Do You Really Want a Revolution? CyberTheory Meets Real-Life Pedagogical Practice in FrankenMOO and the Conventional Literature Classroom

College Literature, Summer 2006 by Sonstroem, Eric

What It Is (The MOO itself)

In 2001 I collaborated with Ron Broglio from the Georgia Institute of Technology to create FrankenMOO, an interactive, immersive electronic environment based closely on Mary Shelley's novel and hosted on the Romantic Circles website at the University of Maryland.5 Much like the traditional experience of reading a book, logging into a virtual MOO space offers real-time interaction between reader and text. Indeed, participation in a MOO is quintessentially a textual experience: one reads blocks of text that describe settings, characters, or objects; one types short text commands to move from location to location, or to interact with objects or other characters; one reads dialog from other characters, and types one's own dialog. MOO stands for "Multi-User Dimension, Object Oriented," and MOOs are an outgrowth of MUDs, or "Multi-User Dungeons," which developed during the 1980s.6 They evolved as rapidly as everything else in cyberspace, growing beyond their original roots in role-playing gaming to encompass rich textual spaces that range from the serious and scholarly to the whimsical. In undergraduate-level college education, MOOs have been used for numerous purposes from online writing centers to electronic workshop and peer-editing sessions to distance-learning discussion and lecture environments. Literary MOOs and literature-themed MOOs have also been created and used in both traditional and distance-learning settings.7 We chose Frankenstein as our literary text for this MOO experiment for a number of reasons. Perhaps most obviously, Frankenstein is already thematically engaged with the revolutionary dynamics of new technology in ways that are immediately accessible to undergraduate students and are deeply skeptical of Utopian claims. We hoped that the choice of this text would make it easier for our students to self-reflexively interrogate their experiences in the MOO as "revolutionary." Also, somewhat more ephemerally, we have found that Shelley's narrative is unusually flexible in the classroom; it is an extraordinarily generous text, capable of sustaining a number of different readings, capable of surprise even for the instructor who has taught it a number of times. We hoped to create a monster that was beyond our control, and felt that such flexibility might make Frankenstein especially suited for translation to this medium. Finally, of course, such an experiment would have been much harder to implement with a text that was not in the public domain.