the MUD. Telnet to MediaMOO at telnet://guest@purple-crayon.medi .mit.edu:8888, and observe media researchers at work. Stumble upon a MUD-based educational conference, and watch participants show slides, hold up signs, wink, and stand up to stretch. More and more, researchers and educators are deciding to take their meetings in MUDs.
You can use a Telnet application to access MUDs, although MUD-specific applications, called clients, are better for this purpose. You can get NCSA telnet at ftp://ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Telnet/Mac/. Two Mac MUD clients, MUDWeller and Mudling, are available from ftp://ftp.math.okstate.edu/pub/muds/clients/misc.
MUDs are seeing use in business, where their immediacy and their informality make them good places to get things accomplished. Meeting Space, from World Benders (wb-info@worldbenders.com), sets up a MUD for business communications. And by letting businesspeople create and use MOOs (MUDs, object-oriented) at its Internet site, Metaverse (http://io.com/io/metaverse/) rents virtual office space to virtual corporations.
But why MUDs rather than, say, e-mail or workgroup software? Because MUDs work. When the system administrators at Northeastern University wanted to set up a system to coordinate complex activities among members of their workgroup, they compared various methods: telephone, e-mail, newsgroups, Internet Relay Chat, walkie-talkies, and MUDs. They concluded that no other method met their needs as well as using a MUD. MUDs are real-time, multiuser, and unobtrusive; they produce a record of conversations; and they are extensible.
Collaborative Construction. Extensibility, the ability to add new features, is really possible only if you use a MOO or a MUSE (multiuser simulation environment). These variations on the MUD theme allow the collaborative construction of simulated environments. Even without snazzy graphics, these simulations can often feel startlingly real.
That's what happens to kids in Cyberion City (it's part of MicroMuse, at telnet://guest@michael.ai.mit.edu), where museums and exhibits are meant to be hands-on educational experiences in cyberspace. Other educational experiments are afoot in the MUD: Diversity University, at telnet://moo.du.org:8888, is the beginning of an attempt to construct a real university online.
Tip of the Month
Returning to conventional cyberspace, here's a tip for making addresses more useful. When you include a URL in an e-mail message, a newsgroup post, or your signature file, leave spaces before and after it. That way, others can use ICeTee (included with Peter Lewis' Internet Config package at ftp://amug.org/info-mac/comm/tcp/) to command-click-launch the URL.
Don't Know a MUD from a MUG?
MacUser maintains a list of frequently asked questions (FAQs) about the Internet, MacUser itself, and this column specifically. Send mail to faq@macuser.com. MacUser's address on the World Wide Web is http://www.macuser.ziff.com/~macuser/. You can reach me at traveler@macuser.com.
