MUDs and Assassins

In 2010, after having my heart broken by a catfish on an indie blogging site, I joined an “Avatar community” called Menewsha. I’m still active on Menewsha, even contributing to the upkeep of the website by purchasing items for my avatar with real money when I’ve got some to spare, but the site is slow. My favourite threads have become conversations between two people at a time, with each one posting maybe three times in a day. This changes during Assassin.

Once a year, during the site’s 7 day long Halloween themed event, there is a game called assassin. The rules are fairly simple, when you sign up you are given the username of somebody else, and a codeword, and your job is to scour the posts since the beginning of the event to take a screenshot of your “victim” posting the codeword. To add to that, you are being hunted by someone with the same instructions, and you are required to post in the forums at least fifteen times each day.

The site becomes lively, as people hastily find conversations to join to make up their posts for the day, while trying to avoid saying the codeword that they don’t know. A common tactic is to start a conversation about a topic that might relate to the codeword in a thread your victim is talking in. It’s not easy to stay alive for the whole event.

I think it’s games like this that take forum based sites like avatar communities (there are other examples, such as the more popular Gaia Online) back to their roots as MUDs. The avatar sites do not function as dungeons in most situations. Though there are spaces where users can roleplay stories, and some of those are “taverns” where user characters can arrive and leave as they like, the majority of the site is not based on false identities but simply masked identities. The system is anonymous, and users can reveal as little or as much of themselves as they like, and everyone trusts the system. More than a few users consider the site a place where they can truly be themselves because nobody can make a predetermined judgement on them.

But during assassin, every user who signs up to the game takes on the persona of a spy. Suddenly any of the other active users could be out to trap you, every conversation is a potential threat. The stakes are low, no need to create a new character if you die, but as the game drops off so does the rush of the site’s activity. Late in the game, when there are only a few assassins left alive, people have less of a need to post so often, and the site becomes slow again. But for two or three days a year, Menewsha’s users are spies and assassins, ready to double cross and betray their friends- who they really know nothing about.