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.

E-commerce strategists advise companies to create virtual communities for their customers. But what does this involve? Research on face-to-face communities identifies the concept of “sense of community: ” a characteristic of successful communities distinguished by members ’ helping behaviors and members’ emotional attachment to the community and other members. Does a sense of virtual community exist in online settings, and what does it consist of? Answering these questions is key, if we are to provide guidance to businesses attempting to create virtual communities. The paper explores the concept of sense of virtual community in a newsgroup we call Multiple Sports Newsgroup (MSN). We first demonstrate that MSN does indeed have a sense of virtual community, but that the dimensions of the sense of community in MSN differ somewhat from those reported for physical communities. The nature of these differences is plausibly related to the differences between electronic and face-to-face communication. We next describe the behavioral processes that contribute to the sense of virtual community at MSN—exchanging support, creating identities and making identifications, and the production of trust. Again, these processes are similar to those found in non-virtual communities, but they are related to the challenges of electronic communication. Lastly, we consider the question of how sense of community may come about and discuss the implications for electronic business.

E-commerce strategists advise companies to create virtual communities for their customers. But what is involved in establishing and maintaining virtual communities? This paper addresses two questions: Does a sense of community similar to that sometimes observed in physical communities also occur in virtual settings? And how is a sense of virtual community maintained? These questions are examined in an intensive study of an established virtual community called MSN. MSN members experienced a sense of community, but the dimensions of sense of community differed somewhat from those reported for physical communities in ways plausibly related to the differences between electronic and face-toface communication. The experienced sense of community in MSN was actively maintained through the social processes of exchanging support, creating identities and making identifications, and the production of trust. Again, these processes are similar to those in non-virtual communities, but related to the challenges of electronic communication. The findings suggest a process model of sense of virtual community creation and maintenance that is simpler and more powerful than previous theories.