Tinytalk Episode 010: MUDs and spirituality

Javelin,

I compliment you on finding and following paths not often traversed. The AoC guys were fun to listen too and made several points about admin/player interactions that are useful, no matter the spiritual preferences.

Based on the episode title, I wasn't inclined to listen but I'm glad I did.

-Mark

Intro

Welcome to Tinytalk, a podcast about MUSHes and other text-based virtual worlds. I'm your host, Javelin, and this episode focuses on text-based gaming and religion and spirituality. Let me say at the outset that I do understand that there's a difference there – between religion and spirituality – but for the purposes of this podcast, any interaction between muds and peoples' connections to a higher power or spirit is fair game.

Sacred spaces

Spiritual uses of MUSH have intrigued me for years. In part, this has been an outgrowth of my roleplaying interests. I spent quite a while playing Rabbi David Sauvrete on the WoD MUSH Paris: Les Fleus Du Mal, during which time I built a replica of the Synagogue du Rue Pavee and tried to provide a realistic sense of Jewish spirituality, albeit colored by the World of Darkness and my character's position as a Kabbalistic Mage.

Later, on M*U*S*H, I developed softcode for the display of Hebrew characters and the calculation of the numerical value of Hebrew words, and conducted an online Passover Seder in 2003. I also returned to the idea of sacred spaces, building a hedge maze in the form of the Kabbalistic tree of life as a meditation area for myself and a fellow MUSH player. As a side note, I was often asked what the hedge maze was about, as it didn't seem to be a maze in the puzzle sense in any way; I guess that goes to show that a sacred space depends quite a bit on context.

Finding God – I don't mean object #1 – on a MUSH is perhaps a strange pursuit. If you believe that God can be found everywhere, either because God lies within each of us or because God is outside of us but omnipresent, however, it's clearly possible to attempt to design sacred spaces online where someone might be more attuned to making a spiritual connection. There's only been a limited amount of discussion about how this might be done outside the terms of a roleplaying context, but I thought I might tentatively offer a few suggestions:

First, of course, it's important to understand, if not practice, the religion for which you're building a sacred space. What sets a true sacred space apart from one constructed for roleplaying around spirituality might be players' beliefs that the space really does offer RL religious meaning, and that won't happen if aspects of the space conflict with the values and symbols of the spiritual practice it's intended to enshrine. In a synagogue, the ark containing torah scrolls is traditionally on the east wall. In a mosque, there are no images of Allah or Mohammed. In a Catholic church, there are traditional architectural features that are frequently present.

Second, "sacred" means "set apart", and a sacred space must be marked in some fashion so that believers or initiates can distinguish it and understand its intended purpose. If the religious observances that take place in the space are to be limited to members of the religion, this likely means that the space must be set up on a MUSH of its own, rather than embedded within an existing MUSH where it may be impossible to limit access.

Third, many religions mark the creation of sacred spaces with some sort of ceremony of consecration or sanctification, and this seems especially important for virtual spaces.

Fourth, online spaces are different than physical spaces, and if it's possible to take advantage of int a spiritually meaningful way, we should try to do that. There are plenty of synagogues; there are few hedge mazes that one can traverse in a chosen order to reflect on the relationships of the sephirot of the tree of life (although there are a significant number of Catholic labyrinths!) Online spaces can do things that physical spaces can't, and can be organized more symbolically and less geographically, and this can be a benefit.

Of course, it's entirely possible that some of these conditions or others simply can't be met online for some religions. For a druid or wiccan, is it sensible at all to venerate nature symbolically through the bits and bytes of a mud? For an orthodox Jew, who will avoid writing God's name anywhere impermanent, lest he or she contribute to its desecration, can meaningful copy of the Torah be instantiated in a server's database? These kind of questions remain open.

Have you built a MUSH church, temple, mosque, kirk, or other sacred space? I'd love to hear about it.

Interview with Kal, Intense, and Athos, co-implementors of Ark of the Covenant MUD

Interview not transcribed.

News and notes

It's not often that you see a new server-client protocol develop, especially one that's based in softcode on the server side and scripting on the client side – which means it can be implemented without server code hacks in either place, and without a wizbit. Well, Trispis at c.p.o has got one, a protocol for a "status console" – currently a six-line area of the client's screen that is addressable from softcode by row and column position. That means, for example, that you can do animation (including color) and the like generated by softcode. There's a set of wiki pages on c.p.o now (in the new "Book o'Wiki's) that documents the protocol, provides scripts for tinyfugue and mushclient to take advantage of it, and has a series of softcoded sample applications. It's really neat and it's only just begun, so this is a great time for people to develop new uses and innovative ideas. How about a stock ticker? A multi-line prompt system? A room parent that maintains the room description or other state in the console, cleanly separated from speech and other ongoing output?

I'm still looking for people to tell me what music they like to listen to while MUSHing for a future segment.

Music credit

Music for this episode of Tinytalk was Beethoven's Piano Sonata #14, also known as the Moonlight Sonata, performed by MUSHer Stoko (from M*U*S*H and InterMUSH)