MUDs and MOOs: Narrative Play in Educational MOOs

MUDs and MOOs: Collaborative Narrative Play at Work in the Classroom

Narrative Play in Educational MOOs

In addition to usual benefits academic MOOs provide, instructors gain two things with the MUD/MOO project proposed herein. First, they introduce narrative as a research strategy; second, they stress the MOO's collaborative possibilities in a way that connects to work students will encounter outside the classroom.

When MUDs and MOOs first emerged as pedagogical tools, many educators avoided recognizing the history of MOOs as gaming environments. Tari Fanderclai explained, in 1995:

The reasons for [creating MUD social control devices] are rooted in traditional notions of what education is and is not. A university or other organization may feel forced to create a virtual representation of a "real" university in order to make their MUD appear a legitimate educational endeavor to those who do not understand its nature or purpose and yet control the funding. Campus computing departments, some of whom already have problems with users of gaming MUDs taking up resources that others need for work, cannot understand why a teacher would want to encourage MUDding. Teachers are used to having control in their classrooms, and the chaotic and playful nature of MUD interaction can make them worry that no one is getting anything done. (section 4)

While MUDs no longer take up significant system resources, universities still often ban "gaming" from computer labs.

Today, many instructors still downplay the game-ancestry of MOOs. For example, in "Creating a Virtual Academic Community," Day, Crump, and Rickly call MUDs "multi-user dimensions," reminding readers that the older term, dungeon is "a name left over from the days when these environments were used purely for sophisticated versions of Dungeons and Dragons-like games"("Mediamoo" par 2). The shift from dungeon to dimension helps the authors argue that instructors can use MOOs to "to create a sense in which productive and creative interaction can occur"(par 4). In short, they praise the rapid exchange of ideas and other elements of play as useful, but they distance themselves from the grounding of those elements in gaming.

We do not suggest, here, that such arguments are in any way wrong (in fact, we like such arguments). Instead, we suggest that the value of such play can be strengthened by foregrounding the roots of that play in gaming. We feel that distinguishing academic MOOing from gaming places sole importance on traditional cognitive goals such as argumentation and exposition, practices academia distinguishes from aesthetics and narrative. As Fanderclai suggests, MOO work is best when it mixes work and play. The arguments traditionally leveled against MUDs thus provide the argument for the construction of narrative MUD structures in educational MOOs. Students mixing work and play will thus be mixing argumentation and narration.

At the same time, composition instructors who do embrace play often use it as "learning time," separated from time spent on more "productive" work. For instance, Janice Walker asks how such play, integral to our progress as scholars of electronic media, should fit into the traditional categories of review and advancement ("The Carnivalesque" par 1). In doing so, she draws a distinction between play and work, arguing for the value of play, but still distinguishing it from productive work.

The division between work and play has long been a part of academic environments. Courses about less canonical work--like popular culture, film, and other new media--focus on serious treatments of their texts. They discourage students from thinking of their subjects light-heartedly. This seriousness is both pragmatic and functional: instructors demand scholarly thought to encourage critical thinking. By doing so, instructors re-assert that their subjects are worthy of study, a battle constantly being fought by recent-media scholars. The battle for legitimacy is nowhere more needed than in new media courses. Because the institution resists these media, it is important that students read good (serious) work; they should not just play around.

However, as many have noted, the work/play dichotomy becomes difficult to maintain when a class moves into a MOO. MOO sessions involve interactive environments, anonymous characters with strange names, and backchanneling. While some educational MOOs allow instructors to "lock down" more playful features, we agree with Fanderclai that these features are what makes the MOO an enjoyable place for students to be. (We freely acknowledge that our bias comes from our familiarity with JaysHouse Core, a relatively open MOO.)

These play elements are essential to MOO-ing itself. Gregory Ulmer reminds us that ". . . the MOO is indeed a very playful environment. It is nearly impossible not to fool around and improvise with language while interacting in real time with other characters online."("When in Mooville" section 14-15). Play comes easily to people in MOOs; perhaps that play is necessary for the "work" that can be done in MOOs.

Game play can unlock the innovative elements of digital media and the cognitive patterns that accompany them. Jerome McGann suggests that "our criticism and scholarship have not escaped the critical models brought to fruition in the 19th century: empirical and statistical analysis on one hand, and hermeneutical reading on the other"(Radiant Textuality 159). He recommends a method of scholarship built as a game. In his example, "the goal is to rethink the work's textuality by consciously simulating its social reconstruction"(160). McGann urges instructors to adopt a writerly (to use Barthes' term) pedagogy that has students engage with text through a mix of aesthetic and analytic work.

Robert Ray also uses games as a fruitful way to structure research and pedagogy. He explains, in The Avant Garde Finds Andy Hardy, that Breton and the Surrealists used games to find new ways of acquiring knowledge. "[T]wo aspects of the Surrealist games proved most attractive: their automatic/collaborative nature, and their recreational dimension"(49). Ray then suggests an assignment based on the Surrealist game "Exquisite Corpse," whose results will "force its players in directions that conventional research would not"(49). For Ray, Surrealist games provide new entry points that students can use to explore films. Students eschew the usual templates of hermeneutic criticism in favor of a heuristic that leads to aesthetic criticism of a different sort.

McGann and Ray are looking for methods that occasion different kinds of thinking from their students. Both seek to "turn up" the students' sense of the aesthetic, and do so with games. Perhaps re-introducing some aspects of MUDding into educational MOOs is one way to do so. Students who concern themselves with the experience of their spaces will have a distinctly different cognitive journey than those writing in a largely argumentative register. The potential for this sort of "directed play" is enormous.

Our pedagogy also addresses the dichotomy between argumentation and narrative. In writing instruction, the line between argumentation (taught in argumentative writing courses) and narration (taught in creative writing courses) is supposed to be easily drawn and distinguished. Writing in the MOO makes such lines hard to draw.

Many scholars suggest that the new age of digital communication (what Marshall McLuhan calls the "electric age," Walter Ong dubs "secondary orality," and Ulmer names "electracy") occasions a new relationship between research, analysis, and narrative. Ray looks to the aesthetic as a tool for scholars moving beyond hermeneutic criticism. Ulmer notes that digital works stress design, aesthetics, and narrative because the primary institution driving textuality has changed. While the age of print was led by the institution of Science, Ulmer observes that the digital age is being led by Entertainment (Heuretics). Both of these scholars see the return of the aesthetic as a key component of the new digital age.

In electronic texts like the MOO, narrative becomes very relevant. For instance, Lev Manovich argues that narrative--particularly narrative action--is a guiding principle in new media. He writes, "Movement through space allows the player to progress through the narrative, but it is also valuable in itself. It is a way for the player to explore the environment"(247). He explains that navigation-through-space has become a dominant rhetoric in computer games, and a structuring aesthetic people designing other interfaces (the Web comes to mind). Whatever else MOO writing is, it also embraces this narrative aesthetic.

But how should one approach the question of narration and narrative in the MOO? We suggest that the foregrounding of MUD capabilities in MOOspace can help underline the importance of narrative in new media. Rather than avoiding the narrative aspect of MOO writing, instructors and students can embrace it as a way of writing.

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