LambdaMOO

LambdaMOO is a virtual reality. It is a text-based virtual reality. People from across the world (today close to six thousand of them) link to this space and interact in ways that the space permits. The reality is the product of this interaction. Individuals can participate in the construction of this reality—sometimes for upwards of eighty hours a week. For some this interaction is the most sustained human contact of their entire lives. For most it is a kind of interaction unmatched by anything else they know.

In the main, people just talk here. But it is not the talk of an AOL chat room. The talk in a MUD is in the service of construction—of constructing a character and a community. You interact in part by talking, and this talking is tied to a name. This name, and the memories of what it has done, live in the space, and over time people in the space come to know the person by what these memories recall.

The life within these MUDs differ. Elizabeth Reid describes two different “styles”¹ —social-style MUD and an adventure or game-style MUD. Social MUDs are simply online communities where people talk and build characters or elements for the MUD. Adventure MUDs are games, with (virtual) prizes or power to be won through the deployment of skill in capturing resources or defeating an enemy. In either context, the communities survive a particular interaction. They become virtual clubs, though with different purposes. Members build reputations through their behavior in these clubs.

You get a character simply by joining the MOO (though in LambdaMOO the waiting list for a character extends over many months). When you join the space, you define the character you will have. At least, you define certain features of your character. You select a name and a gender (no gender is an option as well) and describe your character. Some descriptions are quite ordinary (Johnny Manhattan is “tall and thin, pale as string cheese, wearing a neighborhood hat”).² Others, however, are quite extraordinary. (Legba, for instance, is a Haitian trickster spirit of indeterminate gender, brown-skinned and wearing an expensive pearl gray suit, top hat, and dark glasses.)³

Julian Dibbell broke the story of this space to the nonvirtual world in an article in the Village Voice.⁴ The story that was the focus of Dibbell’s article involved a character called Mr. Bungle who, it turns out, was actually a group of NYU undergraduates sharing this single identity. Bungle entered a room late one evening and found a group of characters well known in that space. The full story cannot be told any better than Dibbell tells it. For our purposes, the facts will be enough.⁵

Bungle had a special sort of power. By earning special standing in the LambdaMoo? community, he had “voodoo” power: he could take over the voices and actions of other characters and make them appear to do things they did not really do. This Bungle did that night to a group of women and at least one person of ambiguous gender. He invoked this power, in this public space, and took over the voices of these people. Once they were in his control, Bungle “raped” these women, violently and sadistically, and made it seem as if they enjoyed the rape.

The “rape” was virtual in the sense that the event happened only on the wires. “No bodies touched,” as Dibbell describes it.

Footnotes

¹ See Elizabeth Reid, “Hierarchy and Power: Social Control in Cyberspace,” in Communities in Cyberspace, edited by Marc A. Smith and Peter Kollock (London: Routledge, 1999), 109. Edit Delete

² See Josh Quittner, “Johnny Manhattan Meets the Furry Muckers,” Wired (March 1994): 92, available at www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.03/muds.html (visited May 30, 1999). Edit Delete

³ See Julian Dibbell, “A Rape in Cyberspace,” Village Voice, December 23, 1993, 36, 37, available at www.juliandibbell.com/texts/bungle.html. Edit Delete

⁴ Ibid. Edit Delete

⁵ In particular, see Dibbell’s extraordinary My Tiny Life: Crime and Passion in a Virtual World (London: Fourth Estate, 1998). Edit Delete