MUDs and a little about their sociology

There are several interesting features common to almost every MUD:

• Anonymity and pseudonymity. With the exception of MediaMOO, practically all MOOs hide the real identities of their users. This is not to say that users are mutually indistinguishable from each other; rather, users pick new names for themselves. Those who use multiple MUDs often use the same name on them all. Hence, while someone's real name (q.v. Vernor Vinge's Real Names) might be hidden, their reputation is quite important, often important enough to carry from MUD to MUD. This pseudonymous tendency in part stems from the original role-playing style of early MUDs; it also lends itself to fun with Turing tests and gender-bending, as described below.
• Any MUD of any reasonable size (over 50 or 100 regular users) tends to quickly accumulate a political system. LambdaMOO tried to get away from politics, but excessive demands of the users on the wizards, combined with a rape there, forced self-governance, law, and punishment on the community. Similarly, even though MediaMOO tried to get away from making its administrators symbols of judicial authority (it was my idea, when helping to set up MediaMOO, that we call ourselves janitors, not wizards, to get this idea across), growth of the user community eventually forced politics, councils, and many other governmental mechanisms upon the community. It seems that one cannot be in a community of any real size without politics cropping up.
• Interactivity is a central part of mudding. This takes two forms: interacting with other players (e.g., conversations, joint manipulation of objects in the world), and interacting with the environment itself (building and programming objects, describing rooms, etc). There is pratically no static text in the sense of traditional media theory; even descriptions and interconnections of rooms are potentially volitile. (In fact, familar rooms and their descriptions tend to "fade into the background" to an experienced user; it is the novel aspects which attract attention.) This interactivity and malleable text tends to invalidate those theoretical approaches which assume that there is some canonical or privileged reading of the work; such a viewpoint becomes unsustainable.
• Anonymity and pseudonymity, interactivity, and the purely-textual representation of the vast majority of MUDs tends to encourage a loose and fuzzy boundary between human and machine agency. Indeed, deliberate experiments in Turing-capable agents such as Julia can lead to bizarre sociological malfunctions (such as the poor loser who apparently failed a Turing test himself by following Julia around for days trying to get to first base with her, without realizing he was pursuing a computer program); they can also lead to surprisingly useful tools, such as her navigational and message-handling capabilities, when correctly used.
• The characteristics described immediately above, which lead to Turing-fuzziness, also lead to a great deal of gender-bending, in which users often impersonate people of the opposite gender. If the interactive, conversational style of MUDs does not already make authorship a fuzzy concept, the gender-indeterminacy of many interactions continues the trend. While fixed, static media are often superficially genderless (e.g., either anonymous, or known to be pseudonymous, or corporately produced [thus apparently neuter]), most people expect a conversation or other interactive form of communication to make available information about the gender of the participants. MUDs often deny this, often leading to an unusual interactional mode not seen in other media.

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