MOOTWeb and AFOM are for the most part very informal communities. Any formal structure is largely apparent only in the process of accessing the two media. For MOOTWeb, it is necessary to follow a specific process to request a character. Once the character is granted, the member of the community then has to follow another process in order to log onto the MOO and participate in the community. There are specific commands available to each person that he can use to interact with the other members of the community, as well as manipulate the MOO environment. Likewise, there are formal processes for joining AFOM. A member needs to perform a subscription function through email in order to be subscribed to the list. Then, the member has to send email to a specific address in order to communicate with others on the group.
The behavior of the members of AFOM and MOOTWeb is largely controlled by normative power. Members of both communities follow the norms that have been established over time so that everyone can interact in a productive manner. On AFOM, there has been few serious breeches of the agreed upon norms. Certainly nothing has ever prompted the community to ask a member to leave. In the unlikely even that a member was asked to leave, I'm sure it would be done in a civilized manner, and the person would simply be asked to unsubscribe from the list. However, if necessary, the administrator of the list has the power to remove a person from AFOM. Actually, it has happened in the past that Dan has removed a subscribed email address from AFOM. The reason this has happened, however, is that the email address, itself, had stopped receiving messages, and Dan was receiving undeliverable mail messages.
MOOTWeb has a slightly more formal structure to it than AFOM. This is due, most likely, to the fact that there is more to the environment than simply a means of passing words between the members of the community. When a member logs onto the MOO, she is agreeing that she is taking the part of a character in a virtinteractionual reality. The character is most likely a representation of herself, but the character is in a different location, and can perform different actions than the real person sitting at the keyboard. Members of MOOTWeb have many more properties than those of AFOM. the properties are used to help quantify the virtual reality into something formal. Most importantly, the characters have a name and a location. They also have a description of their appearance, and a gender, and the character can be carrying objects. The characters can walk from room to room, talk to other characters, or jump up and down. On AFOM, the only recorded identifier for who someone is is their email address. And, while the body of an email message leaves room for anything they can describe, the only actual action a member can take is to send the message to the rest of the list.
Normative power also controls the actions of the members of MOOTWeb, for the most part. The wizards on MOOTWeb are more autonomous in their ability to use power than Dan, the administrator on AFOM, tends to be. Dan rarely exercises his power without first consulting the rest of the community. Also, while Dan has the option of removing members from AFOM, that is the only form of control he holds over the members. The wizards on MOOTWeb, on the other hand, can view any interaction that takes place on the MOO, even if it is meant to be private. Dan cannot simply read the private emails that members of AFOM send to one another, and any that happens on AFOM is seen by the whole list, anyway. I asked the two wizards what they though about the power that they have. Specifically, I asked if they get a power trip from it, and how seriously they view their responsibilities.
Elissa Goldberg replied, "I have to admit that at first I did get a power trip. It's kinda cool knowing you have complete control over the entire MOO, and who's on it or not. You can do anything and everything and that does give one a feeling of power."
"After the initial power trip, I then got afraid. Since you have the ultimate MOO power, you can also hurt things. That responsibility scared me. I didn't want to cause serious damage to the MOO."
The other wizard on MOOTWeb said that he sometimes felt a power trip, but not a lot. "I believe it's a lot like being a system administrator. You have total power, but so what? Especially on a MOO, there's not a lot to abuse anyway. I COULD snoop on people's private conversations, but then again, I could listen at doors. It's just safer." He says that "NOT spying on people, etc. is a big responsibility in some ways -- it's not much, but people would be really upset if I did it." Because the MOO is not a production environment, he says he doesn't worry too much about rushing to fix things if they're broken, all the time.
So, while the wizards on MOOTWeb have a large amount of coercive power over the other members of the community, they do not abuse it. One way in which this is evident is through their separation of roles. Both wizards have a wizard character to perform wizardly functions, and a normal character that they use for day-to-day interactions with the other members of the community.
The administrator position on AFOM and the wizard positions on MOOTWeb make up the only formal social structure in either community. Apart from those positions, every member is considered an equal with every other member. In addition, the members who perform the "official" functions spend most of their time participating as a normal member of the community.
Home| AFOM| MOOTWeb| Joining| Purposes| Organization and Control| Norms
This page was created by Mathew Corthell for the course Computers and Society in the fall of 1999 at Northeastern University.