This sounds a lot like today’s instant messaging but a MUD differs from instant messaging in two ways that are directly relevant to our examination of the rapidly evolving nature of identity.

First, the person-to-person interactions in a MUD take place in a computer-generated context – a virtual world. A MUD is conceptually presented to the player as a collection of rooms. Each room contains doors through which you move to get to other rooms. A room might have writing or pictures on the walls. And it might contain furniture and a jar of cookies. A room might be outdoors and be a garden. Or a room could be inside a radio or a can of soup. When you moved from one room to another the MUD program would describe to you what the room you moved into looked like, in 1,200 bit per second text, of course.

In some MUDs the text descriptions creating the virtual world were static and built into the MUD software. In other MUDs players could add new decorations and artifacts to existing rooms and in some MUDs they could create whole new rooms. As an aside, the notion of user-provider content that is so hot today originated with a computer game called Lost in the Caves written by Dave Kaufman and published in 1973. Yes, open source was alive and well back then too.

The second difference between a MUD and instant messaging is that unlike instant messaging where you use your real name and sometimes post a picture of yourself, in a MUD everybody is a fictitious, constructed identity – an avatar. The players in a MUD are just as conceptual as the rooms and the gardens and the soup cans.

Being or more properly presenting oneself as an avatar (we really don’t have agreed upon word constructs to describe the relationship between a human being and their avatars) is not to be confused with being anonymous.

Indeed, being an avatar is all about being identified and identifiable albeit within a well-defined context. In virtual worlds – in the MUDs of 30 years ago as well as the Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPG) of today – players are heavily vested in creating an identity that is distinctly and explicitly not anonymous.

To convince yourself that on-line identities are very real and that people are very serious about them, you need only go to eBay and type in the name of any of the larger MMORPGs. As I write this I see that a Level 70 Alchemist Rogue is going for $400 – that’s 400 U.S. dollars, not some funny in-world money.

The avatars wandering the MUDdy rooms of 30 years ago came slowly and painfully to the understanding that there were large number of subtleties of on-line societies that had not been at all apparent when the MUD was turned on and everybody dialed-in for the first time. Interactions between avatars were just as intense, just as complex, and, yes, just as real as interactions between real, live human beings.

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