Using MUDs in MOOs to Create Collaborative Narrative Practice
Co-authors: Brendan Riley and Mike Sansone
As we write this, thousands of players have logged into a fantasy world filled with trolls, ogres, and battleaxes. This multiplayer game, called EverQuest, allows players to work together towards common goals and to converse within the frame of a fantastic world. Few EverQuest players would consider their play to be work. Nonetheless, judicious use of multiplayer gaming structures can indeed be a good model for classroom production. EverQuest is a more recent incarnation of MUDs (multi-user dungeons), from which the academic MOOs have evolved. We propose a consideration of the history of MOOs as pedagogical practice.
MUDs emerged in the 1970s as an outgrowth of text-based adventure games and from table-top roleplaying games like Dungeons and Dragons. The central hierarchy that limited the construction of MUDs gave way to a decentered programming system, dubbed MOO (MUD Object-Oriented). MOOs allow players (called builders) to add their own sections and objects to the overall world structure. Since their introduction, MOOs have taken a unique place in academic environments because of their emphasis on collaboration, spatial thinking, and particularly writing. The completely textual environments of MOOspaces make them ideal for use by writing courses, as students must talk, act, and build within an entirely written space.
A consideration of the narrative practice being performed in MUDs would allow for an introduction of collaborative narrative play. While MOOs have become available in academic environments, MUDs have largely been ignored. Because MOOs evolved from gaming software, the tendency has been to disassociate them from their gaming roots. We seek to re-introduce the gaming and play elements of MUDs within the academic framework of MOOs. This controlled re-introduction will allow for a productive use of the collaborative narrative work that will stem from the combination of MUD play and MOO building.
By exploring the collaborative practice at work in MUDs and MOOs, students will also be exploring and participating in the collaborative nature of digital writing practice. Students engaging in such writing will thus become aware of the inherent collaboration in all manner of new media forms, from video games and MUDs to non-digital forms like comics and film. The class creation of the shared MUD space mimics the collaboration inherent in those new media forms.
Our project involves student conceptualization and creation of a MUD space in our academic MOO. Using shared permissions architecture allows the students to work together to build the MUD space which they will then analyze in terms of collaborative narrative interaction. This reflection will allow them to expand their analyses of textual production of other new media forms and to consider the possibilities for collaborative narrative as a new way to write.