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Schiano, Diane J. "Lessons from LambdaMOO: A social, Text-Based Virtual Environment." Presence: Teleoperators & Virtual Environments. Vol 8. pp 127 - 139. 1999.

http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/105474699566125?cookieSet=1&journalCode=pres

ABSTRACT
The growing use of the Internet to provide a sense of personal connection and community is converging with the development of shared virtual spaces. In particular, the strong popularity of Multi-User Domains (MUDs), text-based networked virtual worlds, suggests the high premium many people place on social interactivity in their virtual environments. The project described in this paper was designed to broadly characterize what life in LambdaMOO---a classic, social, text-based MUD---is like for many of its members. A comprehensive, data-driven approach was used to explore topics including user and use characteristics, identity and gender role-play, sociality, and spatiality. A rich database of results was gathered. The findings demonstrate a striking and increasingly strong focus on social interaction, even at the expense of spatial navigation. Moreover, contrary to expectations, small, private, even exclusive social interactions were the rule, not the exception. In addition, provocative claims regarding the prevalence of identity and gender role-play were shown not to hold, at least for most people, in this classic social MUD. Finally, some intriguing results regarding the sense of place and space in a purely text-based virtual environment are presented. Taken together, these data shed light on robust psychological and social patterns observed in a large-scale, social virtual world. In doing so, they can help inform the discourse on, and design of, related systems in the future.

Pavel Curtis. Mudding: Social phenomena in text-based virtual
realities. Technical report, Xerox PARC, 1992.

http://w2.eff.org/Net_culture/MOO_MUD_IRC/curtis_mudding.article

ABSTRACT:

A MUD (Multi-User Dungeon or, sometimes, Multi-User Dimension) is a
network-accessible, multi-participant, user-extensible virtual reality whose
user interface is entirely textual. Participants (usually called players) have
the appearance of being situated in an artificially-constructed place that also
contains those other players who are connected at the same time.  Players can
communicate easily with each other in real time. This virtual gathering place
has many of the social attributes of other places, and many of the usual social
mechanisms operate there. Certain attributes of this virtual place, however,
tend to have significant effects on social phenomena, leading to new mechanisms
and modes of behavior not usually seen `IRL' (in real life). In this paper, I
relate my experiences and observations from having created and maintained a MUD
for over a year.