Hi Planet!

If things work out well, this blog should now be visible on the http://planet.worldofsl.com/ blog aggregator. Hi Planet! Say "Hi Beam!".

Let me introduce myself again. I'm Beam Ray. My real life self hails from the Netherlands. My first encounter with the Internet was through muds. Second Life in some ways is much like a mud, and I started off my blog with various comparisons and observations from that perspective.

A quick overview of what went before:

• Hi Beam! wherein your author introduces himself and those quaint systems called muds.
• SL Recognition and Newness Part 1: Furries and Goreans wherein your author describes his previous encounters with Furries, and his observations of Goreans (from a very safe distance indeed).
• SL Recognition and Newness Part 2: Dicksian Themes and Live Music, wherein your loquacious author discusses the not-quite-reality of virtual worlds and also, live music.
• SL Recognition and Newness Part 3: Griefers and the Fashion Scene, wherein your author deliberates upon the phenomenon of griefers and the Second Life fashion scene.

I hope some of you will enjoy the reading!

SL recognition and newness: griefers and the fashion scene

This is the third post in my series: SL Recognition and Newness, about things familiar and unfamiliar in Second Life from an old mudder's perspective. The previous posts are:

• Furries and Goreans
• Dicksian themes and live music
  

We'll continue this series with some discussion on griefers and the fashion scene.

Recognition: griefers

They are called griefers in Second Life. They're quite familiar to me from muds. I forgot what we called them in muds, if anything. "Trolls"? "Annoying"?

Griefers come in many different categories. Their main aim is to affect people emotionally, usually negatively (as that's easiest). That's what drives them. That's why, following Richard Bartle (one of the creators of the first MUD), I sometimes call them clubs. This comes from an excellent paper that he wrote in the 1996 called Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades: Players Who Suit MUDS. Recommended reading that. I'll summarize it very quickly. He classifies different types of players like suits of playing cards:

• Hearts: they want to socialize. Second Life, being a social mud primarily, is of course a system that is excellent for people who want to socialize.
• Diamonds: in it for the game, or the money (the 'diamonds'). Want to "win" the game, reach as high a score as possible. But Second Life is not a game, you might say! Perhaps, but humans have evolved to deal with social networks and are playful creatures, so a system that combines the two can be gamed. This interesting article makes the claim that "Second Life is a level and class driven MMO." Many hard-core diamonds wouldn't consider Second Life a real game, but then you read this (tongue in cheek as it is) and you start to believe there may be something in the reputation game after all. And there are of course also the economic aspects to it, with Second Life's micro-transaction based economy. So, plenty to do for diamonds in Second Life, once they look beyond the obvious.
  
• Spades: there are much more rare than diamonds and hearts. Spades like to dig. They like to find out new ways to use the system, play with new features, discover strange behavior of the software, and so on. Second Life is an excellent platform for spades, so we have plenty of them, building, scripting, creating, working on the client code. That's good as spades tend to be smart and creative and thus contribute a lot to the overall system.
  
• Finally we have the clubs. They like to club people over the head, with, like, a club. Affect people. They get a thrill out of affecting people. Some clubs are friendly and like to affect people positively, but it's far easier to get a response if you try to annoy people.
  

Of course nobody fits neatly in these categories, but it's still a useful way to look at players and their motivations. Below we'll see various combinations of people who are primarily clubs.

The traditional club type, in muds as well as Second Life, is not very sophisticated. The simplest variety tries to annoy you in some way. In Second Life there are quite a few opportunities for them to cause mischief, like bumping into you, or using weapons on you. You could call them the "diamond" variety of club, in that they try to use simple game-like mechanisms to somehow beat you. Sitting down counters many physical attacks in Second Life. Ignoring them is another way to deal with them.

Then there's the "heart" variety of club. These try to upset you by social means. The easiest and therefore most common way to do this is to use words. Fortunately, they're commonly not very sophisticated and use rather child-like strategies to upset people. Sort of like this:

Annoying Club: beam ray u r so gay!
Beam Ray: I'm not gay! I like girls! At least, girl avatars!
Annoying Club: these girls r GUYS in rl you are SO GAY!
Beam Ray: No way! I am NOT GAY!
Annoying Club: u r a patetic little mommas boy who is GAY
Beam Ray: I'm so upset!!!! You should be banned!!!

In the scenario above, the club gets what they want: they have affected someone emotionally. Their strategy only works if you actually let it upset you, though. Ignoring them is therefore again an excellent way to counter their strategy. I sometimes enjoy a conversation with them though, as it tends to get pretty silly:

Annoying Club: beam ray u r so gay!
Beam Ray: Really? Why do you think so?
Annoying Club: see! gay!
Beam Ray: If you say so. Why are you so concerned with this?
Annoying Club: because i dont like pathetic people
Beam Ray: That's really interesting. Why do you think gays are pathetic?
Annoying Club: beam ray is a GIRL!
Beam Ray: Thank you. I'm not, but I take that as a compliment.

Of course the most dangerous kind is more insidious than that. They might actually be able to communicate properly. The most dangerous kinds are the ones that seem different at first, and then suddenly turn out to be trying to hurt you.

The last category of griefers in Second Life are the ones that one could call "spade clubs". This tend to take a bit of sophistication, so these are quite rare. The simplest way a spade club could try to upset you is by taking some very offensive avatar shape. Ignoring that is a good strategy. The most dangerous clubs of this kind are the ones that actually know how to script the environment and use this knowledge to do evil.

A good way to really screw up a scriptable virtual environment is to create a self-replicating object. We've seen this long ago in muds, though in many cases there these were in fact more accidents than deliberate attempts to disrupt the system. A self-replicating object operates quite similarly to what the IT world calls "viruses" and "worms". The griefer creates one object, preferably an annoying one, and then lets it copy itself over and over until the exponential growth starts using all system resources. Enormous lag and crashes tend to be the result. We've seen several of these attacks on the Second Life grid over time, though luckily it appears that Linden Lab has become more effective against defending against it.

That concludes my review of griefers. They've been with us in virtual worlds from the beginning. The good thing is that most of them are quite dumb, so ignoring them is an excellent strategy to make them go away. We will have to remain vigilant though against the more intelligent variety: insidious social griefers can do quite a lot of emotional harm on an individual basis, and scripted attacks on the system can disrupt a lot of people at the same time.

New: the fashion scene

Second Life is the first virtual world I encountered that has an actual virtual fashion scene. Fashion is something that didn't really work in text-based virtual worlds. In Second Life this has really become a major aspect of the whole experience. Fashion is one of these things that can be turned virtual quite easily, unlike for instance food. Virtual fashion is still fashion, it's just on avatars instead of on ourselves. Dolls have already made us quite familiar with the phenomenon of fashion for human representations in our childhood. Fashion for an avatar makes more sense than fashion for a doll: an avatar is after all representing a real person in some way, unlike a doll (unless it's a hand-puppet). Fashion is about representing yourself, and so are avatars. Combining the two is natural. Second Life is also about fulfilling fantasies, and fashion, being glamorous, is the subject of quite a few fantasies. Virtual fashion is also cheap; you can be a complete shopaholic without spending beyond your means. Try that in the real world.

So the fundamentals are right: it makes sense that there is some demand for virtual fashion. Second Life's micro-transaction system makes it actually possible for designers to sell fashion and make money with it. This has caused a supply, stimulating demand which then stimulates more demand in a virtuous cycle.

Linden Lab once every while adds a new feature to the system that the fashion scene can use to generate a whole new range of things. The feature that has had the most impact so far that I've seen is flexible prims. This revolutionized both the skirt and hair fashion. Sculpted prims are also used to generate a whole range of new items. The introduction of bling (before my time) also had a lot of effect on fashion, though this particular person doesn't think it's been exactly a positive one.

I've seen lots of people complain about Linden Lab adding new features to Second Life while there are still scalability and stability problems with Second Life. While of course some level of stability is important for Second Life to be usable at all, I've never been in favor of a ban on new features myself. Perfect stability cannot be reached anyway - there are always more bugs to resolve. If they are wise, fashion designers should be very much in favor of new features that allow for the creation of new types of fashion item. The fashion designers should also be watching the spades carefully to see what kinds of new ways they develop to use existing features as well: some of these might be quite useful to the fashion scene as well.

There are quite a few aspects to Second Life fashion that amuse and entertain me. I'll give a few examples below.

The basic thing that entertains me is of course my ability, as a male, to ogle as many gorgeous (albeit virtual) women as I like. Since there is an enormous diversity of skins, hair, clothes and shoes available, there's a lot of variety to see.

Then there are the models. The Second Life fashion scene gives me the opportunity to meet models, top models, elite models and super models by the boatload as well. I don't recall ever encountering a real-world model, let alone an elite model, but in Second Life I bump into them without even trying. Isn't it glorious?

Also quite interesting are the glossy magazines. These are often very well made. They are just like the glossy magazines in the real world, except that the pictures are of avatars, not people Given the amount of photoshopping that takes place in the "real" magazines the distinction is smaller than you'd think at first, too.

In fact, the glossy fashion magazines that are available for Second Life fashion mimic the glossy magazines available in the real world so well that at any moment I expect the virtual covers also to be graced with lines like "10 ways to drive him totally wild for you. Real life glossy magazines are amazing. As a male, I quite support this type of content in magazines for women. You'd suspect some kind male conspiracy. What else explains this pervasive education program to turn all women into temptresses and sex goddesses? Apparently though it's entirely spontaneous. Crazy! Sometimes the universe is a very friendly place, isn't it? But I digress.

So to this old mudder, the fashion scene is quite a diverse and interesting addition to a social virtual world, and I think an amazing success story of Second Life. I'm all for it! The fundamentals also seem right, so I expect virtual fashion to be with us for the foreseeable future.

SL recognition and newness: Dicksian themes and live music

Continuing my series of things I recognize from muds in Second Life versus things that are new to me, I will now talk about Dicksian themes and music.

Recognition: Dicksian themes

What are Dicksian themes, you ask? Philip K. Dick is a classic science fiction writer. For some reason unusually many of his stories have been turned into Hollywood movies, from Blade Runner to Total Recall, from Paycheck to The Minority Report. I'm not sure why this is so. I can imagine that because of these movies your impression is that P.K. Dick stories are full of high-tech hardware and cyberpunk futures, but in fact he mostly wrote during the 50s, 60s and 70s, and his stories breathe the atmosphere of these times more than anything else. His stories tend to start out in what appears to be an everyday world, and then characters figure out that not all is as it seems. Philip K. Dick's favorite themes are to mess around with what is real and what is human. Philip. K. Dick suffered from quite a few psychological problems, including paranoia which help make his stories interesting. Not that he had nothing to do with cyberpunk fiction at all - he's often considered a forerunner of the genre.

Now what does all this have to do with Second Life? It's a Philip K. Dick world made real. Well, made virtual. The world seems in real in some ways: there are people, and land, and objects, and you can move around in it and do things. It is actually a service being made available on a computer network. The conflicts between these concepts cause a lot of confusion. One can easily make multiple copies of something on a computer, but it's typically hard for physical objects. It's not easy to copy rice and potatoes except by the method of agriculture, unless we someday perfect some form of magic nanotech. A virtual world is magical: one can copy existing objects easily, create new objects out of thin air, and imbue them with behavior by writing complicated spells in the form of scripts.

Dicksian themes are familiar to us old mudders. Creating new objects, copying existing ones, scripting them, all this was already possible in muds. It all looked less pretty as we only had words to play with, but just like a novel and a movie can contain the same story, muds already had that feel of unreal reality that Second Life has today.

What was far stranger than just unreal objects were the unreal people. It's a bit of a paradox: even though the objects are virtual and therefore can behave in unexpected ways, the people we encounter in a virtual world are in fact not virtual. But since you can't actually see them, they can still behave in entirely unexpected ways. They might use the virtual world to express their multifaceted selves as is usual in real life. They might use the virtual world to play some role. They might clearly indicate they are playing a role, or they might not. They might be expressing just some facets of their multifaceted selves more than others, or try to make up altogether new ones.

When I was a young innocent 18 and just started playing with muds, I immediately realized intellectually that the female character I saw on a mud might in fact have a male typist. That intellectual realization didn't stop me from getting quite confused emotionally at times.

Some people responded quite violently to the concept of gender-bending online: it just shouldn't be done. Evil. Other people were more accepting of it. Even given my initial confusion I think it's quite an interesting way to explore oneself and the way people respond to gender. It took me a while to get comfortable with the concept though.

How far is roleplaying supposed to go? Is it acceptable to play a role invisibly, not disclosing that the character you play is in fact a character? In virtual worlds many people present more or less themselves, or themselves in fancy dress-up, others present some other character, but obviously (I know that's not really a faun in real life!), or simply put their presumed real-life identity in their profile (skimpily clad young woman stating she's a grandmother in profile). Yet others present someone else than who they really are, whatever that actually means (a typical Dicksian question, that), and don't disclose this. And then there's the double bluff: I'm not a grandmother but I could put it in my profile just to see how people would respond. A fascinating experiment I shall endeavor to try out one day!

I imagine Second Life is where many people are confronted with this unreality and uncertainty for the first time. Quite a few of the problems in the Dear Randi section in that highly reputable newspaper AvaStar are about confusions like this ("I've fallen for my RL step-brother!" "I'm 21 and my girlfriend let slip she's 71!").

More confident and emotionally secure now, not to mention quite used to it, I've become quite fascinated with this game. When I interact with people, I take them at face value. I feel I have to, even though it's clearly not a dragon in real life that's doing the typing with his paws. At the same time, in the back of my head, I keep in mind that not all may be as it seems. Over time, little facts and hints come in that can help build up a decent intuition that this person is male or female, old or young, British or American. I get to know the person and build up a certain level of trust. But there are very good actors in the world, and I cannot discount the possibility I'm being fooled until I actually meet this person in real life. And even then... everybody knows even in reality not everybody is what they claim to be.

Some people try to keep a strict separation between Second Life and real life. If I got a euro for all the profiles I've seen that claim "SL is SL and RL is RL" I'd be rich now. I don't believe such a strict separation is really possible - such a strict separation would make it completely impossible for the RL typist to actually enjoy Second Life at all. Something has to get through in both directions. I imagine many use this as a marker to warn that their Second Life avatar may not be exactly what it seems. That is, at least, how I interpret such statements. My mental "this person is probably not as he appears" dial will move way out.

As for me, I like to roleplay at times. To highlight facets of myself that I usually show less. To see how others respond if I present myself differently. Be an American among Americans, instead of a Dutchman, say (oh no! you think. That American friend of mine might really be Beam Ray, a Dutchman!). It's a tricky ethical balance to maintain: I don't want to hurt anyone, and I think I've managed to avoid this.

You might learn something about yourself, and others, by playing a role for a while. A man could for instance learn about the various silly ways in which males can hit on his female avatar, and then avoid this practice himself in the future. Perhaps pick up nicer approaches too (like talking to the girl as if she were a fellow human being) - but be careful, don't hurt these people!

Then again, you might also learn something about yourself and others by just being yourself. My shy 18 year old geeky self noticed other people in those muds seemed to like him and want to be his friend. He found it strange at first. It helped him build up confidence.

New: live music

This section is going to be much shorter. As used as I was to Dicksian themes, I was not at all used to music in my previous explorations of text-based virtual worlds. It was in one of my first weeks in Second Life. Much of it was a feast of recognition. Just flying around, I happened upon this cafe with many people in it.They were not chatting a lot. I wondered what was going on. Why was everybody so quiet?

Then I turned on the music stream, and I heard someone far away sing a haunting song. That was when it hit me that Second Life had things to offer that were truly, beautifully, new to me.

That concludes the familiar and the new for today. I hope you enjoyed it. Now to think about what to write next!

SL recognition and newness: furries and goreans

I like new things. I'm a neophile (no, that is not something naughty). Second Life is to many their first virtual world, and to many more their first social/creative virtual world. I'm an old mudder, so I've seen virtual worlds before. Much of Second Life is therefore a feast of recognition and not particularly new, though of course old things do take new shapes. Much of it is new to me, too, though, enough to keep this neophile busy. This will be the first of a series of posts where I discuss what I recognize from before in muds, and what is new to me.

Recognition: Furries

I'm no Furry. I'm afraid I sometimes giggle over Furry peccadillos. I think that's okay though; I laugh at my own peccadillos too.

I'm sort of used to Furries. Years ago, in the early nineties, I visited FurryMuck once every while. I was just exploring yet another mud. This one was interesting as it was always quite busy, even during the mornings and afternoons in the Netherlands when many muds were empty. The dominant nationality of people on the internet at the time was the US. Most mudders were Americans. This meant that muds would typically be most full in the evenings in the US, when Americans had time to play.

Here in the Netherlands I am 6 hours or more later than in the US. During my afternoons, it'd be early morning in the US. During my mornings, it'd be deep in the night in the US. I would usually go online during my days. For muds, this would often mean they were pretty sparsely populated. Just a few people there. But Furries apparently never sleep, and there was always plenty going on in the place, no matter what time of day. It featured dozens of active people at any time of day.

The other, more obvious thing about FurryMuck that is interesting is of course the Furries. At the time I had no idea what Furries were. The FurryMuck startup screen told me Furries were anthropomorphic animals. I thought this was some roleplaying thing. It was that, of course, at least to a certain extent. I didn't realize at the time there's a whole special culture associated with Furries.

I had a few nice conversations with people there. At some point I even ran into a researcher from Australia; just the day before I'd read a paper by her on muds and she was following up on that. Quite a coincidence: it made me realize it was a small world, especially the Internet back then.

Some things in FurryMuck unsettled my geeky, somewhat innocent and somewhat shy 20 year old self somewhat. Not mudsex, or "tinysex" as it was called in some muds. I had run into this phenomenon before I reached FurryMuck. I was sort of over being unsettled by it.

FurryMuck had sex of course, like in any mud. Online sex chat was probably invented 5 seconds after they invented online chat. Furry sex was a bit stranger than usual as it involved tigers and dogs making out. They even have their own verb for it: to yiff, though I don't recall hearing it being used at the time. Hm, the FurryMuck article says they invented it there. Perhaps that was invented later. I do remember scritch (meaning 1), evidently also invented in FurryMuck. Anyway what the heck, I'm Dutch, and we're not easily shocked, otherwise we'd have kicked out Amsterdam long ago.

No, what unsettled me bears a bit of explanation. In muds, things have a description. When you enter a 'room', you see its description. Something like this:

You are in a park. There are many trees here.
You see Alpha here.

The people in muds often delighted in writing very involved descriptions. Besides scripting, creating and describing objects was the main creative thing to do. In social muds, people could describe themselves. So, if you ran into someone called Alpha, you could look at them to see their description:

> look Alpha
> Alpha is a beautiful lady smiling happily at you.

And then you'd say hi, of course:

> say Hi Alpha!
You say, "Hi Alpha!"

This was all text, so the only avatar you'd have in a mud is a name with a description. Many people liked to write longer descriptions of their avatars, along these lines:

Alpha is a beautiful lady with sparkling blue eyes and long brown hair. Her mouth is curved into a faint smile. She is wearing a tall forest-green dress and is wearing no shoes. She is of indefinite age: she looks young but in a timeless way, as if she has seen something of the world already. She looks in your direction now. Perhaps it is time to strike up a conversation?

Often these descriptions would be longer still, and with far more adjectives. Some people in roleplaying muds seemed to think extensive use of arcane adjectives was a mark of good roleplaying. But I disgress...

People in FurryMuck typically made very extensive descriptions for themselves, enough sometimes to scroll off one page when you looked at them. They had a good reason: they had something more to say than the typical description of a human, as we'd be dealing with a person that was also a dog, a cat, or a dragon.

Not unsettling by itself. Still not unsettling! Beam, what was the unsettling bit? Get to the point! It was initially a bit unsettling to run into an anthropomorphic horse equipped with, I believe, multiple sets of both male and female genitalia extensively described. This description is extreme of course, but one would run into quite explicit descriptions like that with some regularity in FurryMuck.

But hey, I thought, if s/he want to be like that, let er. I'm sure s/he'd also be welcome in Amsterdam, after all. By now stuff like that won't make me raise an eyebrow. My eyebrows aren't flexible enough to do that anyway. I need Spock-practice.

So when I saw Furries in Second Life, I was not at all surprised. I'd known about them for a long time by them. They certainly add to the interest of Second Life. They are a familiar sight. The nice thing about Second Life is that they mix with other people in a larger world, instead of in its own mud by itself. They add to the pleasant diversity of Second Life.

I hear sometimes people in Second Life go and badmouth Furries, and even attack them. I imagine some people react violently because they are new to the phenomenon. And they're not Dutch. And they haven't been online much. Where have they been? Or perhaps it's simply because they are amused at seeing people upset, and Furries are easy to target. Strange.

FurryMuck still exists! I just checked! I connected to it and typed 'WHO' in its startup screen, and it has 250 people online. Still a busy place, at least for a mud. FurryMuck never dies. Yay FurryMuck! Yay Furries! I suspect there is quite a bit of overlap between Furries and computer geeks, which would explain both the antiquity of FurryMuck, and its continued maintenance and existence.

New: Goreans

I had expected Furries in Second Life. I hadn't expected Goreans. I'm not surprised by regular, boring, run-of-the-mill BSDM stuff. After all, I had expected sex to be present in Second Life, and was not wrong (proposed heading for a future article: Recognition: sex). I had even expected Furry sex. But not Goreans.

I am a voracious reader, interested in strange new thing and love science fiction, so I'd at least heard of Gor, unlike many people. I knew some guy called John Norman had written a series of many novels featuring the fantasy world of Gor, where men are men, and women are their slaves. At least that's my impression. There are probably many subtleties I am not aware of. There seem to be different kinds of female slaves indicated by the color of the silks they wear. I regularly check out the profile for a female character to see their correct silk color stated there. I guess this must be handy when they are wearing a differently colored outfit temporarily.

I hadn't realized, but in retrospect should have, that these Gor novels had sparked a whole community, and that of course this community was on the Internet. There do not seem to be any communities not represented on the Internet. Sometimes it seems the Internet has more communities than actually exist. Humans are tool-using, community-building creatures, and the Internet is a tool to build communities. No wonder it's so popular! I love the Internet!

So there were Goreans in Second Life. I heard you are welcome to visit their lands as a tourist, but to make sure to wear a tourist nametag, especially with a female avatar, or you might be enslaved.

It is all very interesting, but I haven't gone and visited them yet. Perhaps I should go there and to ask some questions. One thing I wonder about is how many of the Goreans in Second Life have in fact read the Gor novels. I imagine just like me learning about Furries in FurryMuck, quite a few of the Goreans in Second Life have joined this community after learning from it in Second Life itself, as the Gor novels are fairly obscure in the mainstream these days. I know, as I know about Gor, and the things I know about tend to be obscure.

The most intriguing question I have is how this Gorean male-master female-slave philosophy interacts with the fluidity of gender online, especially in places like Second Life. Anyone can claim to be a female. Anyone can claim to be a male. It's quite possible, even likely, that right now, this minute, some Gorean male avatar is interacting with his slave, a female avatar, while in fact their real life genders are in reverse. This has got to affect Gorean philosophies about gender roles somewhat, right? Do Goreans frown on online gender bending? Or do they embrace it? John Norman would be spinning in his grave (were he in fact dead).

This concludes my observations for today. I hope I have offended no Furries or Goreans. It's just I like to observe humans (and anthropomorphic sentients) in general and, um, you do sort of stand out.

Hi Beam!

I've been exploring the fascinating world of Second Life for a while now. This blog will contain whatever thoughts and observations about Second Life that I may have.

Who am I? My avatar name is Beam Ray. I'm from the Netherlands. I've been exploring virtual worlds for a long time now; my first encounter with those text-based virtual worlds called muds was in 1991. That was in fact my first encounter with the internet, though I didn't know anything about the internet at the time, I just knew I was connected to some computer in Sweden and talking to Americans on it.

Muds came in two broad types: game muds and social muds. Games like World of Warcraft are the descendants of game muds: you run around in some typically fantasy world, slay monsters, learn magic and slay guilds. One interesting thing about many of the game muds at the time is that the content was provided by those who had played the game before. In order to become a wizard, you needed to gain a certain amount of experience points in the game. You could then extend the mud for the players by writing scripts and programs. This made these muds ever-evolving and also frequently chaotic mediums.

Other muds were social. Having initially only encountered game muds and having worked hard to become a wizard on one, it was rather odd to discover that in a mud like the famous LambdaMOO you could extend and program the environment right away. But, but... being able to program right away? That's just wrong! The difference was that these were not primarily games, but social. The environment wasn't so much a game as a "software toy". Social interaction was primary, the environment was there to support it. It makes sense to me to base social interactions in something that is a bit like a real world, with virtual spaces, objects and bodies. Humans are made to fit in such worlds, so we fit the environment to fit ourselves.

As some of us mudders were dreaming of at the time in the early 90s, muds made it to the mainstream in a major way. It took a long time. The first step was the mainstreaming of the internet itself. After that, the essential ingredient to make muds more mainstream was to add nice 3d graphics. The high-powered special effects of games were merged with the fun of playing games together in a persistent world. There are many different game muds, World of Warcraft most prominently. Of course these days we've mostly discarded that cute little term "mud" and are using the unwieldy acronym MMORPG instead.

Where were the social muds? For some reason it took a while longer for them to reach mass appeal. I imagine because the challenge of creating a large user modifiable 3d environment is a lot harder still than creating a game environment. Linden Lab took up that challenge. So while it took a while longer, we now have social muds too, such as Second Life. The differences between social and game muds are even more extreme than in the past: game muds are professionally run and player-created content is rare to absent. The companies in control want to maintain a strict quality control of the game. No random individuals adding new monsters to the game, or pots of gold, completely unbalancing it. In contrast a social mud environment like Second Life, by adding visuals and sound besides text and scripting, not to mention a whole economic system based on micro-payments, has opened up whole new dimensions of creativity and commerce.

People do interesting and sometimes strange things in this new environment. The challenges of operating such an environment are also extensive. There is a lot to observe for this old-time mudder. I hope some of you will enjoy my perspective.