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.
