Word: virtually
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Jackson and Madonna don't do much more than appear in the vicinity of the Pepsi logo; Michael Douglas and Gene Hackman hire out for commercial voice-over work but -- We're major artists! -- decline to appear in ads or be identified by name. This is the age of virtual endorsement...
TECHNOLOGY: Virtual Jungle...
...tricky on the MUDs. Because you can be anything you want to be -- a tall Xantian with purple eyes or a gorgeous earthling hunk -- there is quite a bit of gender swapping going on. "A lot of men pretend to be women so they can have more virtual sex," says Amy Bruckman, an M.I.T. researcher studying social interaction on MUDs. "A lot of women pretend to bemen so they'll be left alone." Tracy (not her real name), a 28-year-old writer, oftenassumes the identity of a macho, beer-guzzling, care-for-nothing college student. She says it gives...
Some educators are trying to find a way to channel all that creative energy. Education-technology researcher Barry Kort administers a child-oriented MUD in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where children learn by doing. Among its virtual worlds are the Land of Oz and a model of Yellowstone National Park, complete with spouting geysers and wandering moose. The Yellowstone world was built by a nine-year-old boy just back from a family vacation. "Instead of writing about what he did on his summer vacation," says Kort, "he built a working model of his summer vacation...
Nobody has yet found a way to make money from MUDs, but commercial exploitation may not be far behind. Howard Rheingold, author of a new book on virtual communities, points out that many MUDs already have elaborate systems for tracking the points that players amass by finding treasures or killing enemies. Those systems could just as easily be used to amass dollars, says Rheingold. "As soon as somebody figures out a way to play for real money, you're going to see some real action...