Electronic social spaces such as Multi-User Dimensions offer a great potential for enriching the lives of its participants, as well as a great potential for harming them. Such varied effects ranging from psychological rehabilitation to social fragmentation cause these virtual communities to be the subject of heated debate. In many cases, individuals obtain a better understanding of their identity at the price of becoming disconnected and alienated from their physical community. This paper will attempt to trace the history of the Multi-User Dimension back to its origins in an effort to better understand the properties of this social medium, and then analyze how it can be used to further integrate individuals with their physical community rather than separate them from it.

The journalist Julian Dibbell notes that the Multi-User Dimension is ultimately a descendant of the map (1999). He describes how the map has always been an instrument for transporting an individual into a figurative place that is not immediately accessible, a tool that invites one to imagine as though he or she were in the space that the map depicted. Map-based board games such as Parcheesi and chess eventually evolved from the interactive potential of the map, as the symbol of the game pieces and the goal of the game provided a context and a story for the immersion into an alternate reality. Such a need for games like these was brought about by the want to simplify reality into easy-to-understand rules which could be manipulated and experimented with, in which fate is represented but its effects are not permanent. Dibbell describes that this game-playing, even in secular environments, is "just another way of wrapping our hearts and minds around religion's primal conundrum: the cosmic raw deal that gave us each just one life to live." Thus these games were created not only to be a source of recreation, but also to provide the participants with an interactive way to reflect on life and its consequences.

In this way, the map-based board game was one of the first forms of interactive narrative, because it put the participants in an imaginary situation and allowed them to interact with an alternate world with its own set of natural laws. For example, in the game of chess, the players were put in the command of an army that was pitted against another army on a battlefield, and the world followed a set of purely rational laws. Each member of each army was subject to different abilities based on their ascribed status, and those abilities were static, rational, and unchangeable. An actual game of chess being played was the narrative of the conflict between two opposing forces, and such a story would affect the players’ perceptions of their own reality.

In this way, board games and their descendants served as objects-to-think-with, or as physical carriers of ways of thinking. In anthropological terms, they were a part of Claude Lévi-Strauss’ concept of bricolage, or the process "by which individuals and cultures use the objects around them to develop and assimilate ideas" (Lévi-Strauss 1968, cited in Turkle 1995:48). In other words, the object and the way it works influences our cultural understanding of a concept. For example, a child playing "The Game of Life" might associate the rolling of dice with the uncontrollable forces of circumstance that influence one’s life, affecting their construction of the world. The game of chess described above might foster their sense of viewing the world as a place that is controlled by competition and rationality. In this way, any object could be seen as a kind of material symbol containing a pathway for learning about some concept in a cultural context.

The board-game paradigm of interactive narrative was maintained until the early 1970’s, when Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson introduced the concept of role-playing with Dungeons and Dragons. This game was essentially an interactive oral narrative in which an individual known as the "dungeon master" served as the omniscient god of the alternate reality and as a storyteller for the participants. He would give the players a second-person description of their surroundings (e.g., "you are in a giant cave"), allowing them to materialize this alternate world in their imagination through the words they were given. Thus the dungeon master would create the plot, non-player-characters, objects, and territory of the alternate reality, and immerse the players within the fictional world. "D&D," as many players referred to the game, was significantly different from traditional board games in two distinct ways. Firstly, the map was taken away from view; instead of seeing pieces on a game board that signified as observers within the alternate reality, the player was taken directly into the alternate world by being placed inside it. Secondly, role-playing was different from board-games because, although the individual games played during each gaming session usually had a goal, each session was connected with one another in the form of an ongoing saga. As a whole, the saga did not necessarily have a teleological goal or even an ending (Dibbell 1999). Rather than "winning," the purpose of playing Dungeons and Dragons was to put oneself in the shoes of another individual and role-play that individual’s life, dealing with the problems his or her character was confronted with. Because the players’ characters traveled together in the game as a party, they were often confronted with the same problems and had to deal with them collaboratively. Thus the concept of role-playing focused more on the individuals’ interactions with the other players and with the environment around them rather than the attainment of some all-encompassing goal (Murray 1997). This allowed the relationship between players and the world in a D&D game to be much more open-ended than that of a map-based board game. This open-endedness allowed them to learn more from their experiences with this form of interactive narrative, as it offered more room for experimentation. Choices they made would not have any consequence to their actual life, so they felt free to tinker with their identity and their actions, interpreting and learning from the results. Role-playing also allowed them to examine the world from a different point of view, as participants would often play the role of a character possessing different beliefs, morals, and physical characteristics from those of the player (Turkle 1995).

The concept of role-playing was carried into other areas, but served a slightly different purpose. The players in a game of Dungeons and Dragons were usually good friends that knew each other to a certain degree, and the social interaction that occurred as a result of the role-playing often fostered their sense of unity and friendship with one another, like any social activity might. However, in a scenario in which the participants had not known each other, such an activity could potentially be very powerful force for not maintaining but creating a sense of unity and understanding between them.

Throughout the history of western societies, it has been shown that individuals who do not know each other at all will often join together for survival in times of need. When this happens, these individuals become suddenly and keenly aware of what could be described as a sense of humanity and understanding between one another. In the aftermath of such a crisis, social bonds have been formed and the experience often leaves the participants with a stronger sense of community.

Businesses, schools, and other organizations regularly evoke the effects of such a phenomenon through role-playing. For example, many elementary education systems have their students go to wilderness areas (e.g., the concept of "camp") to undergo various group-building activities. Such activities place the students in a make-believe crisis, such as the aftermath of a plane crash in which they are the survivors. Some of the students are also given imaginary statuses, such as the role of a disabled individual or a pregnant woman, and the entire group must cope together and prevail through the crisis together. This fostered the same kind of feeling of unity and togetherness that was created by an actual crisis, and as a result it was helpful in the community-building of a social environment.

In respect to Lévi-Strauss’ concept of bricolage, role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons were somewhat ambiguous. They could be seen as objects-to-think-with, but their existence was chiefly mental. There existed rulebooks, pre-written worlds and adventures, and accessories (such as dice) for the playing of such games, but the actual game took place mentally, in the minds of the participants—yet they were still games, like chess or Parcheesi, which were objects-to-think-with. In any case, the end effect of such a role-playing game was the same, as there was an interchange between the world of the game and the culture of the participants playing it. The imaginary world was created and changed based on the cultural perceptions of its participants, and the cultural perceptions of its participants changed as a result of the events taking place in the imaginary world. For example, if a player’s character had been forced to confront something that the player had never confronted in real life, such as the death of a companion, the player’s cultural construction of death would change after experiencing it in the imaginary world. The imaginary world would then be affected as a result of the actions of the player’s character in response to the death, and it was this pattern of exchange between the game and reality that made the phenomenon personally and socially influential (Murray 1997). However, it was the interactive realism of the game that enabled such a powerful exchange to occur, and as a result the line between the game and reality became somewhat blurred—an effect that the MUDs to come would both inherit and cultivate.

At the same time that these role-playing games emerged, personal computers had come into the market and were beginning to be used in nearly every field, from fiction writing to engineering. Now gamers realized that the computer was also capable of serving the task of the dungeon master, as long as the data of the world, its objects, and its rules were pre-programmed into it (Dibbell 1999). Such a single-player "adventure game," called Colossal Cave, was created in the late 1970’s, in which the player explored a giant cavern.

Because the rules that were programmed into this game were rigid and not susceptible to the inconsistencies in the nature of a human dungeon master, the computer seemed to offer a more realistic world because its rigidity better represented the physical laws of nature (Dibbell 1999). However, with the aspect of social interaction taken away from the game, the experience became less experimental and open-ended. Without other participants, the potential for collaboration was lost and the game reverted into something that had to be "won," because the computer could not be programmed to respond to every possible human interaction with its world and its characters. The player was usually required to perform a specific action to advance to another stage in the game, because a player’s total freedom of action would result in an enormous number of story threads which the computer could not be programmed to handle. Thus, the game became more of a static puzzle that the player had to solve rather than a dynamic world that he or she reacted to.

Multi-User Dungeons offered a solution for this problem of inefficacy and lifelessness. In the late 1970’s, two undergraduate students at the University of Essex created the first of these, called simply "Multi User Dungeon" (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.

These online games achieved a huge amount of popularity due to their role-playing 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 allowed the MUDs to have the same kind of open-ended experimentation and social interaction previously experienced in role-playing games like D&D. 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.

And a community it became. Over the period of a few years, the MUD evolved from what was exclusively a hack-and-slash paradise into communities like Habitat in which social laws were created and a definite sense of citizenry formed (Turkle 1995). These MUDs eventually evolved into "social MUDs" in which there existed no preoccupation with monster-slaying or treasure hoarding. A social MUD was essentially a tabula rasa of adaptive culture that was given meaning and form solely through interactions of the personal views and motivations of its inhabitants (Varma 1998). Such places were the birthplace of various virtual communities ranging from experimental societies such as LambdaMOO and TinyMUD, to centers for research collaboration such as MediaMOO, to centers for collaborative learning and socialization such as MOOSE Crossing (Bruckman 1998). On MUDs, the concepts of narrative and community are conflated, providing for a very unique and unusual social medium. Several traits present in this new social medium make for a community that is vastly different from the physical, real-world community in many respects. These traits and their effects on the MUD’s community and its individuals will be discussed below.

One such characteristic is known as constructionism, and it is the philosophy that MediaMOO and MOOSE crossing were founded upon; it is akin to Levi-Strauss’ concept of bricolage mentioned earlier. Seymour Papert defined constructionism as an extension of Jean Piaget’s constructivism:

Through this process, individuals created objects to help themselves understand and learn a concept, and their object helped others understand the concept from the creator’s point of view. When placed in a communal context such as MUDs, the community fosters the concept of constructionism. When individuals fuse their ideas and knowledge with objects, others are inspired by those objects to create their own. The very purpose for them to create objects is centered around a contribution to the community, as the creator makes an object not merely for oneself to use, but for those around him or her to use and examine. Through this, the creation of interesting objects confers status amongst the authors of the objects and it becomes a community activity. Through a common relationship and interest with these objects, it can help bind a community in such a shared activity, as everyone is a craftsperson of objects-to-think-with.

In this way, objects also serve as an art on the MUD, and they are feats of computer programming at the same time as they are feats of artistic expression. As the computer progamming involved is directly oriented towards making "material" objects in the virtual world, it has a direct purpose. It becomes something more than just a tool to create seemingly mundane database applications and programs that print the Fibonacci sequence—in MUDs, programming becomes the language that, when interwoven with one’s natural written language, an individual uses to create objects which express oneself. Programming also becomes more of a collaborative and social activity, as individuals can work on objects together and ask for help from other individuals in the virtual community, who can examine their code and help them modify it in real-time (Bruckman 1998). Because of this, computer programming becomes easier to identify with and relate to in such a practical, social setting and can be more easily seen as an art rather than something complex and esoteric. Such a relationship between technology and the individual can be a very powerful force in fostering a better understanding and friendliness towards modern technology. It also presents a very formidable impetus for bridging the gap between the arts with the sciences, as they are essentially unified into one in the context of object creation in MUDs.

Recognizing such a fusion of two opposites is the result of mental connections in one’s mind. The difference between a written poem and the lines of code in a computer program or the elements of a mathematical equation seem to be completely unrelated concepts, but when placed in the proper context, connections can be made between them. For example, the artwork of M.C. Escher and the music of J.S. Bach both share very intricate relationships with mathematics, but these relationships cannot be seen unless one is placed in an environment that facilitates such connections by viewing objects from both a mathematical and an artistic perspective. In a practical sense, the MUD’s context of computer programming for the purpose of creative writing and artistic expression creates this kind of environment. But on another level, the social spaces of Multi-User Dimensions can also provide an environment for new ways of thinking precisely because its world is the embodiment of pure ideas and pure information which are the diverse thoughts, ideas, and beliefs of its participants. Such a diverse range of information gives the participants the opportunity to make connections between concepts as they are exposed to the varied perspectives of multiple individuals, and this knowledge is carried into their understanding of the physical world.

The combination of programming and creative writing present in constructing the world and the stage-like dialogue and emotes used to communicate with one another inside it are the building blocks which make up the collaborative, interactive narrative of the Multi-User Dimension. At the same time, these are also the building blocks that make the MUD a community as well. For although the world is still make-believe, its consequences on reality augment those of its role-playing and board game ancestors to such a degree that the border between the imaginary and the real becomes increasingly blurred.

One major factor that enables such an ambiguity between the real and the figurative is the property of anonymity inherent in the MUD’s social medium. Like its narrative ancestors, the MUD allows an individual to experience things that they may not be able to experience in real life due to circumstance or some ascribed status such as age, gender, or ethnicity. But in board and role-playing games, every participant was always aware of the real-life identity of every other participant, and this unalterably had an effect on the way the participants viewed the characters of the other players. For example, if the individual who played a male character were female, the participants in the game would automatically have some mental image of the character she played. This would be because they know that she herself is not male, and that the way she portrays her character will be affected by her real-life construction of males. The participants would thereby attribute any action her character performed to their conception of her real-life perspective of males. In this way, the way she role-played her character could potentially affect her actual identity as perceived by others. Because this correlation with a participant and the character he or she role-plays is lost in the medium of symbolic communication, the identity of a character played by a participant is determined entirely by the symbols the participant uses to describe that character and interact with others (Turkle 1995). This allows for the participant to play the role of the character without fear of injury to one’s real-life identity or the interference of one’s ascribed real-life statuses, such as age or sex.

There have already been numerous documented cases in which some participants used MUDs in this way to better understand some particular aspect of their real-life culture or identity. For example, an woman who had been recently amputated in real life played the role of a virtual amputee on a MUD and the inhabitants helped her accept her new status. Because she was on a MUD, she did not have to fear for injury to her identity, and no one could actually see the physical state she was in when she spoke to them. Hence she felt freer to talk about her state with others on the MUD and others felt free to tell her what they thought of it. As a result, the inhabitants’ widespread acceptance of her amputee status on the MUD greatly helped her accept her new real life status as one (Turkle 1995).

In another case, a man who felt that he was not assertive enough in social situations played the role of an assertive female character on a MUD and was able to integrate the assertive facet of his personality on the MUD with his real life. Through gender switching, he also learned about the cultural gender construction of females, since he was able to play the role of one on the MUD. While researching on LambdaMOO, I was told about a different gender type called "Spivak" that was brought into the mainstream through being a gender option in MUDs. This gender was eventually taken into real life by citizens on LambdaMOO who found the Spivak gender to be a comfortable status that was absent of the often demeaning cultural constructions that characterized and distinguished male and female. I recently changed the gender of my character on LambdaMOO to Spivak, and as a result my conceptions of gender and gender constructions is changing a great deal as I try to examine the world from a different perspective.

However, the anonymity and the continuous nature of MUD culture (Varma 1998) have also allowed individuals to detach themselves entirely from their physical culture and became immersed entirely in the MUD culture without allowing any diffusing to occur between the two. These have produced mostly negative results, as the individual often acquired two personas from the separate cultures that could not interact and communicate with one another because they were so vastly different (Turkle 1995). From such cases, it has been hypothesized that it is the permeability between the physical and the virtual—the ability to carry thoughts, ideas, and constructions between the two worlds—that makes the experience of MUDs enriching and meaningful for its participants.

However, meaning is not enough. Although the Multi-User Dimension gives individuals a way to better understand themselves and their identity, it often has a counteractive effect on one’s relationship to their physical community. This is the result of the individual’s virtual community being entirely separate from the physical one; one must split one’s time between the two cultures, and it is undoubtedly difficult to balance between the two. If one has a group of friends in their real-life and an entirely different group of friends in his or her virtual community, then some sacrifices must be made for the individual to devote his or her time and resources to support such a wide range of social connections. For example, in the majority of Sherry Turkle’s case studies, the individuals who walked away from the MUD experience as a more enriched, enlightened individual had to make many sacrifices in the real world to be able to effectively experience the virtual one. Robert, an individual mentioned in Turkle’s work, began skipping his classes and sleeping less as a result of his immersion into the world of his MUD; he essentially ostracized himself from his physical community. In the end he completely disconnected himself from the virtual community and came out from the "virtual moratorium" of the MUD with a better understanding of himself (Turkle 1995); but he had sacrificed his role in both communities at some point in the process. Furthermore, although Robert had a better understanding of himself, the others in his community did not; thus, there was still fragmentation present in the community as a whole. Indeed, it seemed as though Robert had separated himself even more from his physical community at the expense of building his identity.

However, Robert believed that he would have been getting drunk or doing some other escapist activity in the place of the MUD, and that his involvement in the MUD was therefore a better solution. But can a community to have the best of both worlds? Is it possible to strengthen one’s sense of identity while simultaneously strengthening one’s sense of belonging in their physical community? Is it possible to have a community possessing the advantages of experimentalism, constructionism, and anonymity inherent in MUDs, while still maintaining the physical closeness of "real-life"?

I believe that such an effect can be made possible if physical communities and virtual communities are run in parallel, as shared and localized counterparts of one another. In this relationship, the communities could possibly reciprocate one another if the virtual community is localized to encompass primarily the inhabitants of the physical one. For example, in Robert’s scenario, if his university had a MUD in which its students participated, Robert would have been able to establish his identity on that MUD, amongst the pseudonymity of others in his real-life community. Because he would not know their real-life identities and they would not know his, he would still be able to express himself freely, but at the same time the physical community around him would become aware of his personal expression of himself. Though they could not attribute this expression to his real-life identity, they would have the opportunity to learn about and understand a perspective that would not have been exposed to the physical community for fear of rejection. As a result, the virtual community’s acceptance of Robert’s virtual character could have made Robert not only feel more understanding of himself, but more understanding of his physical community as well. Robert would have also felt more accepted by his physical community, since it was populated by many of the same inhabitants in the virtual society that accepted him; being supported in the virtual community would make him feel more supported in the physical one. Thus, in such an environment, instead of an individual dealing with a problem separately from one’s physical community, he or she could instead bring the problem to the community in an anonymous setting—thereby strengthening both the individual and the community as a whole.

As a result, Robert also might not have had to sacrifice his role in his physical community as a result of participating in the virtual one. Others in this parallel virtual community, for example, could have encouraged him to go to his classes. The permeability of social connections between the real and virtual is also made possible by this dynamic of shared, complementary communities. Robert could have revealed his identity to some close friends he made on the MUD and met them in real life, as members of his physical community, transferring his virtual friendships into physical ones. In large communities of more than a few hundred people, the individual can easily feel alienated in such a large space, when the inhabitants are of such diverse nature that it becomes hard for them to find anything in common. In virtual spaces, it becomes much easier to find common interests between one another because individuals are able to express themselves more freely and in a variety of different ways. Through constructionism, for example, they can express themselves through the objects and places they create; these objects and places can essentially become "conversation pieces" which motivate informal talk about common interests that would not have been noticed if the individuals had passed by one another on the street (Bruckman 1998). Even social interactions between one another would be easier to initiate due to the anonymity, and so it would become easier for people to meet one another and find commonality. Any friendships created in the virtual community would then be carried through into the physical one, allowing individuals to interact with people that they might never have met in a large community that was solely physical in nature.

In these ways, the community, the individual, and the relationship between the two are enriched and enlightened as connections are made between people in such a shared space. In another way, this system of joint communities could potentially cause social change in one community through the conflicts created in its counterpart.

Some may argue that the virtual societies created by MUDs allow for make-believe worlds in which there is no conflict, in which its participants stagnate because the world they have created is more perfect than a physical world could ever be. However, it has been shown through the past twenty years that this is not, and cannot be the case. MUDs are the epitome of adaptive culture and they permit the creation of societies that are as full or as absent of ascribed statuses and natural laws as their owners or participants want them to be (Varma 1998). However, its inhabitants are still human beings. Due to the fact that the MUD is the embodiment of the thoughts, ideas, and beliefs of its individuals, those concepts are bound to clash because every individual has a unique world-view, no matter what that particular world’s natural laws or ascribed statuses are. When these thoughts, ideas, and beliefs clash, they often create tension, Hegelian conflict and resolution. Such processes occur regularly on virtual societies, as exemplified in the political conflicts of Habitat and Ultima Online’s player-killing debates, LambdaMOO’s cases of virtual rape and identity harassment, or the "virtual terrorism" present in the Postmodern Culture MOO.

When such crises arise, their resolution helps unify the virtual community in the same way that real-life crises unify physical communities. As described earlier in this paper, the simulation of a crisis in a role-playing environment helps give the participants a similar sense of belonging and understanding with one another. Because crises are as inherent in the nature of MUDs as they are with any community, MUDs provide this kind of "crisis simulation" that may be able to bind together not only the virtual community, but the physical community as well. Currently, however, this does not happen in social MUDs in which its denizens are spread across the world; any sense of community created in the virtual space remains restricted to the virtual space and cannot extend to the physical realm because its participants are geographically isolated. However, the case is obviously different when the virtual and physical communities are localized and shared in parallel. Social changes in the physical community can reverberate into the virtual one, and resulting changes made in the virtual can reciprocate back to the physical, forming a dynamic interchange between the two.

For example, in the fall of 1998 at Kenyon College, a student sent out an email to all the students on campus regarding his dissatisfaction with the promotion of Gay Pride week, which was taking place during the time. In his email, he claimed that the signs put up for Gay Pride week, which were efforts to increase awareness for the acceptance of homosexuality in the community, were in fact bordering on vandalism. He essentially claimed that he agreed with the idea of accepting homosexuality, but that the signs were like graffiti and that such an "in your face" attitude was unnecessary and would not be effective in influencing homophobes to accept homosexuality, ending his email with the words "I welcome responses." What followed was a bombardment of replies that ran the gamut of community perspectives on the issue, containing other students’ perceptions of Gay Pride week and their opinions on what the student had expressed. Some agreed with him wholeheartedly, some both agreed and disagreed with him in different ways, some understood the way he felt but tried to make him look at things from another perspective, and some insulted him for his views. This student then compiled a list of the responses he received and sent it to the students who had sent him thoughtful replies.

Although his initial email angered many, the conflict was ultimately enlightening for those who read the list of responses to his email. Those replies that had much thought put into them gave the readers a sense of understanding for why some people felt the way they did, and the readers’ own perspectives changed as a result. In the end, the conflict resulted in a better understanding of the standpoints that the different individuals had, but this might have never happened if the student who originally sent the email did not have the courage to speak his mind.

Such feelings about sensitive topics like homosexuality are often repressed in large physical communities because many people are too afraid to speak their voice for fear of rejection, hatred, or other harm to their personal identity. Most individuals who have a strong feeling for a volatile issue will only discuss it amongst their social group, and in the case in which the social group has a similar perspective to the individual, what results will only be a collective feeling of similar nature. When multiple perspectives do not collide, what results is stagnancy, for nothing will ever be resolved.

Due to the anonymous nature of the virtual community however, such virtual spaces are a collective home for multiple perspectives. Here, individuals can discuss sensitive issues without the fear of stigmatizing their social identity. As a result they will often be exposed to the perspectives of other community members that they might not normally hear because of the limited social group they normally interact with, and these perspectives will change their outlook on the issue. All of this could help to ultimately increase the awareness of all the individuals in the community and provide them with a better sense of unity. Constructionism could help motivate this conflict and its resolution, because in many cases it will be easier to convey an idea or belief through creating an object or a place that embodies the concept rather than describing it. Thus the virtual community could serve as a kind of metaphor for the "mental state" of the physical one—for the virtual community is an expression of all the thoughts of its members.

Political and social reforms that are initiated in shared virtual spaces can even be carried into the community’s physical counterpart if they are successful in their virtual form. These activities make the virtual society a kind of prototype for changes to its physical counterpart, which further highlights the MUD’s potential for the experimentation and understanding about the ways in which human beings interact. In such a way, the virtual community serves as a sort of "conscience" for the physical community. It is the place where ideas are expressed, clash with one another, are experimented with and sorted out. The actual resolution of a conflict that the "community conscience" arrives at can then be implemented in the physical counterpart of the community. Such a relationship between a community’s "mind" and its "body" can eliminate much of the mental rigidity and stagnancy present in a community by bringing its problems out into the open and dealing with them.

The result of this conflict is a better understanding between the individuals of the community, and this helps in binding the community together. In this way, the parallel sharing of localized virtual and physical communities could lead to a better sense of both identity and community, as the participant no longer is required to separate oneself from either world. Indeed, such a dynamic between the physical and virtual could also allow for online roles to diffuse into physical community roles. For instance, if a shy individual takes on a leadership role in the virtual community, they will be more likely to take on such a role in their physical community if the two communities are shared.

There are obvious side-effects and complications that would arise from such a relationship between the physical and virtual, however. Many issues would have to be resolved in terms of the political relationship between the two communities, as they are still being resolved in MUDs today. For instance, on LambdaMOO, a character recently posted sensitive information about another character’s real-life identity on a bulletin board forum, and proceeded to call the individual on the phone and harass him verbally. Such negative acts create discussion and laws about the relationship between the two worlds, however, and the openness of expression made possible in the virtual world will help the community come to a resolution in an effective manner. Indeed, the potential for becoming fully immersed in the virtual world is greatly reduced when the physical and virtual communities are shared in parallel, but the possibility does still exist, just as the obsession for any activity does. However, as computers have an increasing dominance in our lives, I believe that we must confront these matters. They have become and will always be an inextricable part of our lives, and only stagnancy will result if we see them as a dehumanizing force and ignore their potential for aiding humanity. Thus, instead of pulling us away from our physical community and into one that is disembodied, I have proposed a way in which a sharing of two localized communities can both help us understand ourselves and strengthen our sense of community, combining the best of the virtual and physical worlds.

Storytelling and role-playing is a natural extension of the human characteristic of empathy, for it is through examining the roles of other individuals that enables us to understand the way another individual feels and how he or she thinks. In this way, it is the MUD’s property of interactive narrative that makes its unique effects possible, for it is precisely its make-believe nature that allows for the expression of ideas, role-playing, and experimentation which lead to such an understanding of oneself and others. It is this understanding which makes one understand humanity, and it is not only this understanding but its reciprocity—provided by community—that ultimately forms bonds between us and provides meaning for our lives. Over the past several decades, I believe that the evolution of industrial society has caused us to lose the vitality of community, caused us to even lose track of its value in our lives; but perhaps an integration of the physical with the imaginative world will allow us to obtain it once more.

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