In 1995, while surveying the growing field of cybertextal media and ergodic literature, Espen Aarseth pointed to MUDs and MOOS as potential sites of innovative literary activity. Despite this endorsement, digital poets, those relentless investigators of new media forms, have given scant attention to the opportunities for literal play that MOOs provide. MUDs have a lot to answer for here. Role-playing MUDs, the ancestors of MOOs, are narrative environments, rigidly bound by conventions such as naturalistic representation, unilinear plots, consistency in story line and character development. This paper proposes to resituate MOOs as one logical end of the search for a new location of poetic practice in the hopes of drawing the gaze of contemporary new media poets to these rich grounds of literal play.
MOOs should be interesting to poets in part because they are home to a wide variety of linguistic activity. They are, by definition, object-oriented programming environments, and as such, much of the linguistic enterprises in MOOs involve the creation and naming of objects. Here, the word as such takes on tangible significance. The MOO object, the basic unit in this objectively-oriented verse, is a compelling object for semiotic study. The relationship between name and object number and code partakes of what Katherine Hayles calls a flickering signification, where the signifier itself is a complex entity, unfolding in the wavering dynamic flux between materiality and transparency. This relationship is further complicated in graphic user interface MOOs, where the textual representation of objects is preserved and presented simultaneously, yet not always identically, along side a graphic representation of the same. The very nature of the split screen interface invites speculation on the relationship between word and image. Further, because most graphic interface MOOs maintain the ability of the user to be able to connect through text-based telnet clients, these MOOs may be said to perform a differential poetic, where the user may experience the same work as a verbal text or a multi-media digital installation, and neither is form is given the privileged status of the original.
The MOO object is not only a flickering writing surface- it can be a text-generator in its own right. Objects may be programmed to simply spit out input texts randomly or according to user-determined triggers, or they may be developed into complex language processing machines, performing mesostics, lipograms, stochastic text generative procedures, etc. Unlike most text-generating programs, these text-generators are meant to be seen as well as heard. They occupy a shadowy territory between subject and object, and as they execute this machine poetic, they play dangerous havoc with notions of autonomous human authorship. The same may be said for human interactors in MOOs, whose presence and agency partake of the same complex relationships that plague all objects in MOOs. These dynamics are now further complicated by the animating presence of human "players," who perform their subjectivity in and amongst and against the coded objects that represent their identity within the space.
Because MOOs support multi-user synchronous participation, they offer a potential solution to many of the problems involved in staging readings of digital poetry, much of which is composed according to the intimate scale of single user and computer screen. A poetry performance in a MOO also easily exploits the tension between the human reader and the subjectivity of the voice of the author, since the nature of the human subject in a MOO is already a fragile thing. The audience in a MOO performance might find it difficult to distinguish itself not only from the performers, but from the environment itself. Since MOOs are polysynchronous environments whose dynamics play out across real time and virtual space, they are not only locations for the performed word but they can be read as performances in and of themselves. They are performance spaces, performed spaces and performing spaces.
MOOs are capable of supporting the widest variety of literary exploration of digital media being currently undertaken by contemporary poets. Considerations of algorithm and authorship, program and performance are integral to the poetics of literary MOO activity, where the boundaries between reader/ author, code/text, word/image, subject/object, presence/absence, present/past are simultaneously invoked and frustrated. The sheer complexity of the manner in which these tensions play out would seem to guarantee that any meaningful engagement of the space would seriously advance contemporary poetic expression and theory. Yet, it is paradoxically this very complexity of the space that forms the most significant barrier against the participation of poets. That which makes them interesting ensures their obscurity. This raises questions of a pedagogical nature. What is required of the reader and writer to learn how to effectively engage these spaces? And if the investment of time and effort is deemed prohibitively high, should the space be redesigned to accommodate a less intensive involvement, or is this sacrifice necessary, in which case one must ask if it is worth it? Certainly, if we are to see anything new under this virtual sun, we must be willing to lose a little time and sleep in the pursuit. For the digital revolution does not only transform texts and their materiality. It transforms our relationship to these texts, and our own sense of our materiality, and, indeed, our very own materiality.