Nearly twenty years ago, what once started as a make-believe fantasy game for college students grew over the next several years into a phenomenon that many would not hesitate to call a society. Though the implications of such an activity were similar to those of a game—for example, no one’s physical well-being was endangered as a result of participation—there were several aspects that caused people to question the social nature of the activity. Since then, these make-believe worlds, commonly referred to as Multi-User Dungeons (or Dimensions), have been given such wide-ranging descriptions as psychotherapeutic workspaces, dehumanizing playgrounds for escapism (Turkle 1995), centers of community and collaboration (Bruckman 1995), potential utopias for political experimentation (Gaitenby 1996), and more. Some have characterized the MUD as "social life minus the body" (Gaitenby 1996:136), and in its most literal and radical sense, that is what it could be interpreted as—a reality which operates through the transmission of signals which are made up of language rather than of physical characteristics.

The ambiguous and technological nature of such a social activity often causes people to dismiss it as being a mere waste of time, an addictive game, and a technological novelty. But what happens when one becomes so involved in one or more of these alternate realities that the individual comes to see it as being more detailed and intricate than his or her physical life? What happens when they see their real life as "just one more window" on their computer screen (Turkle 1995:14)? When a virtual community such as a MUD offers more meaning to many individuals than the real world does, an anthropological inquiry must be made: is the Multi-User Dimension a culture? If so, what implications does such a geographically independent culture hold for other contemporary cultures around the world? This paper will attempt to analyze the MUD in respect to the Totalist and Mentalist definitions of culture, and identify what implications MUDs have for the field of anthropology as a whole. To analyze the Multi-User Dimension as a culture, however, one must first have a basic understanding of the circumstances in which the prospective culture arose and of the medium in which it exists.

The ancestry of the MUD dates back to the phenomenon of Dungeons and Dragons and other role-playing games of its kind, created in the early 1970’s. These role-playing games emphasized the role of the imagination in storytelling and social interaction, as the world of the game took form in the minds of its participants. In the late 1970’s, a kind of single-player computer game commonly referred to as an "adventure game" emerged from the influences of these role playing games. Such a game was set in an entirely text-based (non-graphical), figurative world which the user explored. Such a world was divided into sections (or nodes) commonly referred to as rooms. For example, one of the rooms in adventure might be described as "You are in a large cavern. There is a key on the floor and a small corridor leading west." The player could type in "go west" and they would be moved into a room that was connected to the room they were just in, which would have a different description. In this way, the world the game depicted was characterized as having a topology but no Euclidean dimension (Read and Gessler 1996). The player could also type in actions such as "get key" which would allow their persona in the game to pick up the virtual key and "hold" it in their virtual hands. Such sentence-like commands would be the building blocks that allowed the player to explore and interact with the world of the game.

In the late 1970’s, two undergraduate students at the University of Essex created the first MUD, called simply "Multi User Dungeon," which expanded the concept of the single-player adventure game (Dibbell 1999). This environment was one that resembled the single-player computer games, but added the characteristic of social interaction. This added an entirely new dimension to the experience, and since it existed on the Internet, people from all over the world connected to it, interacting in the same geographically independent environment.

Because more than one person could be present in the same virtual environment at a time, additional socially oriented commands were added to the game’s repertoire of verbs. Users could still interact with the physical world by entering commands like "get key" or "go west," but now they could also interact with other players by typing things like "say Hello." In such a case, the words "Abraxas (or whatever the name of the player was) says "Hello"" would be displayed on the screens of all the participants who were in the same room as the player. Another added social feature was the so-called "emote," or "emotion command." Such a command allowed players to simulate physical gestures and emotions ranging from waving and laughing to crying and kissing. For example, if the individual who played the role of Abraxas typed "wave Lenirya," the participants in the room except for Lenirya would receive the message "Abraxas waves to Lenirya," and the individual who played the role of Lenirya would receive the message "Abraxas waves to you." Through this, the image of a player in other players’ minds was formed by the way he or she talked and the emotes that he or she used (Turkle 1995), which allowed for a large degree of role-playing and character development. This kind of social interaction also allowed customs to be established which were conducive to such an environment. For example, if a player wanted to say something in his or her own voice rather than in the role of his or her character, the individual would type "OOC" before what he or she said, indicating that he or she was saying it out of character. Other customs were carried over or diffused from each player’s particular culture; for example, waving to and "high-fiving" others was common.

These online games achieved a huge amount of popularity due to their role-playing and gaming potential, and other MUDs soon came into existence all over the world. The fact that computers could be used to create artificial realities that could be experienced by multiple individuals was what allowed for the open-ended experimentation and social interaction that had previously been experienced in Dungeons and Dragons. Now, the computer both played the role of nature by carrying out a framework of natural laws to govern such a virtual world, and it also had the processing power and networking infrastructure to handle the participation of hundreds of people within that world. As a result of these two characteristics, the MUD provided an environment that was no longer a huge game of Dungeons and Dragons; it was potentially a community as well.

One of the first games that exhibited characteristics of community and opened debate on the cultural implications of this phenomenon was a MUD called "Habitat," run by Lucasfilm in the early 1980’s (Read and Gessler 1996, Turkle 1995). Habitat’s creators, Chip Morningstar and F. Randall Farmer, allowed their players to carry guns and other weapons. They said this was done "because we felt that players should be able to ‘materially’ affect each other in ways that went beyond simply talking, ways that required real moral choices to be made by the participants." (Morningstar and Farmer 1991:289, cited in Turkle 1995:250). On Habitat, however, the only consequence of virtually ‘killing’ someone was that the killed individual was transported to a central location in the game stripped of all possessions. Because it was like losing a life in a video game and having to start over materially, the consequences of death were not nearly as dire as they were in actual communities. Because of this, players killed each other on Habitat without much consideration because the consequences were minimal; for them Habitat was a game, not real life. The reaction to this problem was one of the first debates over the fundamentally ambiguous nature of the Multi-User Dimension. Was the MUD just a game, or was it a realistic community with its own culture?

Some players believed that a universal ban on weapons was appropriate, because such a law meant only a few lines of code had to be written for it to be universally implemented, unlike real life (Turkle 1995). Thus they saw MUDs as political utopias in which chaos was kept in check by the laws of society, which were as rigid and unbreakable as the laws of nature. Others believed that it was unrealistic to do this, since in real life the laws of society could easily be broken by an individual; they believed that the weapons should be allowed, but that their consequences should be more serious (Turkle 1995). They thought that the "death" of a player should mean that his or her character would be erased from the MUD, and that the individual would no longer be able to play as that character. Those who saw the MUD as a game believed that virtual violence was as acceptable in MUDs as it was in video games, because it was part of the fun. At one point, a player who was a Greek Orthodox priest in real life started a church in Habitat called "The Order of the Holy Walnut." The members of this church pledged not to steal or use any kind of virtual violence on the MUD.

In the end, Morningstar and Farmer divided the world into two parts: the town and the wilderness outside of it. In the town, violence was prohibited and in the wilderness it was allowed (Turkle 1995). Eventually a democratic voting process was implemented in the MUD, and the players elected a local sheriff. Following this, discussion then took place about the nature of the laws of Habitat and of the balance between chaos, law, and individual freedom. Soon the players saw themselves as citizens of a community rather than solely as players in a game.

In anthropology, the Totalist view of culture is defined as "that complex whole of knowledge, beliefs, arts, morals, and customs acquired by people as members of society" (Suggs 1998, p.c.). Habitat and other MUDs satisfy many of the conditions in these definitions. Players gain the knowledge of the mechanics of the MUD, including the various commands used to interact with the world and how to use them, as well as knowledge of mechanical aspects of constructions, such as the voting system in Habitat. In respect to beliefs, every player has his or her own vision of the nature of the MUD; it is their own interpretation of the virtual world. As mentioned previously, some saw Habitat as a community in which the rules of the real world applied, some saw it as a place of experimentation for political utopia. Others saw it just as a place to relax, a world that was absent from the worries of modern, industrial life. All of these views produced different beliefs and moral conceptions, as some believed that weapons should be banned and some believed that the consequences of their usage should be amplified or made null. These ideologies were turned into laws as the inhabitants interacted socially, exchanging their thoughts and ideas and solidifying them into a legal code for behavior in the community (Gaitenby 1996).

Customs also exist on MUDs, beyond the "emotion commands" described earlier. For example, On a fantasy-oriented MUD called DragonRealms, players wanted their characters to be able to ‘mock fight’ with one another to playfully see whose character was the stronger, but they also wanted the ability to be able to kill characters "for real." As a result, the administrators of the MUD set up a custom in which users were given a command that allowed them to "mock fight" each other. In this mock fight, combat was the same as "real" fighting but the character that lost was stunned for a short period of time instead of actually being "killed" (Ivey 1998, p.c.). In this way, formal laws and the customs comprise the rules that the citizens of MUDs like Habitat and DragonRealms live by, which satisfies the Mentalist definition of culture.

Lastly, the arts also exist on MUDs. On DragonRealms, individuals who play the roles of medieval bards compose and virtually "sing" their own songs. Players write fiction which they submit to the administrators of the MUD, who turn them into book objects that characters can read on the MUD. When events occur, some players take on the role of historians and chronicle the occurrence, and their log is turned into a history book that others can read. Some players create character-based artwork (e.g., creating a picture of a castle through multiple lines of characters like /, o, %, etc.) and submit them to be put in an art gallery (Ivey 1998, p.c.).

Another cultural attribute that MUDs possess is kinship, although it is of a slightly different nature than in physical cultures. Although biological relations and descent systems obviously cannot exist in such an environment, close emotional friendships and relationships are established between characters and often extend into real life (Turkle 1995). In this way, the concept of kinship exhibited on MUDs is the kinship model in industrial societies taken to the extreme. Industrial societies use a bilateral descent system so that the individual can minimize the number of biological kin relationships he or she has, and maximize the amount of kinship ties with those who share common interests or personality. In MUDs, biological descent is eliminated entirely, and the individual finds one’s "family" in his or her friendships with other inhabitants.

Anthropology also claims that culture is continuous, that it exists through time and after those who carry it pass away. The social atmosphere on MUDs is always present; because the community is geographically independent, anyone from anywhere in the world can log on at any time. Because it is always daylight in some part of the world (and many MUDders are nocturnal), there is never a time on a MUD when there are no characters interacting within it. Certain players may eventually stop playing on the MUD, and thus they essentially "pass away" on it, but new individuals with new characters enter the game, creating a constant flux as people leave and join. The culture is carried on by those characters that exist in the interim, as well as by the objects and structures in the virtual world around them. There also exist inhabitants who are online continuously, known as "regulars." Many inhabitants of MUDs have commented that it was their interactions with the regulars that were the most meaningful (Bruckman, 1995). In this way, such regulars serve as a sort of "social glue" that binds the community together and makes it more continuous and fluid, for it is the regulars who will always be present to pass on the culture and preserve it.

If MUDs based on Dungeons and Dragons are indeed cultures as they have been shown to be, they are very reminiscent of the class-based industrial societies that their creators came from. They all had a strict dichotomy between a ruling class of creators known as wizards and a plebian class of players (Dibbell 1999). The wizards would always create (through programming) the world which the players interacted within and they would arbitrate over it, imposing rules as they saw fit, so that malicious players would not be able to greatly disrupt the environment. In many of these MUDs such as DragonRealms and Habitat, there did exist a very strong bond between the players and the wizards. Most of the formal institutions and laws on the MUD emerged as a result of the players giving feedback to the wizards, and the wizards implementing structures and rules based on the feedback. However, the players still had very limited freedom compared to the wizards. They could only perform actions that the wizards allowed them to; they could not create their own objects or places, as it would potentially disrupt the wizards’ vision of the world that was being created. For example, an undisciplined player creating an automatic machine-gun in a medieval setting would be entirely uncalled for. But in a world in which the universal implementation and guaranteed enforcement of a law was made possible by a few lines of programming code, denying the inhabitants the right to create meant denying them a certain characteristic inherent in humanity. It denied them Lévi-Strauss’ concept of bricolage, the ability to convey one’s ideas and influence their culture through objects and constructions of one’s own creation (Turkle 1995). It also denied them, in a certain way, the ability to express themselves; because they could not create their own "emotion commands" either; if there was not an emotion command the wizards had implemented for staring at someone, for example, the player’s character simply could not perform that action.

TinyMUD, an experimental MUD set up by a Carnegie Mellon graduate in the summer of 1989, changed all of this. In TinyMUD, the players were given nearly the same privileges as the wizards; they were allowed to program objects, terrain (including rooms), and actions into the MUD, thus giving them almost complete freedom of action. There were only few actions they could not perform, such as disconnecting online players or deleting their existence from the MUD (these actions could be comparable to real-life "knocking out" or "murdering," respectively), or the individual implementation of universal laws. Although players previously helped create a social environment by collectively influencing the wizards to change that environment and rules through reacting to the environment and rules around them, they now had the opportunity to literally create their own world collaboratively, without the barrier of the wizards. Wizards were still the peacekeepers and lawgivers, but the players were given the freedom to create. Now that the wizards were not the primary creators of the world, citizens were able to instantly react to their culture through influencing it directly. What was once a hierarchical, ordered world that was driven by monster-slaying, treasure hoarding, and questing was now an anarchistic world that was literally whatever its inhabitants wanted it to be; it was a piece of clay that could be molded in the cultural constructions of its inhabitants. In fact, it was entirely a cultural construction of its inhabitants, for there existed no fundamental, unchangeable biological world that lay under it. Instead of the MUD’s culture serving as "an interface to the biological world" (Suggs 1998, p.c.), the "biological world" of this MUD was a construction of the cultural views of its original inhabitants, composed of the diffusing culture (usually industrialized nations) from which those inhabitants came.

In this way, MUDs such as TinyMUD are the epitome of adaptive culture. Many characteristics of culture that anthropology has found to be universal to all cultures are not present, because the MUD as a piece of software is essentially a cultural tabula rasa that is given meaning and form solely through interactions of the individual views and motivations of its inhabitants. There are few common cultural properties that all MUDs share in common in comparison to the common cultural properties that all cultures in the physical world share in common, because it is impossible to alter the laws of nature in the physical world. For example, the only ascribed status that is always present in MUD cultures is that of the "newbie," or a new individual who enters the society of a certain kind of MUD culture for the first time. Newbies are like newborns that generally do not fully understand the way they should act in such a virtual community, as they believe that they can do anything because they are in an anonymous setting. Eventually they mature, and their conception of their place in society develops from a role of anonymity to pseudonymity, "developing the concern for their character's reputation that marks the attainment of virtual adulthood" (Dibbell 1993).

However, this is probably the only ascribed status that can be attributed to all MUDs. Gender, biological age, and kinship—ascribed statuses that are common to all cultures in the physical world—do not even have to be present in virtual communities. Such statuses and others can be made to be entirely voluntary, randomly assigned, or nonexistent. As a result of this flexibility, MUDs like TinyMUD came to be seen as places for experimenting with adaptive culture.

This caused many heads to turn, as many professionals became aware of the potential of such virtual spaces to be communities for the growth and development of some field or concept. Since TinyMUD and its kind, many more MUDs of its kind arose. These kinds of communities were termed as "social MUDs," because they focused solely on the social and cultural aspects of community and abandoned the "hack-and-slash" paradigm of D&D. For similar reasons, it was also at this time that the term "MUD" began to stand for "Multi-User Dimension" rather than "Multi-User Dungeon," for now a MUD could be any kind of virtual community, not just a fantasy-oriented one.

Indeed, the social MUDs that came after TinyMUD were very diverse in range and content. Amy Bruckman of the MIT Media Labs set up a community called MediaMOO in which professional Media researchers could come to discuss, hold conferences, and convey ideas and concepts through the dynamic, ongoing creation of the world and the objects within it (Bruckman 1995). The Xerox Corporation set up an experimental society known as LambdaMOO in which the citizens have set up a democratic voting system for the passing of laws (Dibbell 1993), among many other things such as the establishment of ten distinct genders. In another social MUD called FurryMUCK, the vast majority of inhabitants are not even human at all—most citizens play the roles of animals that have the ability to speak, perform their own actions, and create their own objects and virtual homes.

The boundary between the physical and the virtual is becoming constantly more blurred. In 1993, one of the first documented cases of "virtual rape" occurred on LambdaMOO. A character named Mr. Bungle performed sexual acts on a character on the MUD using emotion commands. While he was doing this, he used an object called a "voodoo doll" to make it seem as though his victim was entering emotion commands in positive response to his advances, when in fact his victim was doing nothing of the sort. When the journalist Julian Dibbell interviewed the victim, he noted that "posttraumatic tears were streaming down her face -- a real-life fact that should suffice to prove that the words' emotional content was no mere fiction" (1993). Dibbell noted that the victim had experienced feelings indicating that what had happened to her was both real and virtual. She had reprimanded him for a breach of civility on a LambdaMOO bulletin board post, showing that she was annoyed and irritated at him, yet the fact that she was crying also indicated that there were more emotions involved than solely botheration. It was this combination of "murderous rage and eyeball-rolling annoyance" (Dibbell 1993), he said, that characterized the situation.

Such ambiguity can be seen as a trait, not an abnormality, of MUD culture. Indeed, the MUD is both a figurative, make-believe world—being a culture that came into existence exclusively through the diffusion of other cultures—and an alternate reality at the same time. If its consequences are simultaneously and inseparably real and virtual, the relationship between the MUD culture and the physical culture must be questioned. What does it mean when someone can simultaneously participate in more than one culture simultaneously, as individuals do when they are logged on to multiple MUDs on their computer and are still interacting with their own culture, all at the same time? If people from different cultures all over the world are citizens of the same geographically-independent virtual community, to what extent can their physical cultures be viewed as distinct and separate from one another when their cultures diffuse with one another instantaneously through electronic signals? Perhaps the relationship between MUDs and the physical world might be better interpreted as a continuum of morals, values, ideas, and beliefs rather than as an interaction between distinctly separate cultures. In any case, the concept of geographically independent, electronically mediated social spaces is of very great relevance to cultural anthropology, as it confronts the very nature of community and culture.

In conclusion, MUDs present us with the vision of a world in which physicality exists only in our imagination. It is a world in which the language we use describes the shape of our being, conveys the flow of our thoughts, our feelings, and our actions, its use is what causes the world to spin into motion and give it meaning. It is purely an exchange of signals, having nothing to do with any concrete reality but only our interpretation of it, for it is literally what we make of it. And it is this world that we must confront to have a better understanding of what it means to be human. We must allow it to question us, our ways of life, our beliefs, and we must listen to it—to the furthest extent possible—with an open mind.

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