Telematic Subculture

The art world remained oblivious to much of this creative telematic output when William Crowther, using Fortran programming language, designed a cave puzzle game in the early 1970s. It was expanded by Don Woods in 1976, a researcher at Stanford's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, who added fictional elements drawn from the stories of J. R.R. Tolkien (Murray 290). But, it was a very early computer game, Zork, that created the Dungeons-and-Dragons element that MUDs inherited. The game introduced the typing of navigational commands and searching for objects residing in different "rooms." MUDs began as a collective game of Zork, although the "players" were most excited at the possibility of sharing the virtual space and role-playing (Murray 290).

Pavel Curtis, a programmer from Xerox Parc working on research with programming language and design, programming environments, programming language compilers, and interpreters, already had experience with Zork when he stumbled onto MUDs. He remembers logging on to the old ARPANET every evening and exploring the mapping of the Great Underground empire. But what was really exciting to him about the MUD he discovered was that many people were logged on at the same time and were able to talk to one another ("Not Just a Game," 27).

James Aspnes, a graduate student from Carnegie Mellon, invented TINYMUD, software that allowed users to talk to one another and gain access to the programming language itself. The first developer of a MOO server was Stephen White. Curtis built on White's basic design and code and supplemented it with added features, which culminated in the first LambdaMOO core ("Not Just a Game" 29). MOOs offer an alternative to MUDs, which are fixed environments controlled by an oligarchy of programmers. The MOO environment is easier to program, with a format closer to natural language, and it allows users to create objects in categories and subcategories.

For participants, MOOs can be described as constellations of spaces, or "rooms," within which multiple individuals can congregate and interact. Movement is possible from room to room by typing in cardinal directions or via "teleporting," which allows immediate transport to rooms not adjacent to the ones present. In a MOO, one uses commands to do many things: move between distinct places; manipulate objects; interact with people who in reality may live thousands of miles away; create new imaginary places; describe one's character, the places one creates, and the objects one owns; e-mail; and conduct live events. Pavel refers to MUDs and MOOs as "text-based virtual realities"-which could be considered an oxymoron, or thought of as taking us back to the idea of literature transporting us to the imaginary (Curtis, "Mudding"). In our imaginations, we are free to interpret and visualise as we please instead of having the worlds defined for us. But, perhaps what remains most powerful about text-based multi-user systems is that the information is so compact that it allows easy movement away from the terminals. With the proliferation of palm-sized portable computing, connected wireless to the Net, text remains the most powerful communication tool.

To date, text-based environments are still popular with hundreds of thousands of users and provide useful research data for those planning commercial ventures with graphical multi-user communities on the Web. There are over five hundred MOOs in existence, with hundreds of thousands of users who might easily make a transition from the text-based environments to more graphically designed spaces (Turkle 11).

But, perhaps the most important addition to the excitement around emerging multi-user spaces were the online "chatter bots" that were frequently part of the MUD space. The mother of chatterbots is ELIZA, born the same year Nine Evenings was taking place. Murray describes the historical moment in 1966 when Joseph Weizenbaum, a professor in computer science at MIT, created ELIZA as equivalent to what Lumiere did for the motion picture camera. ELIZA, unfortunately named after the Pygmalion story, was an experiment in natural language processing. "She" is able to respond to typed words with printed words. To Murray, Weizenbaum stands as "the earliest, and still perhaps the premier, literary artist in the computer medium because he so successfully applied procedural thinking to the behaviour of a psychotherapist in a clinical interview" (68). A few years after the appearance of ELIZA, computer games that were predecessors to MUDs and MOOs started emerging in labs. Both ELIZA and Zork were programmed in LISP (List Processing Language), developed in the 1950s at MIT by John McCarthy for use in artificial intelligence research. These projects introduced dynamism and immediacy into the work process of the programmer in relation to the machine that opened the realm of possibilities for reconsidering the way we work with computers.

Since the invention of ELIZA, many have been inspired to create their own versions of an online "bot." Bot is short for "robot," a term coined by Michael Maudlin from Carnegie Mellon University, whose own version of the bot is Julia. Ignoring the fact that on the Web "she" is represented as a cute cartoon of a maid robot, Julia is one of the most successful online computer-based characters. Julia's representation as an actual female on a MUD was so believable that one person spent thirteen days trying to seduce her into going with him to a private room to have virtual sex (Murray 216). Julia lives in TinyMUD and acts like a character: she answers questions, sings songs, plays hearts, and is helpful in orienting new users by giving them the layout of the MUD. She is a prototypical online agent that has inspired much work and study around possibilities of this kind of collaboration with the machine on the net.

Julia is a "chatterbox." She was devised strictly to communicate with humans, before the World Wide Web came to be as widely used as it is now. With the explosion of the Web, we are seeing more types of bots emerge, most significantly "shopbots" and "knowbots." Shopbots are programs that shop the Web on the user's behalf to locate the best price for the product being sought. Knowbots are programs that collect knowledge for their users by automatically visiting Internet sites and gathering information that meets certain specified criteria. There are also bots such as OpenSesame that observe a user's patterns in navigating a Website and customize the site for that user. Most development of online agents has moved into the realm of elaborate search engines that act as "servants."

MUDs and MOOs have given birth to an entire new genre of young people who are comfortable with code and computers and frequently hack the system just for fun. This genre was not taken seriously until two women, Amy Bruckman and Elizabeth M. Reid, both of whom wrote doctoral theses on the subject, made MUDs and MOOs a legitimate topic of academic research. Yet, there have been surprisingly few artists who have attempted to create art works utilising MOOs. David Blair, however, is one exception, and Robert Nideffer is currently developing a project called Proxy that interfaces a MOO database with a mobile software agent technology. MUDs and MOOs have generally captivated young hackers along with literary and educational sectors and continue to flourish in these circles. Text-based MOOs successfully break all established expectations of the art world-it is collaborative authorship, the audience participates in the process, and there is no "product" to exhibit or market. Further, to really manipulate the code and play with the architecture requires not only knowledge of programming but access to live network connection that is difficult to access for those not connected to academic institutions. The promise for new conceptualists working in this sphere of exploration lies in the development of software agents and automated tasks that require creative ability, critical thinking, and collaborative situations.