Judy Malloy, Editor

Originally begun as a multi-user "adventure" program by Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle at the University of Essex in England, MUDs (Multi-user Dungeons) and the subsequent MOOs (MUD's object oriented) are text-based, programmable virtual communities that connect many users to the same place at the same time. In addition to creative social interaction, LambdaMoo, created by Pavel Curtis at Xerox PARC, also fostered virtual world building and allowed for a variety of narrative structures. Participants who "enter" MOO environments are usually textually "visible" to each other, and they share a database of "objects" such as "rooms" and "exits". MOOS have been used as meeting places, for distance learning, to create text for performative works, and to create hypertextual and/or interactive fiction narratives and/or virtual locative narratives that many readers can simultaneously explore.

This Authoring Software page on MUDs and MOOs is a resource in progress and invites contributions of works and references.

Contents
THE LIVING ROOM (LAMBDAMOO OCTOBER 4, 1993)

>The Living Room
>It is very bright, open, and airy here, with large plate-glass windows
>looking southward over the pool to the gardens beyond. On the north
>wall, there is a rough stonework fireplace. The east and west walls are
>almost completely covered with large, well-stocked bookcases. An exit
>in the northwest corner leads to the kitchen and, in a more northerly
>direction, to the entrance hall. The door into the coat closet is at
>the north end of the east wall, and at the south end is a sliding glass
>door leading out onto a wooden deck. There are two sets of couches, one
>clustered around the fireplace and one with a view out the windows.

Pavel Curtis, "THE LAMBDAMOO LIVING ROOM",
Making Art Online Telematics Timeline, Walker Art Center
Works Created with MUDs and MOOS
- Authoring Software Statements

Antoinette LaFarge
Demotic

"To start with, we gathered the Plaintext Players on a MOO, which is a virtual, text-based, multi-user domain of a kind that predominated on the Net before the advent of graphical worlds. The MOO performers improvised 'in character', in real time, creating a text that was partly written, partly performed. Only one of the MOO performers was situated in the same physical space as the actor and the sound artists, and this person served as a key link between the remote and local performers. The base text generated by the MOO improvisers was fed into the physical space of the stage in two ways: as visuals and as sound. The visuals took the form of scrolling text projections, which the stage performer used as a kind of teleprompter, responding vocally (by reading/improvising) and physically (with improvised movement). and other effects."

Visit Antoinette LaFarge's statement on the creation of Demotic to find out more.
Sue Thomas
Hello World: travels in virtuality

"@go #388
The Hot Tub
The hot tub is made of molded fiberglass: on three sides a bench will seat five comfortably (and ten who are friendly), and on the fourth side there is contoured couch for one luxurious soak. There are two rubber mounted buttons here. You may push either the right or left button. The rising sun puts a rosy glow on everything. The underwater light is on. The bubbling jets are on. You see thermometer and Hot Tub Bar here. Aaaahhhh! The water is at that perfect temperature where you can just lie in here forever. Splash!"

"....Hello World: travels in virtuality is made with object oriented programming via the LambdaMOO Core; lots of post-its and small notebooks; manuscripts created with A4 paper and inscribed by nice black pens (medium tip) then typed up in Microsoft Word; ink, print and paper via Raw Nerve Books; PDF downloads; Typepad blogging software, and the user's imagination."

Visit Sue Thomas' statement on Authoring Software to find out more.
MUDS and MOOs - Papers, Discussions, and Narratives

  1. Richard Bartle, Designing Virtual Worlds,, Berkeley: New Riders, 2003

  2. Richard Bartle, "Interactive Multi-User Computer Games," MUSE Ltd Research Report, December, 1990

  3. David Blair, WAXweb, hosted by the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia

  4. Amy Bruckman and Mitchel Resnick, "The MediaMOO Project: Constructionism and Professional Community", Convergence, 1:1, Spring 1995

  5. Marlena Corcoran, "Life and Death in the Digital World of the Plaintext Players", Leonardo, October 1999, Vol. 32, No. 5, Pages 359-364

  6. Pavel Curtis, "Mudding: Social Phenomena in Text-Based Virtual Realities", Xerox PARC CSL-92-4, April 1992

  7. Pavel Curtis and David A. Nichols, "MUDs Grow Up: Social Virtual Reality in the Real World," Xerox PARC, May 5, 1993.

  8. Dene Grigar and John F. Barber, "Defending Your Life in MOOspace, and Other Stories of Academia on the Electronic Edge." in High Wired: On the Design, Use, and Theory of Educational MOOs Cynthia Haynes and Jan Rune Holmevik, eds, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

  9. Carolyn Guyer, "Hi-Pitched Voices", Making Art Online, Telematics Timeline, Walker Art Center

  10. Leslie D. Harris, "Writing Spaces: Using MOOs to Teach Composition and Literature" Kairos 1:2, 1996

  11. Cynthia Haynes and Jan Rune Holmevik, Editors, High Wired: On the Design, Use, and Theory of Educational MOOs. Second Edition. Ann Arbor, University of Michgan Press, 2001

  12. Michael Joyce, "Songs of Thy Selves, Persistence, Momenntariness, Recurrence and the Moo", in Othermindedness: the emergence of network culture, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press 2000.

  13. Lori Kendall, "MUDder? I hardy Know 'Er! Adventures of a Feminist MUDder," in Wired Women: Gender and New Realities in Cyberspace, Lynn Cherny and Elizabeth Reba Weise, eds., Seattle, WA: Seal Press, 1996 pp. 207-223

  14. Antoinette LaFarge, "A World Exhilirating and Wrong: Theatrical Improvisation on the Internet", Leonardo, 28:5, 1995 pp. 415-422.

  15. Antoinette LaFarge, and Robert Allen, "Media Commedia: The Roman Forum Project", Leonardo, 38:3, 2005. pp. 213-218.

  16. Judy Malloy, Brown House Kitchen, LambdaMoo, 1993

  17. Judy Malloy, "Narratives and Narrative Structures in LambdaMoo", in Art and Innovation - the Xerox PARC Artist-in-Residence Program, Craig Harris, ed, Cambridge, MA MIT Press, 1999.

  18. Tom Meyer, David Blair, and Suzanne Hader, "A MOO-Based Collaborative Hypermedia System for WWW"
    discussion of the Hypertext MOO including Hypertext Hotel (begun by Robert Coover in conjunction with his Hypertext Fiction Workshop at Brown University and ported to Storyspace) Carolyn Guyer's Hi-Pitched Voices, and David Blair's WAXweb

  19. James Morgan, curator, Look Art, Turbulence, 2011
    with works by Thomas Asmuth, Alejandro Duque, and Christopher Poff

  20. Patricia Nolan, "TWUMOO: The Female Collected, and, The Female Collective, A Work in Progress on Women and the Technology that brings their Achievements to Life" Educational Technology & Society 2:3, 1999

  21. On Site Research and On-Byte Investigation: Three Views of Conducting Thorough Academic Research 1995 MLA Convention, December 1995; Chicago, IL
    __:Tim Redman, Associate Professor; University of Texas at Dallas, School of Arts and Humanities
    "The Biographer's Kit: Actual and Archival Research Techniques"
    __Dene Grigar, Assistant Professor, Texas Woman's University, Dept. of English, Speech, and Foreign Languages
    "Detective El [ectronic] Queen, Sleuth of the Internet"
    __Cynthia Haynes, Assistant Professor; University of Texas at Dallas, School of Arts and Humanities. Jan Rune Holmevik, Institute for Studies in Research and Higher Education (Oslo, Norway), Co-founders of Lingua MOO
    "Synchroni/CITY: Online Collaboration, Research, and Teaching in MOOspace"
Programming, Instructions, and Resources

  1. Judy Anderson, yduJ's Programming Tutorial

  2. Judy Anderson, yduJ's MOO Lore Pamphlet

  3. The Barn
    A Repository of MOO Code and Resources for enCore

  4. Basic Moo Commands, VRoma Documentation Library

  5. Pavel Curtis, LambdaMOO Programmer's Manual For LambdaMOO Version 1.8.1, May 2004

  6. moolist.com
    The moolist.com MOO list currently contains 240 MOOs.
For information about the Authoring Software project, email Judy Malloy at jmalloy@well.com
Last update January 14, 2012

Authoring Software
Home
Authoring Software
Tools and Applications

Index

Writers and Artists
Talk about Their Work
and the Software They
use to Create Their Work

Mark Amerika
Stefan Muller Arisona
Mark Bernstein: __Interview wirh Mark Bernstein
Alan Bigelow
Jay Bushman
J. R. Carpenter
M.D. Coverley
Steve Ersinghaus
Caitlin Fisher
Chris Funkhouser
Susan M. Gibb
Dene Grigar
Fox Harrell
Dylan Harris
William Harris
Ian Hatcher
Adriene Jenik
Chris Joseph
Rob Kendall
Antoinette LaFarge
Deena Larsen
Donna Leishman
Judy Malloy
Mark C. Marino
Mez
Ethan Miller
Nick Montfort
__and Stephanie Strickland
Judd Morrissey
Stuart Moulthrop
Alexander Mouton
Karen O'Rourke
Regina Pinto
Andrew Plotkin
Kate Pullinger
Sonya Rapoport:
__Interview with Sonya Rapoport
Aaron Reed
Scott Rettberg
Jim Rosenberg
Stephanie Strickland
and Cynthia Lawson Jaramillo
__Nick Montfort and Stephanie Strickland
Sue Thomas
Eugenio Tisselli
Noah Wardrip-Fruin
Joel Weishaus
Nanette Wylde