The language of virtual worlds 191
that conventional truth-descriptions cannot manage, giving valid-
ity to utterances which would be of questionable or unacceptable
status in real-world language.^28 It is a world where, indeed, colour-
less green ideas can exist, and sleep furiously. The use of role-play
further distances MUD interactions from reality. Anonymity al-
lows players to introduce all kinds of exaggerations and deceptions
(p. 50).
Perhaps as virtual worlds become less textual and more graphic,
they will become more like real life, thereby imposing greater con-
straints upon the language used. A textual medium can cope un-
concernedly with ‘colourless green’; a graphic medium cannot. It
is therefore important to note that, as with other Netspeak situa-
tions, MUDs have begun to evolve a multimedia dimension. Asyn-
chronous interaction and e-mailing already exists in some sites,
with messages stored in the database. Mailing lists are often used
for such purposes as circulating general information, carrying out
petitions, and organizing ballots. The new options are welcomed by
some, and opposed by others: asynchronous messaging, for exam-
ple, is a way of giving more players a greater chance to be involved
in the group; however, for those for whom the MUD experience
is real-time only, a matter of culture rather than technology, such
extensions can be viewed as heretical.
The language of virtual worlds, as of chatgroups in general, is
difficult to study, as was informal face-to-face conversation in the
early days of linguistic research. Many MUDs do not bother to save
their interactions (this is one reason why researching the history
of the medium is not easy), and when they do, they can easily be
edited. Some of the logs I found, in researching this chapter, had
been sanitized in various ways, with presumably sensitive infor-
mation deleted. Then, once a reliable sample has been obtained,
the important question of privacy needs to be considered. Such
issues have long been satisfactorily addressed in the large linguistic
(^28) See Cherny (1999: 220ff.) for a discussion of emoting expressions with reference to tense,
aspect, and related considerations.