Figure 1: Multi-User
Domain Design
Volume 1, Number 1
<1> In November 1993, University of Texas undergraduate Claire Benedikt, a Liberal Arts Honors Major, set up the TinyMUSH (Multi-User Shared Hallucination) called AcademICK, on a NeXT computer in the Computer Writing and Research Labs. Since then, she has been building there with Mafalda Stasi, myself and others. All players are given the same building abilities.
<2> Benedikt, who is 20 now (in 1994), started MUDding in 1989, just two weeks after the first TinyMUD went online. She has won an award for her design of Blue Bayou, an interactive narrative site on a MUD called Islandia, and she has been asked to serve as a "wizard" in over twenty different MUDs. Within a MUD hierarchy of power, the Gods are the administrators who own the program and database for a MUD, while the wizards are barely distinguishable from them and typically come in from another site to build and maintain the MUD.
<3> Benedikt delineates three basic MUD designs: topological, nexus, and island, which I also describe as a general graph, tree, and set of unlinked nodes, and illustrate in:
Figure 1: Multi-User
Domain Design
<4> While Benedikt considers the topological arrangement more realistic, she chose the nexus design for AcademICK, which she views as imaginative in a non-linear manner. In this framework, she describes the ACT Lab TinyMOO, called Point MOOt, as having a topological design.
<5> AcademICK was designed to have open-ended thematic spaces; there was no concern about the consistency of a single theme. At the start of the character's experience on AcademICK, seven arches present themselves as potential areas to enter. Choosing an arch will lead the participant variously to Crayola County (with grass that's "green like a crayon"), Point South Apartments, a tutorial on political and emotional issues related to Bisexuality, a Hall of Mirrors or Cyberpunk Museum, and a physics model called Physique (AcademICK, May 1994).
<6> Describing her aesthetic approach to MUD design, Benedikt says that an environment should "simulate real life" (Interview 4/7/94). She says that in the same way that architecture in real life places no sign on itself saying "You are scared now," descriptions should not force an emotional state or action onto a character. It would be preferable to describe slanting walls to evoke a sense of fear in characters, rather than announcing outright that they are scared. Benedikt abides by the literary dictum: "show, don't tell." MUDders use the term "power-gaming." Benedikt writes, "Powergaming is when your text forces the reader (or the individual with whom you are interacting) to think something, feel something, or do something NON-CONSENSUALLY" (Tiny* tutorials 5).
<7> In her descriptions, Benedikt also provides specific sensory information to evoke location. She notes that "Good room descriptions will be subtle...but helpful, and will always have useful things to say about where you are and where you can go, and what you must do to move around successfully" (Tiny* tutorials 2). In addition, she advises that character descriptions depict the "PHYSICAL primarily, not personality" (Tiny* tutorials 2).
<8> Benedikt also says that in the space she designs, she wants people to feel "Comfortable, not being forced around. Like they are someplace REAL, even if the area is totally fantastical. In order to do that, you have to know what elements in RL [Real Life] cause you to feel this way or that, and reproduce those elements as effectively as possible" (Interview 4/14/94).
<9> In one example, Benedikt's description of "Midnight Alleyway,
Behind the Paradise Hotel," runs:
In a perpetual haze of midnight or early morning, the alley is strung across with fishing wire and grey laundry dripping water like rain into puddles. Wet newspapers wrap around the necks of Coca-Cola bottles which refract greenish light in their dirt-smeared piles. To the north, rectangular brown dumpsters exchange blank stares, black plastic piling from the rusted hatches. The smells are sour and acidic, each brush of wind from around the corner replacing one stench with another. Beyond the dumpsters, tinny music plays from behind a green-painted door, and a square of yellow light slants across the wet concrete. (AcademICK, April 1994)
<10> In another description rich in sensory detail in a romantic
setting, Benedikt writes:
Steaming Hot Bubble Bath
A wide tiled bathroom misted by steam, the white and beige pattern on the floor is broken in the center by a huge porceline tub sunk into the ground. The gold faucets at one end still pour steaming water into the already piled high hills of iridescent bubbles that shimmer and overflow the smooth white banks of the bath. Benches facing the sunken tub are stacked with folded fluffy towels, and near the running faucets are brass caged baskets of lotions, oils, bathing perfumes, soaps, and washcloths. The room is heady with rain-smelling flowery steam and the constant soft rush of hot water pouring into the whispering piles of bubbles. Beneath the lavender-tinted water are benches molded into the side of the tub, room for plenty, and champagne and glasses are on a silver tray nearby. A circular skylight made of crystal holds the night sky over the tub. (AcademICK, April 1994)
<10> Benedikt's room descriptions are evocative literary works, and are designed to set the tone for character interaction. She says if the purpose of a space is to just "exist in," then the writer should at least, "Keep mood in mind...quiet-sounding rooms calm conversation. Noisy-sounding rooms tend to rev things up" (Interview 4/14/94). She advises keeping the weather and time of day neutral to avoid conflicting with the Real Life (RL) contexts from which characters will be connecting. But if a room has a function, she says "neutrality of weather, or time of day, isn't so much of a concern. If this room is room5 of a Quest...then the person has committed to being part of a story, and the narrative can travel all around them...They are in it for an experience. They've consented, by entering the puzzle or quest, to become a character of the author's instead of themselves as an autonomous being in a pre-existing world" (Interview 4/14/94).
<11> With a camera's eye, Benedikt's descriptions locate the player in a visual environment. In addition, as in realistic production modes in physical space, she prefers to obscure the means of production to encourage the player to become more directly, psychologically immersed in the environment. Benedikt says, for example, that "brackets destroy your willing suspension of disbelief--which is important when you're immersing yourself in a VR [Virtual Reality], graphical, textual--any sort of cyberspace--[they remind] you that you are in cyberspace, playing with a computer sitting at a desk--the whole point is not to do that, to have people lose themselves instead" (Interview 4/14/94). Benedikt would prefer a program provide output from a "say to" command by writing it out in sentence form rather than using brackets. For example, if SuperWoman typed on the screen:
To Rhetoric_Reina Hey friend, what's up?
Benedikt would prefer the output read:
SuperWoman says to Rhetoric_Reina, "Hey friend, what's up?"
But in some programs, the textual output from such a command would read:
SuperWoman [to Rhetoric_Reina]: "Hey friend, what's up?"
The second example illustrates the type of textual display used in BayMOO, at: mud.crl.com 8888 (from a visit 10/7/94).
<12> Although Benedikt's aesthetics correlate most aptly to literary prose descriptions, she has also designed interactive dramatic scenarios, one of the most daring of which remains in unfinished form on AcademICK (she completed the project in HyperCard). The omniscient third-person and at times second-person narrator of this scenario takes the participant through an experience of being a Jewish man or woman, young or old, religious or non-religious, in the Nazi era in Germany.
<13> Overall, Benedikt's aesthetics rest on a fundamental respect for the agency of players; the relation between player and environment should be one of consent. Though she is highly invested in maintaining the suspension of disbelief within the experiential world of a TinyMUDspace--maintaining the illusion of being in a virtual world only--when acts or descriptions undermine player agency excessively, she opts for maintaining respect for the player.
<14> In one example, she suggests naming a self-propelled flogger (an
instrument which whips a person) a "public" self-propelled flogger, to alert the
person who picks this object up that whatever action it takes on the player will
be broadcast publicly (e-mail 15 May 1994). Then, the player who types the verb
"use" before the words "public self-propelled flogger," would not be so surprised
that this message would be given "outloud" to the rest of the room:
Sadao is taken by surprise as he activates the public self-propelled flogger! It begins wildly flogging his back! Sadao is attacked by the public self-propelled flogger! (e-mail 15 May 1994)
<15> By having the warning that the item is public, Benedikt says that the character Sadao has in a sense "consented" to having his name used. Says Benedikt, "Notice that I named the object "public" to differentiate it from "normal" non-intrusive objects" (e-mail 15 May 1994). She prefers descriptions of objects which maintain respect for the players who will interact with them. Adds Benedikt, "Some argue that naming an object anything like that breaks the suspension of disbelief in the same way brackets do. I agree, but here you're measuring several different things. Weighing courtesy and consent against aesthetics and realism" (e-mail 15 May 1994).
<16> While Benedikt has built much of AcademICK, other builders add further divergence in style within this TinyMUSH. While Mafalda Stasi acknowledges that she is an apprentice of Benedikt's, she admits that the way her environment sometimes interacts with players is not consistent with Benedikt's aesthetics. Says Stasi, "I made a room where you get impaled by steel spikes which I guess can be seen as manipulation of the player" (Interview 4/19/94).
