Learn how one of the first virtual worlds ballooned into a real-life nightmare,

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The following tale of surprising successes and fabulous failures was excerpted from Pavel Curtis' article "Not Just a Game: How LambdaMOO Came to Exist and What It Did to Get Back at Me," published in "High Wired: On the Design, Use, and Theory of Educational Moos" edited by Cynthia Ann Haynes.
Curtis will appear on Wednesday's episode of "The Screen Savers" to talk about the viability of online communities.
First, some definitions

A computer scientist trips and falls into the MUD
  • I came to the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in the summer of 1983, as a summer intern working on adding static type checking to the Smalltalk programming language. By the time the summer of 1990 rolled along, I had started and was leading the SchemeXerox project in the Computer Science Laboratory at PARC. The project ran into some bureaucratic snafus, and I began to spend a lot more time reading NetNews than I had before; I was even willing to consider reading completely off-the-wall new groups whose charters were obscure at best.
  • New newsgroup alt.mud; subscribe? (yes/no) yes
    As I read through the first day's traffic on this new group, a few things quickly became clear:
    1. The discussion was neither about wrestling nor wet dirt.
    2. Everyone who was contributing to the group already understood the subject matter so well that they saw no point in making it clear to anyone else.
    3. Whatever this "MUD" stuff was, approximately half the contributors thought it was a game; the other half vehemently and heatedly disagreed.

  • Over the next few days, I ascertained that MUDs were some kind of software, that people used them together somehow, and that they owed something to older programs like Adventure and Zork. Remembering the purely textual but evocative puzzles of Zork, clearly the product of wicked, twisted imaginations that I admired very highly, I became even more interested in tracking down these descendent MUD programs. It took, I think, over a week before someone on the newsgroup finally let slip enough information for me to connect to one of these worlds.
  • Apparently, there were other people using the program at the same time, and it was possible for them to talk to one another! You can easily imagine my surprise the first time someone "teleported" into the same "room" and started talking with me; I almost embarrassed myself further by mistaking them for a cleverly programmed "robot"! This program, this place, this virtual world was created by the very same people who were currently visiting it, along with a great number of others. Anybody who came there and explored for long enough was allowed to create more!
  • After disconnecting from the MUD, I started tracking down and exploring the FTP sites that contained documentation and source code for the many kinds of MUD servers that existed. As I searched and dissected these sites, I discovered to my disappointment that MUDs were, at least in the main, not really programmable at all; there were various commands for building and for setting the messages on the objects, but pretty much all of the actual behavior was fixed and unchangable by the users.
  • I finally came across two exceptions to this rule, two MUD programs that were almost entirely programmable by the users. The first of these was very disappointing from a designer's point of view, being very error-prone and difficult to use reliably. The second one, though, was different; it was reasonably straightforward and reliable, and it had a simple but powerful object-oriented programming model. There was this student from Waterloo, one Stephen White, who had created it; he called it "MOO."


Next page: From MOO to LambdaMOO in Four Easy Months


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