reality

It is very unlikely that a MOO would scale well to large scale discussions. Just as it is almost impossible to get anything done in a meeting with everybody talking at once, it is just as difficult to get anything done in a MOO with everyone talking at once. And even though there is a sense of being able to talk directly to somebody, all conversations will scroll through the session, making it hard to keep track of any one thread of discussion.

But for pure conversation, the MOO does its job, and it does it well. Without the technologies required for what we traditionally think of as Virtual Reality, a MOO gives us a space, gives us a setting, and gives us the means to interact with other people. Given an environment based purely in text and leaving almost everything up to the imagination of the user, the MOO provides a reality to those who use it. It may not be the same reality as the rest of the world may be experiencing, but to those people who log in and have lives in these worlds, they are virtually indistinguishable.

And there you have it.