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“When the good citizens of a community find places to spend pleasurable hours with one
another for no specific or obvious purpose, there is purpose to such association. Further, the
most important of the purposes or functions served by informal public gathering places
cannot be supplied by any other agencies in the society.”
Oldenburg, 1997, p.IX, my emphasis
Any CMC system that does not contain a persistent virtual environment – a conceptual
place that is structured in the image of a perceptual place – faces challenges as to the spa-
tial/geographical dimension. Similarly, any CMC system that does not allow for synchro-
nous communication faces challenges as to the ritual dimension (gestures, standardized
phrases, signs of acknowledgement) and the communicative/interactional dimension.
Conventions are possible in asynchronous systems, but social rituals imply co-presence.
Conversation also implies co-presence.
Being part of a community means that you know where to head when you feel the urge
to bump into and talk to acquaintances and friends instead of strangers. Such places both
naturally acknowledged and reinforce the identity of the members through the “simplest”
of means; by being there, by meeting friends or acquaintances, through social rituals and
through talk. These means unfortunately seem to be among the most difficult to mobilize
in modern societies where time and attention – the ultimate scarce resources – are con-
stantly held to be deficit.
Variation between muds
A mud, be it text-based or graphical, supports all the three dimensions above (spatial/geo-
graphical, ritual and communicative/interactional) as well as harboring the possibility of
making strangers into acquaintances. Different sorts of CMC systems face significant
challenges in comparison to muds and it would thus be expected that they, in terms of
category membership, easily become more peripheral members of the community category.
However, the degree of community also varies within the same category of CMC sys-
tems. One bulletin board system can have different functionality compared to another
system can thus support the creation of community to a higher extent. Different sets of
computer code can in this manner support community to different extents, again an ex-
ample of how social and technical issues interact and co-evolve in intimate ways.
The same is true for muds. In the medieval ages, life was lived in public. The home was
a public place. Privacy – loneliness – was seen as improper, as the greatest poverty that
could strike a person and especially a person of high status. The status of a nobleman was
in fact dependent on the numbers of persons he could gather around him. In the end of
the 16th century, with the birth of the good solitude, intimacy and isolation, also the way
to build houses changed. From having consisted of one or perhaps two large rooms, with
huge beds crowded with people (ten persons in the same bed was not unusual), the rooms
started to shrink and get appendixes where people could retreat to get some privacy. From
having built all rooms in a row so that you always had to pass them all, the new so-
cial/architectural invention was to build a central corridor with rooms along it – all of
which were isolated from each other. (Englund 1991).
The interesting connection to muds is that many social muds allow all players to create
private rooms and endow the owner with far-reaching rights in terms of admitting people,
throwing them out, “locking” the room etc. However in SvenskMud players can not build

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Graphics
Another direction in which to extend studies would be to look at more modern, graphical
social or adventure muds to find out to which extent the lessons learned in SvenskMud
can be applied to other systems. One candidate to look closer at would be the Swedish
Dobedo graphical virtual environment7. Dobedo is not an adventure game but rather a
crossing between a purely social virtual environment and an interactive soap opera. Do-
bedo users control cartoon-like avatars and “Dobedo – the company” keeps them con-
stantly tuned and entertained by developing the social environment and by creating new
content within the game. The company thus both enhances and develops the technical
system, not the least by creating new technical artifacts and gadgets within the game, and,
constantly develops an evolving plot which is animated by avatars run by “ordinary” em-
ployees and by specially employed editors/narrators.
It is difficult to judge how many people use Dobedo since it is difficult to determine
what the relevant measures would be. There is no doubt however than Dobedo, after two
years, is vastly larger than SvenskMud8. Dobedo opened in Sweden in October 1998, in
England and Germany in 1999, and is slated to launch its services in France and Holland
in the autumn of 2000. Dobedo stated that they had 300.000 registered members in Swe-
den, 180.000 in England and 10.000 in Germany in the beginning of 2000. From mid-
April in 2000 to mid-May, Dobedo measured that 70.000 of its members logged in to its
service (60% of those visited the Swedish Dobedo site (world), 29% the English site and
11% the German site).
Several questions immediately arise that are of interest in relation to this work. How
does Dobedo function as a game, as a computer program (systems development project)
and as a hobby for the users? How does the fact that Dobedo is a commercial enterprise
affect the game, the program and the hobby? What is the effect of Dobedo being run by
professional software developers and editors? What is the effect of – not the least in terms
of community – of having not hundreds, but tens of thousands of users?
Design
Throughout three and half years of studying SvenskMud, I have primarily been a rela-
tively unobtrusive observer. I have collected my material, analyzed it, and now publish my
findings. I know I have affected my informants in the process but my general strategy has
been to control and minimize the impact.
Advances in computer technology and, technological evolution in general, follow a
general pattern of construction, use, analysis and redesign. A more general model of the
socio-technical design cycle (O’day et al. 1996), called the task-artifact cycle (Carroll et al.
1991, Carroll & Rosson 1992), posits that:
“The evolution of HCI [human-computer interaction] technology is a coevolution of HCI
tasks and HCI artifacts: A task implicitly sets requirements for the development of artifacts
to support it; an artifact suggests possibilities and introduces constraints that often radically
redefine the task for which the artifact was originally developed. For example, electric type-
writers altered office tasks, word processors altered them again, desktop publishing systems

7 See <www.dobedo.com> and <www.dobedo-inc.com>.
8 All figures about Dobedo comes from IT-Affärer [IT-Business], #7, August 2000, pp.24-32.