About ATHEMOO!

About ATHEMOO

ATHEMOO History

ATHEMOO is an educational and professional MOO created by Juli Burk in
June of 1995 for the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE).
ATHE is the major organization for theatre scholars and educators in the
United States with over 2,000 members. As ATHE's Vice President for
Conference in 1995, she was in charge of the association's yearly
gathering that had been scheduled to take place at the Fairmont Hotel in
San Francisco. This event generally includes over300 sessions in a
four-day period and is attended by roughly half of the organization's
members. Fully aware of the fact that a large percentage of ATHE members
earn less than $20,000 per year, during the two years she spent in
preparation for the conference she began to explore ways to provide access
to those who could not, for a variety of reasons, attend the conference.

In January of 1995, while casually perusing a magazine, she read about an
Internet environment that she had never known existed, something called
MOO that allowed for synchronous conversation. Fortunately, she was able
to attend a brief workshop in February organized by Judy Kirkpatrick and
visited LambdaMOO, MediaMOO, and Diversity University. It was immediately
clear that the MOO environment, with its simple commands for expression
and opportunity to converse in real time with people around the world, was
the perfect mechanism for expanding access to the ATHE conference. The
ATHE Board of Governors, none of whom had ever visited a MOO, agreed that
the MOO was a good idea for the expansion of the conference into
cyberspace, and the University of Hawaii was willing to support the
project by providing diskspace. Thus, within a few short months and with
no experience in computer programming, she had begun the process of
creating ATHEMOO.

Although the original idea was that the MOO would function only as a
conference-related venture, her work in developing the MOO lead her to
believe that it was an educational environment of amazing proportions that
could function within ATHE in numerous arenas, of which the conference was
only one. In addition, she was convinced that she could build a community
with a technologically friendly environment in which women could both
accomplish goals related to their work in the theatre and also attain
knowledge and familiarity with programming. While the vast majority of
players in the MUD environment are men, the population of educational MOOs
is more balanced, as is the division between male and female archwizards.
Despite the fact that her colleagues in the theatre were almost completely
unaware of MOO, she believed that the theatrical nature of the environment
would ease the resistance to this new technology. ATHEMOO would not only
serve to accommodate the various functions of the national organization,
it would provide an opportunity for both her female and male colleagues to
learn how to use the technology for meetings, seminars, teaching, and
performance in an atmosphere specifically designed for those new to MOO.

As a then untrained stranger in a strange land, she was fortunate to be
introduced to Jan Rune Holmevik and Cynthia Haynes (creators of LinguaMOO)
whose assistance in the design, educational features, and programming of
ATHEMOO have been invaluable. (You can visit LinguaMOO by telnetting to
129.110.16.13 8888) Contrary to her fears about being a woman in the
traditionally male-dominated environment of computer programming, she has
never felt denigrated as a woman or a newcomer. In fact, what she
discovered on the stages of educational MOOs around the world was that
there are several women in the top ranks of educational MOOs, beginning
with Amy Bruckman, the creator of the first such MOO, MediaMOO. As she
works to build ATHEMOO, men and women around the globe have assisted her
with great generosity and patience, and her questions have never been met
with derision or snide remarks about her gender.

The only resistance from the ATHE Board of Governors came from those who
had read Julian Dibbell's article "A Rape in Cyberspace or How an Evil
Clown, a Haitian Trickster Spirit, Two Wizards, and a Cast of Dozens
Turned a Database Into a Society" (1993) and, as feminists, were concerned
about a potential lack of accountability in MOO that might make it an
unsafe environment. Ironically, while the gender-specific violence
described in Dibbell's article is to be avoided at all cost in any
environment, the Board's concerns about a MOO for ATHE might have served
to limit women's acquisition of skill and knowledge there. In response to
the Board's initial hesitations, she explained that not having a MOO
limited access to a sphere with great opportunities and that instead she
could take measures to make it safer than LambdaMOO where the rape in
question occurred. In response to the Board's concerns about potentially
violent actions taken without full accountability, ATHEMOO policy was set
to disable the automatic creation of characters, to require the use of
real names within the MOO, and while players do not have to be members of
ATHE, their full names and email addresses are available for all
registered players.

Since ATHEMOO began as a virtual conference center for theatre scholars,
teachers and artists, the first public spaces were modeled after a hotel
lobby. In addition to taking steps toward accountability, one of her first
steps toward creating a gender-balanced MOO was to name the guest
characters after important figures from world theatre history
representing, unlike so many theatre history texts, as many women as
possible. In the time since ATHEMOO's first room was named The Lobby, Ken
Schweller has brought in his Theatre, Zot O'Connor has brought in his
Improv Room, Lee-Ellen Marvin brought in a tutorial for new members, and
through the generosity of other programmers around the world we have an
auditorium, a classroom and meeting rooms, an office suite, an inter-moo
communication system, and many new rooms, objects, verbs and features.
Most recently, she has worked with Jan Rune Holmevik to connect ATHEMOO to
the web and with Paulo Reis to add vrml capabilities to ATHEMOO through
the BioGate program.