MUDs and MOOs: Collaborative Narrative Play at Work in the Classroomby Brendan Riley, Laurie Taylor, and Mike Sansone |
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A Brief History of MUDs and Academic MOOs Narrative Play in Educational MOOs Collaboration and the MUD Project |
Introduction
As we write this, thousands of players have logged into EverQuest, a fantasy world filled with trolls, ogres, and battleaxes where players work together towards common goals and converse within the frame of a fantastic world. Though few EverQuest players would consider their play to be work, multiplayer gaming structures can provide a good model for classroom production. EverQuest is a more recent incarnation of MUDs (multi-user dungeons), from which academic MOOs have evolved. We propose to consider the gaming history of MOOs as pedagogical practice. MUDs emerged in the 1970s as an outgrowth of text-based adventure games and from table-top role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons. The limiting central hierarchy of MUDs gave way to a decentered programming system, dubbed MOO (MUD Object-Oriented). MOO players (called builders) can 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 textual environments of MOOspaces make them ideal for use in writing courses, as students must talk, act, and build within an entirely written space. A consideration of the narrative practice being performed in MUDs allows for an introduction of collaborative narrative play. Several scholars suggest that some value of MOO pedagogy comes from our ability to play in MOO space. However, many see that play as "learning curve" time--required but ultimately counterproductive. Thus, while MOOs have become available in academic environments, MUDs (predicating on play) have largely been ignored. In fact, the tendency has been to disassociate MOOs from their roots in gaming MUDs. We seek to re-introduce the gaming and play elements of MUDs within the academic framework of MOOs. This controlled re-introduction allows for a productive use of the collaborative narrative work that stems from the combination of MUD play and MOO building. While MUDs are often referred to as multi-user domains, to include constructs like chat rooms, here we refer to MUDs as multi-user dungeons (including text-based adventure games like Zork). By exploring the collaborative practice at work in MUDs and MOOs, students also participate in the collaborative nature of digital writing. Students engaging in such writing 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. Our MOO, the University of Florida's MOOville, has shared permissions architecture which allows students to work and build together. Using this structure, the students built a MUD space, which they then analyzed in terms of collaborative narrative interaction. Writing these analyses allowed 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. | ||