176 LANGUAGE AND THE INTERNET
observing the manners of visitors to the site (guests). MUDs are
just as conscious of the need for courtesy as are chatgroups; but
in a virtual world, where anything can happen, there are more op-
portunities for bad behaviour. For example, it is bad manners to
eavesdrop (by entering a room silently) or to teleport a character to
some other location without the player’s consent. Several stories of
sexual harassment exist.^8 As with chatgroups, anything which in-
creases lag (such as spamming, or the use of unnecessarily complex
commands) is considered inappropriate. Persistent offenders may
find themselves temporarily prevented from using their character
(newted) or find that their character is limited in its capabilities or
evencompletelyexcludedfromtheMUD(toaded).Agagcommand
is also available, enabling player P to ‘shut up’ player Q, making
Q’s messages invisible just on P’s screen; while Q would not be
aware of P’s action, an accumulation of gag decisions by several
players would soon convey the group’s antipathy, inculcating in Q
a dawning sense of communicative isolation.
As with chatgroups, it is important to appreciate the size
of MUD groups. Most are relatively small, but the largest sites
(notably LambdaMOO) have thousands of registered characters,
and players often in the hundreds, though the number of people
simultaneously playing is much less, and there is some indication
that numbers may be diminishing. Cherny’s ElseMOO had around
thirty users connected at any one time, with another hundred or
so who connected sporadically.^9 Nonetheless, thirty interlocutors
is by no means a small number, and all the linguistic complications
involved in managing such situations, discussed in the previous
chapter, will be encountered again here. Lag, in particular, is a seri-
ous problem in the larger groups; LambdaMOO even introduced
a ‘lagometer’ on screen at one point. Cherny makes the apposite
comment: ‘Complaining about lag time is the MUD version of
complaining about the weather: it affects everyone, and everyone
has something to say about it’.^10 The problem of group size worries
(^8) See, for example, Dibbell (1997), and other papers in Dery (1997).
(^9) Cherny (1999: 15). (^10) Cherny (1999: 262).