Richard

Hi, I'm trying to write an article for an upcoming issue of the Admiral bombows Chronicles on personae names.

That should be interesting!

1. What's the story behind your name?

It's my real-life name. As an arch-wiz, I find it more useful to have some reminder of reality when I play, so people (wizzes in particular) are aware that I do have some real-world powers over the game and am "not as other wizzes". I occasionally argue that I use my own name because I'm perfectly happy with who I am and don't need to role-play, but generally I only do that when I want to get someone's back up...

2. Any other names you used in the past that have an interesting story behind them?

Well there's POLLY, but this is a really long story. It harks back to the very early days of MUD, when I'd just taken over programming it from Roy and was fleshing it out and deciding what to do with it. I haven't ever told this in public before (you'll see why when you read it, it's a little manipulative) but I guess 20 years is a long enough period to exceed any statute of limitations...

When I took over programming, I had a clear vision of what I wanted MUD to be. I knew it had potential way beyond that of "normal" games. I knew that I could use it to provide people with a tool to explore their own identities, and to experiment with new traits of personality (didn't think I was that aware, huh?). I had done enough D&D-style role-playing to realise how this could liberate people. What I wanted to do was to give individuals that kind of freedom: to be whoever they wanted to be. I don't mean what passes for "role-playing" today, where people choose a destination (half-elf fighter/magic-user/thief) and then drive their character towards it; rather, I mean encouraging people to try out new things, to explore in multiple directions, and to reach destinations they hadn't even considered before.

Sorry this is all metaphor; it's just how I "see" it internally...You'll recognise the argument from some of my postings on the wiz BB. (umm, if I ever get there. --Tethys)

The reason I wanted to provide this was mainly because of my friends. The hacking community at Essex was strong and vibrant; there were some really nice people there, and we were all great friends. However, with no females whom we could treat as females (the few girls we knew were of the "honorary men" variety, ie. we didn't think of them as girls, we thought of them as people), most of us were desperately short on social skills. We didn't have the opportunity to build the necessary abilities, because we had no means to practice. The girls on campus were all far more sophisticated than us, and we felt it was just pointless attempting to hit on any of them: we didn't know what we were doing, they completely out-gunned us, and so we just suffered in silence. The topic was taboo.

This really angered me. I saw these decent, honest, likeable guys becoming more and more set in their defensive, insular ways. Nowadays, it would probably have some label like "nerd syndrome", but whatever, I saw I could do something about it. Through MUD, they could begin to free themselves from their self-imposed shackles - not in a sexual way, I hasten to add, but in the area of personal growth. If they could see themselves achieving things by behaving in ways they wouldn't do ordinarily, and which they maybe even liked, then this could equip them with the necessary means to do a similar job in real life. All they needed was for someone to show them what to do, and to let them know it was OK to do it.

The "OK to do it" part was where the manipulation came in. I realised that if I wanted to encourage people to explore their personalities in even a small, incremental way, they had to have "permission" from their peer group to do it. The easiest way to demonstrate it was OK would be to give a demonstration of an absolutely massive gulf between persona and player, and the best way to demonstrate that was to gender-switch; it may be a simple, Boolean flag, but its effects are anything but Boolean... Also, this being the late 1970s, I knew that simply offering a "sex: male or female" option wouldn't alone work: the default activity would have been for people not to cross genders, and to make disparaging remarks about the sexuality of anyone who did. This would have extended the rules of the group from the real world into the game, so we'd have been no better off.

When I first took over the programming of MUD, there was no gender in the game. All the characters were male. This was entirely due to Roy Trubshaw's rush to write as much of the core of the game as he could before he finished his final year at Essex University; he felt that gender could be added later, whereas things like communication had a higher priority. The fact that we had no female players (this was in a computing department in a UK University in the late 1970s: women were a scarce commodity) was not a contributing issue; Roy was, and is, strongly against blind prejudice of any kind.

So, I started work on a secondary character called "Polly", ostensibly named for a stereotypical parrot. If I just wanted a second persona to test the game (and it happened I DID want one anyway) then a parrot who just stood around and repeated what it was told was a reasonable enough approach. After a while, I announced that I was going to add gender to the game, and, because Polly was a female name, I'd make Polly the first female persona. Everyone knew it was me, and everyone knew I was male, but I had sufficient kudos from being the best hacker and the person who was writing MUD that they accepted it as OK. "If Richard is playing a female persona, well hey, maybe it might be fun to try it myself?". Thus, people began to act with a freedom in MUD that they couldn't have in real life. To this day, I remain rather proud of the fact that playing a character in a MUD with a gender different to one's own does not suggest anything about a person's sexuality, just one's readiness to spread one's wings and fly. As for whether it helped, well, to be honest, it was too late to help my friends. I genuinely believe, though, that it did help players who came afterwards: it de-nerded a lot of them.

I'd like to emphasise that crossing gender was not done as a means in itself: I was attempting to show what role-playing was, and that it was OK; gender was just the mechanism I used to do it. The fact that researchers always write about crossing gender as if it was something amazingly special (whereas playing a 90-year-old ninja elf is something people have no trouble with) continues to bemuse me.

So now you know the story of Polly's birth...

3. Any names you would rather forget? How come? (could be yours or others)

No, I'm usually pleased with the names I use. The most annoying one was when I worked up a persona from deep undercover called CEZANNE, after the impressionist artist. I had the back story designed, and I'd reached necro undetected from a "complete newbie" start, then all of a sudden the Tate Gallery in London decides it's going to hold a Cezanne exhibition of national importance, with 71 Cezanne paintings from across the globe assembled in one place. Somebody went, button-holed my character in the game, and started asking questions about the difference in light and shade between the early paintings and the later ones where the brush is angled, and found out that I actually knew very little about Cezanne and was therefore likely to be an impostor.

I choose my mortal names more carefully these days...