MOO

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
For other uses, see Moo (disambiguation).

A MOO ("MUD, object-oriented"[1][2]) is a text-based online virtual reality system to which multiple users (players) are connected at the same time.

The term MOO is used in two distinct, but related, senses. One is to refer to those programs descended from the original MOO server, and the other is to refer to any MUD that uses object-oriented techniques to organize its database of objects, particularly if it does so in a similar fashion to the original MOO or its derivatives. Most of this article refers to the original MOO and its direct descendants, but see non-descendant MOOs for a list of MOO-like systems.

The original MOO server was authored by Stephen White, based on his experience from creating the programmable

Xerox PARC employee, Pavel Curtis
.

One of the most distinguishing features of a MOO is that its users can perform object-oriented programming within the server, ultimately expanding and changing how it behaves to everyone.[4] Examples of such changes include authoring new rooms and objects, creating new generic objects for others to use, and changing the way the MOO interface operates. The programming language used for extension is the MOO programming language, and many MOOs feature convenient libraries of verbs that can be used by programmers in their coding known as Utilities. The MOO programming language is a domain-specific language.[citation needed]

Background

MOOs are network accessible, multi-user, programmable, interactive systems well-suited to the construction of text-based adventure games, conferencing systems, and other collaborative software. Their most common use, however, is as multi-participant, low-bandwidth virtual realities. They have been used in academic environments for distance education, collaboration (such as Diversity University), group decision systems,[5] and teaching object-oriented concepts;[6] but others are primarily social in nature, or used for role-playing video games, or simply to take advantage of the programming possibilities. They have also been used in scientific studies of virtual presence.[7][8][9]

Most commonly, MOOs are connected to by users using a client which speaks the telnet protocol, which provides a stay-alive connection with the host, to relay output and send commands. Some however have developed web interfaces, or other such methods; however this commonly limits interaction that the user can have, usually to the point they have no interaction, but instead can browse objects and discover typical information. Developments in cross-MOO networking have also led to the creation of SunNET, a hubless network allowing cross-MOO communication and add extra possibilities to cross-MOO development, including networked channels. Another network called GNA-NET, designed by Gustavo Glusman of BioMOO connected seventeen mostly education sites. Most of these MOOs hosted online classes or other early versions of distance education.[10][11]

Every MOO stores the content and state of all its objects within a persistent object database, which keeps objects from being lost by a reset of the MOO server software or the computer hosting it.

New MOOs have to choose a starting database from which to set their MOO up, or they can use a minimal one which contains only the necessary objects to start a MOO. There are a handful of such MOO "core" databases which serve as foundations of code and utilities from which to start your MOO, including LambdaCore (from LambdaMOO), MinimalDB (considered the minimum necessary code and utilities to work usefully in a MOO), JHCore (from Jay's House Moo), and enCore (from LinguaMOO).

Every object in the MOO is assigned a number, and may be referred to by this number, prefixed with a #, as well as its name when the user is in the object's presence. Administrators, also known as

wizards
, who can manage the MOO, and assign certain global names to these objects, which are prefixed with $, a process known as corifying. They also feature parenting systems, and every object will have a parent, commonly eventually leading to Root Class, otherwise known as #1. #0 is also reserved as a special system object which is responsible for managing the list of global names, incoming network connections, and other information related to the operation of the system.

History

MOO, along with all of its nephews, started out with

text based adventure games. With the advent of the internet, MUD
was formed as a networked version of one of those games. Eventually it developed into a tree of different types of MUD, with MOO becoming one of them.

Stephen White (also known by the handles "Ghondahrl" and "ghond") wrote the first version of the MOO server, which was released on May 2, 1990, and used for the operation of a server called "

Xerox PARC
and also known by his handles "Lambda", and "Haakon", took the basic design, language, and code, fixed bugs and added features to release the second version, called "LambdaMOO" on October 30, 1990.

According to Jill Serpentelli in her paper Conversational Structure and Personality Correlates of Electronic Communication:

Curtis went on to explain how the transition occurred from
UseNet (a world-wide bulletin board system) in February 1991 (Curtis, personal communication).[12]

MOO was originally developed as a

TinyMUD
.

There are currently[when?] two distributions of the MOO server code. The more popular of the two, the LambdaMOO server, is named such as indication of the close historical and continuing association of the MOO server code with the first public MOO, LambdaMOO.

The LambdaMOO version of MOO that gained popularity in the early 1990s, and it remains[

SourceForge.net
project.

Social behavior on MOOs

Behavior on social MOOs and role-playing MOOs has been shown to differ. For example, an early study looked at whether users engaged in gender-switching (that is, adopting a different gender online). The majority of participants (60 percent) in social MOOs had never engaged in gender-switching, while the majority (56.7 percent) in role-playing MOOs had done so. However, most of those engaged in gender-switching did so on average only 10 percent of the time. The study also found that the primary barrier to gender-switching was the belief that it is dishonest and manipulative.[13]

Current projects based on MOO

  • Stunt is a backward compatible fork of the latest MOO server code. It adds multiple inheritance, anonymous objects, native HTTP support, JSON parsing and generation, a native map datatype, and better cryptography primitives.
  • Codepoint is an effort to extend LambdaMOO to support Unicode characters. Originally the project was started by
    Unicode Character Database
    without being unwieldy. The project is now being developed by James C. Deikun, Robert Leslie, and Kenny Root with the goal of eventually integrating it into the main LambdaMOO distribution.
  • ToastStunt is a fork of the Stunt server intended primarily to add new features. These include 64-bit integers, SQLite support, Perl-compatible regular expressions, background threaded functions, Argon2id hashing, telnet IAC capturing, profiling support, performance improvements, and dozens of additional built-in functions and improvements.[citation needed]

Non-descendant MOOs

Some servers use "MOO" style object-oriented characteristics without being descended from the original MOO server, in the sense that they use little or none of that server's source code and use internal languages that are more or less incompatible with the MOO programming language. None of them have attained the popularity of LambdaMOO or its relatives.[citation needed]

Stephen White went on to write a new and similar system called CoolMUD, although it never obtained the same wide userbase as MOO. Another, later, attempt at a programmable object-oriented MUD server was ColdMUD, written by Greg Hudson and later maintained by Brandon Gillespie under the name "Genesis".[14]

One unusual MOO with no real relationship to the original MOO is called mooix. mooix is unique among MUDs in that it uses the underlying UNIX operating system to handle all of the multitasking and networking issues. Several unique side effects result from this, one of which is that the MOO can be programmed in any language. mooix was written after a failed attempt by Joey Hess to write a MOO entirely in Perl, called perlmoo.[15]

Access

Participants (usually referred to as users) connect to a MOO using telnet or some other, more specialized, client program. Upon connection, they are usually presented with a welcome message explaining how to either create a new character or connect to an existing one.

Almost every command is parsed by the server into a call on a MOO procedure, or verb, which actually does the work. Thus, programming in the MOO programming language is a central part of making non-trivial extensions to the database and hence the virtual reality.[citation needed]

Administration

All MOOs provide a flag called

Wizard
; when set on a player, the player gains the ability to view and modify nearly everything in the MOOs database. Such players usually form the basis for MOO administration. Designated owners of a MOO are sometimes referred to as Archwizards.

These wizards can restrict access to the MOO, as well as make news postings and monitor logs. Wizard permissions are needed for modification and even execution of verbs and properties for which the user does not own, or is not publicly readable/writable. All verbs and properties within objects have the appropriate flags, with the user can change to determine its current state.

Notable examples

Social MOOs

Research MOOs

Educational MOOs

  • Diversity University, the first dedicated educational MOO, created by Jeanne McWhorter in 1993.
  • Postmodern Culture MOO (PMC2 or PMCMOO) was a MOO hosted by the Institute for Advanced Technologies in the Humanities (IATH) at University of Virginia that was very active in the mid-1990s. It featured discussions of postmodern culture within elaborately programmed spaces, including a segment of Nighttown from James Joyce's novel Ulysses. Some archives remain online.[25]
  • MOOSE Crossing, a
    constructionist learning educational MOO designed for teaching children ages 9 to 13.[26] It was developed by Amy S. Bruckman in 1996 as her doctoral dissertation work,[27] and cited among "the most notable MOO research in education".[28] It closed in 2007 after 11 years online.[29]
  • BioMOO was a professional MOO started by Gustavo Glusman and Jaime Prilusky at the Weizmann Institute of Science in 1993. It was a virtual place for Biology researchers to meet to brainstorm, hold colloquia and conferences, and explore the serious side of MOOs as a medium.[30] These professional activities were recognized in an article entitled "Cyberspace Offers Chance To Do 'Virtually' Real Science" published in the journal Science.[31] BioMOO Wizards created a portable subset of the BioMOO server, called the Virtual Conference Center, and submitted it as a paper at a virtual scientific conference [32] and used the VCC to host another virtual scientific conference.[33] BioMOO sported a VR web interface.[34] During its eight years of activity, BioMOO hosted many professional activities including the Virtual School of Natural Sciences' courses on BioComputing and Principles of Protein Structure.[35] Prilusky and Glusman also released in 1994 the File Utilities Package, a MOO server modification enabling direct but controlled access to the underlying file system.[36] Glusman also developed the intermoo GNA Network.
  • LinguaMOO is an educational MOO dedicated to general studies of arts and humanities, created in 1995 by Cynthia Haynes of the University of Texas at Dallas and Jan Rune Holmevik of the University of Bergen. Many educational MOOs use the enCore system, derived from LinguaMOO, for their MOO database core.[37] Haynes and Holmevik published two books on the educational use of MOOs.[38][39]
  • MundoHispano was founded in 1994 by Lonnie (Turbee) Chu and Kenzi Mudge (Syracuse University), with co-directors Theresa Minick (Kent State University) and Greg Younger (The Economics Institute). It was the first MOO in Spanish, complete with Spanish commands and accents, built for native speakers, learners and teachers of Spanish. At its height it had over 4,000 user accounts logging on from over a dozen countries.
  • University of Hawaii and was an online performance and teaching space for academics and professionals with an interest in theatre. At its height 2200 people were involved in ATHE and ATHEMOO.[40][41][42]

MOO games

See also

References

  1. ISBN 0-471-11633-5
    . For example, the MOO (Muds Object-Oriented) is a direct result of work in this area.
  2. ^
    ISBN 0262201631
    .
  3. ISBN 0-13-101816-7
    . One player, Stephen White, decided in 1990 to extend the functionality of TinyMUD and write TinyMUCK (muck being a kind of mud). Using this as his template, he then produced MOO (MUD, Object Oriented).
  4. ISBN 0-13-101816-7
    . MOO introduced a fully functional scripting language (as such in-world programming languages are called) and thus brought the LPC-like capabilities to social-oriented virtual worlds.
  5. ^ Evard, R. (1993, November) Collaborative networked communication: MUDS as systems tools. Proceedings of the Seventh Systems Administration Conference (LISA VII), pp. 1-8, Monterey, CA.
  6. ^ Towell, JF (2000) MOO: An active-learning environment for teaching object-oriented concepts in business information systems curricula, Journal of Information Systems Education, 11(304) 147-150.
  7. ^ Towell, JF, & Towell, ER (1997). Presence in text-based networked virtual environments or "MUDS," Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments 6(5) 590-595.
  8. ^ Shiano, DJ (1999). Lessons from LambdaMOO: A social, text-based virtual environment, Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments 8(2), 127-139 article Archived 2015-05-14 at the Wayback Machine.
  9. ^ Towell, JF & Towell, ER (2001) 34th Meetings of the Hawaii International Conference on Systems Science (HICSS-34), Maui, Hawaii.
  10. ^ "The GNA Network". 2011-07-24. Archived from the original on 2011-07-24. Retrieved 2020-07-19.
  11. ^ "Projet staf14: Distance education on WWW". 2010-05-30. Archived from the original on 2010-05-30. Retrieved 2020-07-19.
  12. ^ "Conversational Structure and Personality Correlates of Electronic Communication". Electronic Frontier Foundation. 2007-09-26. Archived from the original on 2007-09-26. Retrieved 2020-07-19.
  13. doi:10.1080/136911899359538
    .
  14. ISBN 0-13-101816-7
    . MOO had two important offspring: Pavel Curtis' LambdaMOO (which was to become a favorite of journalists, academics, and social misfits) and, via CoolMUD, ColdMUD (an attempt to create a software-engineering quality virtual world authoring system).
  15. ^ "perlmoo". 2007-02-18. Archived from the original on 2007-02-18. Retrieved 2020-07-19.
  16. ^ "LambdaMOO (with LambdaMOO Map) An Introduction -". 2005-12-18. Archived from the original on 2005-12-18. Retrieved 2020-07-19.
  17. ^ Riddle, Prentiss (1993-04-13). "GopherCon '93: Internet Gopher Workshop and Internet Gopher Conference". PrentissRiddle.com. Retrieved 2008-05-20.
  18. ^ "What's New! June 1993". Netscape Corporation. 1993-06-24. Retrieved 2008-05-20.
  19. ^ Hand, Chris (1994). "meet me in cyberspace".
  20. ^ "FactoryNET Prospectus". 1998-12-05. Archived from the original on 1998-12-05. Retrieved 2020-07-19.[unreliable source?]
  21. ^ "EFF & Aerosmith Rock the Net - Update - Where/When/How". 2011-09-27. Archived from the original on 2011-09-27. Retrieved 2020-07-19.
  22. ^ LaFarge, Antoinette. "Towards an Id Theater". Plaintext Players.
  23. ^ "SchoolNetMOO Lesson Plan" [1] 14 August 1998
  24. ISBN 1-56604-222-4
    . What began as an experiment in text-based virtual reality has become the hangout for a virtual who's who of media researchers. The MediaMOO is an online recreation of MIT's Media Lab, and it's populated exclusively by people interested in the future of interactive communication, alternative media and virtual reality.
  25. ^ PMC2 Archives
  26. ISBN 0-7494-2989-5
    .
  27. ^ Bruckman, Amy. MOOSE Crossing: Construction, Community, and Learning in a Networked Virtual World for Kids (Ph.D thesis). MIT Media Lab.
  28. MIT
    . November 1999. Retrieved 2007-10-10.
  29. ^ "MOOSECrossing". 2007-05-07. Archived from the original on October 12, 2009. Retrieved 2010-04-22.
  30. ^ Flusfeder, Helena (1996-11-08). "Life mutates in MOO dimension". Retrieved 2008-12-16.
  31. ^ Anderson, Christopher "Cyberspace Offers Chance To Do 'Virtually' Real Science" 264, 900-901, Science, 1994.
  32. ^ Towell, John Foster, Hansen, Paul, Mercer, Eric, Leach, Martin, Rubin, Irit, Prilusky, Jaime & Glusman, Gustavo (1995, November). Networked virtual environments and electronic conferencing. In S.M. Bachrach, D.B. Boyd, S.K. Gray, W. Hase, and H. Rzepa (Ed.), Proceedings of the First Electronic Computational Chemistry Conference [CD-ROM]. ARInternet: Landower, MD.
  33. ^ Hardy BH, Robinson A, Doughty S, Findsen LA, Towell ER, Towell JF, and Wilson IBH (1996, January) A new direction in conferencing: the First Electronic Glycoscience Conference, Trends in Biochemical Sciences, 21(1), 31-33.
  34. ^ "BioMOO announce VR web interface". 1995-04-30. Retrieved 2008-12-16.
  35. ^ Fuellen, Georg. "GNA's Virtual School of Natural Sciences". Archived from the original on 2008-06-12.
  36. ^ "FUP server builtin functions". 1997-04-17. Retrieved 2008-12-16.
  37. ^ "Login (LinguaMOO)". 2005-12-15. Archived from the original on 2005-12-15. Retrieved 2005-12-01.
  38. ISBN 0-205-27114-6
  39. ISBN 0-472-08838-6
  40. ^ Sant, Toni and Flintoff, Kim. [2], 24 July 2007. Retrieved on 29 October 2012.
  41. ^ "ATHEMOO Basic Information" [3] 28 October 2012
  42. ^ Schrum, Stephen. "Theatre in Cyberspace", Pg 112 Peter Lang Publishing, New York, 1999.

External links

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