the_croupier

April 21, 2006

A Night in Milliways (final version - first part)

            On June 30, 2004, a small group of role-players placed their first posts on a new LiveJournal role-playing game named Milliways Bar. Each mun had a character drawn from a popular-culture "canon" (a novel, play, movie, or television show) which the mun hoped to give new life.[1]  In the game, heroes and villains (and some characters who were both or neither) found themselves pulled out of their worlds and brought to a mysterious bar run by an enigmatic Landlord. In reality, their new home was moderated by two (soon to be four) women who first met among the pages of LiveJournal.  Milliways, the setting for this “pan-fandom LiveJournal role-playing game,” first appeared in the 1982 science-fiction novel by Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. Credit for recreating Milliways as a role-playing community belongs to  'Nny ("Yeah, I nicked the name. I was drunk.") of Cardiff, Wales, and Sophie, of Dublin, Ireland.  Two early players--Meg, of Indianapolis, Indiana, and Josie, a recent arrival to Ann Arbor, Michigan--also became moderators a few months later. Though the online community describes Milliways as a bar, not a restaurant, its identity remains otherwise intact as the ultimate tourist attraction, offering visitors a spectacular view of the universe in its final hours.[2]

            Two years later, Milliways Bar is a thriving community with over 150 contributing members from the United States, Canada, Britain, Ireland, Australia and South America.[3]  The establishment is populated by a colorful mob of characters from  throughout time and space. Nearly all of them first came to the bar by accident, walking through a normal-looking door only to find themselves guests of the Landlord.  No one has ever seen, much less met, the bar's owner, but day-to-day management of the place is in the hands of Head Barman Bernard Mickey Wrangle (from Tom Robbins’ Still Life with Woodpecker).[4]   Most of the denizens of Milliways spend their time drinking, eating, carousing and feuding with their fellow barmates. Some travel the universe (or rather, the "multiverse"), others are ‘Bound’ to the bar. Many will eventually leave to meet their final Destiny, but until then, their journeys eventually bring them back to Milliways, where each character has, more or less, carved out a space for him-, her-, or itself. [5]

            This initial paper is intended to be an introduction to Milliways Bar. It begins with an overview of the many elements that make up the community, then goes on to consider various topics such as how members learn to play the game, how the community regulates behavior, and how identities evolve within the context of the game. Many of the concepts used here to explore Milliways come from the book Communities of Practice, by Etienne Wenger, which has been very helpful for explaining much of what happens inside and outside the game.[6]

 
Technical aspects of the game

            The main ‘stage’ of the community is the LiveJournal "Milliways Bar."  When a player (known as a ‘mun’) posts a thread to this LiveJournal he is announcing to other players that his character (known as a ‘pup’) has just entered the bar. Muns who want to have their pups interact with the new arrival can ‘tag’ this new thread with posts of their own, and the muns then trade posts back-and-forth. The thread thus becomes a process of collaborative storytelling, and also a record of that interaction for other players in the game. These threads occupy the main column of the Milliways Bar LiveJournal, flanked on the left by icons of the pups contributing to the thread. On the right hand side of the page is a long column of links. At the top are basic reference and introductory pages. Below them are links to several LiveJournal pages which are used in various ways to support the events taking place on the main page. Below these links are a long list of tags, a recent addition to the page, which allows muns to tag a thread with the names of the pups who appear in it and, if the thread is part of a larger story, with the name of the 'plot' as well.[7]

Figure 1: The Milliways Bar LiveJournal

 

            The supporting LiveJournal pages on the right hand side of the page fulfill a number of functions. The most important of these LiveJournals is “Ways Back Room,” which acts as a bulletin board for the entire community. Here muns can post messages to explain their absence (usually the fault of that annoying thing, Real Life), announce new plots or developments for their pups, or coordinate real-life gatherings known as “Millicons.”  In addition to the Back Room, there are also several "Role-Playing

Figure 2: Ways Back Room

 

Communities,” which are supplementary storytelling journals for specific groups in the bar, such as doctors (“ways_infirmary”) or the bar staff (“ways_office”).[8]  Threads posted in these sub-communities are given links to the main page once they are finished so other members of the community can keep up with what is happening in them if they wish.  There are also “Plotting Communities,” which are meta-spaces for coordinating elaborate story lines. Each of these communities is based around pups from a specific canon, including the television series “24” (“24_ways”) and “Lost” (“casta_ways”); the Harry Potter books (“potter_ways”); the musical “Rent” (“ways_for_rent”); and movies such as “Dead Poets Society” (“welton_ways”) and the Star Wars series (“far_far_aways”).  In addition to all of these, each pup has a LiveJournal of his or her own, which is created by the mun during the application process. Every post in Milliways includes a link (found on the left, directly under the icon) to the pup's LiveJournal page, which allows other muns to refer to it and glean basic information about that pup and his or her canon. Finally,

Figure 3: A typical LiveJournal pup information page

 

there are several miscellaneous support pages. These include attempts to document the Milliways community, including a “milliWiki” and a “millipedia,” which, unfortunately, have all proven too time-consuming for their creators to maintain for very long.  There is, however, a very good “milliDictionary” of community terms; pages used for adopting or requesting pups ("millidoption" and "milli_wanted"); and two pages for posting memorable threads ("milliquotes") and quotes from the chatroom ("milli_crack").[9]

            In addition to LiveJournal, most muns use AOL chat rooms to interact with other muns, and nearly all of them use Instant Messaging as well. The largest of the chat rooms is “crackchat” (or “crackways”), described in the FAQ as “the affectionate name we have for our AIM chats.” [10]  Chat and IM give muns a more immediate kind of contact than the LiveJournal pages alone would allow, and make it easier for two or more muns to coordinate the conversation or plot they are constructing in a thread.  They also allow a mun to clarify what he meant if another mun does not understand his most recent post.  Some muns use chat to signal to a collaborating mun that they have just responded to their post. (This is usually done by typing, “Tag <X>,” where <X> is the name of the other mun’s pup.)  But chat is probably most important for providing a virtual space where muns are free to talk about the game, various canons, or anything else that comes to mind. In that respect, they have helped to sustain a sense of community that LiveJournal alone might not have achieved (though chat rooms can also be a source of conflict as well).[11]

Milliways Bar as a ‘community of practice’

            The primary activity of the muns in Milliways Bar is collaborative storytelling, and the means by which they perform this activity, creating LiveJournal threads, is a perfect illustration of Etienne Wenger’s ‘negotiation of meaning.’ [12]  Wenger uses this phrase to refer to the kinds of interactions that take place among members of the community. It includes two processes. The first is participation, which Wenger defines as, "a process of taking part [in an activity], and also to the relations with others that reflect this process. It suggests both action and connection." (This definition is basically the same as the common understanding of the word.)  The second process is reification, in which members "[give] form to [their] experience by producing objects that congeal this experience into 'thingness.'"  In other words, when people take an abstract concept and make it concrete, that concept becomes easier to talk about. "When a newscast reports that 'democracy took a blow during a military coup,' or that 'the economy reacted slowly to the government's action,' the process of reification provides a shortcut to communication." [13]

            When muns create threads in Milliways, they are sharing in an activity, and at the same time, they are establishing or furthering their relations with other members of the Milliways community. Yet this act of participation is also an act of reification, because the thread that constitutes that participation is also a record of it. The thread, as a reified object, is available to the participating muns and all the other muns as well, and that means they are able to negotiate with one another about what that thread should "mean" for the pups (and muns) who took part in it. If the events recorded by the thread are important, the thread might also have meaning for other pups (and muns) in the bar as well. Because different members of the community will probably have different opinions about what that meaning should be, Wenger calls their interaction a "negotiation of meaning." The repercussions of a meaning could play out in other threads.[14]  In fact, any thread could demand a renegotiation of the meaning of a preceding thread, even if an entirely different set of pups and muns are involved. The pups in that later thread may, after all, be reacting to events that took place in the preceding thread, either because they saw what happened (the virtual space of the bar is open enough to allow people to see what others are doing) or because they heard about it from other pups.

            This "negotiation of meaning" brings coherence to what Wenger calls a "community of practice," a community characterized by "mutual engagement," "a joint enterprise," and "a shared repertoire."

            There is mutual engagement when many people come together to perform a "shared practice." For Milliways, this means creating threads as acts of collaborative storytelling.  To participate in this way, a mun must first “app” (submit an application for) a pup to the moderators, receive approval for that pup, and then introduce her newly created pup into the bar by means of an introductory thread. Then the mun "enables engagement" by announcing the presence of her pup in the bar, and making herself available to other muns so the process of negotiation can begin.[15]

            The joint enterprise of Milliways is the collective goal of creating plots and other interactions among the pups that make Milliways Bar a rich environment for storytelling. Different muns may have varying methods for achieving this. Some may resort to humor, others to pathos, still others to some combination of these or to other literary modes and genres. Yet the freedom to improvise in this way contributes to the diversity of the storytelling environment.  Muns are also "mutually accountable" to one another because the more they strive to become better role-players (and to help other muns do the same), the more successful and enjoyable Milliways will be as a game. Unfortunately, like any joint enterprise, Milliways is also subject to "external influences." The most important of these is "Real Life," which always puts demands on muns' limited time. Another is inconsistent service provided by internet service providers, LiveJournal and AIM, which regularly disrupts the creation of threads and participation in chat or instant messaging.  But, as Wenger suggests, because every mun must deal with these challenges, they also contribute to the muns’ shared sense of community.[16]

             A shared repertoire consists of "routines, words, tools, ways of doing things, stories, gestures, symbols, genres, actions, or concepts that the community has produced or adopted in the course of its existence, and which have become part of its practice." [17] Milliways' shared repertoire is quite rich, with phrases, concepts, and  memorable threads. A short review of some of the terms used in Milliways suggests how complex  mun' interaction can be, and how conscious they are that they are engaged in collaborative storytelling:

 

• Canon: Defined by the milliDictionary as the “source material” for a pup. The game accepts a wide range of sources--books, films, television series, graphic novels, online comic strips, and so on—but every Milliways pup must have one. Original pups are not allowed.
• Crack: An amusingly flexible term for anything considered crazy, usually in a (mostly) positive sense.  The chat room is often called ‘crackchat’ to reflect the fast-paced and frequently silly exchanges that take place there during its best (worst?) moments.
• Godding: The attempt by one mun to control the actions of another mun’s pup. If this attempt is uninvited, it is considered very rude behavior in the community and will probably result in a reprimand from the moderators. However, if one mun gives another permission to "god her pup," then it can also be a sign of the trust the two have in one another as good muns.[18]  
• IC and OOC: (“In character” and “Out of character”) Refers to acts, and sometimes thoughts, attributed to a pup by his or another mun. An act ‘in character’ is considered true to that pup as she appeared in the original canon, and/or as that pup has naturally evolved during her time in Milliways.  In some cases--when a pup and a canon is known to several muns--deciding whether a given act is ‘in’ or ‘out’ can be a social process, a true ‘negotiation of meaning.’  That debate can become sharp if an action by one pup has a negative impact on another pup whose mun believes the act was "out of character."

                  Note: The term "OOC" is also used in threads to indicate comments made

      directly by one mun to another mun. There are many reasons why a mun might

      make such a comment, but one of the most common is to clarify intention.  For

      example, if a pup is insulting another pup, the mun may end his post with "[ooc:

      sorry, he's really cranky today.]" to show that the insult is intended as an "in

      character" act by the pup, and not meant to be taken personally by the mun

      herself. [19]

• Millitime: Placing a given thread out of the chronological order it would otherwise have in the main LiveJournal. This is accomplished by an announcement made at the beginning of the thread and is usually done to fill in a perceivable gap in a given plotline. While ‘Millitime’ is technically a noun, it is usually used as a verb (“[This thread is] Millitimed to three days ago…”)
• OOM: (“Out of Milliways”) Any Milliways scene that does not take place within the confines of the bar itself.  Threads posted in one of the supporting "Role-playing Communities" are OOMs, as are scenes taking place in pups’ private rooms (located on floors above the bar).  OOMs may also be used to give a pup more depth, usually by showing the pup responding to established events in her canon which would not be of immediate interest to other pups or which would be difficult or impossible to portray within the bar itself.[20]
• Slowtime: A frequent occurrence when one or another mun must leave the game before they both agree a given thread is complete.  The muns continue to add to the thread as opportunity permits during the following days, or in rare cases, weeks. Ideally, ‘slowtime’ continues until the conversation or scene described in the thread reaches a satisfying conclusion. If a period of slowtiming lasts for some time, it may overlap later interactions, putting a special demand on the muns to keep the timeline of events in proper order.[21]
• Whitetext: Using an html element to render text in white, effectively making it invisible against the typical white background of Milliways threads. This might be done for various reasons, but the most common one is to reflect the deepest feelings and thoughts of a pup, including some of which the pup himself might not be entirely aware.  Whitetext might also conceal ill-will harbored ‘in character’ by one pup against another.[22]

             Even the virtual space of the bar itself is part of the community's shared repertoire. As the moderators note in their FAQ, “The physical space of the bar is highly fluid. All that we seem to agree on is that there are tables, booths, a Bar, and occasionally a pool table.”  This flexibility also extends to the area ‘behind’ Milliways, which the moderators describe as ‘nebulous’: 

            There are gardens and lawn furniture, thanks to Asar-Suti. There are stables on

            one side. There is a greenhouse. And there is a forest. Seasons follow current

            earth seasons. It’s just easiest that way, and we tend to sort-of follow Scotland’s

            weather patterns, but not precisely by any means….

 
            How much leeway do I really have?

 
            Loads. Some have said the lake is huge; others have said it’s not that big. There

            are rocks here and there along its edge, but they haven’t been all that closely

            described. If you have a worry about a description, do ping Josie, who is the mod

            who tends to handle physical aspects of the bar.[23]

Everything, therefore, is available for negotiation and renegotiation of meaning: the bar, its immediate surroundings, and every event that has taken place there (in the sense that all threads posted in the game become part of the LiveJournal archive). The only constants are the existence of the bar itself, and the simple “Rules” that are always in force:[24]   “No violence in the bar. No business in the bar. No sex in the bar.”[25]  Muns who decide a given plot or interaction demands their pup resort to one of these must either find a way to ‘take it out of the bar’ (and, therefore, into an OOM), or must risk the possibility of temporary imprisonment by the Security staff.  Even in this case, however, the community is sufficiently large that an honor system is in force, with a mun usually contacting another mun (one whose pup is a member of the Security staff) and reporting the illegal act committed by his own pup.

April 21, 2006

A Night in Milliways (final version - third part)

Reputations and Social Comparisons
             As noted above, Milliways does not have specific levels of participation, a reputation feature (such as eBay), or clearly defined goals. Muns are free to decide for themselves how active they will be in the game, and even a particularly high level of participation in the community will not garner a mun an obvious advantage over other muns. There are benefits to active participation, of course, but they are more subtle and less concrete than those available in, for example, a more commercial online video game.  The more active a mun is, the more visible his pups will be in the game, and this will make other muns more inclined to seek her out for mutual storytelling, both because she is more available (a simple function of being in the bar and in chat more often) and because the more familiar other muns are with her, the more comfortable they are likely to feel about approaching her (and the more receptive they are likely to be if she approaches them).[1]

            Yet while the Milliways FAQ speaks to this benefit, it would be difficult to quantify it because whether announcements of a pups entering the bar receive several responses or none depends on a variety of factors beyond the 'reputation' of the mun. The mun may be introducing her pup into the bar on an unusual day or at an unusual time, when the muns accustomed to interacting with that pup are not present.[2]  Or those other muns might already be engaged in other threads by the time the mun introduces her pup. Or perhaps the introductory sentence or paragraph which the mun offers in her post is simply not interesting enough to attract the usual attention her pup receives.

            Determining the reputation of the mun may be further complicated by the fact that some of her pups may be more popular than others, thanks to the relative popularity of the source material from which she drew them.  This "halo effect" of a popular book, film, or television series may give a new pup a popularity in the game entirely separate from the standing of the mun who has applied for her. Over time the popularity of the mun, her good behavior toward other muns, and her talent for portraying her pup in a recognizable and interesting way, will likely have a greater impact on the pup's reputation in the bar, but the balance of these influences is not easily determined in a quantifiable manner.

            This indeterminacy must also affect the ability of muns to make social comparisons with other muns and their pups. A pup with a particularly high level of notoriety (for example, the Head Barman, Bernard Mickey Wrangle, who belongs to one of the moderators) may inspire upward comparisons by other muns.[3]   However, there are no indications that the high visibility of one pup has directly inspired other muns to make their pups equally recognized and respected in the community.

            Would the addition of a quantifiable reputation feature (and by extension a more concrete means for social comparison) have a beneficial impact on the community and the level of mun participation?  This seems unlikely. The community already has an active roster of muns who regularly contribute fifty to seventy individual threads each day (and sometimes more). While a reputation feature might encourage some added participation, and also give the community a way to acknowledge those muns whose stories are considered 'best,' these benefits would probably be offset by the introduction of a competitive spirit into the game which might discourage new muns (who are often already insecure about their storytelling ability) and generate conflict and ill-will among established muns. The health of Milliways as a game is dependent on the quality of the stories told rather than their quantity, but a reputation system would most likely introduce more problems than benefits.

 
Growing Pains
            The diversity of the Milliways muns contributes to the richness of the game environment, and the globe-spanning reach of the membership holds promise that Milliways might eventually become a round-the-clock experience. (At times the chat room comes within four hours of that feat.)  But growth has not come without cost. Building on the previous section about "Conflict," this section considers some of the effects of that growth on the Milliways community. It must be said, however, that an analysis of network effects emerging due to growth are complicated by the specific relationships muns and their pups establish with one another and the considerable time required to make any one of those relationships meaningful.[4]

              As with many communities, the network effect of adding members to Milliways Bar is not a simple mathematical relationship. Even if one sets aside the difficult question of "talent" in playing the game, not all muns are created equal. The value of a new arrival to any given mun often depends on which pup they have chosen to play, and on what other pups the new mun is willing to adopt at the request of the established mun. To take a simplified example, a mun whose pup is Harry Potter is more likely to welcome the arrival of another pup from that "canon," such as Ron Weasley or Hagrid, than she is the arrival of Gimli the dwarf from The Lord of the Rings. On the other hand, Harry and Gimli, as pups from works of fantasy, are more likely to have something in common with each other than either of them would have with the forensic scientist Gil Grissom from C.S.I.  Despite the whimsy of this example (and its inaccuracy, given that imaginative muns can find surprising points of common interest between very different pups), it makes the point that the value of a mun to another mun depends on the potential of her pup to inspire new plots and interesting interactions for the other pup. Similarly, the loss of such a complementary pup can have a serious impact on the first mun, even to the extent of making her own pup unplayable. In the survey conducted for this study, one mun, when asked for the reason why she retired her pup, replied, "Played the character specifically to interact with another character at another mun's request, and the other mun chose to give up the other character." [5]

            As Wenger notes, members of a community will follow different trajectories of participation. New muns may be drawn into full involvement ("in-bound trajectories"), long-standing muns may continue their full participation ("insider trajectories"), while others involve themselves to only a limited degree ("peripheral trajectories") or even focus on spanning boundaries between communities ("boundary trajectories").[6]  As noted above, in Milliways the effect a mun's trajectory will have on the community will depend on how much other muns expect of her and of her pups. If there is a misunderstanding about the level of commitment a mun is willing to make, or if a competing real-life issue intervenes, the bar may lose a fruitful pup interaction or an interesting plot. But one need not assume that only mun on an in-bound or insider trajectory have something to contribute. A peripheral mun, whose pups only make occasional appearances in the bar, might nonetheless serve as a periodic novelty, or even a rare pleasure, for regular muns.

 
Sub-communities in Milliways
            As suggested above, the growing membership of the Milliways community has also presented certain challenges. As would be the case in any community, when the total number of participants grew, muns subdivided into smaller communities, many of which gained LiveJournals of their own. These "Role-Playing Communities" are accessible from a column on the main Milliways Bar LiveJournal page, and the muns who belong to these sub-communities regularly post links to their plots on the main journal page so the rest of the community can read them as well. So far as it goes, this has proven to be an effective and popular response to a growing community. 

            At the same time, however, the growth of the community since the summer of 2005 raised the possibility that sub-communities had become more significant for many muns than the community as a whole. While overall activity was quite high, there was a sense among the moderators that muns had settled into small cliques whose members interacted only with one another. Possibly as a result of this, events in the bar were becoming repetitive; interactions among the pups were becoming less interesting; and  muns were relying on the constant introduction of new pups to give the game a false sense of novelty. The latter phenomenon was a particular concern because many of the new pups were not being played often enough to allow them to grow into the rich and complex personalities for which Milliways had always been known. The parade of new pups also meant that many of the established regulars were being seen less frequently in the bar. By the spring of 2006, the moderators concluded that the long-term health of the game demanded extraordinary action on their part. In a long message to the community, posted on April 3, 2006, they wrote:

            You've all probably noticed, recently, that the game is... not what it used to be.

            Yes, we know, change is inevitable, natural process of evolution, and so on and so

            forth. But it's become increasingly apparent, over the last few months, that we

            haven't just lost the evolutionary dead-ends (so to speak) but some essential, core

            part of the game that made it such a thrill and such a delight to be a part of.

The solution they proposed was two-fold: first, a cap on new applications for that month, followed by a moratorium on new pups until the following fall, and a systematic purge of pups that had never been played with any regularity.  In addition, throughout the summer: 

            ....Us mods will be working hard to actively promote the kind of community spirit

            that we want to see return to Milliways. We'll introduce and organise things like

            regular car-keys threads.... The mods will also continue to introduce plots similar

            to last month's tab call-in; these won't necessarily be earth-shattering events, but

            they will help to cohere the bar so that, when big plots do go down, you are all

            more accustomed to playing and reacting together. We'll be taking suggestions for

            those across-the-board plots, so email them to the mod account if you've got a

            brainwave. All ideas are welcome. [7]

It remains to be seen whether this plan will be successful over the long run, but for the moment, the announcement has inspired the return of some once familiar faces and instilled new vigor in the community.

            Milliways is fortunate in that, while the community is subject to polarization, there is little indication of it happening along historic fault lines (such as race or nationality) or to the point of provoking extremes, like those described by Cass Sunstein in Republic.com.[8]  Instead, disagreements seem to occur primarily between individuals on the basis of incompatible personalities, or as the result of slights suffered within the game. This may be an indication of a certain cultural homogeneity among Milliways muns (even across national boundaries), but it is difficult to confirm this, due to a lack of reliable demographic information about the community. [9]

 

Community Attachment and the Formation of Identity in Milliways
            In a recent article, Ren, Kraut, and Kiesler place members of communities into two categories: those who feel an attachment that is identity-based (for the community as a whole and its common goal or task) and those who feel an attachment that is based on the bonds they have to individual members of that community.[10]  The distinction they make, as presented in their article, is somewhat overstated, but it provides a useful way to examine how muns first come to the game and also how the moderators' plan may affect the community. While Milliways Bar was the subject of a two-part online magazine article in March 2005, it is not a site which advertises its presence.[11]  Most newcomers seem to learn about the site from people they know who are already members themselves. This suggests their decision to join is driven, at least in part, by a bond-based attachment to the members who told them about the game. On the other hand, the level of commitment required to apply for a pup and then portray him in the bar, particularly over an extended period of time, suggests that there must also be some degree of commitment to the common goal of role-playing, and that suggests an identity-based attachment to Milliways Bar as a whole.

            When asked why they joined, several players emphasized the premise of the game (identity-based), but also acknowledged the friendships that drew them to the game or that they made once they were a part of its community (bond-based).[12]  The muns Ven, Camwyn, and Diana were introduced to the game by friends (two from online communities, one from real life). According to Camwyn, "there were some people I knew playing there, and occasionally some of them... would talk about it, and I wanted in, too."  As for why she stayed with the game:

            The premise is a lot of it, but I'm attached to the characters now--not just mine,

            but other people's. I like exploring how they react to one another, the possibility

            of seeing character in wholly different situations, seeing how people world-build,

            things like that. And the socialising, both in-game and in the chats; it's a common

            point of conversation and an exchange of ideas, and I love that.

Ironically, mun Michelle first heard about Milliways at the LiveJournal "Bad Role-Players Suck": "People were talking about this RP where you could play anyone from any canon.... I'd seen the multi-canon thing before and it usually just looked like an utter mess, but I checked it out, and saw that the writers in Milliways had a lot of talent."  She suspects she was not the only mun Milliways gained from that negative comment at BRPS: "I think a few people came over from that entry because a ton of Milliwaysers came over to defend their RP and were really eloquent about their defense of the place."

            Once they had decided to join Milliways, each of the four muns had to choose which character they would apply for as their pup. All of the muns had been fans of the canons from which their pups were drawn, but when asked whether they made their choice based on canon or character, they all agreed it had been the characters themselves that had inspired their decision, not just the book, movie, and television series in which they first appeared. For example, Camwyn says,

            I've pretty well apped the pups because of the characters. If I'm more interested in

            a canon in general than a pup in particular, I can usually take it to fanfic and write

            what I like there... without stepping on characters' toes. Gimli was apped because

            I wanted a Tolkien pup, but mostly because I really like Gimli; Jah-lila, who's

            relatively minor for me, was a case of loving the canon more. The humans,

            however, are all cases of being very, very fond of the characters in question, with

            the canon a bit behind.

            However, there were other factors involved in their selections as well. Ven's choice was made easier by the fact that she had played her pup, Gorlim (a character in J. R. R. Tolkien's The Silmarillion), in another community, the "Middle-Earth Sock Puppet Theater," for two-and-a-half years before bringing him to Milliways. As for how she picked him in the first place: "I wanted a male, and I wanted to play one fairly angsty (always have done). The reason I took Gorlim was because his NAME was angsty ("the Unhappy")."  Gorlim also offered Ven the advantage of being an obscure figure in his canon. This was helpful because it would give her more freedom while developing his character.  When Camwyn's first pup proved an unsatisfying fit for Milliways, she decided to find "a pup that could interact with a wider spectrum of people without me feeling awkward or them having to know the character already."  At a friend's suggestion, she chose Ray Stanz, the character played by Dan Ackroyd in the movie Ghostbusters.  That turned out to be a good thing for Diana as well because it inspired her to apply for Peter Venkman, the Ghostbuster played by Bill Murray. "I liked the movies, and the cartoon, and the character. I saw there was a Ray, and asked about other characters, was pointed to Milliwanted, and decided to app him. Can relate to the character some."  She notes there is an advantage in having other muns playing pups from the same canon, "because it helps having other canon pups for them [her own pups] to talk to. And also some characters just work better that way, especially such close-knit ones." Michelle chose Illyria, from the Joss Whedon television series Angel, because, "her story's largely untold. There's room for me to do a lot with her that was never done in her own canon, and she has a unique enough voice that I don't feel like I'm playing just anybody.... And because she fit into the setting fairly easily--it wouldn't freak her out to suddenly be in the bar at the end of the universe, but she would have plenty to be curious about." [13]

            The four pups discussed here suggest there is an interesting balance their muns must strike, between having a pup with a large canon or a small one. A large canon will probably mean the pup will be more recognizable to other muns (and, therefore, may make them more interested in interacting right away), but it might also mean the pup's character is more defined and set. A small canon puts more of a burden on a mun to capture the attention of other muns, but has the advantage of giving them more flexibility in allowing their pup's personality to develop in different ways. Ven comments:

            It's up to the mun's discretion how much the character is eventually influenced by

            other worlds and other ways while in the bar. I've heard people say they feel

            obligated out of love the canon's author to remain as close to the original as

            possible, but I don't believe it's necessary to limit character development to the

            extent they seem to have done. I think a character can change and develop to be

            ultimately quite different on the outside, yet can retain his or her essence and still

            do honor to both the canon and creator--can even do that BETTER if you allow

            change, sometimes.

The issue of the pup's relationship to his or her canon is an important one for all the muns, and one that definitely requires its own form of negotiation. Michelle writes,

            I think it's important to find a balance. Personally, I've been told that my take on

            Illyria is very distinct, not really *different* from canon, but a different voice than

            a lot of people use for her. It's the difference between just parroting back lines

            from canon and actually finding something that resonates with you personally. It's

            helpful to stick close to canon, to keep reminding yourself by rewatching or

            rereading if you feel that the character's starting to change fundamentally in a way

            that you're not sure works, but I also think you really have to find something

            about the voice that comes naturally to you.

Diana's approach to the topic almost suggests a kind of journey that pups take when they are apped into Milliways. She writes,

            ....I try to keep the character true to the canon, or at least true to the character

            itself. They start out with their canon voice. But, of course, being in different

            situations, and meeting different people is going to change that some. The

            character won't be in canon anymore, and they're gonna be more their own voice

            as they move along. You take what you experienced, and adapt it to your mind-set

            and perceptions.... So it's really more of the pup's voice itself, the crux of the

            character. I mean it's going to be my pup, since I play them differently, and take

            them through different circumstances than other muns. But the heart of the

            character remains constant....

Conclusion
            Online communities in general are encouraging new thought about the meaning of community, the challenge of regulating behavior in virtual space, and the potential to craft alternate identities in electronic environments. What better place to explore these challenging topics than an interactive game in which an active community of players, in a loosely regulated setting, engage in an ongoing negotiation about the identity of their characters in the context of other characters and the original sources from which they were drawn?  One may concede that the premise of Milliways Bar is whimsical, and still make a case for it as an intriguing and complex example of many of the concepts and theories being addressed in the current, scholarly literature about online communities.  If anything, this paper has only begun to address the Milliways community in this respect. My hope is that, with luck, the creativity and perseverance of its moderators and muns--and a liberal dose of "crack"--Milliways will continue to grow and evolve to become an even better example of a thriving "community of practice" in the future.

 
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Hi everyone,

This semester I’m taking a class in online communities. The main assignment for the class is a case study of a community, and I’d like to make Milliways the subject of mine. This won’t be research for publishing—just a study to aid my learning about how online communities work. My term paper will be about what the purpose of Milliways is, what technologies it uses (AIM, LiveJournal), and what problems had to be solved to keep the community going. I’ll also be looking at the roles different people play in the community and the identities they create (their pups, basically), and what norms and rules are in place to help everyone get along together.

The course actually has a website, so if you would like to learn more about it, you can find it here: http://icd.si.umich.edu/684

I’m going to be posting notes about what I observe during my study here. Please feel free to visit it at any time, and any feedback you’d like to give about it will be very welcome.

My paper will be looking at the site in general, not at anyone in particular. I’ll be posting a survey for it in the Back Room in the next couple of weeks, and I hope to interview some muns and the mods to help supplement that. But if I plan to use a quote or story from one of you, I will be sure to ask your permission first, and you are completely free to ask me not to use it. Even if I do use a quote, I intend to keep all quotes anonymous for the sake of privacy.

If you have any concerns what I'm doing, you may contact me by email at the.croupier @ gmail.com or you can contact Professor Resnick at presnick @ umich.edu.

Thanks!
Rick