MOO is one of the forgotten Internet technologies. Its predecessor, email, has achieved such ubiquity in business, academia, and in the general population, that it is already difficult to imagine life without it. The more recent technologies of the World Wide Web currently demand the lion's share of the attention as developers and users continue to try to make sense of concepts like e-commerce, web-based learning, and the like. Outside of a limited circle of enthusiasts, however, MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons) and MOOs (MUDs, Object Oriented) remain virtually unknown and unused. The first MUDs were developed in the days of command-line, text-only interfaces, and lacked the visual richness that accounts for some of the explosive popularity of the web. Even though web-based MOO interfaces have added multimedia possibilities to the MOO experience, MOOs can still seem drab compared to the spectacular graphics and animation of some professionally designed websites. At the same time, the origins of MUDs as fantasy role-playing environments and their infamy for addicting undergraduate users still perhaps stigmatize such environments as not being appropriate for "serious" uses.
Despite its relative obscurity, MOO offers a versatility that gives it unique potential as an educational tool. MOOs combine the hypertextual structure of the web with the synchronous interactivity of chat (or face-to-face conversation). That combination offers intriguing possibilities for designing not just online course materials or discussion spaces, but for creating educational spaces in the fullest sense of the term. With this dissertation I hope to begin to reveal the unrealized potential of MOO noted by Espen Aarseth when he states that they "are not the poor relatives of more artistic textual media but contain a potential for textual complexity and diversity that is far from mastered, or even conjectured, at the present time" (161). Specifically, I plan to demonstrate the value of MOO as a tool for teaching literature and to provide a working model for the development of spaces that allow for the study other topics. More broadly, I hope to weave together strands from the still largely separate realms of hypertext theory and computer pedagogy, showing how the insights of one can enrich and expand the other.
MOO has been defined as a multi-user, text-based virtual reality (Curtis and Nichols). Technically, it is a combination of a database and server software that allows simultaneous connections and interactions by multiple users. It is similar to Internet Relay Chat (IRC) in that the system can be used for real-time communication among a dispersed group of users. It differs from chat in that it supports the creation of durable "rooms", "exits," and other objects to furnish the virtual environment and provides a wide, and expandable, array of commands that allow users to interact with and manipulate those objects. MOO is a variant of an older technology, MUD (Multi-User Dungeon/Domain/Dimension), that was first developed in 1979 by Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle at Essex University and became widely spread in the 1980s. Many of the earliest MUDs tended to be used for role-playing adventures modeled after single-player games like Adventure and Zork, although some, like James Aspnes's TinyMUD, shifted the emphasis from puzzle-solving and monster-slaying to world-building by giving players limited abilities to extend or customize the core space of the MUD.[1]
MOO emerged in 1989 when Stephen White applied the concepts of object-oriented programming to MUD, allowing much greater user-expansion and customization of the environment. Pavel Curtis expanded upon White's work and created the influential LamdaMOO in 1990.[2] Just as important as White's and Curtis's technical innovations was their conscious shift in purpose from designing a game system to creating a more open-ended social environment (Curtis, "Mudding"). By presenting itself not as a game to be conquered but as a virtual community constructed and maintained by the mutual efforts of its members, Curtis's LamdaMOO opened the door for a subsequent wave educational and professional MOOs, including MediaMOO, BioMOO, and Diversity University.[3]
The first MUDs and MOOs were strictly text-only environments. The emergence of the World Wide Web and graphic web browsers in the 1990s sparked interest in adding multimedia capability to MOOs. While there were various attempts to create Web-based MOOs (sometimes called WOOs), LinguaMOO <http:// lingua.utdallas.edu/>, founded by Cynthia Haynes and Jan Rune Holmevik in 1995 and hosted by the University of Texas at Dallas, was (and remains) one of the most successful. Its interface, called enCore Xpress, uses a Java telnet client (MOOtcan) running inside a standard web browser to allow synchronous interaction with the MOO via typed commands while displaying MOO spaces and objects as HTML content. Haynes and Holmevik took the further step of making their core database and server software freely available to other educational institutions to use for establishing their own MOOs (Holmevik and Haynes, enCore). EnCore-based MOOs are now in widespread use as educational MOOs.
Within certain circles, at least, MOO has become accepted as viable tool for facilitating discussion, promoting collaboration, and providing distance learning. The educational use of MOO has spawned several collections of scholarly articles (Day et al.; Haynes and Holmevik, High Wired; Barber and Grigar) and even a textbook (Holmevik and Haynes, MOOniversity). More generally, MOOs have featured prominently in critical discussions of such issues as identity construction online (Turkle, Stone, Bruckman), the formation and dynamics of virtual communities (Rheingold, Dibble), the performative quality of electronic communication (Murray), and the debate over the role race plays in virtual reality (Kolko, Nakamura, and Rodman). Virtually all of this work, then, has been "sociological" in nature. The interest in MOO-spaces has been focused on the interactions that take place within the space and not on the qualities of the space itself.
I would like to refocus attention on the underlying hypertextuality of MOOs, which I believe constitutes MOO's significant untapped potential for the teaching of literature. The typical spatial metaphor of rooms connected by exits is an almost exact analogue to hypertextual nodes and links, a fact that becomes self-evident in a web-based interface where MOO rooms are represented as web pages and exits as HTML links. From its earliest postulations in Vannevar Bush's Memex and Ted Nelson's Xanadu to the present, hypertext has been presented as a means, perhaps the ideal means, of exploring intertextual and contextual relationships among literary texts.[4] MOO, I argue, offers a platform that can be used to explore the same complex networks of interrelationships with the added advantage of existing within a synchronous, collaborative environment.[5]
Compared to other web-based educational tools, MOO offers a unique combination of features that makes it attractive. The most striking of these is its integration of synchronous and asynchronous communication functions. The chat-like interaction in MOO offers opportunities for spontaneous, informal interaction among students and free-form discussions much like those enjoyed in face-to-face classrooms. In fact, features like transcripts and a rich variety of presentation commands give MOO discussions advantages not found in traditional classrooms. At the same time, the ability of students and instructors to create durable additions to the MOO space through building and arranging new objects constitutes an asynchronous communication channel in which students can engage in more extended and reflective thinking and writing. Holmevik and Haynes call this hybrid of the synchronous and asynchronous "cyphertext" and see in it a radical new form of publication:
A cyphertext is a kind of publication that is never still; it changes constantly with the presence of players/readers/writers and the objects and texts they create and recycle. It is by its very nature, a form of publication that will never be finished, or finite. ("Cyphertext MOOves" 227)
There are other ways of taking advantage of both synchronous and asynchronous modes, for example through alternating use of chatrooms and web-based discussion (or by using an integrate course management system like WebCT or Blackboard that offers both functions as optional modules in a course site), but only in MOO is the combination of the synchronous and asynchronous such an integral part of the system.
Related to the merging of synchronous and asynchronous modes in MOO is the fact that author and reader functions are very tightly integrated in MOO. Hypertext theorists often make the claim that hypertext transforms the reader into a kind of co-author since each reader's choices among links lead to different reading pathways. However, this sense of "authorship" has always seemed rather strained. MOO literalizes the merging of reader and author, becoming what Michael Joyce calls "constructive" rather than merely "exploratory" hypertext (41-42). Even if a visitor is only navigating the MOO and exploring its hypertextual architecture, he or she becomes a presence inside the text, changing the behavior of the text by virtue of his or her presence. And of course as soon as users engage in chat or begin constructing their own spaces and objects, they become authors by any definition of the word. Furthermore, users can switch continuously between these two roles with little loss of time or momentum. In this respect, MOO stands in stark contrast to most of the web, where users author in one application and browse in another, and the steps involved in switching between the two are cumbersome at best.
The fact that MOO is an authoring environment is one reason why it has achieved some of its greatest popularity in the field of composition. As a world constructed solely, or at least largely, out of language, MOO emphasizes the power of writing. MOO authoring, via both chat and object creation, always assumes an audience of fellow players, making MOO writing less a private transaction between student and teacher and more a public act. In the case of object creation, the prospect of making a permanent addition to the world of the MOO can be offered as an incentive for investing care in one's writing. George Landow's work with student authoring in the Intermedia system at Brown University suggests that writing projects possessing this kind of "authenticity" can greatly improve the quality of student work (Hypertext 133-149).
A further advantage of MOO authoring is the existence of multiple authoring levels requiring increasing degrees of technical expertise and allowing progressively more profound manipulations of the MOO environment. The most basic level, Guest access, provides a user with a temporary presence in the MOO. Guests have full access to the MOO space and can participate in MOO discussions using a broad range of commands. Depending on how objects are programmed, they may allow guests to manipulate them, perhaps even make lasting additions (as in the Generic Note object, which can be "written" on by any class of user). However, Guests cannot own objects or create new ones in their own right. Higher levels of user include Builders (the typical starting level for permanent characters), who can create and own objects; Programmers, who can further customize object behaviors by adding and modifying "verbs" (programs written in the MOO programming language); and Wizards, who have access to powerful administrative commands. This system of graduated permissions is primarily a security feature, ensuring that only experienced and trusted individuals have enough power to make fundamental changes to the system. However, it also means that students need not be masters of the entire system in order to make significant contributions to the space. Particularly through the use of inheritance (see below), novice builders and programmers can add complex objects based on the creations of past programmers.
MOO is an inherently collaborative system. The principles of object-orientation and inheritance that underlie MOO programming mean that every act of MOO construction is a collaboration with and expansion upon the work of a previous programmer and creates an opportunity for collaboration with a future user. As Holmevik and Haynes put it:
When someone writes a new program (known as a verb)... it is publishing in its most dynamic and empowering sense. Not only does it empower the author; but it levels the playing field, so to speak. It enables the reader to also be author, and it empowers both to be "publishers." ("Cyphertext MOOves" 227)
For example, the Generic Classroom included in the enCore database contains a number of pre-programmed features (a clock, a blackboard, desks for small-group discussions, etc.). When a user creates a new Classroom based on the generic one, all of those features are available in the new room even if the builder has neither the permissions nor the technical expertise to program them him- or herself.
More traditional kinds of collaboration are also explicit features of the LinguaMOO enCore (Haynes and Holmevik, "Lingua Unlimited").[6] The fluid space of MOO can be easily adapted to group building, since separately authored components can easily be grouped through either containment or networks of exits. Although object ownership can pose a barrier to complete collaboration, several MOO systems have developed methods of sharing access to objects (notably, LinguaMOO enCore version 3.2 allows players to grant editing rights on their own objects to other individuals). Again the combination of easy collaboration and control over the sharing of access in this environment is striking when compared to other online teaching tools. It is possible, for example, to give a group of students access to a web directory for the construction of a collaborative site, but such access rights are typically all-or-nothing. Either they can edit or delete everything in the hierarchy or they cannot do any authoring at all.
Taken together, these features suggest the potential for MOO to be a truly revolutionary pedagogical environment. Much more than traditional web pages and commercial course management systems, MOO seems to embody constructivist principles of active, student-centered learning.
My dissertation will attempt to demonstrate the potential of MOO described above by developing a prototype resource using MOO as a platform for the study and teaching of the "nonsense songs" of the British Victorian poet Edward Lear. This prototype will be built and maintained on CowTown MOO at the Ohio State University (http://moo.cohums.ohio-state.edu/), where I have the necessary administrative privileges for creating such tools. Specifically, the dissertation will take the form of a completed suite of MOO objects and related files (scanned images, stylesheets, and HTML documents), supplemented by a critical apparatus explaining the theoretical context and pedagogical implications of the project.
The project takes its name from Gromboolia, the collective name assigned to the imaginary settings of Lear's poems. Gromboolia is less a fully conceived alternate universe than a loose collection of place names and descriptions that recur among the poems, suggesting connections, both obvious and subtle, between his works. Because of its hypertextual nature and strong spatial metaphor, the MOO platform seems ideally suited for representing a pseudospace such as Gromboolia and the textual relationships that define it. I call the project a "classroom" to distinguish it from both a course website and an online scholarly archive. On the one hand, this project attempts to be more than static collections of course materials by using the interactive capabilities of MOO to create an educational space in the fullest sense of the word. On the other hand, a comprehensive archive of Lear's texts, to say nothing of other supporting materials, is beyond the scope of this project and probably not well-suited to the MOO platform. My goal is, rather, to use the built-in capabilities of MOO to enhance the pedagogical opportunities for teaching a select group of texts.
As currently planned, the suite will contain about twenty main nodes (rooms). These include rooms for eight of Lear's nonsense songs (four each from the volumes Nonsense Songs, Stories, Botanies and Alphabets [1871] and Laughable Lyrics [1877]) and seven rooms based on the places of Lear's Gromboolia (including the Great Gromboolian Plain, the Hills -- or Lakes -- of Chankly Bore, and the elusive Crumpetty Tree). Four special rooms will help guide navigation of the space. There will be an "entry" room (Gromboolia) linking the space to the rest of CowTown MOO, and two rooms (The Places and The Poems) providing links to all of the place-rooms and poem-rooms, respectively. Finally, the room Bong-Tree will serve as a kind of "crossroads" between places and poems. Lear's invented plant, the bong tree, recurs throughout his work and serves as a kind of signpost indicating that one has entered the nonsense realm of Gromboolia. Lear's references to Bong-trees in several poems make the term a point of connection between those texts and the places they describe and suggest its use as a special transfer-point or nexus in the MOO space. Although the space as planned is essentially self-contained, it should be noted that in the MOO platform, it would be a simple matter to either expand the space according to its current themes (e.g., by adding rooms for additional poems or places) or to connect this space to an entirely different group of spaces (e.g., a suite of rooms devoted to another author). In other words, the potential uses of this tool and approach extend beyond its current scope and focus.
To enhance the utility and interactivity of the Gromboolia space, I plan to make use of several specialized MOO objects. One of the strengths of the MOO platform is the ease with which one can create customized objects. This strength derives from the object-orientation of the MOO programming language and hinges on the concept of inheritance. In MOO, users can create "children" of existing objects, which "inherit" all the characteristics of their "parent" object. Inheritance empowers all users by allowing them to use complex objects that have been created by previous programmers (such as the "core" objects included in a basic MOO database) without having to do the programming themselves. Inheritance also provides an efficient means of specializing objects from more general types.
The use of inheritance to customize objects can be illustrated with a simple example. The MOO core contains a Generic Note object, which can be used to store simple text messages. Notes can passed from one character to another and read by any character. To personalize the notes that I create, by having them represented with a yellow icon (instead of the default white one), I would not have to program such an object from scratch. Instead, I would create a child of the Generic Note object and name it Yellow Note.[7] The Yellow Note would inherit all the features of the Generic Note, but since I owned it, I would be able to modify these attributes. I would then change the icon attribute from its default (inherited) value to the file location of a new yellow icon.[8] Now, any children of the Yellow Note would inherit all the features of the regular Generic Note, except the icon attribute, which would be inherited from the Yellow Note. If I further made my Yellow Note object "fertile," other players would be able to create their own Yellow Notes and to add additional features or modifications to these children. Theoretically, there is no limit to this process of inheritance, so that MOOs are almost infinitely expandable and customizable.
A MOO core database contains many objects that form the essential foundation of the MOO space (generic rooms, exits, and character classes, for example). The LinguaMOO enCore also contains a number of more specialized objects developed especially for educational uses (Schweller). The Gromboolia Project will make use of some of these either in their "out of the box" form or with modifications appropriate to the purposes of the project.
One customized object is the Generic Gromboolian Room, a variant of the core Generic Web Page object. The Generic Web Page is a special type of room that allows the use of HTML markup to provide greater control and flexibility in formatting room descriptions. The Gromboolian Room adds to the Generic Web Page a link to a cascading stylesheet (CSS) document I have designed that enables me to mark up Lear's poems for online viewing and to reproduce the typographic features of the standard edition of Lear's work.[9] Placing texts online is itself not particularly novel and does not require the use of MOO, but the poem-rooms created in this way have additional benefits. First, each poem can become a forum for student discussion of the work. Indeed, these forums support discussion in both synchronous (through normal MOO chat) and asynchronous (by leaving Note objects in the room) modes.[10] Moreover, the idea of students/readers becoming virtually embodied withinthe text is theoretically provocative. Holmevik and Haynes discuss how MOOs require "new codes for living inside publication, but also for publishing that lives at the intersection of a new dis/order of publication" ("Cyphertext MOOves" 215). Finally, once poems are represented as rooms, intriguing possibilities for hypertextual linking become available through another core MOO object, the Exit.
As mentioned above, the overarching metaphor of MOOs is spatial: "rooms" connected by "exits." That metaphor provides an easy means of exploring relationships among texts: by adding an exit from one poem-room to another, the texts become hypertextually linked.[11] The Generic Exit object is sufficient for expressing undifferentiated links, but it is also possible to create children of the Generic Exit to express multiple types of relationships. For the Gromboolia Project, I have created three new generic objects: a Generic Textual Link (for links to poems), a Generic Geographic Link (for links to places), and a Generic Speculative Link (for links that are only offered a possible relationships). The only technical difference between these and the standard exit are the icons they display in the MOO browser, but they add an easily recognizable level of link-typing that allows a builder to express the relationship a given exit is supposed to explore. It would be a simple matter to create additional "link types" if further relationships were needed.
Two other features of MOO exits have not been exploited in the Gromboolia Project yet, but seem to hold potential for pedagogical use. Any time an exit is used, the MOO will display messages to the player using the exit and to other occupants of the player's originating and target locations. While these exit and entrance messages have simple default values ("Bill leaves for The Great Gromboolian Plain"), they can also be customized by their owners. Manipulating these messages to comment on the connection between the source and destination rooms (e.g., "You move from the 'The Jumblies' to its sequel, 'The Dong with a Luminous Nose'") offers a further opportunity for expressing link relationships and literalizes what Landow has called the rhetoric of arrival and departure in hypertext ("Rhetoric of Hypermedia"). Another core MOO feature, locking, can be used in conjunction with exits to create the effect of conditional links. Locking an object imposes a constraint on its use. An exit can be "locked" so that only certain characters can use it (enabling the creation of secure or restricted zones within a MOOspace), or it can require that a player possess a certain object to pass through it (which could allow a teacher to regulate passage from a basic to a more advanced space by issuing tokens that allow entry).
Within the structure of the Gromboolia Project, the Generic Note object will play an important role. If exits in Gromboolia create a navigational infrastructure through the relationships among Lear's texts and places, Notes left inside the space can express more local relationships, such as textual, contextual, and interpretive commentary on the texts and settings. Notes are easy to create and edit, even from a command-line interface, meaning that users can generate them spontaneously during a MOO discussion. Once finished, a Note can be "dropped" in a given room, becoming a kind of footnote or annotation to the room itself. Notes might be added by either students or teachers and could, like exits, be typed to reflect different authors or purposes. If clutter becomes a problem, notes can be further organized by being collected and placed in Containers (another generic object with various sub-types). The simplicity of the Note is one of its pedagogical strengths because it reduces cognitive friction and facilitates the tight integration of reader and author modes within the space.
The basic objects described above will be the workhorses of the project, but another of the strengths of MOO is the virtually infinite variety of objects that can be created. Because MOO is a full-fledged programming language, there is little that a MOO object cannot be made to do, given sufficient time and ingenuity on the part of the programmer. In particular, it is possible to create objects with complex interactive behaviors. The Generic Bot, which monitors the conversations within a room and can be programmed to respond to certain key phrases with canned responses, is one popular example.[12] A bot programmed to respond to common queries provides a more adaptive method of delivering help information than, for example, a long FAQ page. Likewise, a bot representing a character from the poems that has the ability to explain something about itself (for example a Lady Jingly Jones who talks about her biographical inspiration, Gussie Bethel) achieves the same informational purpose as an explanatory note, but in a manner that is engaging and playful.
Since one of the specific virtues of MOO is its user-expandability, I plan to leave some of the furnishing of Gromboolia to groups of students, whom I will bring to Gromboolia beginning this fall. Student authoring in the MOO environment promises to realize constructivist educational ideals of learning through doing and is crucial to the project's goal of moving from the static model of the "online course" (which often means something like an online textbook) to the dynamic model of an online classroom. A student assignment of designing and furnishing a new space (such as a new poem or place) for Gromboolia would involve "serious" intellectual activity (thinking about the relationships of texts and contexts and finding appropriate expressions for those perceived relationships) but could be undertaken in a spirit of play. Such assignments could easily involve collaboration (with each student being responsible for creating one or more objects and then negotiating as a group how best to arrange them). What's more, successful student projects would become durable and valuable contributions to the project, revealing new connections within the space or expanding it into unforeseen directions.[13]
This project consists of three broad phases or sub-projects, some of which may be developed concurrently. Those phases are:
Phase 1 is already well underway, with four of the eight poems coded for online viewing and almost all of the project's infrastructure in place. What remains of the construction phase is mostly fleshing out the existing space and adding interactivity. I hope to undertake Phase 2 during Fall semester. I am in the process contacting colleagues at several institutions who have expressed willingness to participate in the project by bringing their students to the MOO. I am also laying the groundwork for Phase 3 by doing the necessary research in MOO scholarship, hypertext theory, and educational theory to support a critical apparatus for the project. Assessment will necessarily take place after I have seen some groups of students explore and use the space.
[1] For a comprehensive, but biased, survey of active MUDs circa 1990, see Richard Bartle. Bartle is clearly hostile to the idea of non-gaming MUDs, calling TinyMUD "not so much a MUA [Multi-User Adventure] as a forum. For conversation where participants have pinned pieces of prose on the wall for the benefit of anyone with the inclination to read them. If this kind of MUA gets a strong hold in the USA, it could set the industry back several years" (http://www.mud.co.uk/richard/imucg5.htm#6).
[2] For an extended account of the creation and evolution of LamdaMOO, see Pavel Curtis, "Not Just a Game" (25-42).
[3] MediaMOO was started by Amy Bruckman at MIT in 1992. BioMOO was founded in 1993 by Gustavo Glusman and Jaime Prilusky at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. Diversity University (http://www.du.org/) was founded by Jeanne MacWhorter for the social work profession (Haynes and Holmevik, "Introduction" 2-3). See Aarseth for another brief overview of the early evolution of MUDs and MOOs (149-52).
[4] Nelson sees in relationships that exist among literary texts a kind of prototype or model for hypertext systems. He goes so far as to call literature "debugged" (2/11).
[5] The possibility of synchronous interaction within a hypertextual space is surprisingly absent from hypertext theory, which has tended to assume hypertext reading would be a solitary activity. Even in the WWW, which is strictly speaking a multi-user system, users are typically quite unaware of each other. An exception to this trend is the concept of "social hypertext" raised by Mark Bernstein in his presentation of the "exotic" systems Card Shark and Thespis.
[6] See especially the "collaboration" node: http:// wwwpub.utdallas.edu/~cynthiah/collab.html.
[7] MOO objects
are created using the @create command,
the syntax of which, in fact, demands that a new object be a child of some
pre-existing object. The command for the process described would be: @create
$note named Yellow Note ("$note"
is a MOO shorthand for the Generic Note object).
[8] In the enCore Xpress graphical MOO interface, every object has an "icon" attribute, which is the path or URL of an image file that is displayed with the object's name whenever that object is present. The icon attribute is set by default to one of a limited number of images included in the MOO core. Because the icon attribute takes any URL as a valid value, custom icons can be images hosted on other servers, as long the full URL to the image is known.
[9] Here again,
I stress that exploring textual variants and other editorial issues in Lear's
work is not within the current scope of this project. I have followed the
Dover Publications edition of The Complete Nonsense of Edward Lear,
which is an unaltered republication of the 1947 Faber and Faber edition of
the work. The Gromboolia
stylesheet is online at http://www.donutage.org/
bill/styles/gromboolia.css. CSS is the current World Wide
Web Consortium standard for defining formatting instructions for web documents.
It provides broader range of options and a finer degree of control than other
options (such the deprecated HTML <FONT> tag) and allows a stricter
separation of structural and presentational markup. In designing the stylesheet
and in coding the poems, care was taken to make sure that essential textual
features (line and stanza breaks, indentation patterns) would still be represented
if a user has not enabled CSS formatting on his or her browser.
[10] I am also considering programming a feature into the Gromboolian Room that would allow the generation of notes that would belong to the room's owner rather than to the player making the comment. This would allow visitors in guest mode to leave comments and room owners to manage or "moderate" the comments within a room. Such a feature also would not penalize the building quotas of students or visitors making comments, which might discourage participation in this form of discussion.
[11] Strictly speaking, MOO exits are always unidirectional: they are exits, not entrances. However, it is quite easy in MOO to create exits and return-exits simultaneously, effectively providing bidirectional linking. Incidentally, MOO exits are more unobtrusive than traditional inline web links because (in the Xpress interface) they appear at the bottom of a given page rather than within the text.
[12] Bots are similar to the famous "Artificial Intelligence" program, ELIZA, in that they use simple keyword-matching and randomizers to "respond" to the spoken comments of users within the same room. Depending on the programmer's skill and effort, their behavior can range from extremely rudimentary to fairly complex. Some bots have been known to fool human users into thinking they were actually human players.
[13] Perhaps the most spectacular example of the possibilities for student-authored hypertext is George Landow's award-winning Victorian Web project, which began as a combination of instructor- and student-authored nodes in the Intermedia system at Brown University.
Aarseth, Espen. Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.
Barber, John F. and Dene Grigar, eds. New Worlds, New Words: Exploring Pathways for Writing About and in Electronic Environments. Research and Teaching in Rhetoric and Composition. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2001.
Bartle, Richard. Interactive Multi-User Computer Games. MUSE, Ltd. 1990. <http://www.mud.co.uk/richard/imucg0.htm>. Also available FTP: <ftp://ftp.lambda.moo.mud.org/pub/MOO/papers/mudreport.txt>.
Bernstein, Mark. "Card Shark and Thespis: Exotic Tools for Hypertext Narrative." Hypertext'01: Proceedings of the Twelfth ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia, University of Aarhus, Aarhus, Denmark, Aug. 14-18 2001. Ed. Hugh Davis, Yellowlees Douglas, and David Durand. New York: ACM, 2001. 41-50.
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Bush, Vannevar. "As We May Think." Atlantic Monthly 176 (July 1945): 101-108.
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_____. "Not Just a Game: How LamdaMOO Came to Exist and What It Did to Get Back at Me" in Haynes and Holmevik, High Wired 25-42.
Curtis, Pavel and David A. Nichols. "MUDs Grow Up: Social Virtual Reality in the Real World." Xerox PARC Technical Report. 5 May 1993. Available FTP: <ftp://ftp.lambda.moo.mud.org/pub/MOO/papers/MUDsGrowUp.txt>.
Day, Michael, et al. "CoverWeb: Pedagogies in Virtual Spaces: Writing Classes in the MOO." Kairos: A Journal for Teachers in Webbed Environments 1.2 (Summer 1996). <http:// english.ttu.edu/kairos/1.2/coverweb/bridge.html>.
Dibble, Julian. "A rape in cyberspace; or how an evil clown, a Haitian trickster spirit, two wizards, and a cast of dozens turned a database into a society." 1993. Rpt. in Peter Ludlow, ed. High Noon on the Electronic Frontier: Conceptual Issues in Cyberspace. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996. 375-95.
Haynes, Cynthia. "Help! There's a MOO in this Class!" in Haynes and Holmevik, High Wired 161-76.
Haynes, Cynthia and Jan Rune Holmevik, eds. High Wired: On the Design, Use, and Theory of Educational MOOs. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998.
_____. "Introduction: 'From the Faraway Nearby'" in Haynes and Holmevik, High Wired 1-12.
_____. "Lingua Unlimited: Enhancing Pedagogical Reality with MOOs." Kairos: A Journal for Teachers in Webbed Environments 1.2 (Summer 1996). <http://english.ttu.edu/ kairos/1.2/coverweb/HandH/start.html>. Also available at <http://wwwpub.utdallas.edu/~cynthiah/start.html>.
Holmevik, Jan Rune and Cynthia Haynes, "Cyphertext MOOves: A Dance with Real-Time Publications" in Barber and Grigar 213-32.
_____. enCore Open Source MOO Project. LinguaMOO. University of Texas at Dallas. Sept. 30, 2001. <http:// lingua.utdallas.edu/encore>.
_____. MOOniversity: A Student's Guide to Online Learning Environments. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2000.
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