The first MOO's were known as MUDD's ("Multi-User Dragons and Dungeons") and were, as their name implies, network based adventure games which several users could play simultaneously via Internet links. MUD1, written by Britains Richard Bartle and Roy Trubishaw in 1979-80, is generally accepted as the first workable MUDD. As of December 1993, there were 424 publicly accessible MUDD's based on 23 different types of software on the Internet (Bruckman, 1993). In the original MUDD games players were able to create one or more fictional personalities for themselves (so-called `personae' or `avatars'), and to cohabit environments which are created through written descriptions of an imaginary (or virtual) world . According to the rules of the game, players would "fight for survival" against the "personae" of other players who were logged in simultaneously. The better one became at playing the game, the higher status and the more rights one gained in relation to the virtual world. The highest possible status was as a so-called "Wizard" (or "Oracle"), with associated "open" programming rights. Once qualified as a Wizard one could then contribute to the further development of the game and continue building the virtual environment that the game was played in. Playing the game had in other words both an explicit (winning the battles) and implicit (becoming an expert user) qualifying function, and successful development of this function was progressively liberating for players in relation to the metatextual norm systems (i.e. the programming language and procedures) which regulate everything which can happen in the virtual world (see Reid 1994 for a more detailed description of background, how MUD's work, and some lively and interesting discussions of MUDD-culture in relation to gender and social control) Other articles that discuss serious uses of MUDD's and MOO's are Bruckman 1992, Bruckman & Resnick 1995 Curtis 1992, Dibbell 1993, Germain 1993.
Modern MOO's offer other possibilities than the first generation of gaming MUDD's. Established MOO-environments like PARC Xerox's Lambda MOO and MIT's Media MOO, are complex virtual social environments where researchers and other visitors can take part in lectures, seminars, informal meetings and brainstorming sessions "represented" in the virtual environment by their own virtual user-"representatives". Qualified users who gain permission from MOO-owners ("Arch Wizards" ) may develop their own research communities where groups of researchers from institutions in different cities, regions or countries around the world can meet, discuss and build virtual offices, cafés and other common meeting spaces in the text based virtual world (see Aarseth, 1993; Bruckman & Resnick, 1993; Steffen, 1993). Other network based information services and tools such as Gopher and World Wide Web are now being integrated as functional units in MOO's. From inside the MOO one can read both Gopher and World Wide Web documents. Examples of this can be seen at Jay's House MOO at Northeastern University (Masinter & Ostrom, 1993), Lambda-MOO at PARC-Xerox, Diversity University MOO at Marist College, all in the USA, and Bio-MOO, which is based in Israel. In an object oriented MOO it is possible to develop interactive objects, such as "tape recorders" that record what happens in a given room, and other objects such as furniture and books. Internal electronic mail messages ("paging" ) can be sent to other users who are logged n in the virtual world at the same time, and it is even possible to send electronic mail from the virtual world to recipients in the real world. There are many other functions in a MOO which I will not go into in detail here, but which I may refer to briefly later on. From a number of MOO's one can also follow what is happening in other MOO's around the world, since links are being developed between "local" virtual environments so that they in the longer term will come to constitute a "Virtual Internet". As time goes on there will be more and more integration of different kinds of distributed multimedia and hypermedia user interfaces and tools with virtual MOO-environments, and more seamless integration of these into the World Wide Web.
In a MOO environment novice writers can deposit objects which contain draft texts, notes, letters, poems and other things they have written for others to read, and they can give and receive response to one another, either in real time (there and then while they are virtually present), or asynchronously via electronic mail. They can also plan and arrange virtual seminars and conferences in the virtual environment.
To investigate how writers' textual and interactional norms change over time this project will chart and describe some of the potential and limitations implicit in the use of distributed virtual environments for scientific writing as cross-disciplinary groups of novice scientific writers are introduced to virtual environments in a systematic way and take part in developing various kinds of collaborative scientific writing projects. Collaboration with writing teachers and researchers from other disciplines and fields will be necessary if the project is to achieve its long term objectives. One such collaboration partner is associate professor Laura Castor who teaches technical writing classes at the Norwegian College of Technology and her students, and I hope at a later stage in the project to be able to collaborate with teachers and students at the interdisciplinary writing course project "The Writing Space" (Skrivingens Rom), led by Romance languages professor Sissel Lie and coordinated by a colleague, associate professor Marte Halse. An important collaboration and conversational partner is another colleague, Finn Bostad, who is doing research into how working with hypertext writing technology affects ways of reasoning and thinking[6].