Constructing the Virtual Campus

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  Constructing the Virtual Campus


      [Text of a paper delivered by John Unsworth at the 1994 Modern
      Language Association meeting in Toronto]

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This paper is about my experience in constructing three text-based
virtual worlds; it is also, to some extent, about the mapping of those
worlds as expressive, pedagogical, and disciplinary "spaces"--or, one
might better say, texts.. The first of these text-spaces was the virtual
campus at North Carolina State University, on which I taught two
courses; the second is PMC-MOO, sponsored by the electronic journal
Postmodern Culture as a conference facility/slash/theme-park on the
topic of postmodernism, formerly hosted at NC State, now moved with me
to the University of Virginia; the third is a conference
facility-cum-reading room for the University of Virginia's Institute for
Advanced Technology in the Humanities.

In a panel of papers on postmodern maps, I feel a bit like the odd one
out, since the terrain I'm discussing is still peppered with primitive
"here be dragons" markers. Because this sort of relatively unmapped
terrain inspires some predictable but misguided hopes and fears, let me
begin by listing a few of the claims I am not going to make:

  * I am not going to claim that contact with other people in the
    virtual world can, will, or should substitute for face-to-face contact.

  * I am not going to claim that virtual reality is inherently more
    democratic, inherently more empowering of the marginalized, or
    inherently more open than non-computer-mediated modes of being.

  * I am not going to claim that everyone ought to run right out and
    invest their time and energy homesteading in cyberspace. 

That's more than enough negative generalization to start with: now we
move on to definitions and examples. The virtual campus, PMC-MOO and the
Institute's conference center are all MUDs, an acronymn for Multi-User
Dungeon. Actually, MUDs are only the earliest of a class of programs
developed for playing dungeons and dragons over the networks--real-time,
text adventure games (not unlike those old BASIC-language computer
games, with the difference that you can meet other players in the
game-space). All three of my ventures into this kind of text-based
virtual reality have involved a cousin of MUDs called a MOO, which
stands for MUD, Object-Oriented. MOO-code was developed by researchers
at Xerox's Palo-Alto Research Center, principally by Pavel Curtis. These
programs run on Unix machines, and although one can make a direct telnet
connection to these virtual worlds, just as one might telnet into a
library catalogue system or other networked resources, it is often best
to operate a MOO (or MUD, for that matter) through a client program
(programs such as these are freely available on the network, for all
three major hardware platforms).

To the extent that one can generalize about these environments, MOOs
tend to be less goal-oriented, less violent, less sexual, and more
academic than MUDs, and they also tend (by virtue of their
object-oriented nature) to be more easily editable and programmable from
within. MOOs share with MUDs and other kinds of multi-user environments
(MUSHes, LPMuds, MUSEs, etc.) the general quality of being extremely
absorbing--surprisingly so, given the low bandwidth of their text-only
user interface. In fantasy adventure MUDs, it is not uncommon for
players to spend forty hours a week logged in and playing; some spend
twice that, sometimes at a stretch. Even in more academic MOOs, one
finds people who spend many hours a day logged in, and people who will
invest hundreds of hours in acquiring self-taught expertise in the MOO
programming language, in order to create interesting, useful, or
entertaining objects for themselves and the others. At LambdaMOO, the
originary MOO still running at Xerox PARC, over 2,000 "citizens" vote on
issues of comunity interest, participate in architecture review boards
and mediation panels, and generally maintain what would qualify as a
very active civic life in any "real town." The players on these MU*s
come from anywhere on the internet, which is to say almost anywhere in
the world; in a few cases, they constitute a tightly knit and
well-defined interest group of some sort, but more often than not they
are simply net-travelers attracted by the name or the theme of the MU*,
and increasingly, as the size and nature of the internet's user
population changes, the players are people who, while joyriding around
the net, stumble in on these roadside attractions and decide to stay.

My first experience with a MOO was very much of this type: I read about
MUDs on the TechnoCulture Listserv discussion group, and LambdaMOO was
mentioned as a good place to visit for a taste of MUDding. I telnetted
into Lambda as a (nameless but colorful) guest, and within a few minutes
I was already considering the possibillity of using this sort of
interactive, multi- user program as a teaching tool. I'll admit, this
associative leap was made, in part, because I was faced in my 'real
life' with teaching a composition class for Engineers, and I don't
really like teaching composition, so I was half looking for something to
make the task more interesting. During that first visit, I found myself
talking to a female player who turned out to be a male astrophysicist
and wizard of the MOO (wizard being a cross between a janitor and an
omnipotent deity). This was David van Buren from Cal Tech, and it turned
out that he was at that time (a year ago now) setting up AstroVR, a MOO
for astronomy conferencing. This MOO, which still exists, incorporates
sound and graphics via some very fancy implementation of network
technology and some very simple client programs. Dave was quite
interested in seeing MOOs used for teaching, and he helped me get up to
speed in the week or two I had to prepare.

With more help from Engineering Computer Operations (initially rather
suspicious of the whole idea, since MUDs were banned at NCSU as they are
at many campuses), I got the virtual campus set up in time for the
Spring Semester's class, and spent about a hundred hours learning the
programming language well enough to operate the basic elements. I also
had invaluable help from several students, one paid as an assistant and
two more who came in, under aliases and via some fairly underground
network pathways, from Washington University and somewhere in Cambridge.
It soon became clear that there was an inverse relation between age and
expertise: the 35-year-old knew the least (and ostensibly controlled the
most), the 21-year old was more knowledgeable, the 18-year-old more so,
and the 16-year-old could run circles around all of us put together.
During these initial days, it was my firm belief that somewhere out
there, there was an eight-year-old who knew absolutely everything--and
I'm sure there is.

During the semester that followed, I taught two sections of freshman
composition to Benjamin Franklin Scholars--Engineers double-majoring in
the humanities. All of these students already had internet accounts and
had been through a very rudimentary short-course on Engineering
Computing operations; contrary to what I expected, not all of the
students were computer literate, and some were even rather
computer-phobic. After two weeks of introductory reading, training, and
discussion, we met half of the time in a physical classroom and half the
time on the virtual campus. Because all definitions of space are
textual, as are all communications within or across spaces, and because
the MOO relays eac remark made by anyone in a MOO room to all others in
that room, so that no one can be interrupted, many of my students (and
all of our guests, found the MOO very demanding and sometimes chaotic
and confusing. In short, those students who had grown up doing their
homework with the TV and the stereo going, seemed right at home; those
who could deal with only one channel at a time, were disoriented and
found the MOO much too noisy for their taste. On theother hand, each
class left behind a complete textual record of everything said in the
meeting, available for each to review as he or she chose.

The course itself had a narrative and a role-playing element, intended
to capitalize on the role-playing heritage of the MOO. At the beginning
of the course, each section was told that they were a panel of advisors
to Al Gore (played woodenly, by me); their job was to come up with a
twenty-page position paper to guide government policy on each of four
issues--privacy rights, public access, intellectual property, and
computer crime. Each member of the class was required to declare an area
of expertise (lawyer, economist, sociologist, ethicist, whatever they
chose) that would account for his or her presence on this panel, and
furthermore each student was required to choose a committee assignment
as an editor, a network resource person, or a traditional library
resource person. Students then outlined the issues they wanted to
address, took the part of the outline that fit their expertise,
researched and wrote that one-to-two-page section, swapped drafts with
the other class, and then on the basis of further research, the coments
of the other class, and my comments on their drafts, they collectively
revised the separate sections into a single document. Once during each
topic round, the class met with real experts who joined the class on the
virtual campus--these were lawyers, librarians, lobbyists, and others
who would read the students' drafts and then spend an hour or so with
each section in discussion. At the end of the revision process, one
position paper would be selected for the final white paper, to be mailed
to the real Al Gore.

It was not accidental that the networks were the subject of the class: I
wanted the students to explore networked resources for at least half of
their research, and at that point (it's still true to a lesser extent)
there was more information on the net about the net than about any other
single topic. The content and fate of this particular class is off the
map of my topic, so to speak, but I do think it is worth mentioning that
this was, without a doubt, the best composition class I have ever
taught, the student writing was the best I have ever incited, and the
students themselves were extremely diligent, self- organizing, and
enthusiastic about the class, often running class sessions on their own
and often meeting after hours to do small group work.

Given the unusually self-disciplined and self-disciplining quality of
the subects in this experiment, it will perhaps not come as a surprise
to learn that the layout of the virtual campus was modelled (at least,
above-ground) on Foucault's (or actually, Bentham's) panopticon, which
we chose as the most effective representation we could think of for any
institutional structure. The (description, remember, of the) layout
referred to a circular building of several levels, with a central
observation point. In fact, that point existed and you could quite
literally stand in that room and tune into the conversations going on in
any other room in the panopticon. The only difference between this
panopticon and the original was the rather significant one that the
student/prisoners were free to occupy that central point. And, when it
came to discussing privacy rights, the panopticon provided us with some
practical examples.

The second plane of the campus, though, was below-ground, where we had
the rhizomic steam tunnels. These tunnels were actually areas where the
students were free to build anything they wanted, create their own
rooms, and connect those rooms in any manner they desired to any other
room in the steam tunnels. As you can imagine, the cells assigned to
each student in the Panopticon very quickly developed trap doors with
laundry chutes or waterslides down into the steam tunnels. Students did
spend all hours of the night and day logged into the campus, talking
with one another, sometimes working on class materials sometimes not,
sometimes programming useful objects for extra credit, but they spent
most of that time below-ground.

My second experiment with a MOO was to set up PMC-MOO, a conference
center plus theme-park of postmodernism. The purpose of PMC- MOO was to
provide a real-time channel for interaction among readers and authors of
Postmodern Culture, and also to provide an opportnity to program object
lessons in postmodern theory. Once again, the terrain of the place was
early on divided into two realms, one ordered (or disciplinary) and one
disordered (or post-disciplinary). In the ordered realm, we had (still
have) a library, a conference center, some offices, and a lobby. In the
disordered (and much larger) section, there are rooms upon rooms upon
rooms, some interesting (such as David Sewell's Borges rooms, where you
can talk with Funes the Memorius, visit the library of Babel, or write
Menard's Quixote) and many more simply banal elfin bowers, or worse.

In an early attempt (inspired, in spirit, by Jim English) to make this
environment suitably hostile and arbitrary, we created all rooms in the
terrain of postmodernism (that is, in the major, post-disciplinary area
of PMC-MOO) as children of the genderfuck room, the effect of which was
that, each time one entered the terrain of postmodernism, one's
self-designed description and gender would be stripped off, and one
would be randomly assigned a race, class, gender, and sexual orientation
immediately visible to all other players. The effect of this very crude
device, like the content of the class on the virtual campus, is not
really part of any talk about maps and space (though it has something to
do with road signs in the social field). In any case, it is worth
noting. Weeks upon weeks of vociferous argument and extended discussion
ensued, with many participants claiming (quite rightly) that this
additive and label-oriented approach to identity was the worst sort of
hackwork: but the interesting thing was that, this critique
notwithstanding, the crude device did produce its intended effect,
though in an unanticipated way. It made people (including our
non-academic, teen-weenie joyriders) focus on questions of identity
politics in a way that they otherwise might not have done.

PMC-MOO has recently undergone a change of location, from an aging
DECstation in North Carolina to a much newer and faster DEC Alpha in
Virginia: we took this opportunity to stage an apocalypnic, during which
people logged into the MOO in North Carolina while it self-destructed;
all the time, a second copy was already running in Virginia, where it
continues today. We also took the opportunity, with the death and
rebirth of the MOO, to institute some changes in the ground rules,
including email registration (formerly, one could be completely
anonymous; now, a wizard can match up a real-life identity with a MOO
player. We did this because, after PMC-MOO was mentioned in WIRED
magazine, we began to have a lot of trouble with disruptive
aggression--MOO terrorism, if you will--by the joyriders of
cyberspace--whereupon a sort of Gresham's law kicked in, and the bad
started to drive out the good. Inasmuch as there are many, many MUDs
intended for aggressive play and very few MOOs for more cerebral
pursuits, I'll admit that I didn't feel especially guilty about
repressing the more disruptive players just a bit.

The third MOO, the Institute's Conference Center, has just been set up
in the last month or so, and has really received no use yet. It will be
a real- names-only MOO with email registration, though it will have some
guest logins available, since one of its purposes is to serve as a sort
of reading room to run alongside the World-Wide Web publications of the
Institute--a place where you can meet other readers of the same
material, a way to bump into someone on the net who shares an interest
with you.

In all three MOOs, space is a more or less arbitrary construct: one may
arrange the network of spaces that constitutes the MOO according to the
compass of three-dimensional space (with north, south, east, west, up,
down), but one may as easily arrange spaces according to topics, themes,
or any other scheme one desires. Spaces can be locked or open, or locked
only to certain people and open to others; they can be public or
private, colorful or drab, they can float through other spaces or remain
anchored in one place. The same room can contain one person or one
hundred; spaces can act on the people within them, arbitrarily or
according to qualities of the player or its possessions or actions. In
one sense, the space occupied by a MOO is a space in memory, since the
MOO loads and runs in random access memory, plus some long-term storage
and short term swap space on disk. The space of the MOO, then, is a
chip--the microscopic passageways etched into a fingernail-sized chunk
of silicon. Or rather, the space of the MOO is the chip plus the
telephone lines that make up the network, since the MOO is mapped on top
of the internet, and its space includes the pathways by which the player
connects to the MOO, perhaps extending as far as the screen on which the
MOO appears to its individual player.

In practice, the space of the MOO is metaphorical and symbolic all the
way down: as such, it simply reflects the richness or the poverty of our
imagination, and the shapes it takes echo our disciplinary structures
and practices. This brings me all the way around, from claims that I
would not make, to claims that I will make. The first of those claims is
that virtual reality, whether text-based, graphical, or immersive, is
largely about literalizing familiar pre-cybernetic metaphors and only
opens new vistas (whup, there's an old metaphor now) by accident. That
is to say, contra Baudrillard, that these artificial models do not
precede the ordering of space or practice in any planned way, though it
could be argued that our linguistic, social, and institutional
habit--the world, as we know it--models this model world. More than
anything else, it is a simple fact that the defense establishment and
the entertainment industry own the past and future (respectively) of the
networks in general and of virtual reality in almost all its particulars.

Second, I will claim that virtual reality, in academic settings, allows
you to experiment with the way authority and order are imposed and
distributed-- though more of ten than not, you will find the boundaries
to be only slightly different from those of "real life" (a spurious
distinction, in any case). Nonetheless, even very slight differences in
one's practice can make quite significant differences in the end result
though (as I said before), those differences are usually not very
predictable.

And finally, I would argue--as Andrew Ross does in TechnoCulture, that
we would do better to engage positively and proactively with this
technology than to spend our time recriminating it for its
military-industrial origins or making grim predictions about its
socio-economic teleology.

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/Last Modified: Wednesday, 29-Jun-2016 15:40:46 EDT/