Simply, a Virtual Community is an electronic meeting place constructed from text, where a group of people gather to exchange ideas on a regular basis.

Many types of communities have formed on the Internet. In over a decade of experimentation, three of the most popular forms are the MUD, (Multi-User Dimension), the chat room and 3-D space. A MOOve (or often-termed a MOO) is an extension of a MUD, as an multi-user object-oriented virtual environment

"MUDs, or "Multi-User Dungeons" are programs that accept network connections from multiple simultaneous users and provide access to a shared database of 'rooms', "exits" and other entities. Users browse and manipulate the database from "inside" the rooms, seeing only those entities that are in the same room and moving between rooms mostly via the exits that connect them. MUDs are thus a kind of virtual reality, an electronically represented "place" that users can visit.

MOOs seem to better support the social aspects of online comminutes, rather than the game-like supporting software developed for MUDs. An increasing number of academic institutions run MUD or MOO based communities both for their students and staff members.

A MUD/MOO is a world described entirely by paragraphs of text. All participants create a name for a character to represent them. First time visitors are given the name guest, until they decide what they want to be. The reliance is all on the written word and the participants' imaginations to form a sense of place. Each time you enter a room, a paragraph describes the place, the exits and who is currently present. The inhabitants talk and act out roles in each room. In many cases inhabitants spend hours on line developing their characters and their rooms or places which they can custom design, depending on the set up they access templates or object-orientated programming tutorials to build these. The social connections between inhabitants can grow to be very complex through role-play and extended time on line... Imagine you spend an hour or two on line each day with another seven to twenty people that you constantly interact with, either chatting or assisting each other with doing things: learning how to communicate, how to navigate, how to build things, the verbs on your object don't activate, you ask someone else for help, you problem solve together and both learn and develop a supportive and constructive communication and relationship. Things get achieved and built upon day after day. People develop pride and loyalty and feel a strong sense of ownership to their worlds.

A MOO database contains entities, each one represented by a number (e.g. #16), whose functionality's are defined by properties and verbs. The MOO server is distributed with a minimal database, which allows only a very few initial operations. Evolved versions of the minimal database, called LambdaCore, are used by MOOs: special commands and features are added to increase MOO functionalities.

MOO environments have the following characteristics.

• entities can be anything from a note of text to a whole "virutal" book; from rooms (kitchen, corridor, classroom) to furniture (tables, chairs, shelves); from players, to robots;
• each entity is described by a text, and can be examined by anyone. It may also provide a help text about its use;
• properties and verbs are the only features which define the functionalities of an entity, its reactions to other users, to the environment, or simply to the passing of time;
• designing a MOO entity means changing its property values and verb codes;
• each entity occupies a certain number of bytes, which affect the quota of the user (if byte based), that is, the quantity of entities that a user can build, and, globally, the length of the database;
• entities which are made fertile, can be cloned and generate a series of children entities with the same inherited properties and verbs;
• an entity can have only one parent;
• an entity may not be automatically fertile, even though its parent was;
• inherited properties and verbs may be changed in an entity without affecting its parent's;
• entities can be passed among players, moved from room to room, locked to a certain place, player, or other entity, destroyed (recycled), carried at any time, put into entity containers;
• entities all descend from a root entity (#1) which is usually not directly accessible (programmable) by lower level users.

The entity characteristics above listed can be manipulated in a wide range of ways, to shape activities and reactions so that each one reflects a specific metaphor (e.g. a blackboard, a chair, a car, a user). All entities are treated the same by the software which hosts connections, and parses (processes) commands.

The personalization of spaces and entities with descriptions and specific functionalities increases the sense of belonging. Cases of theft are not uncommon, even though users can always trace down their own entities; there exists ways of locking entities to a place, user or other entity.

Each user has an inventory of owned entities, and can visit places where they can find displays of various entities (rooms, special entities, robots) to be cloned and modified. Interaction among participants is often integrated with the use of personal belongings, for example, a recorder, or a slide projector. It is characteristic of MOOs to be able to enrich action through the use of other elements. For example, there are rooms which react to what is being said, or to people entering or leaving. The creation of events is part of life in the virtual community, and users often meet in theme based rooms, like a bar, where a robot serves drinks, or a ballroom for a (virtual) party, or a classroom for a lecture.

ACTIVITIES

There are three categories of events in a MOO:

• communication; when users talk among themselves, or sometimes by themselves, interacting with a robot;
• action; such as entity creation, design, manipulation, and use; interactions among users and entities; special automated features of entities and rooms (such as a reaction triggered by someone entering, or picking up something). Results of actions can be: changes on the environment, new entities, manipulations of different kinds (moving, modifying properties, creating/destroying), or simply messages of output from the entity to the environment or the agent;
• navigation; moving around in virtual space by walking or teleporting; jumping from place to place without respecting contiguity.