Research-Oriented Links

This document is part of the MUD Resource Collection.

Last update: March 13th, 1997

This is a list of papers, bibliographies, and other items of interest to those researching MUDs. The list is quite large, and is growing rapidly. I have made an attempt to restrict this page to only those archives offering things which are unique; there are many other pages which are simply lists of resources already listed here. The links here are broken down by category.
o Research Resources
o Paper Collections
o Single Papers
o Related Links

Research Resources

o Bibliography of Electronic Sources
This is an HTML version of a bibliography available on MediaMOO. It makes a reasonable starting point for research.

o Daniel Pargman's Reference List
This is a copy of a list of references for research on MUDs, compiled by Daniel Pargman and posted to rec.games.mud.misc in April 1995.

o EduVR Page on MUDs
An extensive collection of education-related MUD pages.

o UTexas MUD Research
A few useful links to some of the MUD documents related to research being done at UTexas. One interesting document to look at is Aesthetic Approaches to the Design and Study of MUDs.

o The Lost Library of MOO
A good index to MOO-related stuff, with an emphasis on education.

o Pueblo Project
This project is based on Pueblo MOO, the descendent of the elementary-school education MariMUSE, at Phoenix College in Arizone. This set of documents is of interest to those interested in this application of MUDs.

o Maricopa Gopher
This gopher is associated with Maricopa MUSE, an educational MUD. It contains links to various interesting documents detailing the MUSE, the theories behind it, and some other bits of general MUDding interest.

o ARPA MudShop Page
Results of the first and second workshops on MUDs and Education.

o ThesisNet FAQ
This is a reasonably good index to various academic papers that have been published about cyberspace. It particular, it contains a good index of most of the papers on the Xerox PARC ftp site.

o Papers on Synchronous Communications
A small but high-quality index to papers related to MUDs, IRC, and so forth. Contains mostly the "classics", but is nonetheless useful.

o Electric Communities
Electronic communities and more, including the papers about Habitat (Chip Morningstar and F. Randall Farmer's work on QuantumLink in the 1980s).

o Text-based Virtual Reality
A listing of essays and research resources. Brief, but contains some good links.

o Archives of the moo-ed Mailing List
moo-ed@ucet.ufl.edu and cbnvee@mcmuse.mc.maricopa.edu are two mailing lists for the discussion of MUDs and education. Both are fairly low-volume.

Paper Collections

o Internet Resources for Education: MUDs
An archive of education-related MUD resources, particularly notable for a collection of papers.

o The LambdaMOO and MediaMOO paper collections.
These FTP servers contain one of the largest collections of papers that have been written about MUDs. Do note that many of these are somewhat dated, however.

o The Diversity University Journal
A journal of Virtual Reality Education, this concentrates on the work being done at the virtual Diversity University, but contains articles of general relevance to the use of MUDs in education.

o Jen Clodius' Home Page
Jen Clodius (Bedouin at DragonMUD) is a graduate student in anthropology. Her page contains several many excellent papers, with a particular emphasis on ethnography. These are all must-reads.

o The Lynn Cherny's Papers
A collection of interesting papers on MUDs, from a sociolinguistic perspective.

o Elizabeth Reid's Papers
Includes her master's thesis, "Cultural Formations", as well as other related articles.

o Julian Dibbell's Papers
The author of the Village Voice article on the "virtual rape" on LambdaMOO has written a number of other articles.

o Daniel Pargman's Home Page
Includes the MUD literature reference list, and his papers on MUDs. Also includes abstracts from a workshop about MUDs.

o The Electronic Journal of Virtual Culture
The archives for the EJVC mailing list contain a large number of papers, some dated, but most quite interesting.

o The sci.virtual-worlds Publications Archive
Many of these papers are not MUD-related. However, there may be some things of interest, particularly the journal, "VR in Schools".

o The ChibaMOO Papers
A numbr of papers related to ChibaMOO and attempts to fuse WWW technology with MUDs.

o Studying MUD Technology
A few links to a number of assorted MUD-related papers.

o The NooDDLe Project
Papers and utilities related to a prototype MOO-based environment for high school to conduct "mock trials". Includes an excellent list of bookmarks.

Single Papers

o Constructions and Reconstructions of the Self in Virtual Reality
A paper by Sherry Turkle, about roleplaying and identity. A must-read. Also check out an excerpt from her new book, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. Also check out the reviews: one in NetFuture (quite brief), one from a professor at Berkeley, another (which includes an interview) from Howard Rheingold, and one from Curtis Frye. She was also interviewed in Technology Review.

o Collaborative Networked Communications
Subtitled "MUDs as Systems Tools", this is a paper given at the 1993 USENIX, by Remy Evard, about uses for MUDs in systems administration.

o Gender Issues in MUDs
A paper on sex and gender on the MUDs.

o Spoof, Spam, Lurk, and Lag
Lee-Ellen Marvin's paper, in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, analyzing these commonly-used terms, in the specific context of MOOs. (The material is largely applicable to all social-oriented TinyMUD-derived places, however, and it's a pity that the research didn't include non-MOOs.)

o The Real Pleasure of the Virtual
This is a paper written by Paul Dever and Jane Love, presented at the Eleventh Annual Conference on Computers and Writing. It's chiefly concerned with pedagogical methods on educational MOOs (and can be generalized to other MUD types).

o Communication in the Virtual Classroom
Another unpublished paper about MOO use in the classroom.

o MacUser article about MUDs
From the "Net Traveler" column, a few paragraphs about the use of MUDs as collaborative working environments.

Related Links

o Center for Computer-Mediated Communication
A good source of information on computer-mediated communication in general. It's only peripherally related to MUDs, but worth taking a look at if one's doing serious research in this area.

o Virtual Inferface Technology Bibliography
Pointers to documents on and off-line. Much of it is not MUD-related, but it's of general interest to those studying computer-mediated communications.

o Seeker's CyberAnthropology Page
Bunches of links related to anthropological studies of the Net community. Quite a bit of it is related to MUDs.

o Virtual Communities
This is The WELL's index of information related to virtual communities. Not all of it is MUD-related, but once again, it's of interest to those studying related fields, as well.

o New Tools for Teaching
James O'Donnell's collection of information on how the Internet can help education. It contains a number of brief MUD-related articles.

o maddog's studio
A large collection of links related to virtual worlds. In addition to information on MUDs, there's also a lot on virtual reality and hypermedia technology.

o construct.net's Cyberspace Projects
Links to a number of VR/cyberspace/MUD-related projects, including cyberchat, 3-D worlds, VRML, book reviews, and the future of the Internet.

o Computer-Mediated Communication (German)
This is a list of resources in CMC, including an excellent general bibliography as well as a page of papers and links. These pages are about half-English, half-German; there's enough English to find what you need to find, even if you don't know German.
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Lydia Leong / lwl@graphics.cis.upenn.edu / August 16th, 1994