Epilogue: Returning to the Scene of the Crime

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The Slow Death of A Murder Mystery

Three years ago, three brave graduate students at Old Dominion University set out to construct a MOO-based fiction. I term us "brave" because we were truly neophyte MOO programmers. Use the finger command on any of our player personas at the time and you would have found our MOO lives measured in days and weeks not months and years. Yet we were committed to pushing the boundaries of the medium and learning new skills and techniques.

The beauty of the this project was that it was collaborative in nature. We dreamed the plot, planned the programming and compromised on various issues as a group. I believe it was one of the major strengths of our work. However, it has also proved to be the greatest weakness of the project.

As much as possible, we divided the labor of constructing our fiction. I will not bore you with an excruciatingly detailed accounting of who created what in relation to our MOO space. You really only need to know a few salient details:

• Dean Spik (Cyberspik in LinguaMOO) wrote HTML code that would allow us to construct an "interactive" computer to be placed in The Loft. This virtual computer would allow visitors to unearth clues useful in solving and understanding the 12-Step Murders.
• Carla Jones constructed objects and wrote text-based descriptions that would enhance the ambience of the space. Her goal was to add the "personal touches" that would make the space seem more "real"-- the layers of ephemera that would give The Loft a "lived-in" feel.
• I (Vincent in LinguaMOO) built the rooms and constructed a robot (Adam) that would nominally interact with visitors.

To combat a few of the problems inherent in our collaboration, our professor (Dr. Joel English, Joel in LinguaMOO) offered us the use of a fourth player account named CDV (an amalgam of our initials). We used this avatar to construct the rooms that comprised The Loft to avoid the need for "permission" when constructing entrances and exits. CDV was also utilized to build various objects for use throughout the space. While this did centralize some aspects of the creation and eliminated a few problems, it created other complications.

Obviously, only one of us could "be" CDV at a time. If another player logged on as CDV while someone else was using the persona, the system ejected the previous player and any work in progress was lost. As a result, we logged on first as ourselves to ensure CDV was not in use and then logged in again as the avatar if the account was available. But time constraints prohibited us from using CDV exclusively to create all aspects of the loft. We simply had too much to construct and too little time. Often, Carla, Dean and I were online simultaneously for a few hours each night.

Once the project was complete, we basked in our accomplishments, earned a good grade and went on to other courses. We gave no thought to The Loft's future. And the slow death of the MOO murder mystery began.