MUDs and MOOs

First let me start off by letting you know I’ll try to keep this a little shorter than last week’s posting. Sometimes my fingers just get to typing and my brain goes on dump mode. I’ll try to keep it under wraps this week.

It was interesting to spend some time looking at Zork and LamdaMOO. I greatly appreciated the Zork handout; it saved me a lot of time, but more importantly, laid the groundwork that gave me confidence to explore on my own. I took the advice and began mapping my movements and locations which helped me figure out the general idea and layout of the game.

Looking at social interaction in a MOO environment verses others environments that we have studied to date, I observed some big differences. The MOO environment has an extra layer of realism to it that the others environments don’t. Part of this can be explained by the ability to create and interact with artifacts and part can be explained by sensing the presence of others. Being able to manipulate objects and see the consequences from those manipulations adds a completely new dimension to the online experience. How do new users (such as myself) know what to manipulate or how to manipulate the various objects? Doing some research beforehand prepares one to enter LamdaMOO, but certainly questions arise as one is in the environment. I found the other participants to be quite helpful and supportive. As Bruckman states, “MUDs place special emphasis on collaboration, encouraging construction within a social setting.” I certainly found this to be the case. The different level of cooperation between the online environments is huge! If I were to graph my experiences with cooperation in the different environments, it would look something like this….

<-U-------------------------------------------B------F-M-------->

where U is USENET, B is blogs, F is fan fiction, and M is MUDs/MOOs.

Sensing the presence of others also added a great dimension to this experience. Knowing that there was somebody else, right next to me in the same room, was very comforting. If I had a question, I knew all I needed to do was ask. Hopefully I would encounter someone with the same playing style and speech modality as mine. Bartle classified players into four different groups: Achievers, Explorers, Socialisers, and Killers. I am definitely in the Socialiser group. Examples of the four groups and their speech modalities were presented in Bartle’s article. For example:

• Achievers say things like: “I’m busy.” Or “Sure I’ll help you, what do I get?”
• Explorers say things like: “Hmmm….” “I haven’t tried that one, what’s it do?”
• Socialisers say things like: “Hi!” “What happened? I missed it, I was talking.”
• Killers say things like: “Coward!” “Die! Die! Die!”

Bartle also discussed the important of keeping the four groups in balance and provides suggestions and strategies to maintain equilibrium.