Chapter four 
The Strange Allure of Interactive Games
Falling in love over the Internet is one thing, but falling in love with the Internet is yet another. Tales of addiction and obsession, of people, almost always young men, who take digital bytes of information directly into their veins, who spend fifteen, eighteen, even twenty hours a day “logged on” to the Net, have been often reported by both zealots and skeptics, as proof of how wonderful this innovation can be, and as proof of its danger.
In my own quest to understand, my search for an answer to Thoreau’s “of the devil or of God” question, I wanted very much to find such a person, sit with him, watch him compute, and then take the poor fellow to a sidewalk café, a real one, so that he could see what the rest of us look like, feel the wind in his hair. I wanted to find such a person, but I never imagined it would be so easy.
My introduction to Rob Dale came in the form of an electronic plea that he posted to the newsgroup alt.cyberspace:
Subject: I AM ADDICTED!! HELP!!
My name is Robert, and I am totally addicted to “Cyberspace.” I was first introduced to the Internet by a friend. At the time I was only MUSHing … I did that for the next seven months. I spent the entire day, save breakfast, lunch, and dinner, on the computer. Anything I could do by modem, I would try. The semester just ended at the end of April and I was going to quit playing on the computer but, due to my grades, I have to attend summer classes. Now, I’m back to the same.
Rob is nineteen, tall, almost gangly, and clean shaven. On the day I meet him, he wears corduroy slacks, a Dockers shirt, and a Duke Blue Devils baseball cap, and seems altogether embarrassed. He wrote and posted the plea for help during the spring semester of 1994, but though I ask him more than once, he can’t seem to tell me exactly why. He shrugs a lot.
Rob was born in Norway but moved to the United States, to Monroeville, Pennsylvania, when very young. Some of Rob’s friends call him Roy, because he almost always wears corduroy slacks. When I ask which he prefers, Rob or Roy, he shrugs one more time and says, “Either.”
Rob believes himself to be addicted to the interactive game of MUSH, short for Multi-User Shared Hallucination. Multi-user means more than one person can be playing the game at any given time. The Shared Hallucination part has to do with the nature of the game: the players create their own characters and their own rooms within the MUSH, fill the rooms with imaginary objects—both mundane and magical—and then interact with whoever comes to visit. It is all text-based, meaning words scroll by on your computer screen, not pictures.
“I just didn’t know all you could do at the computer center,” Rob explains to me. We are munching fries in the food court at a mall in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, a town about thirty miles east of Pittsburgh. I had offered to buy Rob lunch, anywhere he wanted, and he chose McDonald’s. “I thought the computer center was just for word processing. I didn’t know that much about the Internet. I knew it was there, and I knew you could do stuff on it, but I wasn’t sure what.”
His friend, a fellow student at the University of Pittsburgh’s Greensburg campus, introduced him to the ins and outs of the Internet in one long day. After that, Rob spent “almost three days straight” on the computer, “except for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and about four hours sleep.”
Rob, of course, was also taking classes at the time—Chemistry 2, which included a lab, a lecture, and a recitation; English; biology; and an introductory computer course—but he started missing more class periods than he made. “I wouldn’t do anything all day, and then I’d go down to the computer center, a little while before dinner, mess around, and after dinner I’d probably go to the computer center until midnight and then, depending who was still up, go to their room, until about four or five in the morning.”
His girlfriend, Kelley, was not pleased. “She hates computers. She doesn’t understand why I do this.”
His professors weren’t too thrilled, either.
Before his obsession with the game of MUSH, Rob was an A and B student, but at the end of that spring semester, he came up with one D and three Fs.
Visit the computer center on nearly any American college campus. Day after day you will see many of the same faces glued to the screens, bug-eyed sophomores, grinning until their lips hurt, unable somehow to pry themselves away. Walk up to one of them, say hello, and chances are he will act startled for a moment, then look right back at the screen.
Some of these young men and women are doing homework, but more of them are probably playing a MUSH, a MUD, or a MOO. A MUD is a Multi-User Dungeon. MUDs are more violent than MUSHes, because the object is often to kill or be killed. “MOO” stands for MUD/Object-Oriented, a distinction that is important to programmers and has nothing to do with dairy cows. Part of the appeal of these games is the way they let players interact—when I am playing the game and you are playing the game, we are playing with each other, not just with a machine. Many of the MUSH/MUD/MOOs are quite complex, and college students can’t seem to leave them alone.
Why?
Let me advance three theories.
Theory One: They Are Addicted
The Internet is nothing more than an innovative electronic drug, and college students get this drug for free. (Of course, once they’re hooked, they graduate, and then they get all jittery and nervous and have to pay corporate America for their next fix. Here is a fresh area of study for aging conspiracy theorists.)
This theory has the support of at least a few members of the mental health community. Dr. Michelle M. Weil, a California psychologist and authority on the effects of computer games, told the Baltimore Sun that games certainly can be addictive, and these on-line, interactive games are even more addictive than the games you buy in a box or cartridge. “With a (boxed) computer game,” Dr. Weil explained, “you’re always aware that it is a game.” The fact that real people are on the other end of these interactive games, however, helps people lose track. They confuse the game with reality. “The underlying danger: the more time you spend facing the screen, the less time you spend doing other things.”
Theory Two: They Are Learning Valuable Lessons
A second theory, hammered home by more than forty MUD users who responded to a few brief questions I posted on the Usenet group rec.games.mud.misc, is that the MUDs, MUSHes, and MOOs are useful, social, and educational.
A fellow calling himself TimberWolf, for instance, told me he was a student at USC in the school of architecture when he was introduced to the Internet. “I quickly found NetTrek [a Star Trek game, with graphics, where people take over planets and blow one another up] and MUDs and MUSHes. I spent a great deal of time on them, and at points decided to skip classes… This obviously had a lot to do with my lower grades… but I enjoyed the instant gratification and social interaction not available to me at the time. I turned to gaming for the fun and excitement I was lacking, and I still do.”
Lavinia Hales, a recent Ohio State graduate, has spent up to fifty hours a week on a MUD. “What I like best about MUDs is the social atmosphere,” she wrote me. “You can make friends and meet several people in different countries and regions of the U.S. Some MUDFriends actually meet and they become real life friends. Many guys use MUDding as a nonviolent and healthy release of pent up aggressions. They can log on and kill things when they feel upset or angry over something.”
Like their grades, maybe?
And Jessica Hekman, a student at Harvard who spends an average of ten hours a week on games, said she learned a new skill. “I like coding—in fact, I like writing MUSHcode so much that I took two semester of computer science this year in school.”
Coding means programming—writing the commands (in computer language) that tell a machine what to do and when to do it. In a MUSH, for instance, advanced users can create an imaginary object (such as a robot bartender or a magic lamp) and write computer instructions that will allow that object to perform its designated function as other players encounter it, whether the creator is playing at that moment or not. It takes some work, some cleverness, lots of time, and lots of patience, and it can be a good way to learn.
Still, I have a third theory.
Theory Three: They Are College Students
College students, I have observed, love only one thing more than they love free beer, and that is to waste hours and hours of time, as much time as humanly possible, for at least four years. The Internet simply represents the newest and most efficient time-waster available, and college students are helpless in its grasp.
So that I can see a MUSH firsthand, Rob Dale takes me to McKenna Hall, the computer center at Pitt-Greensburg. McKenna Hall is the classic cost-efficient brick architecture you see on campus after campus. The Greensburg campus itself is a haphazard conglomeration of dorms and classroom buildings ringing a series of parking lots.
Before we can even enter the computer room, however, Rob has to check with the center’s director and ask permission. He pops his head in the office door, chuckles nervously. “I have a guy here writing a book. Is it okay if I MUSH a little?”
The director looks up, looks me over, then laughs. “He brought you as an excuse, huh?”
I shrug.
Rob smiles sheepishly.
Rob has been banned from MUSHing because he and others were dominating the machines. “If they catch me,” he had explained at lunch. “I’ll get tossed out.”
The director, though, nods his okay. “But just for today, Rob. Just for today.”
This is not so uncommon. A large number of campuses have had to ban MUDs and MUSHes, or have banned them during certain hours. Others have a standing policy that anyone with a legitimate academic use, such as a term paper, can throw a MUD or MUSH user off any machine at any time. (On the other hand, students have found innumerable ways to fool computer center attendants. Rob changes the screen colors on his machine so that the student monitor can’t see what he is doing from a distance. Moreover, the trend on many campuses now is to wire individual dorm rooms to the Internet, and machines in those areas can be used for anything at all.)
Rob sits down at one of the forty or so terminals in the room. It is about one in the afternoon. Only three of the terminals are occupied, but this is because Pitt-Greensburg is between semesters. Rob assures me that the blue chairs would be full if school were in session, and if it were later in the day. His classmates, or at least those most likely to explore cyberspace, most often roll out of bed around noon.
He plants his long fingers on the keyboard and begins to type. He types rapidly, scrolling from screen to screen, flicking the keys, barely stopping to read the text that appears. I finally ask him to stop. “What is it you’re doing?” I ask.
“Oh, just showing you what’s on here.”
“But I can’t see it.”
He agrees to slow down, and I ask Rob if he could enter a MUSH and show me how it works. First, though, he checks his electronic mail but doesn’t read more than one or two of the twenty or so messages waiting for him. He then spends nearly ten minutes sending electronic mail to himself to determine how long the mail takes to wend its way through the Pitt system and back into his account.
He eventually types the command “telnet” on the blue screen, followed by a seemingly random string of numbers. The numbers are actually the “address” of the MUSH Rob most often plays, TinyCWRU (CWRU stands for Case Western Reserve University, on whose mainframe computer the MUSH is housed).
The screen pops and blinks a few times, then the following words appear:
Welcome back to TinyCWRU! We are the world’s second oldest MU*, running TinyMUSH 2.0.10.p6, the latest & greatest MUSH version.
This is followed by a short list of commands, and the information that six players are logged in. Rob checks to see who they are, and the following list appears:
Damien
puh
lynn
Juney
shadow of light
spyman
They are nicknames, obviously. Even Damien and lynn may be using pseudonyms, and as elsewhere on the Net, there is no real way of even knowing lynn’s gender, or anyone else’s. The nickname “puh” refers to Rob himself. He is reluctant to tell me what it means—he shrugs again, and says it is just a joke.
Juney, shadow of light, and spyman might be anyone, anywhere. Because these games are on the Net, a student like Rob at Pitt-Greensburg can be interacting more or less instantaneously with a MUSHer in New Jersey, another in California, and maybe a fourth person in New Zealand.
Nothing happens, then suddenly the computer screen displays this message:
You sense that lynn is looking for you in the Pinnacle Revolving Restaurant, high atop the Grand Hotel.
Lynn has apparently noticed (her computer tells her this) that puh has logged on, and she is attempting to make contact.
Rob types “visit lynn” and away we go.
The Pinnacle Revolving Restaurant, high atop the Grand Hotel. This is the first floor … There are four private tables here, numbered 1-4, and there is one main table. You are welcome to have a seat at any table you choose. As the restaurant revolves, you can see various panoramic views of the world of TinyCWRU out the window.
Rob types “hi.”
On the screen appears “lynn says hi.”
Rob types “1 lynn” (shorthand for “take a look at lynn”).
On the screen, we read: “lynn has long soft brown hair, her skin is coffee with just the right touch of cream.”
This may or may not be a true description of lynn, of course. What Rob is looking at is the text of the description lynn has typed in for herself. For instance, when we “look” at Damien, we learn the following:
Before you stands a dark and brooding figure in a black suit. He is very tall and has jet black hair. His eyes seem to be totally black, but reflect light like a cat’s. The interior of his cape is bright red.
It is fantasy time here, time to become a vampire, a dashing prince, or a clever detective, but I cannot help but imagine that in real life Damien is actually five feet two inches, painfully thin, light-haired, blue-eyed, sixteen, and wearing baggy shorts in front of his dad’s computer. We have entered the Shared Hallucination, and for a while Rob and I wander from the Revolving Restaurant to the Penthouse to the Study where Professor Mustard has the rope and the candlestick. Not much seems to happen. We just look around, say “hi” to any other players who happen to be in that room, check out people’s descriptions of themselves, and meander along. Then Rob notices that a new player has logged on. The guy’s MUSH name is CEE.
“Hey, I know him,” Rob blurts out, rising in his chair. It is the most enthusiastic he has been all afternoon.
Rob sends a private message to CEE: “hey are you okay??”
Simultaneously, he explains to me that CEE is a friend, a fellow Greensburg student, now home in New Jersey. “He’s a guy, but he’s had cybersex with I think about five guys and about seven girls.”
“Is he bisexual?” I ask naïvely.
“Oh no, he has a girlfriend.”
“Why does he do it?” I ask, meaning, why would a heterosexual young man want to get on his computer and pretend to be female and have “sex” with other young men.
“He does it because it is so funny.”
Rob types a message to CEE. “How many times have you had cybersex and with what?”
CEE answers “why?”
Rob: “For a guy writing a book.”
CEE: “At least a dozen times and with both sexes.”
Throughout this redundant, overlapping conversation between Rob, CEE, and myself, lynn keeps interrupting. Some of what Rob and CEE are saying is sent as a private conversation between them; some of it (out of sloppiness, I think) is sent in a way that makes it public to anyone on the MUSH, and lynn is understandably confused.
lynn: “huh? what does that mean?”
No one answers her, so she repeats the question. Then she repeats it again. Eventually, she tries a new tack. She is an inexperienced user, it turns out, and starts asking a series of beginner questions, of the “How do I do this? How do I do that?” variety. I can only sympathize.
Rob and CEE ignore her, trading howdy-do’s and small talk with one another, until lynn finally types “I give up” and disappears from the MUSH.
It is not a game, in the classic sense. No one wins, no one loses, there is no score, and there is no point where the game ends. To the best of my observation, there is a great amount of wandering around, asking questions, being friendly, but there is no real goal.
If Rob’s attention span is typical of his generation, our world is going to be in trouble in a few years. While simultaneously wandering the MUSH, trying to explain the finer points of the process to the writer sitting at his left elbow, and exchanging messages with CEE, lynn, and a few other Net travelers, he is also checking his E-mail accounts (he has more than one) and looking at messages in various Usenet groups. I am losing track rapidly and am not precisely sure to what extent Rob himself is able to make sense of the ceaseless input.
His fingers are constantly tapping. When there is nothing to type—for instance, while waiting as the computer answers his previous request—he strokes the outside edges of the keyboard or taps the table. His eyes are locked on the screen, and it occurs to me that Rob has barely made eye contact with me all day, even over our cheap lunch. He seems both eager to tell his story and embarrassed by it. Eventually he logs off the MUSH.
“So what do you like so much about MUSHing?” I ask, not having seen much to explain the appeal.
“You can do anything you want. It is not like society. There is no bias to anything. You can have any name you want. There are no arguments, no fighting. There is, like, no race. You can be yourself.”
I point out the obvious. “You spend a lot of time on the computer, don’t you?”
“I spend a lot more time on computers than with people,” he admits.
“Are you more comfortable there?”
“I guess so.”
“Why?”
“Around Greensburg, people are basically all the same, they’re all here, everyone goes to the same mall, everyone does the same thing. On the Internet, you’ve got people from all over the world. Like, there are people on here from the Philippines.”
It sounds good, and Rob is sincere, but I haven’t seen him have any sort of substantive conversation with anyone all afternoon, and most everyone he has met on the Net has been a college student somewhere in the United States. I ask him what he talks to people about, people from the Philippines, or wherever.
“It seems most of the time I’m helping them,” he answers. “I like helping people. You get to talk to them. It’s kind of why I want to be a surgeon, too.”
Rob had planned to become a cardiovascular surgeon, it turns out. At Pitt-Greensburg, he had been on the premedical track, though the low grades derailed that plan. A few weeks after we met, he E-mailed me the news that he had switched his major to Multimedia, the wedding of computers to pictures and sounds, which seems perfectly suited to his interests. Perhaps he will someday design a whole new breed of MUSH, one where we can see our dashing prince in bright color, instead of just watching strings of words that describe it all.
Eventually, Rob and I conclude our MUSH session and say goodbye. I gather my pen and pad, preparing to leave him behind in the computer lab.
“How was that for you?” he asks.
“Good,” I answer. “It was helpful, I learned something. How about you?”
“Aw,” he says, “it seemed boring.”
So what is the appeal? If it is so boring, why do so many people play?
There are a lot of college students, sure, but others play as well: people much older than Rob, people with limited free time, programmers with expert skills, people who should know better. Why do they do it?
Rob sure seemed to be wasting an awful lot of time during the afternoon I spent in his company, but maybe having “the writer guy” hovering over his shoulder just made him too nervous. I have MUSHed myself, subsequent to my meeting with Rob. I never got deep enough into these games to become addicted, but I did get a glimpse of what is enticing about a MUSH. It can be a real kick.
One reason is that people act with striking benevolence in these role-playing games. There is certainly much more chivalry and gentleness on a MUSH than on the streets of your average American city, and who among us, especially when college-aged, hasn’t yearned for such a utopia? The MUDs, the violent games, are just the reverse. We can kill, be killed, act out our aggressions with real ferocity, and no one gets hurt. No need to feel guilty. And we don’t go to jail.
Intimate yet safe—we share our deepest fantasies, yet no one really knows who we are. The urge to fantasize is a very human urge, after all. What these interactive games allow us to do is share our fantasies (anonymously and safely), build on them, and act them out. Some of us take to the stage, but most of us are way too shy for that. Enter the Net.
It is no wonder that references to Star Trek and the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons are so common in cyberspace—it is a world where one can, with ease, “boldly go where no man has gone before.” There are plenty of other ways to fantasize, of course, but maybe the appeal of a MUSH is that having anonymous others read our fantasies, interact with our fantasy characters, and react to our fantasy actions makes it all seem more real.
The computer is just so much plastic and silicon, but on the other end of the other computer, somewhere on a distant corner of the lace doily, there is another person, and for some of us, maybe that is just close enough.