Espen Aarseth, "Songs from the MUD: Multi-User Discourse"

(In Cybertext)

- MUDs as discourse
- Can MUDs be texts? Literature?
- No author, publisher, markets, just writers communicating in a system of symbolic capital
- Closed, non-local social places (space for play, textual pleasure)
- Not a game, because (most) rules are socially enforced (perhaps it's just a different kind of game, or a hybrid?)
- MUDs are real communities, not "virtual" ones
- Written word, text, is paramount
- MUDs as paradigmatic of mediated social interaction
- Free experimentation with fiction, personality (unlike other forms such as e-mail or IRC)
- Site for emerging social/aesthetic modes of textual communication
- Levels of discourse in MUDs: Construction/Progression/Negotiation/Quasi-event/Event
- Analogy to jazz improvisation
- Metamedium (contains other forms)
- "Netiquette" is formulated by individuals? (Isn't it socially constructed? Also describes as a "contested behavioural envelope")
- MUD players as literary cyborgs
- MUD discourse as "meaningful, intelligible mode of literary communication"