To: UCSD Secret Islandia Club 
Subject: [Vernon Lee:  (147 lines)]
Reply-To: David Moore 
From: David Moore 
Sender: dmoore@sdnp1.UCSD.EDU
Content-Length: 7937

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[forwards deleted]

Note: "Ms. Cherny" is the Linguistics Ph.D. student who just defended
her thesis last week, aka "lynn".

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 Entertainment + Technology (A Special Report): Couch Potatoes --- Playing in
    the MUD: Imagine a computer game that has no video, No graphics, no color,
    no sound ---- By Joan E. Rigdon
  Hollywood says you need fast, fancy graphics to create a truly addictive,
    interactive computer game. Silicon Valley says you need a powerful
    computer with souped-up accessories and ultrafast phone lines.

   But Lynn Cherny doesn't need any of that.

   She sometimes spends several hours a day logged on to computer games that
    have no video, no graphics, no color, no sound, not even a joystick or
    mouse. The only way she can play is by typing on her keyboard, and all she
    can see on her screen is words. Sometimes it takes several minutes before
    any new ones show up.

   But what words they are. In one text fantasy land, Ms. Cherny, a doctoral
    candidate in linguistics at Stanford University, has invented herself as
    the sole denizen of a white paper cup lined with pillows. She has created
    her own pet, a soap bubble that drifts on its own through castles and
    houses, reporting to her on where it is, and reflecting the image of only
    one thing in each room. She can talk to other characters, change the
    length of her hair, or build her own castle for others to wander through
    -- simply by typing.

   These games are called MUDs (multi-user dungeons). There are also MUCKs,
    MUSHes, MOOs and many other things, all derivatives of MUDs (MUSH is
    thought to stand for multiuser shared hallucination).

   Whatever they are called, MUDs have been a well-kept secret for years. They
    were invented at the University of Essex in England in 1979, as a
    computerized way to play Dungeons & Dragons, a fantasy role-playing game.
    In fact, most MUD players today are science-fiction and fantasy fans who
    are also university students -- a group that numbers itself in the
    thousands.

   That's "small potatoes" compared with an estimated 35 million to 40 million
    players of action games made by Nintendo Co. and Sega Enterprises Ltd.,
    says Lee Isgur, an analyst at Jefferies & Co. in San Francisco.

   MUDs generally have a low profile because they inhabit the academic portion
    of the Internet and are hidden on servers behind addresses such as
    "129.137.188.48." There are more than a hundred MUDs listed on the
    Internet, but many have gone defunct for lack of players; MUDs spring up
    and die with no notice, save a few notes posted to selected news groups.
    The most popular MUD, called LambdaMOO, was developed by Xerox Corp. as
    part of its research into how people interact on the Internet, and has
    nearly 9,000 regular users.

   But the secret of MUDs is getting out. Their popularity is spreading,
    gaining the attention of major entertainment companies, which may be
    changing their tune about what it takes to produce a popular interactive
    game. In fact, at least one MUD has been relatively successful in reaching
    a more mainstream crowd.

   MUDs aren't so much games as continuous costume parties in cyberspace where
    everyone agrees to stay in character -- to a greater or lesser degree,
    depending on their mood -- and improvise for the entire time they're there
    (unless they're in "OOC," or "out-of-character" rooms, where veteran
    players can give advice to beginners).

   Sometimes the goal is to kill a monster, alone or with the help of other
    players. The monster could be programmed into a MUD to react to specific
    commands against it. For example, a monster may be programmed to die only
    when a player "slashes" with a sword, as opposed to "stabs."

   Some MUDs have more unconventional purposes. One, called FurryMUCK, is a
    place where players assume animal characters and have sex with each other,
    graphically described.

   But many people play MUDs with no goals except to wander the world and talk
    to each other, often dropping their characters in the process. Luyen Chou,
    president and chief executive officer of educational software developer
    Learn Technologies Inc., New York, has noticed that on one crime-solving
    MUD, some players don't even try to crack the puzzle. Instead, they were
    on-line "to be Sam in Casablanca," he says -- meaning they were there
    basically to hang out.

   Chitchat may not make for great gaming. But coupled with the ability to
    play roles and create cyberrooms (players can set up their own rooms in
    any form and with any characteristics, and others can visit and explore
    them), it is considerably more interactive than off-the-shelf computer
    games, where a player's only choices are the programmer's predetermined
    paths.

   No matter how good commercial computer games get, they "aren't as
    unpredictable and interactive as humans," says Pavel Curtis, a Xerox
    researcher in Palo Alto, Calif., who programmed and now oversees
    LambdaMOO.

   "You can't do anything to a game in a store except play it," adds
    Stanford's Ms. Cherny, who is writing a dissertation on how people
    socialize in MUDs.

   So-called mudders can be just as zealous as any teenage Nintendo fan. Dan
    McCaslin, a game developer for Cyberflix Inc., Knoxville, Tenn., recalls
    spending three hours a day during college playing roles such as a
    lieutenant colonel leading a unit of mechanized infantry -- while trying
    to complete a double major in computers and religion.

   "I spent way too much time on them," he says. One of his friends played so
    often that she had nightmares about being stuck in a maze. Instead of
    running through the maze, Mr. McCaslin recalls, she dreamed that she was
    issuing MUD commands: "Go north, go south, go left . . . ."

   Such fanaticism among game players has caused big companies to take notice,
    and their initial moves into this niche are showing promise in creating a
    mainstream success out of MUDs. Time Warner Inc.'s new-media division, for
    example, recently posted a crime-solving MUD called Modus Operandi on
    General Electric Co.'s GEnie on-line service. It has proved so popular
    that Time Warner plans to offer it on America Online and Prodigy by the
    end of the fall. Hollywood is apparently watching, too. Ms. Cherny
    recently spotted a Hollywood agent stumbling through a MUD on the
    Internet, asking other players about the game.

   The few game developers who have heard of MUDs don't necessarily want to
    crank out their own text-only games. They would rather copy MUDs'
    interactive and creative aspects, and somehow marry that with graphics
    without losing the magic.

   At least one game has succeeded by doing something quite similar to that:
    The idea of letting players interact with each other on-line helped Id
    Software Inc. of Mesquite, Texas, sell more than one million copies of
    Doom, making it one of the hottest-selling computer games ever. Doom
    allows as many as four players to collaborate with or kill each other in
    the same game at the same time. Players can also change the way their
    characters look and build their own portions of the world, but only for
    themselves and friends who get copies of their rejiggered software.

   Will players of Id games ever be able to do MUD things like change the way
    they look and create their own portions of the world for every player to
    see? "That's the direction we're moving," says Id's business manager, Jay
    Wilbur.

   ---

   Ms. Rigdon is a staff reporter in The Wall Street Journal's San Francisco
    bureau.