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Gramma -- Alison Mcmahan: Verbal-Visual-Virtual: a Muddy History

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Gramma -- Alison Mcmahan: Verbal-Visual-Virtual: a Muddy History Gramma -- Alison McMahan: Verbal-Visual-Virtual: A MUDdy History http://genesis.ee.auth.gr/dimakis/Gramma/7/03-Mcmahan.htm Verbal-Visual-Virtual: A MUDdy History Alison McMahan In his book, The Rise of the Network Society, Manuel Castells approaches the idea of a networked society from an economic perspective. He claims that “Capitalism itself has undergone a process of profound restructuring”, a process that is still underway. “As a consequence of this general overhauling of the capitalist system…we have witnessed… the incorporation of valuable segments of economies throughout the world into an interdependent system working as a unit in real time… a new communication system, increasingly speaking a universal, digital language” (Castells 1). Castells points out that this new communications system and the concomitant social structure has its effects on how identity is defined. The more networked we are, the more priority we attach to our sense of individual identity; “societies are increasingly structured around a bipolar opposition between the Net and the Self ” (3). He defines networks as follows: A network is a set of interconnected nodes. A node is the point at which a curve intersects itself. What a node is, concretely speaking, depends on the kind of concrete networks of which we speak. Networks are open structures, able to expand without limits, integrating new nodes as long as they are able to communicate within the network…. A network-based social structure is a highly dynamic, open system, susceptible to innovating without threatening its balance. [The goal of the network society is] the supersession of space and the annihilation of time. (469-470) Castells’ claim that we now live in an information society is based on the change he perceives in the balance between nature and culture. For millennia nature dominated culture. With the Industrial Revolution Culture came to dominate Nature (which didn’t free us from the oppressions of Nature). Now we are entering a new era, in which culture refers to culture. Another way to explain this progression is to use the terms for social stages: wilderness, village, city, and oppressive city. Wilderness is what Castells refers to as Nature over Culture; Village represents the transition from Nature over Culture to Culture over Nature; and City, its accomplishment. Oppressive City is the dystopic view of Culture over Nature. But now we’ve moved to something new, not the power of cities over Nature, but a new era of networked cities, a new era of networks. With his contention that we have reached a new age of Culture over Culture, Castells has indicated that we are in a new social stage, a stage that hasn’t yet been named, but perhaps we could call it the era of Global Networks. Here is how Castells characterised this new social stage: It is the beginning of a new existence, and indeed the beginning of a new age, the information age, marked by the autonomy of culture vis-a-vis the material bases of our existence. But this is not necessarily an exhilarating moment. Because, alone at last in our human world, we shall have to look at ourselves in the 1 of 14 5/19/16, 11:01 AM Gramma -- Alison McMahan: Verbal-Visual-Virtual: A MUDdy History http://genesis.ee.auth.gr/dimakis/Gramma/7/03-Mcmahan.htm mirror of historical reality. And we may not like the vision. (477) It is my contention that MUDs1 are just one of those “mirrors of reality” in which we can see our human reflection. Here is what one of them looked like: It was called PointMOOt, and it was designed by “a hodgepodge of undergrads, doctoral students, and intrigued volunteers” at the Advanced Communications Technologies Laboratory at the University of Texas at Austin (ACTlab) under the supervision of Professor Allucquière Rosanne Stone in the spring of 1993. These “wizards” dreamed of simulating a fully functional society, lodged within the digital recesses of a computer, true in all essential categories to the principles of the real world. They called this dream “reality modelling”: …PointMOOt began as a top-down exercise in social engineering. Citizenry would be anyone who could log on. Located at a fictional west Texas cross roads, Point MOOt boasted a university, several strip malls, and a TV station. Cafes, bars, and restaurants lined the streets. Trailer parks and tenement buildings, hospitals and churches, PointMOOt had everything a healthy city requires. To live in PointMOOt you needed money, called quota, or more popularly, MOOlah. To get MOOlah, you went to one of the bureaucrat bots and signed up for a job. Most of the jobs consisted of building onto the city using MOO code, which was simplified programming language, but many casual citizens found that too intimidating. However, this was west Texas, so they also didn’t want to sign up for welfare with the welfare bot. So the wizards, in an effort to avoid the creation of wealthy moo programmers and disenfranchised other citizens, created a Barney spewing machine in the hidden tunnels under PointMOOt. The machine would spew out men dressed in purple dinosaur suits that would go through town singing the Barney song, picking locks and generally annoying people. If you kicked one it broke into 5 pieces and each piece regenerated into another Barney. But if you got a Barney blaster from the bounty hunter bot then you could shoot it dead and get one unit of MOOlah in exchange for the severed Barney head. Unemployment problems solved. Somehow or other, people discovered a few things about the Barneys. In addition to their normal reproduction, (being spewed out of the machine), it was discovered that Barneys could be impregnated, and it would give birth to another Barney that had your name included in its code. Also, if you started feeding a Barney, it went on a feeding frenzy until it blew up, and all the pieces became Barneys, which then went on feeding frenzies. As a result of such antics PointMOOt would occasionally be overrun by a plague of Barneys, until eventually PointMOOt had to be shut down. (Leonard 1-10) Andrew Leonard tells us this story as a basis for his warnings about bots in general. A bot is a supposedly intelligent software program that is autonomous (they can work without direct human supervision) and is endowed with personality (it is anthropomorphized, which is not to be confused with artificial intelligence) and usually, but not always, performs a service. Leonard expects bots to eventually run amok, like the Golem that was supposed to protect the Jews of Prague, seen by some as a progenitor of bots. I don’t share Leonard’s dystopic thinking. I repeat his story to introduce you to the basic concept of MUDs (and MOOs, like PointMOOt). MUDs are communities online, they contain bots as well as avatars (the constructed digital personalities that mask other players), and they are laid out along spatial principles, making the “map” of the world (and it is rare that a MUD will provide you with an accurate map) a crucial part of its structure. This is what all MUDs have in common; apart from this they can be very different. I have been using the terms MUDs, which is the basic, classificatory term, but there are many types of MUDs, types that have names like MOOs, MUCKs, MUSHes, and so on. The three main types are: basic MUDs, in which player “killing” is allowed, MUSHes, in which player killing is not allowed, and MOOs, in which players can create rooms and build props that can be used by everyone. These three classifications represent different kinds of software programming used to build the MUD. Most MUDs are text based, meaning they read like a hypertext novel, but MUDs are gradually becoming graphic (the best known graphic MUDs are Ultima Online and Realms) and there are virtual reality MUDs that are explored in CAVEs (rooms with 3D digital projection on four or six walls from which the visitor can explore 2 of 14 5/19/16, 11:01 AM Gramma -- Alison McMahan: Verbal-Visual-Virtual: A MUDdy History http://genesis.ee.auth.gr/dimakis/Gramma/7/03-Mcmahan.htm cyberspace). However in this paper I focus on text based MUDs, still the best known and most easily accessible (one usually has to pay a monthly membership fee to play in a graphic MUD). There are already more MUDs out there than can be counted, and each one claims the loyalty of hundreds of players. And MUDs demand quite a bit of loyalty: it takes a minimum of about eight hours to get used to the basic gameplay, and then hundreds of hours more to completely explore a single MUD universe and, if you’re lucky, achieve the rank of wizard, or immortal, that is, a level of game play where you can add to the spaces of the MUDs and create new quests and new monsters. History of MUDs Where did all of these MUDs come from? Conceptually speaking, from the fantasy worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien, and, to a lesser extent, of C.S. Lewis. Let’s start with Tolkien. John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born in 1892, the son of an English merchant working in South Africa. His father died when he was still an infant and his mother returned with her sons to England. After serving in WWI–an experience which would colour his later writings–he taught for a while at Leeds and then went back to Oxford where he was Rawlinson and Bosworth professor of Anglo-Saxon for twenty years and was then elected Merton professor of English Language and Literature.
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