Exploring Online Reality

In our media-primed brains, the phrase "virtual reality" triggers off images of Robocop helmets, studded gloves, and 3D Nintendo. VR is seen as the scuba gear for the seas of simulation, a purely technological means of tricking the central nervous system into inhabiting a digitally concocted space. But some netheads are coming to suspect that MUDs—which, depending on whom you talk to, stands for either Multi-User Dimension or Multi-User Dungeon—have already incarnated the spirit, if not the letter, of VR....