178 LANGUAGE AND THE INTERNET
you are, and what rooms you pass through. When you reach your
destination, and enter the room, you are told what objects are in it,
and who is present. In this typical sequence, the player controlling
the character ‘Langman’ types the instruction in the first line:
>go to control centre
You walk to the north ladder.
You climb the ladder and enter the outer office.
You cross the office and enter the control room.
You see:
A bo xof tapes
A tape recorder
A bunch of bananas
A half-eaten copy ofthe Journal of Linguistics
Doc is here.
Prof is here.The players in the roles of Doc and Prof would see the following
message come up on their screen:
Langman arrives in the control centre from the office.Langman may ‘speak’ to the other characters in the room, and
can ‘hear’ what they say. He can have a private conversation with
another character in the same room using awhispercommand. He
cannot hear what is going on in other rooms, but he can talk to
someone there through apagecommand. Some MUDs also allow
amuttercommand, which all but one specified player sees. (Not
everyone likes the exclusionary commands, and some MUDs warn
against them.) It is also possible to find out who everyone is by
typing an appropriate command; this calls up from the database
the self-descriptions provided by the other players. If someone
wants to find out who Langman is, therefore, they could type the
following instruction and obtain the relevant response:
>look langman
A 7-foot robot who has been programmed to speak all the world’s
languages. He always wears a yellow hat and coat. He travels the
world looking for monolingual people so that he can teach them a
second language.