MUDs and MOOs: Collaborative Narrative Play at Work in the Classroom
by Brendan Riley, Laurie Taylor, and Mike Sansone
A Brief History of MUDs and Academic MOOs
Narrative Play in Educational MOOs
Collaboration and the MUD Project
MUDS
MUDs are multi-user dungeons or dimensions. While chat rooms can fit within this definition, MUDs are generally large text-based game worlds. By text-based, these games resembled the single player games Zork and Adventure. Later MUDs include the graphical user interface (GUI) or visual worlds like Everquest and Asheron's Call.
Text-Based MUD
(Image from: Infocom, Inc. Zork I: The Great Underground Empire. Cambridge, MA: Infocom, Inc., 1981.)
MUD with a Graphical User Interface (GUI)
(Image from: Sony Online Entertainment. Everquest. San Diego: Sony Online Entertainment, 1999. http://everquest.station.sony.com/screenshot.jsp)
MOOs
MOOs are MUD-object-oriented because they take the initial structure of MUDs and then allow players greater freedoms. These freedoms include the ability to create objects, set permissions, and to program new verbs. All of these lead to a highly customizable and highly open working, or playing, space. MOOs have been used by academia as chat spaces and as text-based virtual environments to investigate social and spatial construction. MOOs, like MUDs, can be text-based or visually defined.
Text-Based MOO
(Image from: University of Florida's Networked Writing Environment's MOOville. Accessible online here: http://moo.nwe.ufl.edu/)
MOOs with a GUI
(Image from: Purdue University's Pronoun MOO. http://pw.english.purdue.edu/technologies/MOO/guide/interface.html)