Digital Humanities Workshop: MUDs, MOOs, and Why They Still Matter

Friday, May 11 from 2-4pm in the DH Lab, Golda Meir Library, Second Floor East

In this workshop, participants will explore the so-called “multi-user dungeon” (MUD) and “MUD object-oriented” (MOO) not as a curiosities of computer gaming’s golden age but rather as a digital community space that still offers democratic potentials not offered by popular social media. Workshop organizers and participants will first discuss early forms of networked collaborative text-based games as well as their influence on contemporary, more graphically oriented forms of games and social spaces. Following this discussion, the workshop will focus on populating an example MOO created for the workshop.

UWM Land Acknowledgement: We acknowledge in Milwaukee that we are on traditional Potawatomi, Ho-Chunk and Menominee homeland along the southwest shores of Michigami, North America’s largest system of freshwater lakes, where the Milwaukee, Menominee and Kinnickinnic rivers meet and the people of Wisconsin’s sovereign Anishinaabe, Ho-Chunk, Menominee, Oneida and Mohican nations remain present.   |   To learn more, visit the Electa Quinney Institute website.