Welcome to LambdaMOO, which is not a real place at all but a virtual place in cyberspace. More precisely, it is an address on the Internet. Linked to that address is a computer in Palo Alto, Calif., containing millions of lines of text and computer codes. Most of its inhabitants, who are actually spread from Ohio to Manila, have never met in real life. Their lives in LambdaMOO consist of sitting alone at their computer screens, typing at a furious clip.
LambdaMOO is a form of MUD, or multi-user dungeon. MUDs are text-based, real-time bulletin boards with a built-in theme and structure. Connect to a MUD and you are in Camelot or the tomb of Hatshepsut, ancient Egypt’s only female pharaoh. Or, as in the case with LambdaMOO, a very crowded house.
The first MUD, a computerized version of the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons, was created 15 years ago by students at the University of Essex in England. The concept eventually drifted over to North America and, as the Internet exploded, so did the number of MUDs. Today there are more than 500 worldwide.
LambdaMOO is by far the most popular. The brains behind LambdaMOO belong to Pavel Curtis, a 84-year-old computer scientist at Xerox Corp.’s Palo Alto Research Center, who got interested in “mudding” as a distraction when his own research in computer software hit a lull.
Curtis built on work done by Stephen White, a student at the University of Waterloo, who had added to traditional MUDs the notion of players doing their own program ruing. White built an “object-oriented” language, in which programs are built upon previously defined objects. He called his invention a “MOO,” for mud-object-oriented. Curtis developed White’s work further, and by the time he opened the doors of LambdaMOO, exactly four years ago on Halloween. MUDs had begun to move beyond the “hack and slash” of more traditional computer-based role-playing games into experiments in social interaction and collaborative programming.
Players on LambdaMOO move about the house and grounds, and speak to one another by typing such simple commands as “out” and “say.” With its MOO code, LambdaMOO allows players to create their own objects: a private bedroom containing furniture fashioned out of cobwebs; a shopping cart that serves as a dwelling for a “virtually homeless” woman.
Programming on the MOO, or “building,” can be done by any player. Building includes creating new rooms, linking rooms and creating objects. One player, for instance, whose character is Kilik, a Frisbee-chasing black Labrador, programmed a lavish fireworks display last July 4. Another player began to build a Rube Goldberg device. Others added levers and doors to the machine until it became a truly wacky contraption, complete with blaring trumpets and lemmings in search of high ground. When a virtual version of Mel Torme appeared, the Rube Goldberg contraption carried out a rather brutal execution of the crooner.
This all takes some imagination. LambdaMOO is entirely text based, There are no graphics. Log on to the MOO and what you see is line after line of text scrolling on your computer screen.
Curtis modeled LambdaMOO after his own large, very real house in the hills near Xerox. “I wanted it to be a house, because I liked the homey feel,” he says. “I liked the idea of people sitting around.” Perhaps it is the home metaphor that makes Lambda-MOO so attractive, “People have treated LambdaMOO as a house,” says Sherry Turkle, a sociologist and psychologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “And despite the ‘Animal House’ qualities you see sometimes, the home metaphor has been important for its inhabitants.”
LambdaMOO is indeed a seductive place. Many LambdaMOOers, like MUD denizens in general, are college students with plenty of time on their hands. There are usually up to 200 people connected to LambdaMOO at once, and some of them spend up to 20 hours at a time there. “People go there for different reasons,” says Julian Dibbell, who is writing a book about MUDs. “They go to socialize, or program, and a lot of people end up getting caught up in the politics of it.” Some MOOers simply keep their MOO connections running all day in the background and write programs that alert them when, say, a character they like has connected. Says Dibbell: “There’s a tension for a lot of people between their real life and their MOO life.”
The addictive quality of mudding is a much-discussed topic among Lambda-MOOers. After several months of hard-core MOOing, some players attempt to go cold turkey. One method is to randomly change your password by banging your head against the keyboard, making it impossible to log back on.
MIT’s Turkle, who has a forthcoming book on what she calls “personal identity in a culture of simulation,” describes MUDs as “the most recent computational seduction.” MUDs, Turkle says, are to the 1990s what videogames were to the 1980s. Moreover, Turkle adds, MUDs introduce an element beyond the seduction found in videogames. “MUDs are making an offer that people can’t refuse, which is extreme personalization,” she says. “You actually get to build a sell and an alternate world for that self.”
In Turkle’s view, people use experiences on MUDs to work through real issues in their lives. “The appeal of MUDs has to do with what people are able to express, work through, understand about themselves by doing this, to work through problems in a relatively unconstrained way. It’s a little less strange than it looks.”
Players go to great lengths to create their characters–female, male or neuter, centaur or mermaid. “Whether you’re short or tall, fat or thin, black or white, ugly or beautiful in real life, what determines how you look on Lambda is completely controllable,” says John Fink, a 21-year-old senior at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, who took his LambdaMOO character, Yossarjan, from Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22.” “The anonymity also provides people with a sense of invulnerability.”
Which goes a long way to explaining some of the unpleasant, occasionally vile, incidents that have occurred on Lambda-MOO. Less than two years after its inception, LambdaMOO was already one of the largest MUDs on the Internet-and it became increasingly unruly. Troublemakers would enter the living room and print out the entire contents of Webster’s Dictionary, the digital equivalent of pouring a barrelful of marbles on a dance floor. In early 1993, a virtual rape of two other characters by a male character wielding voodoo dolls took place. The act, though confined entirely to the simulated environment of LambdaMOO, was so hideous and public it generated a MOO-wide debate that continues to this day. In the end, one of the MOO wizards. endowed with the power to do so, “toaded” the perpetrator, which means the character was erased from the system.
It was around this time that a debate over the governance of LambdaMOO was at full tilt. To resolve the matter, Curtis eventually came up with a complex system of government by ballot initiative. So far, the system is working and LambdaMOO has emerged as an intriguing experiment in alternative government. Curtis says it is such developments that make LambdaMOO “meta-fascinating.” “It’s not simply fascinating, but it’s been fascinating every day since I started it four years ago,” he says. “And I find that fact fascinating. It is infinitely changeable, and also unpredictable.”
What Curtis once considered a distraction from his work of programming language design has become his main research project at Xerox. He is nov,, steeped in an experiment called Jupiter, which takes MUDs one step further into the realm of audio and video. Another project at the Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago is working to bring researchers together at a real electron microscope there. and give researchers the ability to use the microscope over the network. “We don’t even call it a MUD,” says Remy Evard, director of technology at Northeastern University’s College of Computer Science, who is working on the Argonne project. “We call it social virtual reality.”
By any name, the technology– that started with the first MUD in England has demonstrated the value of bringing people together. This is perhaps the most important and enduring lesson that MUDs can impart. So if you’re ready for adventure. here’s how to connect to LambdaMOO: from the Inter-net, telnet to lambda.parc.xerox.com 8888. Connect as a guest.
