This sounds kind of ridiculous in retrospect, but I've never actually thought of MU*ing as a fannish activity. persephoneflame's post below kind of smacked me in the forehead with, yes, of course, spending weeks/months of devoted personal time creating a big fictional playground (usually) free for everyone with no recompense is very much a fannish kind of mentality, but because I've never played universe tie-in games like PernMUSH or Shadows of Isildur my brain totally never made that connection.
In terms of history/scholarship, my campus library has an awesome selection of completely outdated books on internet sociology/cognitive effects/ethics/etc. which include such great examinations of creative online activities like MU*ing that I've been ruined for a lot of more recent stuff. (There's this very sudden jump in scholarship from "look at all these weird creative anonymous communities!" to "whoa hey Generation MySpace!", with the former giving way almost completely to the latter by the early 2000's. This depresses me to no end.)
Sherry Turkle's Life on the Screen is a justified classic, and has a lot about identity formation and gender play and the psycho/sociological possibilities inherent in roleplaying, and Rheingold's chapter on MUDing/MUSHing in his '93 The Virtual Community is a great overview of MUDing and the scholarship available at the time, referencing everyone from Turkle to Henry Jenkins, but is less focused on purely RP games.
In my experience I've seen a demographic lean toward male players in combat-heavy roleplay-light games, and toward female players in roleplay-heavy games (regardless of their combat content). I'm really interested to see MU*ing being talked about as a largely female activity, because it's one of the few mediums I still interact with where being openly female is almost always problematic for me. Most female RPers I know have at least experimented with presenting themselves as male OOC to cut down on harassment. (This is definitely mitigated in female-run games, though.)
I don't mean to be diverging from topic, I'm just so fascinated to see this stuff being discussed. The Written World project kicks me in the teeth in the same way that a lot of Web 2.0 rhetoric does -- no, this isn't new, we've always been here, we've always hung out in spaces like these being creative and looked down on for it, and to erase our history to talk about The Great Coming Glory of the Brand New Interwebs is just utterly disheartening and frustrating.
no subject
In terms of history/scholarship, my campus library has an awesome selection of completely outdated books on internet sociology/cognitive effects/ethics/etc. which include such great examinations of creative online activities like MU*ing that I've been ruined for a lot of more recent stuff. (There's this very sudden jump in scholarship from "look at all these weird creative anonymous communities!" to "whoa hey Generation MySpace!", with the former giving way almost completely to the latter by the early 2000's. This depresses me to no end.)
Sherry Turkle's Life on the Screen is a justified classic, and has a lot about identity formation and gender play and the psycho/sociological possibilities inherent in roleplaying, and Rheingold's chapter on MUDing/MUSHing in his '93 The Virtual Community is a great overview of MUDing and the scholarship available at the time, referencing everyone from Turkle to Henry Jenkins, but is less focused on purely RP games.
In my experience I've seen a demographic lean toward male players in combat-heavy roleplay-light games, and toward female players in roleplay-heavy games (regardless of their combat content). I'm really interested to see MU*ing being talked about as a largely female activity, because it's one of the few mediums I still interact with where being openly female is almost always problematic for me. Most female RPers I know have at least experimented with presenting themselves as male OOC to cut down on harassment. (This is definitely mitigated in female-run games, though.)
I don't mean to be diverging from topic, I'm just so fascinated to see this stuff being discussed. The Written World project kicks me in the teeth in the same way that a lot of Web 2.0 rhetoric does -- no, this isn't new, we've always been here, we've always hung out in spaces like these being creative and looked down on for it, and to erase our history to talk about The Great Coming Glory of the Brand New Interwebs is just utterly disheartening and frustrating.