Hacking Say and Reviving ELIZA: Lessons from Virtual Environments

Although Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash (1992) is often noted as the inspiration for virtual worlds like Second Life, virtual environments were flourishing prior to its publication. Multi-user dungeons (MUDs), text-based and multiplayer environments for role-playing games, were popular in the 1980s. In the early 1990s, a new trajectory for online spaces was mapped by the introduction of what became known as MOOs, for "MUD object-oriented" (Curtis 1992; Curtis and Nichols 1993). MOOs, like MUDs, delivered a social environment where players could interact with game elements and with each other, but MOOs allowed users, for the first time, to create their own spaces within the environment. Second Life, which has taken center stage in current research around virtual learning environments, is very much a graphical grandchild of MOOs, sharing in many of the constraints and opportunities of these original virtual environments.