My Tiny Life
Crime and Passion in a Virtual World
Being a True
Account of the Case of the Infamous Mr. Bungle, and of the Author's
Journey, in Consequence Thereof, to the Heart of a Half-Real World Called
LambdaMOO
Copyright © 1998 by Julian
Dibbell.
First edition published 1998 by Henry
Holt and Company. [Browse it]
Chapter
1 was originally published in a somewhat different
form in The Village Voice.
Contents
Dedication
Author's Note
PALO ALTO, OCTOBER 1994
1. A Rape in Cyberspace
(Or TINYSOCIETY, and How to Make
One)
NEW YORK CITY, DECEMBER
1993
2. The Scarlet Balloon
(Or
TINYGEOGRAPHY, a Long View and an
Overview)
DELAWARE GAP NATIONAL RECREATION AREA, JULY
1994
3. The Purple Guest
(Or TINYLAW, and
Its Discontents)
NEW YORK CITY, JULY 1994
4. Samantha, Among Others
(Or
TINYGENDER, a Love Story)
NEW YORK CITY, JULY 1994
5. How Did My Garden Grow
(Or
TINYECONOMICS Theoretical and Applied)
NEW YORK CITY, AUGUST 1994
6. The Schmoo Wars
(Or TINYHISTORY,and the Ways a Programmer May Shape It)
NEW YORK CITY, AUGUST 1994
7. S*
(Or TINYSEX, in the Author's Experience)
NEW YORK CITY,
SEPTEMBER 1994
8. Toad Minnie
(Or TINYLIFE, and How It Ends)
SOMEWHERE IN THE HILLS NEAR PALO ALTO,
OCTOBER 1994
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Dedication
For Jessica, who is more beautiful
to me than text can say
Author's Note
The
narrative contained herein is as true to life, and to the facts, as I could
bear to make it. In a few spots I felt compelled to jigger the chronology of
events for the sake of a smooth story line,
but I did so only with matters concerning my own history, not that of
the MOO, and only where such alterations affected the substance of my report no more than trivially. As for
quotes, I was obliged to invent a few in the autobiographical “RL”
episodes, which have been reconstructed mainly on the basis of memory and brief
journal entries, but the book's quotes are otherwise taken straight from
transcripts of online conversations, from MOO-mail
or e-mail, or from interviews conducted via telephone or face-to-face. In
a handful of cases, I conflated separate real-time quotes from a MOO player into a single quote, and occasionally I cleaned
up typos I thought were more distracting than telling. Likewise, I sometimes
revised a few words for the sake of clarity.
For
the sake of privacy I made other alterations, the main one being that names
were changed from actual to fictitious ones throughout the book. This is common journalistic practice, of course, but here
it may seem oddly superfluous considering that the “actual” names I changed
were mostly pseudonyms to begin with,
used by people whose real-life identities are in many cases still unknown to me. If my approach was unusual, however, so were
the circumstances: Lambda-MOO happens to be a world in which, for
technical reasons, knowing a person's name is the approximate virtual
equivalent of knowing that person's phone number, home address, and social
security number as well. And given that that world is also readily accessible
to anybody with an Internet account, I thought it best not to offer unavoidable
encouragement to any ill-mannered rubberneckers (or worse) who may lurk among
my readers. (I don't mean you, of course, and I should add that visitors to
LambdaMOO are usually treated no less kindly than they treat the locals.)
Additionally, when writing about Lambda
residents who could not reasonably be considered “public
figures” within the context of the MOO, I sometimes took
measures to conceal their identities from other MOOers as well
as from visiting outsiders. These measures variously included
rewriting the residents' descriptions of their virtual selves
and possessions, revising information about their real lives
(such as hometown, age, and place of employment), or both. I
changed the non-MOO details of some “MOO-famous” figures as
well, to keep certain aspects of their real lives private.
Where I felt there to be no compelling
reason for fictionalizing a name or pseudonym, I left it
unchanged. This didn't happen often, though. Real names and
pseudonyms found in the book include my own, those of Pavel
Curtis, and those of LambdaMOO characters long gone from the
MOO and very unlikely to return. They do not, however, include
the names of the Lambda “satellite worlds” Interzone and
aCleanWellLightedMOO, although neither place, I assure you, is
any less—or more—real than LambdaMOO itself.
RL PALO ALTO, OCTOBER
1994
The Low-Humming Room Full of Bone-White
Boxes
You are in a quiet, low-lit room full
of stacked metal boxes, their surfaces mostly white, like old
bones, studded here and there with pale green-yellow pinpoint
lights that flicker on and off. The boxes are computers,
twenty-five of them or so: collectively they hum a damped and
hissing drone. There is carpeting beneath your feet -- thin,
corporate, and clean. There is an exit to the south.
You see The Server here.
Pavel and The_Author are here.
Pavel shrugs.
Pavel says, “Well, there it is. Not
much to look at, really.”
The_Author looks at The Server.
look server
The Server
You see a box as unremarkable as any
other in this room, only more so. Three feet square by one
foot high, some cables slithering out the back, no flickering
lights or any other outward indication of activity within. The
box sits at about knee level, stacked unceremoniously on top
of another one just like it.
The_Author has come 3,000 miles to look
at this machine.
The_Author crouches for a better look
and wonders at his disappointment. He didn't think he was so
foolish as to hope for more than this. He didn't expect the
emptiness he feels inside him now. He can't imagine what it is
he expected, really.
The_Author stands and glances
momentarily at Pavel.
look pavel
Pavel
You see a portrait of Santa Claus as an
early-middle-aged man. Thick brown hair to shoulder length, a
full, dark beard, and eyes that underneath their long, fine
lashes actually do appear to twinkle in the manner of the
mythical Father Christmas. But Pavel is otherwise not very mythic looking. He is wearing jeans
and running shoes, and his T-shirt hangs loosely over a comfy
paunch.
He is awake and looks alert.
@aliases pavel
Pavel is also known as Pavel,
Pavel_Curtis, Haakon, Lambda, The_Archwizard,
Keeper_of_the_Server, and God.
Pavel seems, perhaps, to sense
The_Author's wish that there were even the slightest note of
drama to be wrung from this profoundly uneventful moment.
Pavel says, “You know, I brought
PennyAunty down here once and do you know what she said?”
Pavel says, “'My world is in
there.'“
Pavel mimes, with outstretched hands
and eyebrows raised, the wonder that his earlier visitor felt
before the silent, bone-white presence of The Server.
Pavel shrugs.
The_Author smiles awkwardly. He is the
slightest bit embarrassed. He knows now what it is he was
expecting to find here, and it's ludicrous: he really felt,
without admitting it to himself, that he was going to see what
PennyAunty only pretended to see. He thought that he was
coming here to finally gaze directly at a world he had been
living in for months.
The_Author realizes now that during all
those months he never really doubted LambdaMOO was in this
box, compact, condensed, its rambling landscapes and its
teeming population all somehow shrunk down to the size of The
Server's hard-disk drive.
The_Author remembers with a twinge of
newfound understanding the way the people there sometimes
attached the curious prefix “tiny” to the features of their
world, the way they spoke of “tinyscenery,” and
“tinygovernment,” and so on.
The_Author thinks of how impossible it
was to ever quite believe the place was not, in fact, a place.
Of how he never could quite shake the thought that LambdaMOO
existed somewhere in a concrete sense, that somewhere, out
beyond the scrim of fantasy and distance through which he
interacted with the MOO, it waited to be seen unveiled -- an X
on the map of the material world, a thing as tangible as any
rock, or house, or island.
The_Author knows he isn't the first
person to make this kind of mistake. He knows that new
technologies like this one have a history of sowing
metaphysical derangement in the minds of those who first
behold them -- that in the middle nineteenth century, for
example, even educated Frenchmen were known to fear the
camera's gaze, suspecting that it could not work its
representational magic on a person without stealing a little
of his soul.
The_Author, come to think of it, is
carrying a small camera in his pocket at this very moment. Why
not? he asks himself.
The_Author pulls the camera out and
aims it at The Server, and shoots. Perhaps, he muses (deciding
to indulge his metaphysical derangement just a little longer),
perhaps through some strange alchemy of representational
technologies the camera has captured an image of The Server's
soul. Perhaps it will produce a photograph of what he came to
see: the tiny world of LambdaMOO and all the tiny people in
it.
The_Author puts the camera back in his
pocket. Three weeks from now he will hold in his hands the
photo he's just taken and he'll look at it and think, “My
world is not in there. The 1s and 0s of it maybe, the nuts and
bolts. But not its soul.”
The_Author will have to start all over
then. He will have to try and find another way of representing
what the camera failed to show. He'll have to go back to the
night it all began for him and trace his steps from
there.
VR
LambdaMOO is a new kind of society,
where thousands of people voluntarily come together from all
over the world. What these people say or do may not always be
to your liking; as when visiting any international city, it is
wise to be careful who you associate with and what you say. .
. .
—LambdaMOO logon screen
1
A Rape in Cyberspace
Or TINYSOCIETY, and How to Make One
They say he raped them that night. They
say he did it with a cunning little doll, fashioned in their
image and imbued with the power to make them do whatever he
desired. They say that by manipulating the doll he forced them
to have sex with him, and with each other, and to do horrible,
brutal things to their own bodies. And though I wasn't there
that night, I think I can assure you that what they say is
true, because it all happened right in the living room—right
there amid the well-stocked bookcases and the sofas and the
fireplace—of a house I came later to think of as my second
home. Call me Dr. Bombay. Some years ago—let's say about
halfway between the first time you heard the words information
superhighway and the first time you wished you never had—I
found myself tripping now and then down the well-traveled
information lane that leads to LambdaMOO, a very large and
very busy rustic mansion built entirely of words. On the
occasional free evening I'd sit down in my New York City
apartment and type the commands that called those words onto
my computer screen, dropping me with what seemed a warm
electric thud inside the house's darkened coat closet, where I
checked my quotidian identity, stepped into the persona and
appearance of a minor character from a long-gone television
sitcom, and stepped out into the glaring chatter of the
crowded living room. Sometimes, when the mood struck me, I
emerged as a dolphin instead.
I won't say why I chose to masquerade
as Samantha Stephens's outlandish cousin, or as the dolphin,
or what first led me into the semifictional digital
other-worlds known around the Internet as multiuser
dimensions, or MUDs. This isn't quite my story yet. It's the
story, for now, of an elusive congeries of flesh and bytes
named Mr. Bungle, and of the ghostly sexual violence he
committed in the halls of LambdaMOO, and most importantly of
the ways his violence and his victims challenged the thousand
and more residents of that surreal, magic-infested mansion to
become, finally, the community so many of them already
believed they were.
That I was myself already known to
wander the mansion grounds from time to time has little direct
bearing on the story's events. That those same events were,
months after, to draw me deeper into the complex, flickering
core of Lambda-MOO's shadow reality than I had ever thought to
go is also, I suppose, of only a slight and hindsighted
relevance to the matter now at hand. I mention it only as a
warning that my own perspective may, at this late date, be too
steeped in the surreality and magic of the place to serve as
an altogether appropriate guide. For the Bungle Affair raises
questions that—here on the brink of a future in which human
existence may find itself as tightly enveloped in digital
environments as it is today in the architectural kind—demand a
clear-eyed, sober, and unmystified consideration. It asks us
to shut our ears for the time being to techno-utopian
ecstasies and look without illusion upon the present
possibilities for building, in the online spaces of this
world, societies more decent and free than those mapped onto
dirt and concrete and capital. It asks us to behold the new
bodies awaiting us in virtual space undazzled by their phantom
powers, and to get to the crucial work of sorting out the
socially meaningful differences between those bodies and our
physical ones. And perhaps most challengingly it asks us to
wrap our late-modern ontologies, epistemologies, sexual
ethics, and common sense around the curious notion of rape by
voodoo doll—and to try not to warp them beyond recognition in
the process.
In short, the Bungle Affair dares me to
explain it to you without resort to dime-store mysticisms, and
I fear I may have shape-shifted by the digital moonlight
one too many times to be quite up to the task. But I will do
what I can, and can do no better than to lead with the facts.
For if nothing else about Mr. Bungle's case is unambiguous,
the facts at least are crystal clear.
The facts begin (as they often do) with
a time and a place. The time was a Monday night in March,
and the place, as I've said, was the living room—which, due
largely to the centrality of its location and to a certain
warmth of decor, was in those days so invariably packed with
chitchatters as to be roughly synonymous among LambdaMOOers
with a party. So strong, indeed, was the sense of convivial
common ground invested in the living room that a cruel mind
could hardly imagine a better place in which to stage a
violation of LambdaMOO's communal spirit. And there was
cruelty enough lurking in the appearance Mr. Bungle presented
to the virtual world—he was at the time a fat, oleaginous,
Bisquick-faced clown dressed in cum-stained harlequin garb and
girdled with a mistletoe-and-hemlock belt whose buckle bore
the quaint inscription KISS ME UNDER THIS, BITCH! But whether
cruelty motivated his choice of crime scene is not among the
established facts of the case. It is a fact only that he did
choose the living room.
The remaining facts tell us a bit more
about the inner world of Mr. Bungle, though only perhaps that
it wasn't a very cozy place. They tell us that he
commenced his assault entirely unprovoked, at or about 10
P.M. Pacific Standard Time. That he began by using his voodoo
doll to force one of the room's occupants to sexually service
him in a variety of more or less conventional ways. That this
victim was exu,[1] a South American trickster spirit of
indeterminate gender, brown-skinned and wearing an expensive
pearl gray suit, top hat, and dark glasses. That exu heaped
vicious imprecations on him all the while and that he was soon
ejected bodily from the room. That he hid himself away then in
his private chambers somewhere on the mansion grounds and
continued the attacks without interruption, since the voodoo
doll worked just as well at a distance as in proximity. That
he turned his attentions now to Moondreamer, a rather
pointedly nondescript female character, tall, stout, and
brown-haired, forcing her into unwanted liaisons with other
individuals present in the room, among them exu, Kropotkin
(the well-known radical), and Snugberry (the squirrel). That
his actions grew progressively violent. That he made exu eat
his/her own pubic hair. That he caused Moondreamer to violate
herself with a piece of kitchen cutlery. That his distant
laughter echoed evilly in the living room with every
successive outrage. That he could not be stopped until at last
someone summoned Iggy, a wise and trusted old-timer who
brought with him a gun of near wizardly powers, a gun that
didn't kill but enveloped its targets in a cage impermeable
even to a voodoo doll's powers. That Iggy fired this gun at
Mr. Bungle, thwarting the doll at last and silencing the evil,
distant laughter.
These particulars, as I said, are
unambiguous. But they are far from simple, for the simple
reason that every set of facts in virtual reality (or VR, as
the locals abbreviate it) is shadowed by a second,
complicating set: the “real-life” facts. And while a certain
tension invariably buzzes in the gap between the hard, prosaic
RL facts and their more fluid, dreamy VR counterparts, the
dissonance in the Bungle case is striking. No hideous clowns
or trickster spirits appear in the RL version of the incident,
no voodoo dolls or wizard guns, indeed no rape at all as any
RL court of law has yet defined it. The actors in the drama
were university students for the most part, and they sat
rather undramatically before computer screens the entire time,
their only actions a spidery flitting of fingers across
standard QWERTY keyboards. No bodies touched. Whatever
physical interaction occurred consisted of a mingling of
electronic signals sent from sites as distant from each other
as the eastern seaboard of the United States and the southern
coast of Australia. Those signals met in LambdaMOO, certainly,
just as the hideous clown and the living room party did, but
what was LambdaMOO after all? Not an enchanted mansion or
anything of the sort—just a middlingly complex database,
maintained for experimental purposes inside a Xerox
Corporation research computer in Palo Alto and open to public
access via the Internet.
To be more precise about it, LambdaMOO
was a MUD. Or to be yet more precise, it was a subspecies of
MUD known as a MOO, which is short for “MUD, Object Oriented.”
All of which means that it was a kind of database especially
designed to give users the vivid impression of moving through
a physical space that in reality exists only as words filed
away on a hard drive. When users log in to LambdaMOO, for
instance, the program immediately presents them with a brief
textual description of one of the rooms of the database's
fictional mansion (the coat closet, say). If the user wants to
leave this room, she can enter a command to move in a
particular direction and the database will replace the
original description with a new one corresponding to the
room located in the direction she chose. When the new
description scrolls across the user's screen it lists not only
the fixed features of the room but all its contents at that
moment—including things (tools, toys, weapons) and other users
(each represented as a “character” over which the user has
sole control).
As far as the database program is
concerned, all of these entities—rooms, things, characters—are
just different subprograms that the program allows to interact
according to rules very roughly mimicking the laws of the
physical world. Characters may not leave a room in a given
direction, for instance, unless the room subprogram contains
an “exit” at that compass point. And if a character “says” or
“does” something (as directed by its user-owner via the say or the emote command), then only the users
whose characters are also located in that room will see the
output describing the statement or action. Aside from such
basic constraints, however, LambdaMOOers are allowed a broad
freedom to create—they can describe their characters any way
they like, they can make rooms of their own and decorate them
to taste, and they can build new objects almost at will. The
combination of all this busy user activity with the hard
physics of the database can certainly induce a lucid illusion
of presence—but when all is said and done the only thing you
really see when you visit LambdaMOO
is a kind of slow-crawling script, lines of dialogue and stage
direction creeping steadily up your computer screen.
Which is all just to say that, to the
extent that Mr. Bungle's assault happened in real life at all,
it happened as a sort of Punch-and-Judy show, in which the
puppets and the scenery were made of nothing more substantial
than digital code and snippets of creative writing. The
puppeteer behind Bungle that night, as it happened, was a
young man logging in to the MOO from a New York University
computer. He could have been Mother Teresa for all any of the
others knew, however, and he could have written Bungle's
script that night any way he chose. He could have sent an emote command to print the message Mr_Bungle, smiling a saintly smile, floats angelic near the
ceiling of the living room, showering joy and candy kisses
down upon the heads of all below—and everyone then
receiving output from the database's subprogram #17 (a/k/a the
“living room”) would have seen that sentence on their
screens.
Instead, however, he entered sadistic
fantasies into the “voodoo doll,” a sub-program that served
the not-exactly kosher purpose of attributing actions to other
characters that their users did not actually write. And thus a
woman in Haverford, Pennsylvania, whose account on the MOO
attached her to a character she called Moondreamer, was given
the unasked-for opportunity to read the words As if against her will, Moondreamer jabs a
steak knife up her ass, causing immense joy. You hear Mr_Bungle laughing
evilly in the distance. And thus the woman in Seattle who
had written herself the character called exu, with a view
perhaps to tasting in imagination a deity's freedom from the
burdens of the gendered flesh, got to read similarly
constructed sentences in which exu, messenger of the gods,
lord of crossroads and communications, suffered a brand of
degradation all-too-customarily reserved for the embodied
female.
“Mostly voodoo dolls are amusing,”
wrote exu on the evening after Bungle's rampage, posting a
public statement to the widely read in-MOO mailing list called
*social-issues, a forum for debate
on matters of import to the entire populace. “And mostly I
tend to think that restrictive measures around here cause more
trouble than they prevent. But I also think that Mr. Bungle
was being a vicious, vile fuckhead, and I. . . want his sorry
ass scattered from #17 to the Cinder Pile. I'm not calling for
policies, trials, or better jails. I'm not sure what I'm
calling for. Virtual castration, if I could manage it. Mostly,
[this type of thing] doesn't happen here. Mostly, perhaps I
thought it wouldn't happen to me. Mostly, I trust people to
conduct themselves with some veneer of civility. Mostly, I
want his ass.”
Months later, the woman in Seattle
would confide to me that as she wrote those words she was
surprised, to find herself in tears—a real-life fact that
should suffice to prove that the words' emotional content was
no mere fiction. The precise tenor of that content, however,
its mingling of murderous rage and eyeball-rolling annoyance,
was a curious amalgam that neither the RL nor the VR facts
alone can quite account for. Where virtual reality and its
conventions would have us believe that exu and Moondreamer
were brutally raped in their own living room, here was the
victim exu scolding Mr. Bungle for a breach of “civility.”
Where real life, on the other hand, insists the incident was
only an episode in a free-form version of Dungeons and
Dragons, confined to the realm of the symbolic and at no point
threatening any player's life, limb, or material well-being,
here now was the player exu issuing aggrieved and heartfelt
calls for Mr. Bungle's dismemberment. Ludicrously excessive by
RL's lights, woefully understated by VR's, the tone of exu's
response made sense only in the buzzing, dissonant gap between
them.
Which is to say it made the only kind
of sense that can be made of MUDly
phenomena. For while the facts
attached to any event born of a MUD's strange, ethereal
universe may march in straight, tandem lines separated neatly
into the virtual and the real, its meaning lies always in that
gap. You learn this axiom early in your life as a player, and
it's of no small relevance to the Bungle case that you often
learn it between the sheets, so to speak. Netsex, tinysex,
virtual sex— however you name it, in real-life reality it's
nothing more than a phone fuck stripped of even the vestigial
physicality of the voice. And yet, as many a wide-eyed newbie
can tell you, it's possibly the headiest experience the very
heady world of MUDs has to offer. Amid flurries of even the
must cursorily described caresses, sighs, or penetrations, the
glands do engage, and often as throbbingly as they would in a
real-life assignation—sometimes even more so, given the
combined power of anonymity and textual suggestiveness to
unshackle deep-seated fantasies. And if the virtual setting
and the interplayer vibe are right, who knows? The heart may
engage as well, stirring up passions as strong as many that
bind lovers who observe the formality of trysting in the
flesh.
To participate, therefore, in this
disembodied enactment of life's most body-centered activity is
to risk the realization that when it comes to sex, perhaps the
body in question is not the physical one at all, but its
psychic double, the bodylike self-representation we carry
around in our heads—and that whether we present that body to
another as a meat puppet or a word puppet is not nearly as
significant a distinction as one might have thought. I know, I
know, you've read Foucault and your mind is not quite blown by
the notion that sex is never so much an exchange of fluids as
it is an exchange of signs. But trust your friend Dr. Bombay,
it's one thing to grasp the notion intellectually and quite
another to feel it coursing through your veins amid the
virtual steam of hot netnookie. And it's a whole other
mind-blowing trip altogether to encounter it thus as a college
frosh, new to the Net and still in the grip of hormonal
hurricanes and high school sexual mythologies. The shock can
easily reverberate throughout an entire young worldview. Small
wonder, then, that a newbie's first taste of MUD sex is often
also the first time she or he surrenders wholly to the quirky
terms of MUDdish ontology, recognizing in a full-bodied way
that what happens inside a MUD-made world is neither exactly
real nor exactly make-believe, but nonetheless
profoundly, compellingly, and emotionally true.
And small wonder indeed that the sexual
nature of Mr. Bungle's crime provoked such powerful
feelings, and not just in exu (who, be it noted, was in real
life a theory-savvy doctoral candidate and a longtime MOOer,
but just as baffled and overwhelmed by the force of her own
reaction, she later would attest, as any panting undergrad
might have been). Even players who had never experienced MUD
rape (the vast majority of male-presenting characters, but not
as large a majority of the female-presenting as might be
hoped) immediately appreciated its gravity and were moved to
condemnation of the perp. exu's missive to *social-issues
followed a strongly worded one from Iggy (“Well, well,” it
began, “no matter what else happens on Lambda, I can always be
sure that some jerk is going to reinforce my low opinion of
humanity”) and was itself followed by others from Zakariyah,
Wereweasel, Crawdaddy, and emmeline. Moondreamer also let her
feelings (“pissed”) be known. And even Xander, the Clueless
Samaritan who had responded to Bungle's cries for help and
uncaged him shortly after the incident, expressed his regret
once apprised of Bungle's deeds, which he allowed to be
“despicable.”
A sense was brewing that something
needed to be done—done soon and in something like an organized
fashion—about Mr. Bungle, in particular, and about MUD rape,
in general. Regarding the general problem, emmeline, who
identified herself as a survivor of both virtual rape (“many
times over”) and real-life sexual assault, floated a cautious
proposal for a MOO-wide powwow on the subject of virtual sex
offenses and what mechanisms if any might be put in place to
deal with their future occurrence. As for the specific
problem, the answer no doubt seemed obvious to many. But it
wasn't until the evening of the second day after the incident
that exu, finally and rather solemnly, gave it voice:
“I am requesting that Mr. Bungle be
toaded for raping Moondreamer and I.I have never done this
before, and have thought about it for days. He hurt us
both.”
That was all. Three simple sentences
posted to *social. Reading them, an
outsider might never guess that they were an application for a
death warrant. Even an outsider familiar with other MUDs might
not guess it, since in many of them “toading” still refers to
a command that, true to the gameworlds' sword-and-sorcery
origins, simply turns a player into a toad, wiping the
player's description and attributes and replacing them with
those of the slimy amphibian. Bad luck for sure, but not quite
as bad as what happens when the same command is invoked in the
MOOish strains of MUD: not only are the description and
attributes of the toaded player erased, but the account itself
goes too. The annihilation of the character, thus, is
total.
And nothing less than total
annihilation, it seemed, would do to settle Lambda-MOO's
accounts with Mr. Bungle. Within minutes of the posting of
exu's appeal, HortonWho, the Australian Deleuzean, who had
witnessed much of the attack from the back room of his
suburban Melbourne home, seconded the motion with a brief
message crisply entitled “Toad the fukr.” HortonWho's posting
was seconded almost as quickly by that of Kropotkin, covictim
of Mr. Bungle and well-known radical, who in real life
happened also to be married to the real-life exu. And over the
course of the next twenty-four hours as many as fifty players
made it known, on *social and in a
variety of other forms and forums, that they would be pleased
to see Mr. Bungle erased from the face of the MOO. And with
dissent so far confined to a dozen or so antitoading
hardliners, the numbers suggested that the citizenry was
indeed moving toward a resolve to have Bungle's virtual
head.
There was one small but stubborn
obstacle in the way of this resolve, however, and that was a
curious state of social affairs known in some quarters of the
MOO as the New Direction. It was all very fine, you see, for
the LambdaMOO rabble to get it in their heads to liquidate one
of their peers, but when the time came to actually do the deed
it would require the services of a nobler class of character.
It would require a wizard. Master-programmers of the MOO,
spelunkers of the database's deepest code-structures and
custodians of its day-to-day administrative trivia, wizards
are also the only players empowered to issue the toad command,
a feature maintained on nearly all MUDs as a quick-and-dirty
means of social control. But the wizards of LambdaMOO, after
years of adjudicating all manner of interplayer disputes with
little to show for it but their own weariness and the
smoldering resentment of the general populace, had decided
they'd had enough of the social sphere. And so, four months
before the Bungle incident, the archwizard Haakon (known in RL
as Pavel Curtis, Xerox researcher and Lambda-MOO's principal
architect) formalized this decision in a document called
“LambdaMOO Takes a New Direction,” which he placed in the
living room for all to see. In it, Haakon announced that the
wizards from that day forth were pure technicians. From then
on, they would make no decisions affecting the social life of
the MOO, but only implement whatever decisions the community
as a whole directed them to. From then on, it was decreed,
LambdaMOO would just have to grow up and solve its problems on
its own.
Faced with the task of inventing its
own self-governance from scratch, the LambdaMOO population had
so far done what any other loose, amorphous agglomeration of
individuals would have done: they'd let it slide. But now the
task took on new urgency. Since getting the wizards to toad
Mr. Bungle (or to toad the likes of him in the future)
required a convincing case that the cry for his head came from
the community at large, then the community itself would have
to be defined; and if the community was to be convincingly
defined, then some form of social organization, no matter how
rudimentary, would have to be settled on. And thus, as if
against its will, the question of what to do about Mr. Bungle
began to shape itself into a sort of referendum on the
political future of the MOO. Arguments broke out on *social and elsewhere that had only
superficially to do with Bungle (since everyone seemed to
agree he was a cad) and everything to do with where the
participants stood on LambdaMOO's crazy-quilty political map.
Parliamentarian legalist types argued that unfortunately
Bungle could not legitimately be toaded at all, since there
were no explicit MOO rules against rape, or against just about
anything else—and the sooner such rules were established, they
added, and maybe even a full-blown judiciary system complete
with elected officials and prisons to enforce those rules, the
better. Others, with a royalist streak in them, seemed to feel
that Bungle's as-yet-unpunished outrage only proved this New
Direction silliness had gone on long enough, and that it was
high time the wizardocracy returned to the position of swift
and decisive leadership their player class was born
to.
And then there were what I'll call the
technolibertarians. For them, MUD rapists were of course
assholes, but the presence of assholes on the system was a
technical inevitability, like noise on a phone line, and best
dealt with not through repressive social disciplinary
mechanisms but through the timely deployment of defensive
software tools. Some asshole blasting violent, graphic
language at you? Don't whine to the authorities about it—hit
the @gag command and said asshole's
statements will be blocked from your screen (and only yours).
It's simple, it's effective, and it censors no one.
But the Bungle case was rather hard on
such arguments. For one thing, the extremely public nature of
the living room meant that gagging would spare the victims
only from witnessing their own violation, but not from having
others witness it. You might want to argue that what those
victims didn't directly experience couldn't hurt them, but
consider how that wisdom would sound to a woman who'd been,
say, fondled by strangers while passed out drunk in the middle
of a party, and you have a rough idea how it might go over
with a crowd of hardcore MOOers. Consider, for another thing,
that many of the biologically female participants in the
Bungle debate had been around long enough to grow lethally
weary of the gag-and-get-over-it school of virtual-rape
counseling, with its fine line between empowering victims and
holding them responsible for their own suffering, and its
shrugging indifference to the window of pain between the
moment the rape-text starts flowing and the moment a gag shuts
it off. From the outset it was clear that the
technolibertarians were going to have to tiptoe through this
issue with care, and for the most part they did.
Yet no position was trickier to
maintain than that of the MOO's resident anarchists. Like the
technolibbers, the anarchists didn't care much for punishments
or policies or power elites. Like them, they hoped the MOO
could be a place where people interacted fulfillingly without
the need for such things. But their high hopes were
complicated, in general, by a somewhat less thoroughgoing
faith in technology (Even if you can't
tear down the master's house with the master's tools—read a slogan written into one
anarchist player's self-description—it
is a damned good place to start). And at present they were
additionally complicated by the fact that the most vocal
anarchists in the discussion were none other than exu,
Kropotkin, and HortonWho, who wanted to see Mr. Bungle toaded
as badly as anyone did.
Needless to say, a pro-death penalty
platform is not an especially comfortable one for an anarchist
to sit on, so these particular anarchists were now at great
pains to sever the conceptual ties between toading and capital
punishment. Toading, they insisted (almost convincingly), was
much more closely analogous to banishment; it was a kind of
turning of the communal back on the offending party, a
collective action that, if carried out properly, was entirely
consistent with anarchist models of community. And carrying it
out properly meant first and foremost building a consensus
around it—a messy process for which there were no easy
technocratic substitutes. It was going to take plenty of good
old-fashioned, jawbone-intensive grassroots organizing.
So that when the time came, at 7 P.M.
PST on the evening of the third day after the occurrence in
the living room, to gather in emmeline's room for her
proposed real-time open conclave, Kropotkin and exu were
among the first to arrive. But this was hardly to be an
anarchist-dominated affair, for the room was crowding
rapidly with representatives of all the MOO's political
stripes, and even a few wizards. Lombard showed up, and Aurea
and Quanto, Spaff, TomTraceback, Eldopa and Bloof,
ShermieRocko, Silver Surfer, MaoTseHedgehog, Toothpick—the
names piled up and the discussion gathered momentum under
their weight. Arguments multiplied and mingled, players talked
past and through each other, the textual clutter of utterances
and gestures filled up the screen like thick cigar smoke.
Peaking in number at around thirty, this was one of the
largest crowds that ever gathered in a single LambdaMOO
chamber, and while emmeline had given her place a description
that made it infinite in expanse and
fluid in form, it now seemed anything but roomy. You could
almost feel the claustrophobic air of the place, dank and
overheated by virtual bodies, pressing against your skin.
I know you could because I too was
there, in one of those pivotal accidents of personal history
one always wants later to believe were approached with a
properly solemn awareness of the moment's portent. Almost as
invariably, of course, the truth is that one wanders into such
occasions utterly without a clue, and so it was with me that
night. Completely ignorant of any of the goings-on that had
led to the meeting, I showed up mainly to see what the crowd
was about, and though I observed the proceedings for a good
while, I confess I found it hard to grasp what was going on. I
was still the rankest of newbies then, my MOO legs still too
unsteady to make the leaps of faith, logic, and empathy
required to meet the spectacle on its own terms. I was
fascinated by the concept of virtual rape, but I was even more
so by the notion that anyone could take it altogether
seriously.
In this, though, I found myself in a
small and mostly silent minority, for the discussion that
raged around me was of an almost unrelieved earnestness, bent
it seemed on examining every last aspect and implication of
Mr. Bungle's crime. There were the central questions, of
course: Thumbs up or down on Bungle's virtual existence? And
if down, how then to ensure that his toading was not just some
isolated lynching but a first step toward shaping LambdaMOO
into a legitimate community? Surrounding these, however, a
tangle of weighty side issues proliferated. What, some
wondered, was the real-life legal status of the offense? Could
Bungle's university administrators punish him for sexual
harassment? Could he be prosecuted under California state laws
against obscene phone calls? Little enthusiasm was shown for
pursuing either of these lines of action, which testifies both
to the uniqueness of the crime and to the nimbleness with
which the discussants were negotiating its idiosyncracies.
Many were the casual references to Bungle's deed as simply
“rape,” but these in no way implied that the players had lost
sight of all distinctions between the virtual and physical
versions, or that they believed Bungle should be dealt with in
the same way a real-life criminal would. He had committed a
MOO crime, and his punishment, if any, would be meted out via
the MOO.
On the other hand, little patience was
shown toward any attempts to down-play the seriousness of what
Mr. Bungle had done. When the affable Shermie-Rocko proposed,
more in the way of a hypothesis than an assertion, that
“perhaps it's better to release . . . violent tendencies in a
virtual environment rather than in real life,” he was
tut-tutted so swiftly and relentlessly that he withdrew the
hypothesis altogether, apologizing humbly as he did so. Not
that the assembly was averse to putting matters into a more
philosophical perspective. “Where does the body end and the
mind begin?” young Quanto asked, amid recurring attempts to
fine-tune the differences between real and virtual violence.
“Is not the mind a part of the body?” “In MOO, the body IS the
mind,” offered Shermie-Rocko gamely, and not at all
implausibly, demonstrating the ease with which very knotty
metaphysical conundrums come undone in VR. The not-so-aptly
named Obtuse seemed to agree, arriving after sufficient
consideration of the nature of Bungle's crime at the hardly
novel yet now somehow newly resonant conjecture that “all
reality might consist of ideas, who knows.”
On these and other matters the
anarchists, the libertarians, the legalists, the
wizardists—and the wizards—all had their thoughtful say. But
as the evening wore on and the talk grew more heated and more
heady, it seemed increasingly clear that the vigorous
intelligence being brought to bear on this swarm of issues
wasn't going to result in anything remotely like resolution.
The perspectives were just too varied, the memescape just too
slippery. Again and again, arguments that looked at first to
be heading in a decisive direction ended up chasing their own
tails; and slowly, depressingly, a dusty haze of irrelevance
gathered over the proceedings.
It was almost a relief, therefore, when
midway through the evening Mr. Bungle himself, the living,
breathing cause of all this talk, teleported into the room.
Not that it was much of a surprise. Oddly enough, in the three
days since his release from Iggy's cage, Bungle had returned
more than once to wander the public spaces of LambdaMOO,
walking willingly into one of the fiercest storms of ill will
and invective ever to rain down on a player. He'd been taking
it all with a curious and mostly silent passivity, and when
challenged face-to-virtual-face by both exu and the genderless
elder statescharacter PatSoftly to defend himself on *social, he'd demurred, mumbling
something about Christ and expiation. He was equally quiet
now, and his reception was still uniformly cool, exu fixed an
arctic stare on him—no hate, no anger,
no interest at all. Just. . . watching. Others were more
actively unfriendly. 'Asshole,” spat MaoTseHedgehog, “creep.”
But the harshest of the MOO's hostility toward him had already
been vented, and the attention he drew now was motivated more,
it seemed, by the opportunity to probe the rapist's mind, to
find out what made it tick and if possible how to get it to
tick differently. In short, they wanted to know why he'd done
it. So they asked him.
And Mr. Bungle thought about it. And as
eddies of discussion and debate continued to swirl around him,
he thought about it some more. And then he said this:
“I engaged in a bit of a psychological
device that is called thought-polarization, the fact that this
is not RL simply added to heighten the affect of the device.
It was purely a sequence of events with no consequence on my
RL existence.”
They might have known. Stilted though
its diction was, the gist of the answer was simple, and
something many in the room had probably already surmised: Mr.
Bungle was a psycho. Not, perhaps, in real life—but then in
real life it's possible for reasonable people to assume, as
Bungle clearly did, that what transpires between word-costumed
characters within the boundaries of a make-believe world is,
if not mere play, then at most some kind of emotional
laboratory experiment. Inside the MOO, however, such thinking
marked a person as one of two basically subcompetent types.
The first was the newbie, in which case the confusion was
understandable, since there were few MOOers who had not, upon
their first visits as anonymous “guest” characters, mistaken
the place for a vast playpen in which they might act out their
wildest fantasies without fear of censure. Only with time and
the acquisition of a fixed character did players tend to make
the critical passage from anonymity to pseudonymity,
developing the concern for their character's reputation that
marks the attainment of virtual adulthood. But while Mr.
Bungle hadn't been around as long as most MOOers, he'd been
around long enough to leave his newbie status behind, and his
delusional statement therefore placed him among the second
type: the sociopath.
And as there is but small percentage in
arguing with a head case, the room's attention gradually
abandoned Mr. Bungle and returned to the discussions that had
previously occupied it. But if the debate had been edging
toward ineffectuality before, Bungle's anticlimactic
appearance had evidently robbed it of any forward motion
whatsoever. What's more, from his lonely corner of the room
Mr. Bungle kept issuing periodic expressions of a prickly sort
of remorse, interlaced with sarcasm and belligerence, and
though it was hard to tell if he wasn't still just conducting
his experiments, some people thought his regret genuine enough
that maybe he didn't deserve to be toaded after all.
Logically, of course, discussion of the principal issues at
hand didn't require unanimous belief that Bungle was an
irredeemable bastard, but now that cracks were showing in that
unanimity, the last of the meeting's fervor seemed to be
draining out through them.
People started drifting away. Mr.
Bungle left first, then others followed—one by one, in twos
and threes, hugging friends and waving good night. By 9:45
P.M. only a handful remained, and the great debate had wound
down into casual conversation, the melancholy remains of
another fruitless good idea. The arguments had been
well-honed, certainly, and perhaps might prove useful in some
as-yet-unclear long run. But at this point what seemed clear
was that emmeline's meeting had died, at last, and without any
practical results to mark its passing.
It was also at this point, most likely,
that TomTraceback reached his decision. TomTraceback was a
wizard, a taciturn sort of fellow who'd sat brooding on the
sidelines all evening. He hadn't said a lot, but what he had
said, in emmeline's room and elsewhere, indicated that he took
the crime committed against exu and Moondreamer very
seriously, and that he felt no particular compassion toward
the character who had committed it. But on the other hand he
had made it equally plain that he took the elimination of a
fellow player just as seriously, and moreover that he had no
desire to return to the days of wizardly intervention. It must
have been difficult, therefore, to reconcile the conflicting
impulses churning within him at that moment. In fact, it was
probably impossible, for though he did tend to believe that
the consensus on *social was
sufficient proof of the MOO's desire to see capital justice
done in the Bungle case, he was also well aware that under the
present order of things nothing but his own conscience could
tell him, ultimately, whether to ratify that consensus or not.
As much as he would have liked to make himself an instrument
of the MOO's collective will, therefore, there was no escaping
the fact that he must in the final analysis either act alone
or not act at all.
So TomTraceback acted alone.
He told the lingering few players in
the room that he had to go, and then he went. It was a minute
or two before 10 P.M. He did it quietly and he did it
privately, but all anyone had to do to know he'd done it was
to type the @who command, which was
normally what you typed if you wanted to know a player's
present location and the time he last logged in. But if you
had run a @who on Mr. Bungle not
too long after TomTraceback left emmeline's room, the database
would have told you something different.
Mr_Bungle,
it would have said, is not the name
of any player.
The date, as it happened, was April
Fool's Day, but this was no joke: Mr. Bungle was truly dead
and truly gone.
They say that LambdaMOO wasn't really
the same after Mr. Bungle's toading. They say as well that
nothing really changed. And though it skirts the fuzziest of
dream-logics to say that both these statements are true, the
MOO is just the sort of fuzzy, dreamlike place in which such
contradictions thrive.
Certainly the Bungle Affair marked the
end of LambdaMOO's brief epoch of rudderless social drift. The
rash of public-spiritedness engendered by the events might
alone have led in time to some more formal system of communal
self-definition, but in the end it was the archwizard Haakon
who made sure of it. Away on business for the duration of the
episode, Haakon returned to find its wreckage strewn across
the tiny universe he'd set in motion. The elimination of a
player, the trauma of several others, and the nerve-wracked
complaints of his colleague TomTraceback presented themselves
to his concerned and astonished attention, and he resolved to
see if he couldn't learn some lesson from it all. For the
better part of a day he puzzled over the record of events and
arguments left in * social, then he
sat pondering the chaotically evolving shape of his creation,
and at the day's end he descended once again into the social
arena of the MOO with another history-altering
proclamation.
It was to be his last, for what he now
decreed was the final, missing piece of the New Direction. In
a few days, Haakon announced, he would build into the database
a system of petitions and ballots whereby anyone could put to
popular vote any social scheme requiring wizardly powers for
its implementation, with the results of the vote to be binding
on the wizards. At last and for good, the awkward gap between
the will of the players and the efficacy of the technicians
would be closed. And though some anarchists grumbled about the
irony of Haakon's dictatorially imposing universal suffrage on
an unconsulted populace, in general the citizens of LambdaMOO
seemed to find it hard to fault a system more purely
democratic than any that could ever exist in real life. A few
months and a dozen ballot measures later, widespread
participation in the new regime had already produced a small
arsenal of mechanisms for dealing with the types of violence
that called the system into being. MOO residents now had
access to a @boot command, for
instance, with which to summarily eject berserker “guest”
characters. And players could bring suit against one another
through an ad hoc mediation system in which mutually
agreed-upon judges had at their disposition the full range of
wizardry punishments—up to and including the capital.
Yet the continued dependence on
extermination as the ultimate keeper of the peace suggested
that this new MOO order was perhaps not built on the most
solid of foundations. For if life on LambdaMOO began to
acquire more coherence in the wake of the toading, death
retained all the fuzziness of pre-Bungle days. This truth was
rather dramatically borne out, not too many days after Bungle
departed, by the arrival of a strange new character named Dr.
Jest. There was a forceful eccentricity to the newcomer's
manner, but the oddest thing about his style was its striking
yet unnameable familiarity. And when he developed the annoying
habit of stuffing fellow players into a jar containing a tiny
simulacrum of a certain deceased rapist, the source of this
familiarity became obvious:
Mr. Bungle had risen from the
grave.
In itself, Bungle's reincarnation as
Dr. Jest was a remarkable turn of events, but perhaps even
more remarkable was the utter lack of amazement with which the
LambdaMOO public took note of it. To be sure, many residents
were appalled by the brazenness of Bungle's return. In fact,
one of the first petitions circulated under the new voting
system was a request for Dr. Jest's toading that almost
immediately gathered several dozen signatures (but failed in
the end to reach ballot status). Yet few were unaware of the
ease with which the toad proscription could be
circumvented—all the toadee had to do (all the Ur-Bungle at
NYU presumably had done) was to go to the minor hassle of
acquiring a new Internet account, and LambdaMOO's character
registration program would then simply treat the known felon
as an entirely new and innocent person. Nor was this ease
necessarily understood to represent a failure of toading's
social disciplinary function. On the contrary, it only
underlined the truism (repeated many times throughout the
debate over Mr. Bungle's fate) that his punishment,
ultimately, had been no more or less symbolic than his
crime.
What was
surprising, however, was that Mr. Bungle/Dr. Jest appeared
to have taken the symbolism to heart. Dark themes still
obsessed him—the objects he created gave off wafts of Nazi
imagery and medical torture—but he no longer radiated the
aggressively antisocial vibes he had before. He was a lot less
unpleasant to look at (the outrageously seedy clown
description had been replaced by that of a mildly creepy but
actually rather natty young man, with blue eyes. . . suggestive of
conspiracy, untamed eroticism, and perhaps a sense of
understanding of the future), and
aside from the occasional jar-stuffing incident, he was also a
lot less dangerous to be around. It seemed obvious, at least
to me, that he'd undergone some sort of personal
transformation in the days since I'd first glimpsed him back
in emmeline's crowded room—nothing radical maybe, but powerful
nonetheless, and resonant enough with my own experience, I
felt, that it might be more than professionally interesting to
talk with him, and perhaps compare notes.
For I too was undergoing a.
transformation in the aftermath of that night in
emmeline's—and was increasingly uncertain what to make of it.
As I pursued my runaway fascination with the discussion I had
heard there, as I pored over the *social debate and got to know exu and
some of the other victims and witnesses, I could feel my
newbie consciousness falling away from me. Where before I'd
found it hard to take virtual rape seriously, I now was
finding it difficult to remember how I could ever not have taken it seriously. I was
proud to have arrived at this perspective—it felt like an
exotic sort of achievement, and it definitely made my ongoing
experience of the MOO a richer one.
But it was also having some unsettling
effects on the way I looked at the rest of the world.
Sometimes, for instance, it grew difficult for me to
understand why RL society classifies RL rape alongside crimes
against person or property. Since rape can occur without any
physical pain or damage, I found myself reasoning, then it
must be classed as a crime against the mind—more intimately
and deeply hurtful, to be sure, than cross burnings, wolf
whistles, and virtual rape, but undeniably located on the same
conceptual continuum. I did not, however, conclude as a result
that rapists were protected in any fashion by the First
Amendment. Quite the opposite, in fact: the more seriously I
took the notion of virtual rape, the less seriously I was able
to take the tidy division of the world into the symbolic and
the real that underlies the very notion of freedom of
speech.
Let me assure you, though, that I did
not at the time adopt these thoughts as full-fledged
arguments, nor am I now presenting them as such. I offer them,
rather, as a picture of the sort of mind-set that my initial
encounters with a virtual world inspired in me. I offer them
also, therefore, as a kind of prophecy. For whatever else
these thoughts were telling me, I have come to hear in them an
announcement of the final stages of our decades-long passage
into the Information Age, a paradigm shift that the classic
liberal fire wall between word and deed (itself a product of
an earlier paradigm shift commonly known as the Enlightenment)
is not likely to survive intact. After all, anyone the least
bit familiar with the workings of the new era's definitive
technology, the computer, knows that it operates on a
principle impracticably difficult to distinguish from the
pre-Enlightenment principle of the magic word: the commands
you type into a computer are a kind of speech that doesn't so
much communicate as make things happen,
directly and ineluctably, the same way pulling a trigger
does. They are incantations, in other words, and anyone at all
attuned to the technosocial mega-trends of the moment—from the
growing dependence of economies on the global flow of
intensely fetishized words and numbers to the burgeoning
ability of bioengineers to speak the spells written in the
four-letter text of DNA—knows that the logic of the
incantation is rapidly permeating the fabric of our lives.
And it was precisely this logic, I was
beginning to understand, that provided whatever real magic
LambdaMOO had to offer—not the fictive trappings of voodoo and
shape-shifting and wizardry, but the conflation of speech and
act that's inevitable in any computer-mediated world, be it
Lambda or the increasingly wired world at large. This was
dangerous magic, to be sure, a potential threat—if
misconstrued or misapplied—to our always precarious freedoms
of expression, and as someone who lives by his words I dared
not take the threat lightly. And yet, on the other hand, I
could no longer convince myself that our wishful insulation of
language from the realm of action had ever been anything but a
valuable kludge, a philosophically imperfect stopgap against
oppression that would just have to do till something truer and
more elegant came along.
Was I wrong to think this truer, more
elegant thing might be found on LambdaMOO? I did not know. I
continued, in my now-and-then visits, to seek it there,
sensing its presence just below the surface of every
interaction. Yet increasingly I sensed as well that if I
really wanted to see what lay beneath those surfaces—to
glimpse unveiled whatever there was of genuine historical
novelty in VR's slippery social and philosophical dynamics—I
was going to have to radically deepen my acquaintance with the
MOO somehow.
For a time I considered the
possibility, as I said, that discussing with Dr. Jest our
shared experience of the workings of the place might be a step
toward the understanding I sought. But when that notion first
occurred to me, I still felt somewhat intimidated by his
lingering criminal aura, and I hemmed and hawed a good long
time before finally resolving to drop him MOO-mail suggesting
we have a chat. By then it appeared to be too late. For
reasons known only to himself, Dr. Jest stopped logging in.
Maybe he'd grown bored with the MOO. Maybe the loneliness of
ostracism had gotten to him. Maybe a psycho whim had carried
him far away or maybe he'd quietly acquired a third character
and started life over with a cleaner slate.
Wherever he'd gone, though, he left
behind the room he'd created for himself—a treehouse tastefully decorated, as he'd
described it, with rare-book shelves, an operating table, and
a life-size William S. Burroughs doll—and he left it unlocked.
So I took to checking in there occasionally, heading out of my
own cozy nook (inside a TV set inside the little red hotel
inside the Monopoly board inside the dining room of LambdaMOO)
and teleporting on over to the treehouse, where the room
description always told me Dr. Jest was present but asleep, in
the conventional depiction for disconnected characters. The
not-quite-emptiness of the abandoned room invariably instilled
in me an uncomfortable mix of melancholy and the creeps, and I
would stick around only on the off chance that Dr. Jest might
wake up, say hello, and share his understanding of the future
with me.
It happens, in fact, that Dr. Jest did
eventually rise again from his epic sleep. But what wisdom he
had to offer on that occasion I couldn't tell you, for I had
given up the habit of my skittish stakeouts by then. Some
final transformation had come over me between visits to that
lonely place: the complex magic of the MOO grew gradually to
interest me less and less as a way of understanding the future
and more and more as a way of living the present, until one
day I teleported home from Dr. Jest's treehouse for the last
time, determined to wait no longer for a consultation with my
fellow doctor to give me what I wanted from the MOO, but to
wrest it instead from the very heart of the place. I was
resolved now, to make a life there—to loosen for a while the
RL ties that kept me still a sort of tourist on the MOO and to
give in, body and soul, to the same powerful gravity that kept
so many other MOOers logged on day after day and for hours at
a time.
And in the end that's just what I did,
so that for a brief, unforgettable season the buzzing haze of
VR came at last to envelop my existence: my small daily dramas
were absorbed into the MOO's teeming reservoir of small daily
dramas, my labors were directed as much toward the ongoing
construction of that virtual world as toward the quotidian
maintenance of my stake in the material one, and my days were
swept by the same broad currents of MOO history that gave rise
to the Bungle Affair and the momentous social changes that
followed on it.
That is all quite another story, of
course. Yet as I said before, it begins where Mr. Bungle's
ends, and there remains now only a very little of his to tell.
Dr. Jest did finally reawaken, it's true, one late-December
day—but he didn't even make it to January before he decided,
for no apparent reason but old times' sake, to go on a
late-night Bungle-grade rampage through the living room, thus
all but formally requesting to be hauled before an official
mediator and toaded with a vengeance. The new MOO polity
promptly obliged, and I, still busily contriving to loosen
those RL ties in preparation for my full-time residency,
missed by days my last chance to hear the doctor's story from
his own virtual mouth.
But this was no great loss, I suppose.
For after all what more could I have learned? Dr. Jest's
relapse into mindless digital violence, mocking as it did my
wishful projection of hard-earned wisdom onto him, was lesson
enough, driving home what Bungle's story in its fullest
implications should have already taught me by then: that
nothing in the MOO was ever quite what one imagined it to
be.
I would still have to learn this lesson
many times over, of course. I'd learn it again when on the eve
of my immersion in VR two separate and credible sources
revealed to me that the virtual psychosis of Mr. Bungle had
been even starker than anyone guessed: that the Bungle account
had been the more or less communal property of an entire NYU
dorm floor, that the young man at the keyboard on the evening
of the rape had acted not alone but surrounded by fellow
students calling out suggestions and encouragement, that
conceivably none of those people were speaking for Bungle when
he showed up in emmeline's room to answer for the crime, that
Dr. Jest himself, thought commonly to have reincarnated the
whole Bungle and nothing but the Bungle, in fact embodied just
one member of the original mob—just one scattered piece of a
self more irreparably fragmented than any RL multiple
personality could ever fear to be.
I don't know exactly how often it
occurred to me, in the VR-saturated months to follow, that
other such shards of Mr. Bungle's shattered identity might
lurk among the ethereal population I moved through on a daily
basis. But if they were there they never made themselves
known, and I certainly never tried to sniff them out. It was
far too late for that: the time had come for me to live in
LambdaMOO, and I no longer sought the company of ghosts.
RL NEW YORK CITY,
DECEMBER 1993
The Cubicle
You are in a half-height half-cubicle
in the editorial offices of New York City's Premier
Alternative Weekly Newspaper. The desk is cluttered with
books, magazines, office-wide memos, rubber bands, pens,
take-out menus. The wall is covered with some sort of private
iconography: postcards from Brazil, from California; a bumper
sticker from the “In-N-Out Burger” drive-thru chain; a scrap
of circuit board from inside an old computer; a photograph of
Claude Elwood Shannon, inventor of information theory, taken
in 1952; some photographs of friends, of family. The usual
desperate attempt, in short, at carving a personal space from
the employer's bland domain.
The_Author works here as a part-time
copy editor and sometime contributor.
You see a telephone and Atex
word-processing terminal here.
The_Author is here.
The_Author is eating Indian take-out
from a paper plate and moving commas around in someone else's
thoughts about the prospects for democracy in Haiti.
The_Author has been moving the other
writer's commas around for years but can't remember ever
having spoken to him directly. Once a week or so The_Author
calls this writer's words up on his terminal; once a week or
so he sends the words back to the writer through the office
network; once every couple months the two men pass each other
in the corridor and nod.
The_Author squints at his terminal and
tries to shake the knots out of a particularly knotty
sentence. He weighs the sentence in his mind, feeling for the
hidden shape of the writer's thoughts. But he is having
difficulty concentrating. His own words, he sees, are even now
being read in the cubicle next to his, his sentences weighed,
his commas moved around. It's distracting.
The telephone rings.
look phone
telephone
A sleek black corporate-issue
multilined office phone.
The telephone rings.
@exam phone
telephone (#20354) is owned by
VV_Publishing_Corporation (#666).
Aliases : telephone, phone, blower
A sleek black corporate-issue
multilined office phone.
Obvious verbs:
a*nswer phone
hang*up phone
g*et/t*ake phone
d*rop/th*row phone
The telephone rings.
The_Author answers the telephone.
The voice on the other end of the line
goes, “Hi. Julian?”
The_Author says, “Uh-huh.”
The voice on the other end of the line
goes, “It's me. Karen.”
The_Author has no idea who Karen
is.
The voice on the other end of the line
goes, “exu. Silly.”
The_Author almost yelps. He almost
throws the receiver back onto its cradle, as if it had bit
him.
The_Author says, instead, “Oh, hi.”
The voice on the other end of the line
goes, “Yeah, well, the fact checkers over there called me to
check some things in your article and I asked them to transfer
me over to you when we were done, so . . . heh, here I
am.”
The voice on the other end of the line
cannot be exu's.
The_Author has been interviewing exu on
the MOO (about the Bungle Affair, for the article that even
now is being read in the cubicle next to his) and he knows the
voice of exu pretty well by now. He knows it at least as well
as he knows the voices that inform the articles he copy-edits
every week, and he knows it doesn't suffer any from the
comparison. It is a smoother, livelier voice than most; it has
the clarity and the warmth of straight Scotch; it frankly
doesn't sound a bit like the high-pitched, slightly adenoidal,
slightly quavering tones The_Author's hearing from his
telephone.
The_Author is glad to hear them
nonetheless. Amid the interviews and other online
conversations, you see, he has begun to think of exu as a
friend. And so they talk, the Author allowing himself to
believe the voice on the telephone is really hers, enduring
for a while the strangeness of this unaccustomed medium.
Enduring it the way Ire sometimes, as a child, used to pull
himself out of a pool to shiver momentarily in cold air,
knowing he would feel that much warmer when he dove back
in.
The_Author says, “Hey, I'm thinking of
writing a book about the MOO. I'm thinking I'll, you know,
move in for a few months and see what happens and write it al1
up in the end.”
The voice on the other end of the line
goes, “Cool.”
VR
2
The Scarlet Balloon
Or TINYGEOGRAPHY, A Long View and an Overview
It was early in the afternoon of my
first day as a full-fledged inhabitant of LambdaMOO, and I was
in the living room.
It was very bright, open, and airy
there, with large plate-glass windows looking southward over
the pool to the gardens beyond. On the north wall, there was a
rough stonework fireplace. The east and west walls were almost
completely covered with large, well-stocked bookcases. An exit
in the northwest corner led to the kitchen and, in a more
northerly direction, to the entrance hall. The door into the
coat closet was at the north end of the east wall, and at the
south end was a sliding glass door leading out onto a wooden
deck. There were two sets of couches, one clustered around the
fireplace and one with a view out the windows.
There was a crowd in the living room,
as usual, but I didn't know anybody in it. Minnie was
there—I'd heard her name in conversation once or twice before—
and someone called Jimpsum, watching me with mild interest.
Lestat, the vampire, was also present, as were Lopher, Pensee,
Squib, phedro, Jackson, Portia, Mehitabel, Zaphtra, Spunkin,
Dweezilheimer, and a guest.
The guest was beige.
The crowd, in general, was doing what
you did in the living room, which was nothing in particular.
My screen was filling up rapidly with lines of idle chat and
random silliness.
A cockatoo perched near the fireplace
squawked, “Just another MOO.”
Pensee bravely
gags the cockatoo, read the next line on my screen, ignoring nipped
fingers and frantic squawking.
The cockatoo was a robot, programmed to
repeat at random a small selection of the hundreds of
statements spoken in its vicinity over the last few hours. The
cockatoo was immensely annoying, but its designer had
mercifully equipped it with a gag command, which shut it up
for a little while at least.
Spunkin, observing Pensee's brave
gagging of the cockatoo, thought, “Beat me to it.”
Spunkin thought this out loud,
actually, wrapping his thought in a little typographic thought
balloon, which looked like this:
Spunkin . o O (
Beat me to it. )
Pensee grinned.
Mehitabel said to Lopher, “Furrmi was
OK, I guess. Too many danmed typos, though.”
Lestat's soft chuckle echoed in my ears
as he returned to New Orleans to feed. Lestat was gone.
Lopher said, “Well, Furrmi and I weere
good drinking pals :)”
Mehitabel said, “Er, 'damned' that is.
Damn.”
Pensee said to Lopher, “Oh dear, I'm
sorry to hear that.”
Mehitabel blushed.
Chemo comes out
of the closet (so to speak ...), said my screen.
Jimpsum said, to no one in particular,
“Which of these is the most important to you in your life:
spiritual enlightenment, good grooming, sex, pizza, electrical
appliances, spray starch?”
Lopher said, “What can I say? I like
fuck ups, and he was one of the biggest;)”
Chemo slid open the glass door to the
deck and slipped out, sliding the door closed behind him.
Burg teleported in.
Template teleported in.
Mehitabel teleported out.
Spunkin thought, “Hmmm. Spray starch .
. .”
Minnie said, “NairTM.”
A teal guest came out of the closet (so
to speak . . .).
Portia said, “Good grooming before sex
and pizza after.”
The teal guest slid open the glass door
to the deck and slipped out, sliding the door closed behind it
(“it” being the guest, of course, which like all other guests
was of the neuter gender).
Spunkin fell down laughing at Portia's
answer.
Minnie said, “Or Trident Sugarless
bubblegum.”
Jimpsum chuckled politely at
Minnie.
Burg looked at Minnie with some
curiosity (or so Minnie's automated look-detector informed
us). Burg was the twenty-sixth to do so that day.
Jimpsum said, “Assume you have a
thousand dollars. Do you keep it, or go for what's behind door
number three?”
phedro exclaimed, “KEEP IT. ALL THE
PRIZES SUCK ANYWAY!”
Leda teleported in.
Minnie said to Jimpsum, “I'd give it to
a homeless person.”
Burg said, “Does anybody here go to
Northwestern?”
Minnie looks
preposterous with this halo on her head, Minnie
emoted.
Pensee grinned a little.
Template looked at Minnie with some
curiosity. Template was the twenty-seventh to do so that
day.
Jimpsum said, “If you could pass your
time with foolish daydreaming instead of doing a decent job of
what you're supposed to be doing, would you endlessly mull
over simple-minded questions like these?”
Inspector Gadget entered from the
north.
Burg teleported out.
Rob Lowe came out of the closet (so to
speak . . .).
Burg teleported in.
Spunkin said to Jimpsum, “Uh . . .
isn't that what we're doing now? :-)”
I exited to the north.
I was in the entrance hall.
It was a small foyer, the hub of the
currently occupied portion of Lambda House. To the north were
the double doors that formed the main entrance to the house.
There was a mirror at about head height on the east wall, just
to the right of a corridor leading off into the bedroom area.
The south wall was all rough stonework, the back of the living
room fireplace; at the west end of the wall was the opening
leading south into the living room and southwest into the
kitchen. And to the west was an open archway leading into the
dining room.
There was nobody there, and for that I
was grateful. The living room had its charms, to be sure, but
I preferred them in smaller doses than the one I'd just taken.
It exhausted me to try and follow the interactions in there;
keeping track of the disjointed threads of conversation and
the flighty comings and goings of the residents felt too much
like trying to navigate a cocktail party under the influence
of various psychotomimetic drugs.
Besides, even under the best of
circumstances I had never been that good at working a room,
and for anyone even moderately unsure of his social graces,
the living room was not necessarily the most delightful place
to be. Indeed, in my earliest visits to the MOO, the living
room had seemed to me an emotional torture chamber comparable
only to the luncheon tables of junior high school. There was
something downright cruel, I felt, in the architectural
decision that obliged guests and newbies—whose sleeping
quarters were located by default in the living room's coat
closet—to step out into a crowd of deftly chattering regulars
every time they logged on and made their first awkward forays
into the MOO. Even if the regulars hadn't sometimes gone out
of their way to make the new arrivals feel clumsier than they
already did (in an earlier design of the living room's sliding
glass door, for instance, any players too green to know they
had to type open door before
exiting would find their boneheaded, nose-flattening collision
with the pane announced to the room in humiliating detail),
the experience would still have been a trying one for many a
budding MOOer. Just as at the lunch tables of yore, the
challenge of finding one's place in that boisterous roomful of
strangers could be daunting, and it hardly helped matters to
learn, as one soon did, that beneath the surface of the living
room's giddy chitchat the regulars were often carrying on a
number of unseen conversations (both with one another, via the
whisper command, and with players
in other rooms, via the longdistance page command) in which, for all one
knew, all manner of sneering judgments were being passed on
one's ungainly newbie self.
Thankfully, within a few weeks of my
first visit I had found a new place to sleep—the little red
Monopoly hotel in the dining room, where I'd installed my
nineteen-inch TV set and crawled inside and called it home
(using, naturally, the @sethome
command to do so). And not long after that I had found a
new set of friends—through exu, who had taken me under her
wing and introduced me to her lively, bohemian circle. From
then on, whenever I connected to the MOO I usually teleported
straight to exu's room, a.k.a. the Crossroads, materializing
in the richly cluttered attic she'd constructed beneath the
roof of an old barn in the fields just west of Lambda House,
and lingering there into the night trading erudite quips and
lowbrow gossip with assorted anarcho-pagans, slacker
intellectuals, and queer-theorist computer programmers.
Some nights the party migrated over to
Interzone—a MOO founded by exu and her pals and modeled on
somebody's notion of a postapocalyptic Berlin— and I would
migrate with it. I'd set up an Interzone connection in a
second on-screen window and spend my evening there, meeting
new friends of exu's and switching briefly back to LambdaMOO
to add their Lambda character-names to the growing list in my
automated login-watcher, which alerted me when anybody I might
like to talk to happened to connect. exu was already on the
list, of course, as were Kropotkin and HortonWho; and soon
there was Sebastiano, who lived in a small gay community woven
into a rug hung from the wall of exu's barn; and S*, whose
principal Lambda character (loosely based on the woman who
shot Andy Warhol) lived inside a small, free-floating bead of
seawater; and Niacin, who had so many alter egos on Lambda it
was hard to say exactly where he lived.
And there was Gracile, too, and Elsa,
and Alva, all good for a late-night tête-à-tête, along with
others who would do in a pinch—the upshot being, in short,
that I no longer had to enter the living room with anxiety
knotting up my stomach, wondering if I was cool enough or
clever enough to rate a nod from the upper-classmen. I had my
own cool, clever crowd now, and I could take the living room
or leave it as I pleased, and so I did. I'd pop in now and
then to hook up with an acquaintance or two; or sometimes I'd
just wander in and sit there on the sidelines for a while and
watch, with quiet amusement, the dizzying, cartoonish goings
on.
Today, however, I had gone into the
living room in search of something other than companionship or
entertainment: I was looking for a new home.
I more or less had to, because the old
one, as I'd discovered to my dismay upon logging in earlier
that day, had apparently vanished into thin air. The
television set in which I slept was still intact, and I had
awoken as usual amid the fat-cushioned Oriental splendor with
which I had decorated it (drawing much of my inspiration, you
may as well know, from dim memories of I Dream of
Jeannie and the silken interior of Barbara Eden's magic
lamp). But when I tried to leave my lushly appointed lair I
noticed something was seriously amiss: the exit, which had
always reliably led through the glow of the television screen
out into the hotel room beyond, now led no place at all. It
wasn't that the exit was blocked, as a quick examination told
me, nor was it exactly a matter of the TV set having been
removed from its location. What appeared to have happened, on
the contrary, was that the location had been removed from the
TV set. The very ground on which it stood, that is to say, had
been snatched out from under it, for the hotel room itself was
gone, and gone without a trace—erased from the database
without warning or explanation or even, evidently, the
slightest concern for the resulting metaphysical quandary of
my television set, now separated entirely from the fabric of
MOOspace and bearing me along with it through the topographic
limbo into which it had been cast.
I was annoyed, but hardly mystified. I
quickly deduced the reason for this disruption. The hotel
room, I well knew, had belonged to a player named Ecco (who
was a dolphin and a very longtime presence on my login-watcher
list), but Ecco had not logged on in several months and as a
consequence she had been “reaped”—her account closed, her
character erased, her hotel room and other properties and
creations reduced to the electronic bits of which they were
made and redistributed to more active players. Ecco learned
that she'd been reaped not long after it happened, and I heard
the news not long after that, because she told it to me
herself—face-to-face, in the genuine, physical flesh. Which
was how she told me most things, actually, and which was also
only natural, considering the fact that Ecco, the late virtual
dolphin, was in real life Jessica, the woman I shared my home
and bed with.
As it happens, the death of Ecco and
the life I lived with Jessica were not unrelated phenomena.
We'd been together nearly three years by then—a record for me
after the decade or so of fitful, fraught liaisons that
comprised my adult love life, and an emotional achievement
topped only by my unprecedented decision (finally acted on
sometime in the midst of Dr. Jest's long sleep, and just a
month or two after I'd moved my TV set into Ecco's virtual
hotel room) to actually live under the same real-world roof
with her. Granted, it wasn't as if we'd gone so far as to get
formally hitched, but for the time being it wasn't as if I was
really capable of going that far anyway. For though I loved
Jessica dearly, and though I had nothing against marriage in
principle, in practice it was clear to me by now that a whole
thoroughly uninviting closetful of psychological baggage would
have to be sifted through before I might aspire to so
unflinching a state of union. It's embarrassing to admit, yes,
but there it is: I had reached that stage in some people's
lives when their jumpy progressions from one partner to
another can no longer pass for anything as rational as
shopping around or as liberating as free love. I suffered, I
knew, from a hard case of that pandemic set of affective
phobias and existential willies known to the layperson as fear
of commitment. The symptoms weren't anything too terribly
severe, but they were tenacious enough that my relatively
tranquil RL cohabitation with Jessica qualified as a small
personal miracle, which I regarded with the appropriate
measures of reverent wonder and superstitious anxiety.
Yet if this novel state of affairs
could be said to constitute a great leap forward in my
fumblings toward intimacy with the woman I loved, its effects
on our MOO relationship were nothing short of terminal.
Indeed, they could hardly have turned out otherwise, since the
very existence of that relationship had always largely
depended on the physical distance we'd maintained between us.
In the beginning, I suppose, the strange new world of
LambdaMOO may have brought us together in a spirit of shared
discovery, but it very soon became just a nice place to meet
on the nights we found ourselves bedding down separately in
our crosstown apartments—a warmer, somehow more physical plane
than the raw VR embodied by the telephone, where communication
was perhaps more efficient but the opportunities for an
emotionally convincing good-night cuddle (to say nothing of a
leisurely hour of lovemaking amid the plush furnishings of an
enchanted mansion's master bedroom) were not quite as ample.
It came as no surprise then, really, that our moving in
together brought an almost immediate end to our MOO
encounters, even though as a two-phone-line household we could
as easily have carried them on from opposite ends of our new
apartment as we had from opposite sides of the city. There
just wasn't much of a point anymore.
Nor evidently did any other very
compelling motives remain, in the wake of our domestic merger,
to keep Jessica returning to the MOO. My irregular visits
continued, of course, but hers grew increasingly infrequent
and eventually stopped altogether. Two months went by without
her logging in, then three, and then at last a fatal four—the
maximum period of inactivity allowed to LambdaMOO players by
the all-knowing but not exactly all-merciful wizards, who'd
recently been charged by the MOO electorate with maintaining a
strict regimen of population control and had taken to the task
with a more or less punctual ruthlessness.
And so Ecco had been reaped, and so I
had arrived a few days later to find my virtual home adrift in
the void. And so, now, I stood here in the entrance hall of
Lambda House, sizing up the room's potential as a setting for
my TV set.
The potential was not tremendous, but I
hadn't seen much better. Earlier in the day exu had offered to
let me put the TV in the junk-strewn yard in front of the
barn, and I had gratefully taken the offer into consideration.
Of my MOO friends, after all, exu was still the closest (we'd
even met in real life, briefly, when she and Kropotkin came to
New York for a short midwinter visit), and the idea of putting
roots down in her neighborhood appealed to me. But even in VR
there was something unsettling about the thought of leaving a
perfectly good piece of consumer electronics out in the heat
and dust of a barnyard. And though the living room seemed a
more obviously congenial locale, the instant I teleported into
that maelstrom of sociability I remembered why I'd been so
glad to stop sleeping in the coat closet. Besides, the living
room's owner didn't appear to be permitting anybody to set up
house within the room itself—nobody lived there but the
cockatoo, and all things considered, I supposed that was as it
should be. Every community, virtual or otherwise, needed its
public gathering places, and the living room could hardly
serve that function if individual players started staking out
their turf there.
As far as I could tell, however, nobody
did much gathering in the entrance hall. People mostly passed
through it, pausing for a while to chat with other
passers-through perhaps, but always ultimately heading
somewhere else. Nobody would care much if I made my home here,
I didn't think, and the location was certainly central.
I took another look around, which is to
say I typed the look command and
saw the entrance hall's description one more time:
It was still a small foyer, the hub of
the currently occupied portion of Lambda House. To the north
were the double doors that formed the main entrance to the
house. There was a mirror at about head height on the east
wall, just to the right of a corridor leading off into the
bedroom area. The south wall was all rough stonework, the back
of the living room fireplace; at the west end of the wall was
the opening leading south into the living room and southwest
into the kitchen. And to the west was an open archway leading
into the dining room.
I squinted my eyes and tried to picture
my nineteen-inch television set blending in with the
scenery—over there beneath the mirror perhaps, or next to the
globe that stood in the corner, or up against the rough
stonework of the south wall.
I couldn't see it.
I exited to the east.
I was in a corridor.
The corridor went east and west. There
was a door to the north leading to a powder room. A door to
the south led to the stairwell.
I went east.
The corridor ended here with short
flights of stairs going up and down to the east. South led to
one of the master bedrooms.
I went south.
I was in a large bedroom, the main
master bedroom of the house, overlooking the pool to the south
through a sliding glass door. There were louvered doors
leading west, and a north exit back to the corridor.
An obnoxious beeping sound was going
off every few seconds:
«beep» it
went.
«beep»
I ignored the beeping. It was just the
burglar alarm, and apparently you could waste an amusing few
minutes trying to solve the puzzle of how to shut it off, but
I had never bothered with it before and didn't feel like
trying now. I just pretended the noise wasn't there, as I
usually did—as I had, for example, the night Ecco and I had
had tinysex right here on the bed, heedless in our newbie
enthusiasm of the fact that the room was open to the public,
and that anybody could have walked or teleported in on us
right in the middle of our steamiest emotes.
«beep»
I smiled at the memory. And I realized
that this was not the place for me to make my new home,
either. I needed someplace a little farther off the beaten
path. Someplace cozy, and written well and warmly. Someplace
where the scenery had a little poetry in it, but wouldn't
clash with the matte-black finish of a magic television
set.
«beep»
But how was I to find this place? Just
wandering from room to room like this could end up taking
days, what with all the construction that had gone on in and
around Lambda House in its three years of existence. I needed
some way to step back and look at the MOO as a whole—some
vantage point beyond it all from which to scan the
possibilities.
«beep»
I thought a bit.
«beep»
I thought some more.
«beep»
I opened the sliding glass door and
headed south.
From the pool deck I walked west a bit,
into a relatively neglected corner of the Lambda gardens. A
bubble floated in midair there—I slipped inside it, smiled to
see one of TomTraceback's alter egos curled up asleep within,
then slipped back out and continued south. I passed the
blue-and-white awnings of a makeshift outdoor café. I crossed
a well-tended patch of turf complete with Italianate
reflecting pool and Victorian gazebo. At the south end of the
patch of turf I let myself through a wooden gate into a large
open field of tall grass, and there I stopped and had a look
at what I had come here for: three brightly colored hot-air
balloons, straining at their moorings.
I chose the scarlet one with the golden
lion figure sewn into its surface and clambered into its
basket. I'd never actually been up in one of these balloons
before, but the flight instructions, written on a placard
inside the basket, were simple to follow: I released the
ropes, rose up into the virtual sky, and drifted.
And as the words of the landscape
drifted along beneath me—the street in front of Lambda House,
the pool deck behind it, the little gazebo and the makeshift
cafe, all scrolling up my screen at the gentle pace of
breeze-blown flight—I did my best to see LambdaMOO in its
sprawling entirety, the better to find my place within it. For
this of course was what had led me to the balloons: I wanted
to know the MOO as I might know a map, taking in the breadth
of its topography with the single, sweeping gaze of a
bird's-eye view, looking down from up here where the virtual
birds would have been flying if anyone had bothered to write
them in.
Unfortunately, however, birds were not
the only thing missing from these heights. The sky program was
a clever one (conceived and designed by the industrious Dif, a
relative newcomer who would eventually be appointed one of the
MOO's few RL-female wizards), but it apparently lacked the
intelligence to provide the coherent overview I sought,
instead offering balloon-travelers only a randomly sequenced
selection of the texts describing LambdaMOO's various outdoor
locations. This proved a nice enough way to get acquainted
with the range of building activity going on in the environs
of the house, but it told me little about the overall shape of
the terrain. Soon I was floating over hilltops, woods,
castles, apartment complexes, the Colorado Rocky Mountains,
and even something that looked a lot like the entire country
of Brazil, with no sense whatsoever of how any of these places
was connected to any other, or even whether they were
connected to the greater topology of the MOO at all. I felt no
less lost now than I had before I'd climbed into the balloon,
and all the more anxious to somehow orient myself. Was there
no way, I wondered, to catch an
end-to-end glimpse of the MOO? Could the balloon not rise any
farther perhaps?
I checked the instructions: it could. I
turned on the burner momentarily, and the balloon climbed
higher—as high, in fact, as it could go. Surely now the view I
had taken to the sky for would come into focus. Expectantly, I
typed look down, and the following
words slid across my screen:
As you drift,
you see all of LambdaMOO spread out below you. It's hard to
pick out details from such a high
altitude, though.
And what else could I do then but
smile? The sky was only telling me to do what all MOOers must
in order to feel themselves in place within VR, and what I
should have known to do all along: fill in the details on my
own. The sky was telling me to use my imagination now as I
used it everywhere else in the MOOish world, to wrap it around
the skeletal words of which that world was made and bring them
to life inside my head. So I did as I was told. Inside my head
I started building the map I craved, putting it together from
a grab bag of mental images and phrases I had gathered over
the course of all my previous visits. It looked, more or less,
like this:
Near the northeast corner stood the
map's anchoring feature—Lambda House, of course, three stories
high and counting, an immense split-level absurdity mixing one
part Gothic gloom to four parts California ranch-style cheer.
Outside the front door of the house, to the north, a road ran
west into nothingness, and north of that road some rarely
visited commercial buildings had been erected. South of the
road, and west of the house, the fields began: the barn was
there, a gypsy camp, a landing site for spaceships, a haunted
graveyard, and so on off into the western hills, which sloped
gently upward and then down to the beaches of the virtual
Pacific. Back in the other direction, east of the fields and
south of the house, the backyard spread comfortably,
accommodating the pool and the hot tub and the cafe and the
gazebo, not to mention a pleasantly climbable oak tree and a
challengingly navigable hedge maze. Further south lay the
field of hot-air balloons, and a forest of old-growth trees,
and inside that forest a handful of gardens scattered here and
there along with, if memory served me, a cottage or two.
All in all, the map came together
rather nicely, I thought. Until I thought further. For the
picture that had thus far formed in my head, I quickly
realized, really represented only a thin slice of the MOO's
actual geography. Missing, for starters, was the fairly
extensive subterranean MOO: the lush, verdant lands hidden in
caverns directly below the gazebo, the shopping mall that
radiated out from Lambda House at basement level, and other
underground regions I presumably had yet to stumble across.
These would all have to be traced onto the map somehow, as
would the even vaster areas carved unobtrusively out of
MOO-space by various dizzying tricks of scale. There were the
player homes tucked inside television sets and bubbles and
drops of seawater, for example; there was that spacious and
often bustling nightspot, Club Doome, located at the corner of
an urban intersection shrunk down into a model railroad set in
the mansion's guest room; and perhaps most dizzying of all,
there was the Earth itself, spinning quietly on the axes of a
globe in the entrance hall, medium-sized to all outward
appearances but of planetary magnitude once you stepped into
its atmosphere— and growing more capacious all the time as
newly arriving MOOers added fond simulations of their
hometowns, home states, and home countries to the globe's open
database.
As difficult as such spatial
perversities were to keep straight in my mental image of the
MOO, however, there were other locations even harder to fit
into the map. What to do, for instance, with the quaint little
cosmic wormholes that lay strewn about the MOO like so many
Easter eggs—the magical books, mirrors, paintings, and
plastic-snow-filled crystal balls that upon being opened,
gazed at, shaken, or otherwise engaged became portals into
parallel universes of one sort or another? Where were these strange dimensions in
relation to the already quite sufficiently strange one in
which Lambda House existed?
And more naggingly, where exactly were
all the hundreds of places whose owners had never even
bothered to link them into this loopy, post-Euclidean
geography, choosing happily or lazily to reside in the
featureless nowhere-land my television set had lately been
banished to? Did these free-floating locales perhaps share the
same conceptual space occupied by the so-called satellite
MOOs—the breakaway worlds like Interzone or
aCleanWellLightedMoo (established by a group of Lambda
old-timers and dedicated to the fiercely realistic recreation
of a small piece of the outskirts of Mankato, Wisconsin),
which ran on computers thousands of miles from Palo Alto but
remained linked by ties of history and community to the
homeworld that spawned them?
I tried once more to envision it all.
The house and the surrounding lands. The subterranean realms
clinging to the underside of MOOspace. The bubble homes and
parallel worlds swelling like n-dimensional wasp galls within
the very tissue of it. The nonregion of unlinked places
wrapped in a kind of cluttered orbit around the topologically
correct core perhaps, with the satellite MOOs orbiting out at
a much farther and much less crowded remove.
Thus summarized, the big picture did
indeed seem finally to cohere—but only as long as I ignored
the radical discontinuities and physical paradoxes I was
necessarily papering over in my effort to imagine any sort of
big picture at all. The harder I tried to reconcile these
recalcitrant realities with my vision of the MOO, the fuzzier
that vision became. And the more consideration I gave to the
equally recalcitrant fact that the MOO's geography, besides
being a deeply chaotic thing, was a highly volatile one as
well, with random regions being built in and removed all the
time, the closer the vision came to falling apart altogether.
I began to realize why so few maps of the MOO had ever been
attempted, and why the few that did exist mapped only the
simplest details—a floor or two of the house, say, or the
broad outlines of the beach-front regions—while often
qualifying their own efforts with tacked-on disclaimers about
the inherent instability of the terrain.
And then, looking down from my balloon
at the inscrutable details of the landscape far below, I
realized something else. It occurred to me that there was in-fact one map that represented
the width, breadth, and depth of the MOO with absolute and
unapologetic reliability—and that map was the MOO itself.
This was not the most esoteric of
epiphanies, of course. It doesn't take a whole lot of thinking
about MUDs, after all, to come up with the proposition that a
MUD is, at bottom, simply another member of that broad class
of representations specializing in the schematic depiction of
place, and generally known as maps.
And yet, if I would have you understand
the deep impression that this insight made on me, I must ask
you now to join me in a detour from my account of life on
LambdaMOO while we consider just what sort of map a place like
Lamb-daMOO might be, and how it got that way. I must ask you,
in other words, to delve with me into a brief genealogical
history of the MOO, beginning roughly in time immemorial.
The vastness of the time frame is
inevitable, I'm afraid, for any historically complete taxonomy
of the human innovations ancestral to LambdaMOO must really
start where humanity itself did: at that elusive evolutionary
moment when the strictly private act of imagination blossomed
into the preeminently social one of representation, and the
machinery of culture was born. Language, narrative, ritual—all
of these are engines for the creation of virtual realities,
and always were, for always they have served first and
foremost to allow two or more minds to occupy the same
imaginary space. And always that imaginary space has stood as
a challenge to technology, or maybe a plea: to make the space
more vivid, more substantial, to give it a life of its own.
Primitive inscription was the earliest device to answer the
call; painted cave walls and graven clay tablets lent images
and words for the first time a kind of autonomous existence,
independent of the bodies whose fleeting speech and gestures
had hitherto bound them. But the drive to perfect the
technology of representation hardly stopped there, needless to
say, and it's nothing less than the entire history of this
drive to perfection that comprises the proper genealogy of
VR—the full record of every technique ever devised for making
the shared illusion of representation come more convincingly
alive, from the venerable conventions of perspective drawing
and of the realist novel to the latter-day wizardries that
have given us photography, television, Disneyland, and 3-D,
smellovisual, surround-sound cinema.
It is possible, however, and in the end
probably more enlightening, to tell a less ambitious story
about the lineage of LambdaMOO. For just as nothing puts us
humans more precisely in our place amid the abundant and
interconnected branches of life's family tree than the
observation that we are descended from apes, so too the MOO's
place in the evolutionary history of the virtual is perhaps
best grasped by considering the relatively simple fact of its
descent from maps.
Whence maps themselves arose, I
couldn't rightly say. As for their present-day status as a pet
metaphor of certain delirious strains of postmodernism
(according to which the image of a huge map overgrowing and
ultimately replacing the territory it charts—Jean
Baudrillard's “finest allegory of simulation”—condenses
everything you need to know and dread about the decay of the
real in contemporary culture), I assure you it isn't
theoretical modishness that leads me to locate the origins of
the MOO in the invention of cartography. Any close encounter
with a map is all it takes, really, to sense the embryonic
MOOspace embedded within it. Just look at a map yourself for a
while and try, as you look, to resist the urge to imagine
yourself transplanted into the tiny territory spread out
before you, riding the tip of your own colossal index finger
down toy rivers and over minute mountain ranges, hopping
flealike from city to city as your giant gaze flits across the
chartscape. More than most other traditional ways of
representing the world, maps conjure a vision of
representation itself as a space the viewer might enter into
bodily, a construct not merely to be comprehended but to be
navigated as well. They invite interaction, and of course they
frustrate it too: their smooth surfaces remain impenetrable,
like shop windows, inspiring in the most avid map-gazers a
yearning that has less to do perhaps with simple wanderlust
than with an ancient dream of literal travel into the regions
of the figurative.
Small wonder, then, that the earliest
appearances of maps seem to have been followed not long after
by the first attempts to shatter their surfaces and place the
viewer, as it were, inside them. Board games is what we would
call those attempts today, but that shouldn't keep us from
recognizing them as crude realizations of the map's implicit
interactivity. Nor should it dissuade us from suspecting that
the impulses behind their invention were far from trifling.
After all, the oldest game of all—the casting of lots—began as
a device for divining the will and wisdom of gods, and the
history of games in general remained entwined for millennia
with that of religious and magical ceremony. Is it such a
stretch, then, to speculate that the oldest of board
games—which seems to have been a prehistoric, northeast-Asian
sort of Parcheesi in which tiny horsemen raced each other
around a circular chart not dissimilar in design to the
earliest maps of the world—enacted for its players a voyage
through the shadow world of the imagination, the world where
gods dwelt and that the still-novel technologies of
representation brought to life?
Not that the game wasn't also,
undoubtedly, something very much like fun. But even fun has
its serious dimensions, and in the case of board games
(leaving aside those that, like Scrabble, for instance, don't
in effect represent any sort of navigable territory) the fun
to be had has always to an exceptional degree depended on and
referred back to the dread seriousness of fate. The ancient
racing games evolved quickly into games of battle like
checkers and chess, and much later into economic contests like
Monopoly and the Game of Life, but what has remained a
constant in their appeal is that they quite literally map the
real world of day-to-day and ultimately life-and-death
existence onto the timeless and ultimately inconsequential
realm of the imagined. They promise a temporary escape from
the inescapability of history (whether personal or global)
into a place where history is just a simulacrum built of
rules, turns, strategies, and dice rolls, a weightless flow in
which no outcome is so fatal that it can't be rewritten the
next game around. After all these years, in other words, board
games continue to show their religious roots, since even our
simple, secular delight in these rough-hewn virtual worlds
turns out to be, in a sense, just another way of wrapping our
hearts and minds around religion's primal conundrum: the
cosmic raw deal that gave us each just one life to live.
Still, secular delight is also, in
another sense, simply its own reward, and if the tension
between reality and unreality was always the source of the
board-gamer's delight, then it stood to reason from the outset
that a heightening of that tension would increasingly be
sought by players as the games evolved. With other sorts of
games, of course, gambling has long been the preferred means
of flavoring the airy stuff of play with the rugged feel of
real-life results, but tellingly enough, this quick-and-dirty
injection of genuine fate never became much of a fixture of
board games. Instead, starting with the archaic precursors of
chess, they have more often borrowed from real life not its
consequences but its complexity. With the arrival of chess
itself in courtly sixth-century India—and with the later
development of the East Asian game of Go—the board game
attained a degree of tactical intricacy that remained
unsurpassed for hundreds of years, suggesting perhaps that for
the time being the form's evolving complexity had actually
outpaced that of social reality.
By the middle of this century, however,
reality was catching up with a vengeance, and for the first
time board games of a significantly hairier complexity than
chess's began to appear. Inspired, no doubt, by the
increasingly media-blitzed busyness of the postwar information
landscape—and nurtured, obviously, by the sudden abundance of
leisure time in postwar consumerist societies—these new games
carried out their inherited role of simulating history with an
unprecedented and often overwhelming attention to detail.
Their earliest exemplars were the monumental war games
produced since the 1950s by the Avalon Hill company: played on
towel-sized, geographically precise maps of combat sites like
Gettysburg, Stalingrad, or Waterloo, encrusted with arcane
rules and timetables designed to model actual conditions of
battle, and littered with hundreds of miniature playing pieces
all subtly different from one another in their designated
abilities, the games demanded a certain obsessive fortitude
just to get through the instructions, let alone to commit to
the hours, days, or even weeks a single game might take to
play.
But even these tabletop sagas proved to
be light diversions compared to the groundbreaking genre that
emerged from their midst in 1973, when two veteran wargamers
named Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson introduced a new game they
called Dungeons and Dragons. Abandoning the typical
military-historical setting in favor of a mythical age peopled
by wizards, dwarves, elves, and other Tol-kienesque entities,
D&D (as millions of aficionados would later routinely
abbreviate it) took wargaming into a whole new conceptual
world as well, turning it into an endeavor so involved and
involving that it became, in some ways, difficult to recognize
as any sort of game at all.
The most obvious of D&D's
novelties, perhaps, was its near-total indifference to what
had until then supplied the formal cornerstone of virtually
every game in existence—direct competition between players.
Collapsing the wargamer's swarming battlefield of units into a
single heroic character loaded with dozens of precisely
defined attributes, skills, and possessions, the rules didn't
prohibit player-characters from fighting against each other,
but they made it much more interesting for them to band
together instead and set off on lengthy, shared adventures.
These adventures were designed and refereed by a godlike
metaplayer known as the dungeon master, who threw potentially
lethal monsters and other dangers at the players and awarded
ever-more-impressive powers to the survivors in accordance
with a mind-numbingly complicated set of rules. Roughly
speaking, then, there was a point
or two to it all, but winning wasn't one of them. In fact,
nobody ever clearly won the game, and for that matter no game
ever clearly ended: players simply battled on from adventure
to adventure until their character was killed, at which point
they felt a little sad, maybe, and then created a new
character, so that in principle, games might go on for as long
as anyone cared to play them. In practice, they sometimes
lasted years.
Such elaborately structured
open-endedness brought board-gaming closer than ever, of
course, to the free-form complexity of real life itself, and
this was no small contribution to the evolutionary history of
virtual worlds. But in the end, D&D's truly pivotal role
in that history should really be credited to a subtler
breakthrough: its slight yet radical redesign of the
millennia-old relationship between the board-game player and
the board. Dungeons and Dragons succeeded as no game ever had
at slaking the ancient desire of the map-gazer to enter the
map, and it did so, paradoxically enough, by simply taking the
map away. Drawn up fresh by the dungeon master with every new
adventure, the D&D map remained hidden from the players at
all times, its features revealed only as the players
encountered them in the course of adventuring, and even then
only by the DM's spoken descriptions. Gone was the omniscient,
bird's-eye perspective that had always undercut map-gaming's
illusion of immersion, and in its absence game-play took on a
near-hallucinatory quality so integral to the _ experience
that the official Player's Handbook
now actually begins with vaguely shamanistic tips on how
best to achieve it:
“As [the dungeon master] describes your
surroundings, try to picture them mentally,” advises the
manual, walking novices through a hypothetical labyrinthine
dungeon. “Close your eyes and construct the walls of the maze
around yourself. Imagine the hobgoblin as [the dungeon master]
describes it whooping and gamboling down the corridor toward
you. Now imagine how you would react in that situation and
tell [the DM] what you are going to do.”
What had happened, in effect, was that
the cloaking of the map had also hidden the player's token
self, the game-piece, thereby compelling the player to put
himself psychically in its place. As a result, D&D players
weren't merely represented by their
richly detailed characters—they were identified with them, in a
relationship so distinctively intimate that in time it came to
be recognized as the definitive feature of both D&D and
its scores of eventual imitators, which to this day are known
generically as role-playing games. As apt as the name is,
however, it doesn't do justice to the breadth of the
innovation, for the same mechanics that made D&D's style
of role-play so vivid also made D&D more than just a new
kind of game. They made it, frankly, a whole new mode of
representation—an undomesticated crossbreed, combining the
structured interactivity of the board game with the
psychological density of literary fiction, yet eluding the
ability of either medium to fully embody it. Indeed, the grab
bag of primitive media actually used in playing Dungeons and
Dragons—pencil and paper for making maps, dice for resolving
combat situations and character details, and the spoken word
for just about everything else—tended to give the impression
that the technology hadn't yet been invented that could
single-handedly manage the unwieldly hybridity of the new
form.
The impression was a false one,
however. The technology had been
invented, three decades earlier in fact, when a small army of
British and North American engineers perfected a species of
overgrown calculator known as the all-purpose digital
computer—and in the process inaugurated what might reasonably
be considered the single most revolutionary moment in the
history of representation since the emergence of language.
Even before the computer existed as functional hardware, the
theoretical work of mathematician Alan Turing had established
that the device was no mere number-cruncher, but rather the
ultimate representational Swiss Army knife, a universal
simulator capable in principle of symbolically re-creating the
dynamics of any real-world process it was possible to imagine.
Like the board game, then, only on a much grander scale, the
computer was a tool for creating artificial history, and by
the time Dungeons and Dragons appeared, computer scientists
had long been peering into their machines to watch such
complicated and consequential events as rocket flights,
managerial decisions, and World War III unfold in the
weightless, adjustable atmosphere of digital make-believe.
In comparison, obviously, the
simulation of an adventurous romp through faerie posed
scarcely a challenge to the technology, and given the
abundance of free time, enthusiasm, and sword-and-sorcery
geeks among the junior code-slingers of the day, it was really
only a matter of time before someone did the requisite
programming. In the event, it was three years after D&D
hit the stores that a pair of evidently underworked Palo Alto
hackers by the names of Will Crowther and Don Woods wrote the
world's first computer-based role-playing game, an instant
classic known variously as ADVENT, the Colossal Cave
Adventure, or simply Adventure.
Formally speaking, there was little
about the game that any D&D player would find surprising.
The principal setting was the bowels of a cavern crowded with
dwarves, dragons, and magic treasures, and though the position
of dungeon master was gone, the DM's basic functions were
performed transparently enough by the game's underlying code.
Written descriptions appeared onscreen in elegantly sparse but
otherwise entirely standard DM-speak (“YOU ARE IN A MAZE OF
TWISTY LITTLE PASSAGES, ALL ALIKE,” “YOU ARE IN A VALLEY IN
THE FOREST BESIDE A STREAM TUMBLING ALONG A ROCKY BED”), and
adventurers typed in stripped-down versions of typical D&D
player-statements (“GO SOUTH,” “DROP SWORD,” “KILL DRAGON”) to
which the program gave equally typical responses (“KILL THE
DRAGON WITH WHAT, YOUR BARE HANDS?”). Yet from a psychological
perspective, Adventure's automation of the dungeon master was
clearly no trivial modification. For as a direct result, the
rules that defined the game world suddenly felt a good deal more like those that
defined the physical world. No longer dependent on a human
referee's always revocable agreement to abide by them, the
binary-encoded laws of Adventure were maintained instead by
the same sort of logical machinery that had always enforced
the laws of nature: a nonnegotiable procession of unthinking
causes and inevitable effects. Any moderately skilled
programmer could always stop the game and rewrite its rules,
of course, but for anyone in the midst of exploring it, the
world of Adventure was as hard-wired as gravity, and almost as
convincing.
One particularly lifelike element no
one would find in that world, however, was other people. Quite
unlike Dungeons and Dragons, you see, Adventure was a solitary
entertainment, pitting a lone player against the creatures of
code that dwelled in the software recesses of the Colossal
Cave. It was also a high-quality, addictive entertainment, to
be sure, and wildly popular in computer labs throughout the
world. Yet anyone who came to the game seeking role-play at
its richest was bound to sense something missing—and once
again, as with the earlier leap from D&D to Adventure
itself, it was really just a matter of time before some
inspired young programmer took on the task of completing the
picture.
But time was aided, too, in this case,
by historical coincidence, for it happened that the
high-techies of Adventure's early years were just starting to
get used to a fairly radical notion about the computer:
namely, that it was an ideal tool for connecting its users not
only to complex, abstract realms of logic and data, but to one
another as well. The technology of computer-mediated
communications had been in its infancy at the start of the
'70s—when the first nodes of what would later become the
Internet were sprouting in Pentagon-fertilized fields of
academe—but it grew steadily, and in the final year of the
decade its coming of age was signaled by a cluster of landmark
developments. The earliest computer bulletin boards had been
wired into the phone system by pioneering PC hobbyists the
year before; the first commercial online services opened for
business not long after; the first Usenet newsgroups began to
circulate, stirring up a hint of the vast global storm system
of discussion they would eventually grow into; and last but
assuredly not least, code-smiths Roy Trubshaw and Richard
Bartle, both of them undergrads at Britain's University of
Essex, spent much of the year putting final touches on a
program that would at last fulfill the promise of computerized
role-play, allowing two or more geographically distant players
to enter the game at once.
Its name was MUD. The MU stood for
“multiuser,” and much later, as you may recall, the D would
commonly be taken to stand for “dimension,” but at the time
what it really stood for was “Dungeon,” in homage to a popular
Adventure knock-off known by that name. The game space itself
likewise leaned heavily on Adventure-inspired conventions, as
the generically evocative look and feel of the opening
description made plain:
You are stood on a narrow road between
The Land and whence you came. To the north and south are the
small foothills of a pair of majestic mountains, with a large
wall running around. To the west the road continues, where in
the distance you can see a thatched cottage opposite an
ancient cemetery. The way out is to the east, where a shroud
of mist covers the secret pass by which you entered The
Land.
Naturally, The Land was filled with the
usual automated hobgoblins and hidden treasures as well. But
there, precisely, MUD's debts to its predecessors ended,
because The Land was also filled with real live people, and
their presence introduced new elements of surprise and
camaraderie into computer-adventuring's clockwork worlds.
These elements, in turn, raised the attraction of those worlds
to an apparently irresistible level. By early 1980, the DEC-10
mainframe on which the new game was installed had been opened
up to logins from beyond the university, and it wasn't long
before the machine was swamped with an influx of players so
hooked that a near-total ban on outside MUD connections
(permitted by school authorities only between two and six
o'clock in the morning) did little to discourage them. “Even
at those hours,” Richard Bartle later recalled, “the game was
always full to capacity.”
Such a hit was bound to spread, of
course. Requests for copies of the game's core operating
system started coming in from around the world, and Bartle
honored them, exporting MUD code to Norway, Sweden, the United
States, and Australia (where in time the games'
network-clogging proliferation would lead to an official,
continentwide prohibition of them). Inevitably, other hackers
took to revamping and reinventing the program—streamlining its
inner workings, adding to the diversity and realism of its
features. And wherever new variants appeared, new worlds were
built around them, often retaining the stock sword-and-sorcery
thematics of the original MUD, but increasingly veering off
into realms of almost fetishistic specificity. Devotees of
Anne McCaffrey's dragon-happy fantasy novels stepped into
great scaly text-bodies to roam detailed recreations of the
books' faraway planets; Star Trek
fans built vast working models of the Enterprise and sailed them off through
MUDspace; college students erected simulations of their
schools and spent nights slashing giddily away at monstrous,
digital parodies of their professors.
Hundreds and thousands of person-hours
went into the collective design of these games, and many more
went into the often passionate playing of them— and all the
while the culture at large obliviously looked elsewhere for
visions of the mind-bending dream-tech of artificial worlds it
was beginning to sense computers had in them. Millions got
their first glimpses of the dream in early-'80s science
fictions set amid the gleaming, corporate geometries of a
place most memorably referred to (by novelist William Gibson)
as cyberspace, and millions more saw it later in breathless
media accounts of goggles-and-gloves contraptions being
patched together by starry-eyed Silicon Valley capitalists,
yet few people outside the MUDding community seemed to realize
that a global VR industry of sorts was already cranking out
one lucidly believable digital microcosm after another, more
or less just for the fun of it.
And even among the MUDders, it's safe
to say, not many saw with clarity just what an oddly
substantive sort of fun their pastime was on its way to
becoming. Right up to the end of the '80s, after all, all MUDs
were still at least ostensibly nothing more than games.
Granted, they were impressively elaborate games—no less
free-wheeling and engrossing than the pencil-and-dice
role-playing epics they descended from—but they were games
nonetheless, with specific adventures to be pursued, puzzles
to be solved, and typically, hierarchies of points-based
levels to be ascended (leading ultimately to wizard grade and
the right to build new regions and adventures into the game).
Even so, however, MUDders had long noted the marked tendency
of the game space to become a social space as well. Players
not infrequently stepped outside the game without leaving the
MUD, going “OOC” (or out of character) to hang out amid the
passing adventurers, to haggle over administration of the game
and its resources, to deepen the genuine friendships and
authentic antipathies formed in the midst of play. Something
very much like real community was coalescing at the edges of
all that make-believe, in other words, and though such virtual
communities were hardly rare in the online world, nowhere did
they enjoy as richly nuanced and concretely grounded a setting
as amid the gesturally expressive make-believe bodies and
psychically immersive make-believe landscapes of which MUDs
were constructed.
Despite their principal deployment as
games, then, MUDs were more than just incidentally serviceable
as a medium for broader forms of social intercourse. They were
in fact ideally suited for the role. And it may be that a
recognition of that fact was what led, late in the summer of
1989, to the final significant turn in the technological path
to LambdaMOO. Or it may not be. James Aspnes, the
Carnegie-Mellon grad student who took that turn by creating
TinyMUD,* the first of what would eventually be referred to as
the “social MUDs,” certainly didn't seem to think he was
inventing anything but a more fluid adventuring environment.
“I wanted the game to be open-ended,” Aspnes wrote later,
explaining his decision[2] to leave
the conventional framework of player-rankings and fixed goals
out of his new MUD. And open-ended the MUD indeed turned out
to be, though hardly in the familiar, structured manner made
standard long before by Dungeons and Dragons. The truth was,
TinyMUD really had no structure at all—it was literally
whatever its players wanted it to be. With building privileges
no longer limited to a wizard class, the topology of the MUD
quickly came to reflect the diverse whims and backgrounds of
the inhabitants, with virtual Taiwans popping up next to
virtual Cambridges, and Wesleyan University steam tunnels
leading to the buildings of a University of Florida campus. In
time there was even a full-scale replica of Adventure to be
found somewhere on the grounds, though it's unlikely many
TinyMUDders ever sought it out. For it was clear enough by
then that, whatever James Aspnes's original intentions may
have been, people didn't really come to TinyMUD to play
games.
What they did come for wasn't exactly
easy to pin down, but neither was it all that hard to
understand. They came to create, for one thing—to build spaces
and construct identities. They came, too, to explore the
sprawling results of all that creation. But mainly they came
for the simple reason that other people came as well. They
were there to talk, to tell jokes, to make love and fall in
it, to bitch and bicker and backstab. They were there, in
short, to make human contact, which by a hardly remarkable
coincidence seems also to be what most people are on this
planet for. Even less remarkable, then, are the facts that
TinyMUD, which its creator had expected to “last for a month
before everybody got bored with it,” instead grew fat and
thrived in various incarnations for years; or the fact that it
inspired a miniboom in the construction of MUDs generally and
social MUDs in particular; or the fact that its success almost
instantly began to attract the attention of scholars and
professional media developers, intrigued by the now amply
demonstrated depth and versatility of MUDs and eager to
explore their limits.
And what of the fact that the earliest
of such high-minded investigations was initiated by a
thirty-year-old Xerox researcher called Pavel Curtis? Surely,
in the context of the grand evolutionary narrative we've been
tracing, that particular point of information is among the
least remarkable of all. But as it is the point upon which the
entire narrative converges, let it be noted: that on the
morning of the day before Halloween, in the year 1990, Pavel
Curtis issued the command that for the very first time
summoned into existence LambdaMOO, a social MUD in the classic
mold, with little at that point to distinguish it from the
general run of TinyMUD's progeny aside from its exceptionally
powerful set of world-constructing tools (built into the
original MOO code by its author, Stephen White) and the fact
that a major multinational corporation would be keeping a
close watch, through Curtis, on the world LambdaMOO's players
constructed with those tools.
Of course, given the relatively
hands-off nature of the experiment, even the latter
distinction didn't ultimately make much of a difference to
life within the MOO. Nor might it have meant much outside the
MOO either, had the multinational corporation in question been
a different one. But inasmuch as Curtis worked for the same
Xerox think tank that had essentially dreamed up the personal
computer from scratch a decade and a half before (only to
watch helplessly as Xerox marketers dropped the ball and a
tiny start-up by the humiliatingly cutesy name of Apple
carried it into the end zone), his employer-sanctioned
interest in MUDs rather conspicuously suggested that they
might contain the seeds of the next revolution in the nature
of the human-computer interface.
Thus, where TinyMUD had cleared the way
for research into MUDs as a serious technosocial phenomenon,
LambdaMOO ushered the new field in with a loud and
legitimating fanfare. Before long, ethnographers,
sociologists, and literary theoreticians were poking their
heads into the nearest MUD for an often illuminating and
invariably gratifying glimpse (here was a world, after all, in
which the social construction of reality wasn't a matter
merely of academic dogma but of basic physics), and the Net
was peppered with research-oriented MUDs that went beyond
LambdaMOO's ant-farm experimentalism into areas of ever-more
pragmatic application. There were MUDs designed to teach kids
about science and programming while they played, local-area
MUDs where teams of office workers gathered to coordinate
ongoing projects, a MUD where far-flung astronomers came to
trade observations amid the whirling orbs of a virtual solar system, and even, perhaps
inevitably, a MUD reserved for media researchers who felt like
getting together to talk about, well, MUDs mostly.
So that by the summer afternoon of 1994
on which I showed up at Lambda-MOO to wrestle with the curious
case of the dislocated television set, the world I happened to
be coming home to was but a single member of an increasingly
diverse ecology of such worlds. The three or four hundred MUDs
now up and running embodied a range of applications stretching
from the still very popular hard-core adventure games through
the more broadly focused social and research MUDs and on out
to the first limited prototypes of schemes in which the entire
Net might someday be blanketed by one big MUD, its code
distributed across all the world's computers and its sprawling
terrain providing context for every type of digital
interaction conceivable. More and more, as well, the tens of
thousands who inhabited these worlds were dividing into loose
and loosely antagonistic subcultures reflective of their
divergent interests, with habitués of the social MUDs
sometimes jocularly disparaging the adventure worlds as so
much “hack-and-slash” childishness, and adventurers in turn
dismissing the social worlds as “chat systems with
furniture.”
Despite the growing differences between
MUDs, however, it was an underlying unity that still
ultimately defined them. For just as there had never been any
MUD so steeped in playful make-believe that it wasn't also
fertile ground for serious emotional connections among its
players, likewise there was yet no MUD so dedicated to serious
purposes that it could do without the elements of playful
make-believe that made it function. All MUDs, that is to say,
existed in a conceptual twilight zone between the games from
which they had evolved and the real-life social meshes they
had come to resemble, and at bottom it was in this irreducible
ambiguity—rather than in any of the increasingly various uses
to which MUDs were being put—that their deepest significance
lay. They constituted neither an escape from historical
existence nor simply an electronic extension of it, but rather
a constantly disputed borderland between the two— between
history and its simulation, between fate and fiction, between
the irrevocable twists and turns of life and the endlessly
revisable possibilities of play.
If I make any great claims for the
curiousness of LambdaMOO, therefore, understand that they are
really only claims on behalf of MUDs in general, and also,
perhaps, on behalf of what can really only be called the human
condition. Like all MUDs, you see, LambdaMOO was still
essentially a map, and like all MUDs it mapped a place as yet
uncharted by conventional cartographic means: the strange,
half-real terrain occupied by the human animal ever since it
started surrounding itself with words, pictures, symbols, and
other shadows of things not present to the human body. It's a
place we're all well-acquainted with, of course, since we live
in it from the moment we begin to talk till the moment we have
nothing left to say. But have you never noticed how
seductively exotic even the most familiar ground can come to
look, when it is looked at in the tiny abstractions of a
map?
It was that sight, at any rate, that I
was looking down upon from up there in my scarlet balloon—and
yes, the way I saw it, it truly was a sight to behold.
I felt like Balboa on the cliffs at
Darien up there. I felt like Armstrong in the Sea of
Tranquility. It was as if, in finally understanding that the
MOO and my hoped-for map of the MOO were in fact one and the
same, I had stumbled upon some mythic place I never thought
I'd see, a latter-day El Dorado or Shangri-La that I had long
heard rumors of but couldn't have guessed I'd someday get to
gaze on with my own two eyes.
It was no paradise I had discovered, of
course. Not really. The mythic place I had in mind was in fact
that same unfortunate, legendary empire that so fascinated
Baudrillard—the realm whose cartographers once produced a map
of such faithful detail it blanketed the entire imperial
territory, bringing on the decline of the empire and with it
the eventual rotting away of the map. This fable, as told or
perhaps retold by the great Argentine storyteller Jorge Luis
Borges, had long since worked its way into the mythologies of
postmodernism, looming for years at the edge of any
conversation in which anyone took for granted the fundamental
and probably fatal inability of contemporary society to
distinguish between reality and simulacrum.
But if the usual tones in which the
fable was discussed were either dark with foreboding or cool
with irony, my own mood now was anything but. Bather than
dreading the cultural implications that seemed to follow from
LambdaMOO's confusion of map and territory, I found myself
frankly delighting in them. At that moment, the view from the
balloon looked to me like anything but a metaphor for a
culture suffering through the final, delirious stages of
advanced modernity. It looked, instead, like nothing so much
as a metaphor for the cure. For though I had always known that
the MOO was a place people came to in part to exercise and
share their creativity—to make culture, in short—what I saw
now for the first time, gazing groundward in my attempt to
make some sense of this convoluted cosmos, was the remarkable
cultural object all that collective creativity had produced. I
saw a territory that mapped the community that had made this
map, gradually shaping it over months and years of small acts
of construction. I saw my own little lost piece of that
territory—the television home I had so carefully crafted and
the modest corner of my dear, departed Ecco's hotel room that
she had once upon a time set aside for it—multiplied by the
thousands into a complex chart of all the individual
imaginations and moments of connection that flowed daily
through the MOO.
I saw, in other words, the elusive and
poignantly human beauty infused in this gnarled and ungainly
shape, and if I didn't exactly see in it a work of art as
well, that was only because I sensed modernity's working
definitions of the term were inadequate to so organically
communal a mode of creation. No lone, heroic figure had made
LambdaMOO, nor could its meaning be displayed in any museum or
sold in any gift shop. It existed for and in the webwork of
relationships that built it, accumulating the kind of raw and
life-infested aesthetic power found otherwise only in such
grand, undirected collaborations as coral reefs and city
skylines. Yet unlike the reef, with its millions of
indistinguishable constituent microorganisms, LambdaMOO let
every collaborator's individuality glint amid the grandiosity
of the whole. And unlike the cityscape, with its millions of
residents shut out of the high-stakes development game,
LambdaMOO let all inhabitants participate in building the
world they inhabited.
It seemed too idyllic to be true, this
vision, but I couldn't quite bring myself to doubt it. By now
I was thinking rapturously populist thoughts in the key of
Walt Whitman and Woody Guthrie and feeling mildly embarrassed
for myself even as I thought them, yet I couldn't shake the
feeling that my excitement was somehow justified, that I had
stumbled upon a creative form more radically democratic than
any I was familiar with, and more meaningfully participatory
than any critic of the alienating modern gap between artist
and spectator could ever hope for. That I had found this form,
moreover, not among the guardians of some embattled premodern
culture struggling to hold on to its authenticity, but
precisely here, in this hothouse of simulation erected on the
high frontier of late technological culture, seemed less a
reason for reconsidering my rapture than a cause to savor it
all the more.
I savored it, therefore—and knew right
then and there that the place I was seeking for myself in
LambdaMOO was going to have to be more than just a cozy nook
somewhere. Nor could my simple television set be the only
contribution I made to the MOO's evolving geography. I wanted
to leave a far more memorable mark on this world than that,
and after all who wouldn't, seeing it as I now saw it?
Someday, I sensed, LambdaMOO and all the other player-built
MUDs might very well be remembered as the beginning of a long,
vibrant tradition of similarly emergent digital art forms. I
didn't want to live to regret not having participated more
fully in this moment after it was gone.
And thus it was, dear reader, that the
Garden of Forking Paths—my own egre-giously sprawling addition
to the egregious sprawl of LambdaMOO—was born.
Or rather, I should say, thus it was
that the garden was born again. For I had actually conceived
the project some months before, when a nascent fascination
with the ancient Chinese fortune-telling system known as the I
Ching (or Book of Changes) had sparked an urge in me to build
a working model of the oracle inside the MOO. It was an
obvious idea, in some ways. Based on a gracefully intricate
binary code in which six consecutive tosses of coins or sticks
generated one of sixty-four possible six-bit bytes (or
hexagrams), each pointing to a particular reading from the
book's cryptic wisdom, the I Ching had effectively been an
exercise in digital programming from the moment of its
pre-Confucian invention. Nor did this make it especially
unique among fortune-telling devices and other games of
chance. Generally speaking, such things were a cinch to
translate into the algorithmic mechanics of VR, and LambdaMOO
was fairly littered with them: a full-featured casino awaited
visitors to the basement shopping mall, a Crazy Eight Ball lay
buried in the pile of board games heaped in the dining room, a
mechanized gypsy woman read fortunes to players passing
through the encampment south of the barn. There was even, for
that matter, a rather nicely designed I Ching book, complete
with built-in coin-tossing mechanism, to be found also amid
the wagons of the gypsy camp.
But I had something a little less
literal in mind. Why re-create the I Ching as it existed in
real life, after all, when VR gave me the chance to set the
oracle's complexities free from the amber of their material
shape and embody them anew in whatever imaginable form I
wanted? I racked my brains trying to picture what that
reembodiment might look like. I toyed with this idea and that,
considered talking books and mystic slot machines, drew
sketches and diagrams, grew fed up with them all, then
finally, on the brink of settling for some unsatisfying plan
whose details I have happily forgotten, I hit on the answer.
My I Ching would not be a book, exactly, nor would it quite be
a machine, but like the MOO itself it would be partly a
combination of both and mostly something else entirely: it
would be a place.
And as soon as I guessed that much, the
rest came to me in a quick, bracing shower of afterthoughts.
The place, I knew, would be a monumental natural landscape,
shot through with a filigree of repeatedly branching paths.
Visitors would start out in the center of the terrain, where
they would flip a virtual coin to determine whether to take a
northern route or a southern one. Either direction would lead
them to a fork in their path, and the coin again would tell
them which way to go, leading them to the next fork, where
they would once more follow the coin's direction, and so on.
After the sixth coin toss, the wanderers would have made
enough binary choices to spell out a hexagram—and would also
have reached their destination, where they could then either
meditate on the scenery (depicting some aspect of the imagery
traditionally associated with the hexagram they had just
traced) or else go for a quicker and dirtier enlightenment,
typing the command look within to
call up instantly the relevant text from the Book of
Changes.
Now, I Ching purists might object that
my scheme simplified certain crucial aspects of the
consultation process, and I wouldn't argue with them, but the
idea of the garden seemed vibrantly right to me nonetheless.
For the most part its simplicity struck me less as an
abridgment than as an echo of the I Ching's own elemental
elegance. And its user interface likewise struck me as nicely
attuned to the nature of the oracle, which typically, I knew
from experience, was consulted at moments when one's life path
had reached a fork and the need for direction signs had become
acute. I liked this resonance in particular, and was pleased
as well to recognize a second one lurking within it—a second
text, not to be found in the pages of the I Ching but
definitely related to it, and more definitely related to my
long-term understanding of the MOO than I could at that moment
have guessed.
For I was thinking then of yet another
Borges story. This one told the tale of a captured Chinese spy
in World War I who discovered far from home and in the final
moments of his life the legacy of an accomplished ancestor,
one Ts'ui Pén, whose own final achievement had been the
composition of a book that was at once a “chaotic novel” and a
labyrinth. It was a labyrinth “forking in time, not in space,”
however—a violation of the terms of both conventional fiction
and daily existence, with their requirement that “each time a
man is confronted with several alternatives, he chooses one
and eliminates the others.” In Ts'ui Pén's fiction—to the
mournful admiration of his condemned descendant, whose own
self-chosen doom lay implacable moments away—all alternatives
were pursued, every fork in history's path taken. At each
instant of choice, the protagonist created “diverse futures .
. . which themselves also proliferate and fork,” producing a
convoluted “network of times” that embraced “all possibilities.”
This network was the labyrinth, and
though I'm aware that Borges's depiction of it has since been
glossed by techno-sawy literary critics as a premonition of
the branching digital structures underlying hypertextual
universes such as the World Wide Web, what I saw in it just
then was a crystalline image of the existential space the I
Ching aimed to guide its readers through—and that I now aimed
obliquely to model in virtual space. I had no hope of
rendering the concept as exquisitely as Borges had, but I
decided nonetheless that it wouldn't be too vain of me to
borrow for my work the name he'd given both his story and the
remarkable artifact it framed. For wasn't my creation the real
“Garden of Forking Paths” anyway? Ts'ui Pén's only
metaphorically deserved the title, after all, and here I was
about to build the literal thing—garden, paths, forks, and
all.
Or so I fondly believed. But I wasn't
then figuring into my plans that same geometric proliferation
of possibility that had mired the last thirteen years of Tsui
Pén's life in an essentially unfinishable effort. My own task
wasn't quite so open-ended, of course, but as I quickly
discovered once I broke ground on the garden, even the six
simple choices the I Ching called for would require me to
build no fewer than 127 locations, each one containing either
a fork or a hexa-grammatic end point. And though it was no
great challenge to carve the basic shape of all those sites
out of thin MOO air (I took care of that right away,
mindlessly typing the @dig command
127 times in a single late-night, finger-numbing frenzy),
composing the scenery for each of them was a far more daunting
matter. I wanted unique descriptions for every site, you
see—not just the final hexagrams, but every stop along the
way. I wanted every route to every destination to leave a
trail of indelible images in the traveler's mind, to fuse in
memory the I Ching's message and the path that led to it. And
I soon reached the conclusion that what I wanted was going to
cost me more late-night frenzies of composition than I could
possibly, in those early, tentative days of my relationship to
the MOO, afford to spend.
And so, almost as abruptly as I had
taken up the project, I let it drop. Which isn't to say I
threw it out: I didn't want to, and I didn't really need to
either, having carved its sixty-four pathways into a
palm-sized jewel-box landscape that fit almost unnoticeably
into the arabesque decor of my television set. I entered the
jewel box now and then, showed exu and other friends around
its barren, labyrinthine terrain, its fork-sites spreading
monotonously like so many fresh-built soundstages waiting for
the set crew to come fill them with the illusion of place.
Sometimes I took a crack at a description or two, and
sometimes I even pictured myself finally scrounging up the
hours and the inspiration to finish the job in its
overwhelming entirety. But mostly I thought I knew better.
Mostly I thought the garden was an engaging dream, and a nice
conversation piece, and ultimately just another monument to
the unearned ambition of newbies such as I, destined to
languish like dozens of other eternally half-done mega-objects
mothballed away in player-rooms across LambdaMOO.
But then on that first midsummer day of
my immersion in VR, I rode a balloon to the top of the sky and
looked back down on a MOO I hadn't quite recognized before,
and in that moment my prognosis for the Garden of Forking
Paths changed markedly for the better. All the sights and
insights that floated up to me in that high-flying basket—the
impossible, churning shape that the MOOish cosmos presented to
my mind's eye; the map that I saw inextricably embedded in
that shape and the cultural marvel that I saw in every wrinkle
of that map—they all added up in the end to just one
realization: I was going to build my garden after all.
It was going to be the mark I left on
LambdaMOO's map. And more than that, it was going to be my
homage to that map. For I understood now that at some not too
airy level of analogy, the garden was the spitting image of
the MOO that I was seeing for the first time that day—the MOO
whose history began somewhere on Asian steppes, millennia ago,
when humans first gazed fascinated at the tiny abstract
territory embodied in maps and decided they would ride their
tiny abstract horses into that place. The MOO that hovered
now, I Ching-like, between the seductive whimsy of a game and
the supple seriousness of life. The MOO that in the months
ahead would come to seem to me a catalog of all the human
hopes and anxieties that ride the border between what is and
what might be—from the Utopian longings surging through MOO
politics to the experimentalist urges and schizo-paranoid
tendencies amok in MOO identity play to my own lifelong
commitment jitters, soon sorely to be tested in this lush
terrarium of possibility. I would eventually see all these
emotions and all these MOOs reflected, honored, in the network
of paths and choices my garden was to come to be.
But for now I had seen all I needed to
see.
I let the balloon drift for a while. I
sank it on a downdraft to tree-top height, cruised randomly
till the barnyard came into sight below me, then pulled myself
up over the basket rim and leapt. No parachute, of course, and
no matter: I plummeted screaming to the ground, made a largish
crater there, and arose from it unscathed, like the textual
cartoon character I was.
Evening had come to the barnyard,
written into the description by a clever little algorithm that
kept track of the hour and season and supplied the appropriate
atmospherics. The barn rose up before me, its decade-old coat
of red paint chipped and peeling, the gray-brown shingles of
its roof covered with moss and withered leaves and festooned
at the eaves with clumps of twigs, dry
grass, and string, where swallows
have built their nests. Attached here and there to the
front of the barn was an eclectic but somehow meaningful
disarray of plastic doll heads, bright-painted animal bones,
and warped 45 rpm records, while old farm implements and
whimsical shrines littered the yard around me.
I smiled, recognizing exu's style in
the place and loving it. I decided then that I would gladly
take her up on her invitation after all, and lay my television
set to rest out here amid this handsome clutter. It hardly
mattered to me anymore that a barnyard was not the proper
place to put a TV set. The Garden of Forking Paths would be
finished soon enough, and when it was I could easily build a
cozy little cottage all my own just off the garden path. But
in the meantime I wanted most of all to make my home among my
friends, right here, where the closest of them had built a
place of memory and precious junk, and offered me a piece of
it.
I would have told her all this then and
there, except that exu had had to make a sudden disconnection
just a few moments before. She did most of her MOO-ing, I
knew, during whatever slack time she could scrape from her
office day job, and when she had to go, she had to go. I could
tell her in the morning, and she could attend to the
moderately complicated business of building my TV set into the
scenery here whenever she got a chance to. I didn't mind
waiting.
I wasn't, in fact, in much of a mood to
mind anything just then. I felt sated with the discoveries of
the day, and touched by exu's welcoming gesture, and at the
edge of those emotions I could feel the onset of a sort of
runaway affection I had come to think of as peculiar to VR—a
strangely weightless feeling that seemed unwilling to remain
attached to the particular people who brought it on. It tended
to expand out of all proportion, to seep gaslike through the
gauzy limits of whatever virtual object contained it and bathe
the surroundings in its pinkish haze, so that presently I
found myself wanting vaguely to hug not only exu, wherever she
might be, but the twisted old oak tree in the middle of the
barnyard, the barn itself perhaps, and maybe even the very
pixels of my computer monitor, if I could somehow manage
it.
I let the feeling pass unacted-on,
however, and did not rule out the possibility that I had
simply gone dizzy with hunger. For it was true that my stomach
was growling fiercely by then, and it was also true that
though the satisfactions to be found in LambdaMOO were many,
dinner was not among them.
I typed @quit,
therefore, and shut my computer off, and made my way
upstairs to find a bite to eat.
RL
DELAWARE WATER
GAP NATIONAL
RECREATION AREA, JULY 1994
A Rock in Midstream
You are on a comfortable,
flood-smoothed rock somewhere between the New Jersey and the
Pennsylvania shores of the Delaware River. The rock's face
rises a foot or two above the waterline, with ledges you can
walk on spreading out from it just underneath the surface. The
river flows on toward the southwest, placid and cool.
You see inflatable raft and inflatable
raft here.
Jessica,
A_Girlfriend_of_Jessica's_and_the_Boyfriend_
of_the_Girlfriend, and The_Author are here.
The afternoon sun shines bright,
warming the surface of the rock.
The_Author wades out into the shallow
waters that ring the rock, leaving the others to soak up sun,
eat cheese and apples, rest a while from the rigors of
rowing.
The_Author walks a couple yards to
where the ledge drops off and stands there holding an oar in
his hand, feeling the river pass gently around his bare feet,
ankles, and calves.
The_Author looks up at the nearer
shore, the New Jersey side.
look new jersey
High bluffs rising lush-green from the
water's edge, turning ashen as they climb, becoming pine, and
shale, and edges sharp as cut glass where they meet the
cloudless sky.
The_Author looks over at the farther
shore.
look Pennsylvania
High bluffs rising lush-green from the
water's edge, turning ashen as they climb, becoming pine, and
shale, and edges sharp as cut glass where they meet the
cloudless sky.
The_Author grins. He has that ticklish
sensation a person sometimes gets when standing on or near a
border line. You know the feeling: Your senses tell you there
is no essential difference between the land on either side of
the line, your sense of sociopolitical reality insists as
strongly that there _is_ one, and the contradiction spins
your head around a little.
The_Author feels too lazy at the
moment, though, to think very hard about this ticklish
feeling. Too bad. It might help him explain why, after two
weeks of daily immersion in virtual reality, this sudden
getaway into the great outdoors doesn't hit him with as stark
a sense of contrast as he thought it would. It might occur to
him, for instance, that he hasn't really gotten away. That
sociopolitical reality is not that different, finally, from
the virtual kind, and that a human being never inhabits a
physical landscape without also inhabiting its ghostly,
abstract counterpart -- the geography of language, law, and
fantasy we overlay, collectively, on everything we look
at.
The_Author (none of this occurring to
him) turns and looks at his companions on the rock, and
smiles.
A_Girlfriend_of_Jessica's_and_the_Boyfriend_of_the_ Girlfriend, as it happens, are presently of two minds about
The_Author: 1. The Girlfriend isn't sure The_Author is exactly
what Jessica needs in her life right now. 2. The Boyfriend is
asleep.
The_Author respects these opinions,
having shared them both at one time or another.
The_Author has wondered lately, in
particular, how fail to Jessica all this MOOing is, and
whether it won't end up being a flashpoint for the tensions
always looming in their apartment. He has already picked up
hints that she resents his lengthening hours on Lambda, nor
does he much blame her: there is a strange world plugged into
the wall just outside their bedroom, and she's no longer part
of it.
The_Author turns away again, looks out
at the river's broad stream, breathes deep.
The_Author takes a playful swat at the
water's surface with the flat of his oar, a glancing blow that
sends a small splash arcing high and upstream. He watches as
the flying water beads and catches sunlight just before it
drops back down, and then he swats the river and watches it
fly again. And again.
Jessica laughs.
The_Author turns and sees her grinning
warmly at him from her perch on the rock, watching him
play.
look jess
Jessica
You see cream-white skin spread smooth
across broad angles of bone and splashed with dark: black
eyebrows arching sharp and fine over sloe-brown eyes, thin
strands of chestnut hair licking down toward her neck, toward
a body shaped like ocean waves and wrapped up, at the moment,
in a striped blue-and-white two-piece bathing suit.
She is awake and looks alert.
Carrying:
half-eaten apple
The Fifth-Year Grad Student Blues (one
case)
The_Author, as he always does, melts at
the sight of her like this, her smile open, unabashed,
inviting him to drop his guard for good and claim his right to
a lifetime of this moment's sweetness.
The_Author, as he always does, stops
only a little short of accepting the invitation.
VR
3
The Purple Guest
Or TINYLAW, and Its Discontents
Time had a slow and slippery way of
flowing on the MOO. Broken up by the insistent interruptions
of RL (of sleep, work, meals, and social life), my MOO days
stuttered like an archipelago of dreams across the surface of
the real days, touching down for just an hour or two at a time
but somehow lingering in my imagination for much longer. In my
first week I clocked fewer than ten hours in VR (far short of
my standing aim of thirty, and well shy of the hard-core
MOOer's typical fifty, sixty, or even seventy weekly hours),
yet it felt to me as if I'd already spent a lazy season there.
MOO time was in no hurry, it seemed, and consequently neither
was I: the work of completing my garden could wait, and so,
for that matter, could anything else requiring my focused
attention.
So I flitted instead from diversion to
diversion. I explored the grounds some more, gossiped with
friends and small-talked with strangers. I read casually from
the MOO's organic tabloids—the mailing lists, with their daily
accumulations of scandal, scuttlebutt, and silliness. And when
the Fourth of July swung by, I joined a friendly crowd in the
backyard to watch virtual fireworks light up the midnight
LambdaMOO sky. I sat with exu and others in the grass
reminiscing about sparklers and charcoal snakes, gazing up at
a potluck of pyrotechnics programmed earlier in the day by
assorted locals. We applauded the best of the creations:
Hackamore's O.J. Simpson starburst (A thousand tiny lawyers come sparkling out
of the OJ Rocket, falling like pin-striped rain through the
darkness), exu's airborne Thomas Pynchon allusion (A screaming comes across the sky. . .),
Kerrit's climactic typographic blowout, which looked like
nothing so much as . . . well, which looked pretty much
exactly like this:
All right, maybe you had to be there.
But there I was, and unless I reached back into my earliest
childhood memories, I couldn't remember a Fourth of July that
had so amused me.
I was starting to feel, in fact, as if
an unbroken procession of such amusements lay ahead of me in
this virtual sojourn of mine. I'd been around the MOO long
enough to know better, of course, but all the pleasant
distractions with which I'd been occupying myself—the clever
camaraderie and the mechanical marvels, the leisurely chitchat
and the home-made fantasylands—were beginning to make me
wonder. Perhaps, after all, there was
some truth to the newbie's naive first impression: perhaps
LambdaMOO really was, in the end, just fun and games.
And then one day an old familiar
stranger came to call on me in the privacy of my TV set, and
once again I learned just how mistaken that first impression
can be.
It was near the end of my second week,
while I was in the middle of a leisurely afternoon of reading
through the messages on * social,
that I noticed the wall inside my television set suddenly
twist and groan. Briefly the wall tried to force itself into
the form of a certain “Purple_Guest,” and then as suddenly as
it had begun to warp, the room snapped, with a crack, back
into shape.
I scarcely raised an eyebrow. This was
simply the room's way of telling me that yet another flailing
guest character had tried and failed to teleport in past the
television set's programmable security mechanisms. It was a
common enough occurrence. Guests were typically the newest of
newbies, and as such they had an infantlike tendency to stick
their unformed noses into whatever corner of the MOO caught
their unformed eyes. You couldn't stop them from trying,
really, and you tended to respond to their unbidden visits
about the same way you responded to the unmanageability of
infants generally, which is to say somewhere in the emotional
range between gruff annoyance and smiling indulgence.
Myself, I was feeling rather smilingly
indulgent at the moment, so I had the room's security
subroutine-beam a formal invitation to the would-be interloper
and prepared myself to answer the usual guestly questions and
hand out the usual old-timerly tips.
“Oh brave new woild,” said the purple
guest, teleporting in.
“Welcome,” I said.
The purple guest laughed. “Thanks, Dr.
B. Now I guess you have to work out whether I was quoting Will
or Aldous.”
DrBombay .oO( Will?)
“I trust you are well,” said the purple
guest. “Oh, as in Shakespeare, The tempest.”
Purple _Guest's
on a first-name basis with the mortal bard.
“Ah.” I said. “I am well, but not so
well-educated as yourself, I guess.”
The purple guest grinned.
And I grinned back.
But to tell the truth, I was not sure
how indulgent I felt anymore. There was something unsettling
about this guest—something in the way it moved and spoke, in
the ease with which it handled the basics of MOO-mediated
interaction and in the casual familiarity with which it
addressed me, that suggested the guest was not quite what it
appeared to be.
What it appeared to be, of course, was
nothing much. In addition to their neutral gender, guests were
given a blank description by default, completely featureless
except for the randomly assigned color that distinguished one
guest from another. Just looking at the purple guest, in other
words, told me nothing about who it really was, or what
exactly its game might be, and I was getting impatient to
know.
“Well, enough idle banter, Bond,” I
said, only half in jest. “What did you come to see me
about?”
The guest seemed somewhat rattled by
the directness of the question.
“Oh . . . nothing, really,” it said. “I
guess I've achieved that in ample measure, so will be
off.”
Achieved what?” I asked, my impatience
mounting.
“Nothing, really,” it assured me.
But I was hardly reassured. The
suspicion that this stranger was no stranger at all had now
firmly lodged itself in my mind, and I was starting to
consider the possibilities. I imagined various smirking
friends of mine sitting hidden behind that blank description,
having a quiet laugh at my cluelessness; and I imagined worse:
some tentacle of the Bungle collective perhaps, arriving at
last to play head games on me in a twisted response to my
long-gone attempts at contact. Of course, it was entirely
possible that the guest really was just a guest, and if it
was, I hardly wanted to give it the impression we were all a
bunch of hair-trigger paranoids here on LambdaMOO. But all the
same, I couldn't help continuing my interrogation.
“Well... do you have a character here
yet?” I asked, cloaking the question as best I could in the
guise of disinterested small talk.
PurplejGuest is
completely devoid of character.
“I see. Well, have you been on here
many times before?”
There was a pause.
“Yeeeesss,” said the guest. “I think
you could say that.”
Aha! Then it was true—the “guest” was a
regular, and therefore probably an acquaintance as well. The
cat was out of the bag, or halfway out anyway, and we both
knew what that meant: it was time to play the ever-popular
LambdaMOO parlor game “Guess the Guesst.”
But my purple visitor demurred:
“Let's just do lighthearted banter,” it
insisted. “Unless the imbalance of identity bothers you
overmuch. Take it as read, however, I mean you no harm.”
DrBombay holds
his chin and cocks a wary eyebrow at you, I emoted. It
seemed safe enough at this point to believe that the guest was
not in fact intent on messing with my mind, but I wasn't about
to stop my detective work now.
“Liked your Goldfinger reference
earlier, by the way,” said the guest, obviously trying to
distract me from thoughts of further investigation. “We could
do dueling Blofelds, eh? Eh, Mr. So-Called Dr. Bombay? Ahm
very much afrrrraid your plans for worrrld domination are
doomed.”
The purple guest giggled. But I was
having none of it.
DrBombay pokes
you about the soft squishy parts in an investigative sort of
way.
“Or we could do a kind of Chandler
thing . . . .” said the guest.
“A chandler thing?” I punned. “Sorry, I
lost all my candle-making skills centuries ago, back when they
invented whale-oil lamps.”
“I was thinking Raymond, but never
mind. Mean gritty streets, mean gritty detective, interspersed
with poetry.”
DrBombay starts
yanking vigorously on that nosish-looking thing there in the
middle of that headish-looking thing toward the upper part of
you. “Gotta be one of them Halloween type masks,” he mutters.
“Everything profound loves the mask,”
replied the purple guest, quoting somebody or other, I
guess.
I said nothing.
The guest said nothing.
The seconds passed while I tried to
think of something even remotely clever to say.
DrBombay has
gone all fuzzy-headed, I emoted finally. And it was true.
The rambling thrust and parry of the conversation had at last
exhausted me. It was hard enough maintaining the requisite
flow of hyperliterate semisequiturs during late-night hangouts
up in exu's Crossroads, where I more or less knew who was who,
but here, in the mysterious presence of the purple guest, it
was starting to seem impossible. I knew it wasn't cool of me
to feel this way, at least not by the standards of my MOOish
friends, who greatly prized a certain studied insouciance in
the face of VR's never-ending supply of indeterminate
identities. But I couldn't help it: Not knowing which of my
acquaintances I was talking to apparently caused the banter
centers in my brain to simply shut down.
The purple guest sighed.
“Just wanted a chat,” it said. “An
Escape from Dread Significance.”
I tried again to think of something to
say, but couldn't.
“I guess an absence of significance is
just as significant, though,” the guest continued. “And as
they say: There is no significance without a despotic
assemblage.”
I blinked.
I read those words again.
And suddenly I felt a bit of the
fuzziness clear from my head as a smile of comprehension
spread across my face.
It wasn't that I had a very good idea
what the guest was talking about—or even the slightest notion
what a “despotic assemblage” was—but I knew a quote from the
fashionable French anarcho-philosopher Gilles Deleuze when I
saw one, and I knew therefore, at last, exactly who my mystery
caller was. For of all the admirers of Deleuze I'd encounted
on the MOO (and the place was lousy with them, for reasons I
never quite fathomed and would in any case probably take a
dissertation to explain), only one had so hungrily consumed
the great man's words that he seemed incapable of getting
through a conversation without burping a few of them up here
and there. And only one, moreover, had any particularly
compelling motive to keep his identity hidden as he made his
way about the MOO. The purple guest, I had to conclude, was
none other than Horton-Who—brilliantly loquacious Australian
autodidact, perennial MOO-anarchist agitator, and as of some
five weeks previous, the first and only one of Mr. Bungle's
one-time persecutors to have met with the same capital fate as
the notorious voodoo-doll rapist.
I was chatting with a ghost, in other
words. Or more precisely with a geist,
as some MOOers designated those semipresent souls who,
having lost access to their regular characters (either by
official judgment or, more often, through an act of “MOOicide”
meant to free them from a hard case of VR addiction), returned
to haunt the place wearing the one virtual body still readily
available to them: that of the faceless, fleeting guest.
What HortonWho had done to deserve his
banishment to geisthood's twilight existence wasn't entirely
clear to me at the time. I knew that a dispute had been filed
against him under the new mediation system, that the dispute
had accused him of the harassment of some half a dozen leading
citizens of LambdaMOO (all female, though no one seemed to
have characterized his harassment as sexual), and that even
though the sentence ultimately handed down wasn't quite as
unforgiving as Mr. Bungle's (HortonWho had been newted rather
than toaded— his character put in a coma, so to speak, rather
than put to death, and scheduled for revival at the end of six
months), its severity suggested that whatever the precise
nature of HortonWho's supposed transgressions, they weren't
exactly your average, run-of-the-mill breach of local
etiquette.
Beyond that much, however, I don't
think I really wanted to know a lot
more about the matter. I liked HortonWho, as it happened.
Though famously abrasive in both public and private debate, he
was also singularly cordial and urbane when he wanted to be,
and he seemed mostly to want to be on the few occasions we'd
spent much time together. But it also happened that among
HortonWho's alleged victims was a former number-one ally of
his (a former VR lover as well, I had come to learn) by the
name of exu, and my friendship with her was by now beginning
to feel as strong as any I had formed in real life. The
thought of delving deeper into the dispute's details,
therefore—of trying to choose a side (or not choose one) as I
sifted through the heap of conflicting interpretations and
partial truths in which the episode seemed likely to be
mired—put my stomach in knots.
But there was no way around it now.
HortonWho had blown his cover, and didn't seem to mind much
having done so. He obviously was in a mood to talk, and
obviously there would be no avoiding the subject of his
newting. But I supposed that was all right with me. I was glad
to see him now, six months earlier than I thought I'd get to,
and if there was to be an awkward moment or two in our
conversation, that was a small price to pay for the chance to
converse at all.
Our reunion was in any event a pleasant
one. We grinned; we hugged; we shared an imaginary bottle of
plum brandy to celebrate the occasion. And then, because my
dread of unpleasant topics was not so great as my desire to
get caught up with a not-so-very-long-lost friend, I asked
him:
“How are you, old man?”
“Well, I've been better,” said the
purple guest. “Lost net access courtesy of the cabal. Mostly
fine, though.”
I was taken aback. I had been prepared
to hem and haw about HortonWho's expulsion from the MOO, but
the news that he'd been temporarily banished from the Internet
as well left me at a loss for words. All I could think to ask
was how in the world this had happened. And HortonWho,
naturally, told me how, because upon this matter, as upon most
others, HortonWho had quite a bit to say.
He explained, for starters, that when
he spoke of the “cabal” he meant the small group of MOOers who
had filed virtual suit against him, consisting of the six
aggrieved female players and of one male player, by the name
of Cro, who had initiated the dispute on their behalf. He went
on to explain that among the most aggrieved of the aggrieved
was a certain Laurel—another one-time virtual intimate of
his—and that in the heat of the dispute against him Laurel had
decided to take matters beyond the confines of the MOO.
She took them all the way to Melbourne,
in fact, where HortonWho lived and worked, by sending
intercontinental e-mail detailing the allegations against him
to both his supervisor in a software developing venture and
his local Internet site administrator. The acts alleged were
largely “threats,” including threats of “making spurious
professional complaints, leveling fabricated charges of
academic misconduct, contacting professional journals,
revealing confidences and medical information to employers and
professional colleagues, attacking professional works in
public fora, making crank phone calls, and so forth.” “This
individual,” the e-mail further claimed, “is also articulate
and clever enough to make his threats carefully worded and
veiled to be difficult to interpret from a casual inspection
of computer logs. ...” Additionally, HortonWho was charged
with “vile public communication,” “offensive behavior,” and
sundry other menacing speech acts, the sum total converging on
an all-inclusive charge of “systematic harassment.”
HortonWho denied it all (though he
seemed ready to admit to the more-than-occasional episode of
“offensive behavior,” and I certainly never heard him say he
wasn't “clever” and “articulate”). But the university
administrators in charge of his Internet account could not be
moved. “They pulled the plug immediately,” said the purple
guest. “They refuse to discuss Laurel's nastygram with me. The
more stridently I insist, the more convinced they are that the
e-mail is correct.”
Horton's boss, on the other hand, was
more inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. But the
boss was “livid,” nonetheless, about the fact that Horton's
adventures in VR had resulted in a potential threat to
business operations (the possibility of criminal charges
against one of the company's few employees was the least of
it: Horton needed Net access for his daily programming work),
and after calming down a bit the man delivered an ultimatum:
either the MOOing stopped or Horton's job was history.
For most people, I suppose, the choice
would have been an easy one, but anybody who knew HortonWho
knew how many months of intense emotional and intellectual
energy he had by now invested in his MOOish existence, and I
don't doubt that he agonized over his decision. But in the end
he chose employment, and after scaring up a temporary,
jerry-rigged connection to the Net, he logged on to Lambda
just long enough to post to *social
and other mailing lists the announcement of his withdrawal
from MOO society—to which MOO society soon replied by
officially declaring the withdrawal mutual and sentencing
HortonWho in absentia to his six-month banishment.
And now the outcast stood before me, a
skulking geist, come MOOing on the sly to ruminate upon the
ruins of his virtual life.
Purple_Guest
[sings] HortonWho died last week, and now he's buried in the
rocks. Everyone still talks about how badly they were shocked.
But me, I expected it to happen, I
knew he'd lost control, when he built afire on Lambda, and
shot it full of holes.
DrBombay takes a
swig of plum brandy and passes you the bottle.
Purple_Guest was
(for some reason) surprised when VR crossed the border into
RL. Both are thereby
impoverished.
Purple_Guest
takes the bottle, taking a deep draught and swilling
quietly.
I thought for a bit, and had to agree:
there was something startling and a little sad about the way
the virtual had collided with the real in Horton's case. It
was a blunt reminder that the MOO was not the self-contained
world its conventions pretended it to be, and it came as
something of a shock to me.
Not that I had any more excuse for my
surprise than Horton did—the Bungle Affair had taught me
nothing if it hadn't taught me that the line between VR and RL
was no more impermeable than the line between what happens
inside our heads and what happens outside of them. But the
Bungle Affair, in its final outcome, had taught me other
things as well—that true community might be possible in the
MOO, for instance, and that there might be something like real
justice to be found in that community's enforcement of its
defining values. And now I couldn't help feeling that those
possibilities were in a kind of jeopardy. For hadn't the
decision not to pursue RL charges
against Mr. Bungle been the act that declared LambdaMOO's
readiness, at long last, to handle its problems on its own?
Hadn't it established a consensus that MOO crimes would be met
with MOO punishment, no more or less? And hadn't that
consensus been built as much on pragmatism as on poetic
justice—intended as a kind of insurance against the confusions
that might come of seeking redress from institutions
ill-equipped to grasp the quirks and subtleties of MOOish
life, and a kind of guarantee that the requisitely clueful
institutions would be built and nurtured within the MOO?
I'd thought so anyway, and I thought
now that I must be glimpsing a partial, and maybe even
ultimately a total, unraveling of that consensus. It was true,
of course, that if Laurel's charges were valid, then it was
Horton Who himself, with his RL threats, who had first pushed
the conflict into the world outside the MOO, thereby obliging
his antagonists to seek its resolution there. But however it
had happened, a boundary had been breached, and the case of
Horton Who, I sensed, had come to straddle the line between VR
and RL far more challengingly than the case of Mr. Bungle ever
had.
Just how great a challenge it was,
however, was hard to gauge without knowing how it was that
Horton Who had ended up a newt as well as a MOOicide. How, I
wondered, had the participants in Cro's dispute against him
handled the question of the extravirtual dimensions of the
case? Which aspects of the now thoroughly tangled web of RL
and VR events had they chosen to consider, and what had they
opted not to judge? What, in short, were the newtable acts
alleged in that dispute?
“Unspecified. Totally,” said the purple
guest. “I was accused and convicted of 'harassment' (however
spelled) without being confronted with my accusers or their
evidence.”
He told me I should have a look at * D:Cro.vs.HortonWho, the official
mailing list attached to the dispute, if I wanted something
like the full story. I groaned at the thought. The list, I
knew, was probably hundreds of messages long and was sure to
be a sprawling hairball of contradiction and recrimination.
But where else could I go from here? I decided I would give
the list a skim, at least, and I muttered something to that
effect.
And then I changed the subject to a
hopefully more cheery one:
“You will be HortonWho again, won't
you, when the six months are up?”
I could only assume he would. The heat
from his boss would have to blow over, eventually, and even if
it didn't, I couldn't picture HortonWho abandoning for good
the character he'd spent the last two years building up into a
fixture of LambdaMOO's sociopolitical landscape.
Nor, apparently, could HortonWho. But
his plans for the afterlife of his lately estranged virtual
body were not quite what I'd imagined.
“I doubt I'll reactivate him,” said the
purple guest. “I have an idea for a hanged man clock, may have
mentioned. Kinda installation.”
I was intrigued, and the guest was only
too happy to elaborate:
“HortonWho on a gallows. In a dark
landscape. A raven on his shoulder. Listening, creaking. Feet
dangling in a puddle, rope creaking, wind whistling, a
smouldering fire splutters and gives off acrid smoke. The
activity of observers makes the body react, feet pointing to
one of twelve signs. The signs being zodiacal, and interpreted
elementally.”
Purple_Guest's
after an iconic representation of the hanged god, he
added. “I'm hoping it will be sumptuous in mourning. Like a
black velvet Elvis painting with eyes that follow you around
the room :)”
I laughed. “You know, it's kinda dull
around here without you.”
The purple guest smiled. “I think the
dullness is endemic. I mean, look at it. . . all the people
who used to have a revolutionary spark are now simpering
reactionaries, apologising for the structures here and the
fact they don't work.”
There was a pause, and then I nodded,
grinning. But I felt a twinge of awkwardness as I did so.
Because for one thing, though I'd heard enough today to wonder
if something wasn't just a little rotten in the state of
Lambda, I wasn't actually so certain that the social
structures of the MOO weren't working, all things considered.
And what was more discomfiting, in any case, was that I more
or less knew which MOOers Horton had in mind when he spoke of
former “revolutionaries,” and I knew that the one who surely
loomed the largest for him was his old comrade-in-arms exu,
toward whom, I further knew, he felt more bitterness and hurt
than he did toward anybody on the MOO. I could understand why,
to a certain extent—their affair had ended badly, in confusion
and betrayals—and I could even, if I had to, sympathize. But I
preferred not to have to, because for my part, I could think
of nobody on the MOO toward whom I felt more warmth and
admiration, and it frankly made me squirm when he got even
remotely close to talking about her.
But the purple guest, thankfully, left
exu's name unspoken. He preferred instead to hint darkly at
the retribution he would one day visit on the “cabal” and all
allied with them. He spoke of “gathering force” in his exile,
and of the grave mistake his enemies had made in chasing him
off the MOO when they should have let him stay where they
could keep an eye on him.
“The sparks from this will glow for a
long long time,” the purple guest warned. “Incendiary dreams
will walk.”
And right about then, as if on cue, I
got a cheerful page from exu, who had just logged on and
seemed to want to chat. I paged her back, and then, anxious to
avoid a disagreeable scene, I whispered to the guest that exu
was around and possibly on her way over to my room.
“Eeep. OK, I'll vanish. Don't let on,
'K?” said the guest. “She +will+ ask, if I'm any judge.”
I agreed, a bit wearily, to guard the
secret of his identity, for it was true enough that given the
variety of surveillance tools used regularly by LambdaMOOers
to keep track of who was where, exu might already have taken
note of the purple guest's presence in my room. But the guest
was gone before my assurances even left my computer. So I said
good-bye to the empty air and teleported over to exu's, where
I was greeted with a hug and a pleasant conversation and not a
single question about who my visitor had been or so much as an
allusion to the once and maybe future HortonWho.
I breathed a heavy sigh, two parts
relief to one part sadness. They were both my friends, these
two sworn enemies, and I hoped that sooner or later I could
figure out a way to be a friend to both of them without also,
at the same time, feeling like a traitor to them both. In the
meantime, I now realized with a glum sense of resignation, the
least I owed all three of us was to give *D:Cro.vs.HortonWho more than just a
skim.
And so, not long thereafter, I did
exactly that: I spent two hours siphoning the contents of the
mailing list from the MOO to my hard drive to my laser
printer; and on the day after that I took the resulting 102
single-spaced, small-typed pages to work with me. And there—in
the idle moments I might otherwise have spent with a copy of
The New York Times in hand,
updating my supply of common knowledge about the world my
coworkers and I generally agreed we all lived in—I opened that
fat document from another reality and began to read.
This was not the first document of its
kind that I had waded into. For that matter, it wasn't even
the first such document I had read in which HortonWho figured
so centrally. Getting lost in the vast underbrush of legal and
legislative documentation introduced by the new political
order was in fact fast becoming one of the MOO populace's
favorite “leisure” activities, and it had lately become one of
mine as well. It so happened, moreover, that my initiation
into this arduous pastime had been occasioned more or less
directly by HortonWho himself, some two months earlier, when
he'd filed a dispute I couldn't resist having a look at.
Registered in the Lambda legal archives
as D:HortonWho.vs.aCleanWell-LightedMOO, the case and its attendant
contradictions would later strike me as more than slightly
relevant to my attempts at understanding the dispute that led
to HortonWho's newting, yet at the time it intrigued me mainly
as a spectacle of potentially historic dimensions. I was aware
that the new mediation mechanisms had by that point been
brought to bear on a wide variety of conflicts—ranging from
the usual cases of harassment and MOO rape to flare-ups
involving such rarefied issues as the responsibilities of
public-room owners and the ambiguous privileges of the
archwizard Haakon in a democratic MOO—but as far as I knew the
scope of Horton Who's dispute was unprecedented. For the first
time in the existence of this curious, fledgling legal system,
a plaintiff was seeking satisfaction in a matter of what was
semiseriously being referred to as “international law.”
HortonWho, that is to say, was bringing suit against another
MUD.
You didn't have to know the historical
background of the dispute to understand how such a thing had
come about, but it helped. aCleanWellLightedMOO, was, after
all, not just any MUD, but the oldest and the stablest of
Lambda's breakaway worlds, and in taking it on, HortonWho was
thrusting himself into the middle of a long and complicated
relationship. Public opinion about CleanWellLighted was mixed,
to say the least, and had been ever since CWL's inception in
the waning days of the old wizardocracy, when certain less
enfranchised quarters of the population had looked
suspiciously on the fact that the new MOO's founders and
earliest colonizers were almost exclusively members of
Lambda's so-called “Power Elite” (the wizards and their
friends). Haakon's subsequent dissolution of the wizards'
reign (rumored to have met with only grudging acceptance among
some of his corulers) didn't help matters much either: As
LambdaMOO plunged forward into the ensuing months of
tumultuous political change, and Clean-WellLighted continued
to govern itself in the same autocratic fashion still
preferred to this day by 99.9 percent of all MUDs, it grew
easy and eventually common to think of CWL—as HortonWho, for
example, did—as “the MOO founded in reaction to the Lambda
democracy, the place the Power Elite fled to.”
HortonWho, however, was perhaps more
inclined than most LambdaMOOers to think of CWL that way, for
it was his belief that he himself had played a pivotal role in
causing the Power Elite to flee. Nor, though he had a tendency
to exaggerate his own importance in the great events of MOOish
history, was he altogether deluded in this belief. In the
months preceding the wizards' abdication, HortonWho had been a
prominent member of what was called by some the MOO
Underground, a loose affiliation of the politically
disaffected that included exu and Kropotkin, among several
others, and was dedicated more or less to the overthrow of the
existing social order. “We were trying to make anarchy,” exu
said later. This seemed to mean, in practice, a lot of late
nights hanging out in one another's rooms theorizing the local
power structure, a good deal of agitating on the lists and in
the living room for an end to the wizards' summary toadings of
alleged troublemakers, and occasionally, a frank
heart-to-heart with the powers-that-be about the need for
fundamental change.
It was in the course of one of these
latter conversations, Horton told me, that what he seemed to
think of as his shining hour came to pass. It happened one
evening when the leading lights of the Power Elite were
gathered in and around the cafe in the backyard, as was their
habit, and Horton, who had been haranguing them to no effect
about the moral and political urgency of abandoning their
dictatorial ways, decided to try a different tack: “I walked
up to each of the wizards, in turn, Haakon, enaj,
TomTraceback, Chevy, and put it to them personally. I pointed
out to them that if they were going to insist on being social
wheels, it could easily eat up all their RL and MOO time.
They'd assumed they could effect control. By the application
of terror, I guess. But as I explained, it's easier to make
ungovernable than to govern. And I think that realisation hit
them hard.”
No doubt it did, I agreed, but I
couldn't help asking: had it really never hit them before?
Could it really never have occurred to them that the day-in,
day-out job of keeping the peace in this crowded virtual
funhouse might in the long run be a huge drain on their time
and energy? “Not in such stark terms, I think,” said
HortonWho—and anyway, he added, look at the timing: just a day
or two after this parley in the cafe, Haakon delivered his
edict withdrawing the wizards from the social sphere. What
more proof could anyone need that HortonWho had effectively
toppled the wizards' regime?
Well, however much weight you assigned
to Horton's role in this first phase of the transition to
democracy (and the archwizard, for one, was flabbergasted to
learn years later that Horton assigned it any weight at all),
there was no denying his centrality in phase two: the debates
that led to Mr. Bungle's toading and, subsequently, to the
introduction of the petition system. For by then it was a
fairly well known fact that Horton Who's relations with
Bungle's principal victim had progressed well past the stage
of comradely solidarity. By which I mean, of course, that
somewhere amid the heady days and nights that followed in the
wake of the wizardocracy's collapse, amid the rubble of the
old ways and the possibilities for new ones that seemed to lie
wide open all around them, exu and Horton had become lovers.
And so it was that when exu found herself grappling, confused,
with the strange mix of violation and exasperation that
Bungle's attack had left her feeling, it was to HortonWho she
went for comfort. So too, it was in the closest of
consultations with him that she reached the fateful decision
to transform her confusion into action, to politicize it, so
to speak, with her call for Bungle's toading. And therefore it
was also really no surprise that HortonWho was first in line
to publicly second her request—or that he made his subsequent
arguments in its support with so much passion and rigor that
TomTraceback would later cite them as decisive in persuading
him, finally, that Bungle had to go.
In time, HortonWho came to lament his
crucial part in the Bungle Affair as publicly and as
forcefully as he had once performed it, but this too was
perhaps to be expected. As it happened, the final outcome of
the episode had never sat entirely well with him or, for that
matter, with any of the self-styled anarchist crowd, exu
included. After all their talk of building community and
consensus, after all the hopes for a new form of social
organization freely risen from the ruins of the old, Haakon's
archwizardly imposition of the petition system had left a
somewhat ashy taste in their mouths, and for a while, said
exu, “we were really pissed. He was trying to do this deus ex
machina social engineering when we were really trying to get a
movement together.”
By the time the first anniversary of
Bungle's toading rolled around, the movement had pretty much
moved on, but in the interim HortonWho had acquired sharper,
more personal reasons for regretting his contribution to the
evil clown's demise. His relationship with exu had crashed and
burned—after a year in which the two had discovered for the
first time just how deeply an affair conducted over the wire
could reach into their minds and bodies—and he had come to
mistrust her on a variety of levels, not the least of them
being the political, exu had by now essentially made her peace
with the new MOO order, and she'd even got herself elected to
a position in the closest thing there was to a government
agency on LambdaMOO—the Architecture Review Board, which
helped establish and maintain guidelines for local building
and programming. But Horton's view of things had only gotten
darker and more skeptical, and in particular, he had grown to
think of the Bungle debates as one of the great shams of
Lambda history. “Street theatre with a sacrificial clown,”
Horton now called it—a brazen, manipulative power play into
which he, like the rest of the public, had unwittingly been
enlisted by the treacherous exu.
As for the Power Elite, HortonWho
seemed less and less inclined to believe their withdrawal to
aCleanWellLightedMOO was anything but a tactical retreat— a
way of continuing to wield their influence over Lambda's
social affairs from a safe and unobtrusive distance. And
though he wasn't the only MOOer who subscribed to some version
of this theory (“Ruling from Orbit” was commonly said to be
CWL's unofficial motto), he did seem more intent than most on
doing something about it. He took to hanging out from time to
time on CWL—mostly, he said, because there were a few people
there he actually liked to talk to, but also, clearly, for the
purposes of keeping an eye out for evidence of wizardly
conspiracies to hoodwink the LambdaMOO public. These he sought
to ferret out in various ways, including most notably the
technique of planting himself in the middle of the CWL living
room and hurling accusations with his proven passion and
rigor, on the off chance that one or another of his rhetorical
projectiles might actually dislodge a clue.
Needless to say, Horton's investigative
methods did not, in the long run, much amuse the established
residents of aCleanWellLightedMOO. And since their own
amusement was more or less the whole point of the place, they
put him on notice that any further obstreperousness on his
part would result in his immediate eviction. Horton being
Horton, however, this warning only led to a new round of
living room denunciations, and in due time the local autocracy
made good on its promise—first they newted him for a while,
then they denewted him to see if the experience had taught him
to stop his “baiting and provoking,” then at last, having
judged without further ado that he could not be taught, they
toaded him. Horton, outraged, made one final attempt to regain
his place in CWL: he logged on to LambdaMOO, located an
ingenious MOO-to-MOO communications link maintained there by
the CWL crowd, and through it transmitted a heartfelt appeal
for clemency to his CleanWellLighted toaders. To which they
responded by cutting off his access to the link.
And thus, dear reader, we arrive at the
end of the historical background to D:HortonWho.vs.aCleanWellLightedMOO
and the beginning of the dispute itself. For it was at
this point that HortonWho decided that his treatment at the
hands of the CWLers had gone beyond mere personal affront. It
was a casus belli now, as far as he was concerned, and he
wasted no time setting the machinery of a full-scale inter-MOO
confrontation in motion. With a blind eye turned to the
dullish fact that CWL's governing social metaphor wasn't so
much that of the modern national polity as it was that of the
senior prom (with best behavior expected from all and all
rights to eject unwanted partiers reserved by the organizers),
HortonWho immediately proceeded with his “international
dispute,” declaring CleanWellLighted “a repressive fascist
state,” offering his own “summary @toading without due
process” as exhibit A, and insisting that Lambda-MOO, to
preserve its integrity as a democratic society, must break off
official relations with the offending power at once.
Nor did the apparent absence of any
official relations to break off faze him a whit. He overcame
that problem, in fact, in the same dazzling, three-point leap
of logic that got him over the equally formidable hurdle of
the mediation system's rules of engagement, which clearly
forbade disputing any type of entity other than individual
LambdaMOO players. This minor marvel of conceptual acrobatics
on HortonWho's part began, if I understood it correctly, with
the conjecture that in VR perhaps no relations were more
official than the technological kind; it went on to the
observation that the CleanWellLighted communications link was
about as concrete a technological relation between Lambda and
CWL as one could imagine; and it landed ultimately on the
curious fact that the link, for some perverse technical
reason, existed on Lambda as a player object—conveniently
enough named aCleanWellLightedMOO, logged in continuously from
the CWL machine at Boston's Northeastern University, and
residing in a corner of the database evocatively entitled
“Orbiting LambdaMOO.”
Granted, HortonWho didn't make each one
of these points explicit in his dispute, but then he didn't
have to. All were elegantly implied in the bold, concise, and
really only slightly crackpot proposition he submitted finally
for the mediator's consideration:
Toad the link.
He didn't seem to be even remotely
joking about it either. “Evil flourishes when good people do
nothing,” he intoned at the end of his opening brief. “Cut the
link. @toad. . . aCleanWellLightedMOO.”
Unfortunately for HortonWho, however,
and for my expectations of a historic spectacle in the making,
the good people of LambdaMOO seemed perfectly willing, in this
case at least, to do nothing. To be sure, of the dozen and a
half onlookers who gathered around the dispute's mailing list,
there were those who appreciated HortonWho's general political
points, and there were even a few who were willing to get
behind his quixotically inventive specifics. But the majority
opinion seemed ultimately to be that this dispute was just a
waste of everybody's time. Some, for instance, saw it as
formally groundless: if the dispute's standing depended on the
premise that the link was a toadable player, they reasoned,
then why did it not founder on the fact that the link itself
had done nothing more heinous than stop talking to HortonWho?
Others saw the issue as a social one, and wondered why it was
that HortonWho was trying to convince a lone mediator to sever
the entire MOO's communications with CleanWellLighted. Why did
he not place a matter of such wide-reaching public consequence
before the public itself, in the form of a petition?
That these questions failed, shall we
say, to appreciate the poetry of Horton-Who's dispute was
obvious. That they were in some cases also just rhetorical
weaponry wielded by CleanWellLighted partisans seemed likely
as well. But they were good questions nonetheless, especially
if you took mediation at all seriously as an institution, and
as they mounted it grew increasingly clear that the mediator
(one Dr. Fate, if you can believe it) was in warm sympathy
with them. Whether or not HortonWho's request was in fact
headed for dismissal, though, remains technically speaking a
mystery—for it wasn't long before the dispute got bogged down
in procedural complications and HortonWho, in a possibly
face-saving show of exasperation, withdrew it. I don't know if
he gave much thought just then to transforming his complaint
into a petition, but in any case events would soon enough
convince HortonWho that CWL was a minor evil compared to
Lambda itself. His brief career as an inter-MOO human rights
activist was over, and the great cross-cultural showdown I had
thought I saw gathering like thunderclouds over his dispute
dispersed with scarcely a rumble.
Yet as I sat down during a coffee break
two months later to examine the contentious beginnings of
HortonWho's new career as a sometime geist and full-time newt,
it was starting to dawn on me that the one broadly meaningful
query posed by his abortive toad-the-link campaign was still
very much in the MOO air. Half-baked or not, the proposal had sought, among other things, to
test the depth of LambdaMOO's commitment to its new social
system. Was Lambda-mocracy worth defending against less open
forms of virtual government—the dispute had implicitly
asked—or was it not? Of course, the possibility of a broadly
meaningful response to that question had mostly been swallowed
up by the dispute's provocative idiosyncrasies, but here and
there an eyebrow-raising comment had gotten through.
“Personally,” wrote the gruff Alpacazoid somewhere amid the
wranglings of the *D:HortonWho.vs.aCleanWellLightedMOO
mailing list, “I think democracy is overrated, especially
for resources like MUDs.”
And maybe Alpacazoid had it right. But
me, I didn't know for certain one way or the other, and in
that regard I was hardly alone. All around me, in fact, in a
scattered but persistent buzz, a vast deliberation on the
merits of the new MOO regime was under way. In quiet
one-on-one conversations and searing *social-issues flame wars, in the
intimacy of real-time mediation sessions and in the living
room glad-handing of Architecture Review Board election
campaigns, LambdaMOO was trying on virtual democracy like a
new and hastily purchased pair of gloves, always questioning
at some level whether the choice had been mistaken or whether
its subsequent discomforts were just the inevitable complaints
of a breaking-in period. It was everywhere, this mood of
anxious experiment, but nowhere could it be felt more palpably
than in the debates surrounding the great MOO-wide decisions
of the day—the ballot measures that resulted when petitions
finally came to a vote.
I had by now a certain familiarity with
these debates. The taste for MOO-political entertainment that
HortonWho's anti-CWL jihad had aroused in me had spurred me on
toward bigger and better spectacles, and for the most part
they didn't come any bigger and better than the ballots and
their boisterous mailing lists.
The legislative history of the ballot
*B:Minimal_Population_Growth, for
instance, was a fascinating piece of sociology comprising
several dozen screenfuls of intergenerational resentments,
vigorously aired. Alarmed at the explosive population boom
sparked by a recent spate of MOO-related RL media coverage
(including, regrettably, my own), older residents bewailed the
declining quality of Lambda life and called for an immediate
locking of the gates against the newbie hordes. Newer
arrivals, in response, grumbled loudly at the implication that
they somehow had less of a right to be there than the old
folks. The parallels to real-world controversies over
immigration policy were obvious and even mildly amusing, but I
was pleased to see that the arguments never took on quite the
level of hysteria often present in such debates. And I was
relieved as well to see the sensible outcome, in which the
problem I had in some degree helped cause was resolved through
passage of a compromise measure, written by exu, that reduced
the growth rate from an average of fifty new characters a day
to a much more manageable five.
* B:AntiRape,
on the other hand, was a somewhat less inspiring affair.
Written by Laurel just a little over a year after Bungle's
toading, the petition was an attempt to finally codify the
MOO's consensus that virtual rape was “abhorrent and totally
unacceptable in this society.” Its passage should have been a
cakewalk, really, and would have been, had Laurel not insisted
on additionally attempting the impossible: her petition
included a clause establishing a clear division between
virtual “speech” and virtual “action,” with full freedom for
even the most violent instances of the former and mandatory
toading for any instance of the latter that could reasonably
be described as rape. It was a noble try at enlightened zero
tolerance, but it was a tall order indeed to ask MOOers to
envision a solid line between words and deeds in a universe
made entirely of text.
“I just don't think people _make_ the
distinction with any clarity here,” Tom-Traceback wrote to the
ballot's mailing list, and if the lack of clarity in the
surrounding discussion was anything to go by, he was right.
The epistemological complexities that the previous year's
debate had navigated so nimbly now rose up to swamp this one.
Some MOOers, this time around, professed themselves appalled
at the very concept of “virtual rape,” declaring it a
contradiction in terms and a painful trivialization of the
experiences of RL rape victims. Others replied that this
complaint was both wholly valid and, considering among other
things the centrality of metaphor to the workings of MOOish
VR, sort of beside the point. Libertarians and libertines,
meanwhile, fearing for their virtual rights and their virtual
hides respectively, were aghast at the draconian penalties
proposed for behavior whose definition so depended on the
vagaries of language and interpretation.
And there were other, less
philosophical lines of argument as well. Mud was slung,
personal morals were impugned. Supporters and opponents of the
ballot wrestled hither and yon across a broad rhetorical
battlefield whose cratered landmarks included charges of
sexism (from both camps), tortured examinations of the meaning
of sexual consent (with the requisite cross-references to RL
date-rape controversies), occasional pointed reminders about
the genuine suffering of MOO-rape's victim's (with the
obligatory pointed rejoinders about the genuine suffering of
the wrongfully toaded), and eventually, allegations of kinship
between opponents' arguments and the policies of the Third
Reich (with the leaden predictability of a flame war close to
burning itself out).
At which approximate point exu—who had
all along been putting up some of the ballot's more nuanced
defenses—posted to *B:AntiRape
proclaiming the discussion now “contentious nigh unto the
point of incoherence” and proposing, for the sake of
entertainment if nothing else, that future contributions to
the mailing list be made “in limerick form if you oppose the
ballot, and in haiku if you support it.” Almost all the
leading participants in the debate took up the challenge
(prize-winning entry: stingaree's “cherry blossoms fall/the
goldfish darts in the pond/ VOTE YES OR DIE SOON”), and the
debate collapsed into slap-happy silliness. Ultimately, a
relative newcomer by the name of Evandra wrote up a less
ambitious alternative petition asking simply that a notice be
posted, for all inhabitants to see, warning that “sexual
harassment (particularly involving unsolicited acts which
simulate rape against unwilling participants)” could result in
permanent expulsion. Evandra's proposal swiftly passed,
Laurel's went down to narrow defeat, and the MOO breathed a
collective sigh of relief, happy to leave the discussion
behind it. It had been a messy, divisive business, after all,
and I was happy to get to the end of it myself.
All the same, my reading of it left me
tentatively hopeful. For all its confusion and ugliness, the
*B:AntiRape debate had produced a
far ampler discussion of the issues surrounding virtual
violence than the Bungle Affair had. And in the end, through
Evandra's timely intervention, the process had allowed
Lambda-MOO at last to take the forceful, unified stand that
Mr. Bungle had so long before dared it to. In this case at
least, and in its own shambling, imperfect way, Lambdamocracy
appeared to have worked.
Of all the ballot decisions I had
studied by the time I took up studying the case of HortonWho,
however, the one that seemed the greatest test of the new
social order was a proposal that still loomed undecided. It
had risen to ballot status just eleven days before, which
meant that three more days remained before the end of its
two-week polling period arrived. Three days: and then the
votes would at last be tallied, the results would be made
public, and the question posed by the ballot—a question that
was currently burning up the pages of *
social and inspiring endless shouting matches in the
living room—would in principle be resolved.
On the face of it, the question was a
relatively straightforward one. The name of the ballot was * B:DisbandMediation, and you didn't
need to know much more than that to get the gist of its
intentions: informed by the possibly extreme but not exactly
uncommon belief that LambdaMOO's existing mediation system had
proved itself to be an irreparable morass of toxic
inconsistency and well-intentioned incompetence, the ballot's
initial clause proposed simply to scrap it.
But there the straightforwardness
ended, for as the text proceeded, it became clear that this
legislation aimed ultimately to banish not just the present form but the very idea of mediation from the MOO,
and the route by which it would arrive at that end was a loopy
one indeed. To start with, the ballot would henceforth
invalidate nearly all petitions intended to promote or
regulate “mannerly behavior,” excepting only those that
enforced such behavior at the level of MOO physics—i.e., of
binary code. Examples of such proposals might include a
mechanism that would curb the social no-no known as “spamming”
(the abrupt filling of other people's screens with excessive
amounts of text) by automatically limiting the length of
people's utterances, or they might include an optional
subroutine designed to search for and delete all textual
obscenities before they reached the virtual ears of those who
preferred not to hear them. The most basic and necessary of
such gadgets would, upon passage of the ballot, be determined
by an elected committee of fifteen MOO-citizens, who would
thereupon submit a list of them to the voting public and then
pass the winning selections on to the wizards for immediate
implementation. Additionally, the committee of fifteen would
solicit input toward a revised help file on “manners,” which
would become the community's last word regarding what was and
wasn't kosher behavior—and would also thenceforth serve as a
kind of pledge of allegiance to the local value system, to be
signed by all MOO characters, present and future, under pain
of automatic newting.
Once all of these tasks were completed,
the committee would dissolve itself, and from that day forward
MOO society, presumably, would run itself like the well-oiled
machine into which it had been transformed, its members by and
large unable to offend one another even if they wanted to, and
far less likely in any case to want to, having all been forced
at newt-point to agree to be nice.
It was hard to determine just what sort
of fantasy was being floated here. Critics from the ranks of
the MOO's libertarians, techno- and otherwise, saw it as the
ultimate in hive-minded totalitarianism, a horror show of
Orwellian control mechanisms and McCarthyite loyalty oaths.
Those more concerned with nurturing a coherent and healthy MOO
community, on the other hand, saw precisely the opposite
problem: to them, the proposal was technolibertarianism's
reductio ad absurdum—a final transfer of power from the
community as a whole to the technology that was meant to serve
it, and a naive denial of “the necessarily social and
collective nature of human life” (as the eloquently fired-up
communitarian Mzilikasi put it, adding for good measure, “I'm
real gone the moment this passes”).
That the text of the ballot answered
with perfect alacrity to either of these opposing
interpretations hardly helped clarify matters. Indeed, so
finely balanced was the ballot's political ambiguity that it
seemed almost purposefully designed to sow maximum dissension
and bewilderment among the voting public—as if it had been
crafted by a mind intimately familiar with the deepest
nightmares haunting the MOO's political unconscious and
possessed of a perverse genius for driving thoughtful,
socially aware MOO citizens to hair-rending distraction.
Which, actually, it had been. The
author of the ballot was a player named Minnie, and Minnie had
indeed been driving fellow MOOers batty for some time now. She
was on a relentless one-woman campaign to reform MOO politics
from the ground up, and while this on its own would hardly
have ruffled many feathers in a MOO now more or less governed
by the aspirations of self-appointed reformers, its power to
confound and annoy was greatly magnified by the manner in
which she made her case. “Useful stuff incredibly encrusted in
verbiage and weirdness” was how a MOO-acquaintance once
defined for me the vexing style of discourse known to some as
the “Art of Minnie,” and for a firsthand glimpse of it I had
only to examine her defense of *B:Disband. Long, semicoherent screeds
spilling from one mail-message to another, cogent points
drowning in rivers of psychobabble, dulcet-toned conciliatory
gestures alternating with recklessly provocative condescension
and sarcasm—all of these combined to earn Minnie much more
than the average ballot-author's share of ad hominem attacks,
and threatened at times to turn the entire discussion into a
referendum on her maddeningly contradictory personality.
Where on earth had Minnie come from? It
was a question often pondered. She seemed to have burst onto
the political scene out of nowhere, suddenly bombarding it
with screen after screen of her jumbled rhetoric, all in the
service of an agenda sometimes only barely recognizable as
of-this-MOO. And yet the truth was, Minnie was as much a
creation of Lambda's political system as she was a pain in its
butt, for it had taken months of grinding struggle with the
machinery of MOOish governance to hone her peculiar compulsion
to take a hammer to it.
Which isn't to say she hadn't arrived
on the MOO already inclined to a critical view of its
organization. She frequently made the claim, for instance,
that her real-life background as a professional mediator in
the Colorado court system, along with additional accreditation
in the mental health field, was what compelled and authorized
her to straighten out the MOO's “dysfunctional” social
structure. But in fact, when she had first turned up, nothing
about Minnie's behavior suggested any interest in the deeper
workings of the place. She had seemed content to occupy
herself with pleasant conversation in the public places of the
MOO, and with the occasional construction of new ones for the
pleasure of her fellow chatters. Some of those places were
quite congenial, actually, like the popular “Hotter Tub” she'd
built next to the original hot tub, adorning it with a lovely
backdrop of distant hills and stars rendered in the
typographic pictural style known as ASCII art, for which she
had something of a flair. She might, for all we know, have
happily gone on producing such creations for the rest of her
virtual life, except that one day she found she'd used up her
allotted building quota—and if she wanted more, she learned,
she would have to go before the Architecture Review Board and
ask for it. And that was the day Minnie's MOO-political
awakening began.
The ARB rejected her request. Its
ruling, she believed, was rooted partly in the board's
longstanding prejudice against ASCII art, and that in itself
was galling enough. But the closer she examined the decision,
the more convinced she grew that it was fraught with
procedural irregularities as well, particularly on the part of
a certain ARB member named BriarWood. When she filed a dispute
against Briar Wood and lost, she began to suspect that forces
larger than just the ARB were arrayed against her. And in a
sense she was right: BriarWood, she discovered, was a rather
well-connected MOOer, an adept young programmer with enough
friends among the Power Elite to qualify as a junior member of
the PE himself. But where most MOOers tended to think of the
PE (if they thought of it at all) as a kind of social clique,
no more or less noxious than the alpha cliques who lord it
over secondary-school existence everywhere, Minnie quickly
came to the minority view that they were something worse: a
conspiracy to quietly subvert the rights and circumvent the
will of the people of LambdaMOO whenever it pleased them to do
so.
Paranoia, let me now point out in
Minnie's defense, was in VR a somewhat more reasonable filter
for apprehending reality than it was in real life. You have
already seen, for instance, how the MOO's various social tools
made possible a degree of surreptitious communication and
observation unusual in most RL communities, except maybe the
government-intelligence kind. Consider too that there was very
little about the MOO that could not in principle be fiddled
with on the sly by other MOOers, especially by those who had
initiated themselves into the mysteries of the database's
complex programming language, and most especially by those
whom Haakon (but not necessarily anybody else) trusted enough
to endow with the arcane powers of a wizard. Add to all this
the recent, explosive proliferation of legal and political
documents—which, at the same time as it exposed to light much
of the hitherto-unseen conduct of social affairs, also
introduced endless opportunities for disinformation—and you
can understand, perhaps, that it was a simple matter of
precaution to assume that in the MOO, at nearly every level of
its workings, a good deal more was going on than met the
eye.
In Minnie's case, however, this simple
precaution grew to be a sort of passion. She became the
leading conspiracy theorist on the MOO, outdoing in fervor (if
not in shrewdness) even HortonWho, whom she considered so soft
on the Power Elite as to more or less be one of them. In
pursuit of her suspicions, she filed disputes against one PE
figure after another, mostly for obscure abuses of the public
trust, and never with much success. Inevitably some of her
targets turned the tables, disputing her for abuse of them, and one or two of those disputes
did not go favorably for her. She began to suspect that the
dispute system was rigged, designed specifically for ease of
manipulation by the wizards and their pals, and she
increasingly turned her efforts toward unrigging it. The
mediation system permitted minor amendments to its rules if
they were signed by at least thirty qualified players, so
Minnie took to introducing amendments on a regular basis. Some
of her proposals failed; those that passed were often
overturned; and it was periodically alleged that she herself
was trying to rig the system with her endless attempts at
tinkering. It was all at last too much: the time had come, she
realized, to tear mediation down and start again from scratch.
The time had come to set before the people of the MOO the plan
that would be known as *B:Disband.
By then, of course, Minnie's
transformation into a political animal was complete. She could
still be found getting silly in the living room on occasion,
but otherwise her time was almost wholly taken up now with the
business of composing mini-essays for the mailing lists,
fending off legal attacks of one sort or another, going on
occasional spying missions into aCleanWellLightedMOO to
eavesdrop for evidence of PE malfeasance and collusion, and
doing whatever else it took to advance her various causes. A
broader public began to take notice of her, if only to observe
that her mailing-list messages (or “posts,” as such messages
were commonly called) were getting to be intolerably long and
repetitive. Minnie accommodated by introducing posts
consisting only of a brief index referring readers to some
other post she'd made weeks earlier, or on another list, but
the resulting network of posts and pointers to posts hardly
seemed to diminish her public presence. Instead the web of her
messages spread like kudzu across the surface of the lists,
consuming and at last becoming her identity as it grew. How
thoroughly this mass of texts came finally to envelop her
public persona may be gauged by a simple and somewhat
melancholy fact, and that is that I cannot tell you to this
day what Minnie's character was: whether she had created her
MOO-self in the image of a goddess or of a unicorn or of a
cartoon character or a loaf of bread I do not know, because by
the time I got the chance to take a look at her description,
she had replaced it with a long, rambling political
advertisement, which she rewrote from time to time according
to the daily urgencies of her campaign.
I felt a little sorry for her, myself,
and I know I wasn't the only MOOer who did. What I did not
feel, however, and in this I'm sure I also had plenty of
company, was totally convinced she was anything but a crank.
And consequently I was mystified, at first, to behold the
vehemence and gravity with which Minnie's confused proposal to
replace mediation with fully automated justice was being
discussed. Why, I wondered, was this garbled scheme being
taken seriously at all?
But I stopped wondering after I'd read
my way through a few dozen messages on *B:Disband. For as the arguments wore
on, it grew harder and harder not to recognize that the real
confusions stirring the debate were hardly Minnie's—and that
the ballot's core contradictions were in fact nothing more or
less than an extension of those built into the mediation
system itself.
Indeed, if you went back to the text of
the ballot that had initiated the system, what you found was a
document strikingly similar to Minnie's in its political
ambidexterity. What you also found was a document by now
historic: Crotchet the wizard's *B:
Arbitration, the first ballot ever presented to the
LambdaMOO voting public, and perhaps for that very reason a
ballot crafted in such a way as to allow either of the two
broadly opposing tendencies of the fragile new democracy to
find something they could like about it. For those still wary
of even the barest trappings of a virtual state, Crotchet's
proposed system could be understood as just a loosely
organized cooperative for the provision of neutral third
parties— ostensibly modeled on the binding but noncoercive
structure of RL arbitration (the name-change to “mediation”
came later, further softening the degree of discipline
implied), staffed by an all-volunteer pool of mediators, and
guided in its rulings neither by legal code or precedent but
by each mediator's own “understanding of manners and common
sense.” Yet Crotchet's proposal was equally generous to those
who were eager, in the still-choppy wake of the Bungle
episode, for a dependable means of enforcing minimal community
values: mediators would be given broad powers to punish
wrongdoers (subject to a kind of peer review whereby any five
eligible citizens might vote to overturn the decision),
disputes could proceed whether or not the disputed party chose
to participate, and judgments could even be rendered in
absentia if the “guilty” player failed to log on during the
dispute process.
That there were basic incompatibilities
between the two ideals on which the projected system was
founded seems not to have given many people much pause at the
time it was voted on: Crotchet's ballot passed by a solid
three-to-one margin. But in time the cracks began to show, as
inevitably they would. Those who thought they'd voted in a
process for helping disputants quietly work out their
differences couldn't help noticing—as the actual process got
under way— that not all disputants were going willingly into
the mediator's chambers. Those who thought they'd voted for
community empowerment, meanwhile, started to realize just how
little they could count on the collective power of a system
that left each of its decisions almost entirely in the hands
of whichever individual felt like tackling it. Grumbling set
in, then various attempts at reform, some of them small scale
(through the amendment process), some of them larger (*B:AntiRape, for instance), but all
of them really just postponements of the day when the system
as a whole would finally have to face the judgment of
experience.
And if it was fate's idea of a joke
that the occasion for that judgment should at last have
arrived in the form of Minnie's
verbiage-and-weirdness-encrusted plan to turn the MOO into one
big digital engine of social harmony, no one seemed to be
laughing. By now the urgency of the matter was such that even
the most absurdly concocted scheme for replacing mediation
would probably have been seized on as an opportunity for
taking the final measure of Crotchet's embattled brainchild.
As it was, the modest absurdities of *B:DisbandMediation were hardly enough
to deflect attention from the burning issue nestled among them
and summarized in the ballot's title. Scores of reasonable
critics had been hammering away from every direction at the
not-so-brilliantly-conceived particulars of Minnie's proposal
since the moment she released it. But by the time the debate
started coming to a boil, there were just as many voices being
raised in support of the ballot's most basic aim, and these
too came from both ends and every corner of the MOO's
ideological map.
There were the lingering
parliamentarians, convinced more than ever that the MOO needed
a duly structured and elected officialdom to manage its
day-to-day conflicts (BriarWood, for instance, seemed to have
been working for months on the designs for a full-fledged
judicial system, complete with courts of appeals and a
constitution). There was the odd unregenerate wizardist, for
whom the mediation system was but a messy travesty of the
swift justice of yore. And there were of course the legions of
the libertarian-leaning, raring to shake off an institution
they now regarded as dead weight at best (“a couple dozen megs
of shit” added to the LambdaMOO hard drive, wrote one) and a
crude foretaste of the dread rule of bureaucracy at worst.
It fell mainly to Minnie, however, in
one of her more lucid passages, to locate the simple sense of
a hope disappointed that united all these otherwise
conflicting critiques. “Whatever way one chooses to view
Mediation,” she wrote on *B:Disband,
“as a court system to enforce 'laws' or as a 'neutral
friend' who will listen to two others and help them kiss and
make up, it hasn't been successful, and has created more
problems than it's helped.”
Opponents of the ballot scrambled to
point out that in reality dozens of disputes had been resolved
by then to the substantial satisfaction of at least one of the
parties, and often of both. But merely by recognizing the need
to defend mediation they were ceding the high ground in the
debate. For even the staunchest believers in the system's
effectiveness had to grant, over and over, that its
inconsistencies were more than just minor annoyances. Give it
time, they pleaded nonetheless, let the forces in contention
around the system balance themselves out, and mediation would
no doubt mature into the reliable instrument of peace and
justice we had every right to expect it to be.
It would have been much more fun, of
course, to keep picking at the far greater inconsistencies of
the system Minnie intended to replace mediation with, but if
the B:Disband debate had ever
really had much to do with the actual text of the ballot, that
moment seemed now to have long since passed. In three days the
polling period would end, the votes would be counted, and the
results would be posted, but what that final figure would mean
could no longer be stated with any precision. In three days I
might try and guess whether LambdaMOO had had its say on
Minnie's visions of reform, on Minnie herself, on the
workability of the mediation system, or on the possibility of
ever resolving the tension between the needs of the community
and the needs of the individual in this or any other
society—but a guess would surely be the best I could
manage.
In the meantime, on a desktop far away
from LambdaMOO, sat the text of *D:Cro.vs.HortonWho, waiting to be
plumbed. And that was more than enough to puzzle over.
“Just make it quick, OK?” was
HortonWho's first message to the *D:Cro list after the sticky
preliminaries of selecting a mediator had been completed.
Horton had reasons of his own for
urging haste (word of Laurel's letter to his systems
administrator had just reached him, and he suspected it
wouldn't be long before his connection got shut down), but his
sentiment was doubtless widely shared. Certainly Cro, the
character who had called the dispute on behalf of six
acquaintances and presumably spoke for them as well, was eager
to see the matter “confronted directly, without histrionics,”
and with as little distracting input from the gallery as
possible. Likewise the mediator—ace haiku-slinger and longtime
MOOer stingaree, as it happened—made plain his willingness to
expedite the proceedings, which after all were at this point
intended merely to give the injured parties a forum in which
to air their grievances with the disputee. As for myself, I
too couldn't help hoping, though the thickness of the document
I held in my hands told me not to dare, that the process I was
about to watch unfold would prove a swift and relatively
simple one.
And in a way, I suppose, we got our
wish. For .HortonWho's next message to the list was also his
last: it was his MOOicide note. And the message posted after
that, barely five hours later, came from stingaree, presenting
his abrupt decision, after all the earlier talk of nonpunitive
dialogue, to slap a six-month newting on top of HortonWho's
sudden self-exile. The dispute was as good as over, in other
words, and now it appeared there wasn't much left to do but
try and figure out how it had ended this way.
The bulk of the clues, naturally, were
to be found in HortonWho's prodigious farewell message—two
hundred lines of bitter indictment and rueful valediction that
began with a brief and acid explanation of why he was
leaving:
“I have been asked to choose between
completing a long-term collaborative project, and continuing
to play LambdaMOO. The choice was put to me by my
collaborators, but in reality, was
forced upon us by the actions of Laurel _.____ ,
because her confusion between RL and VR
is so complete that it extends into RL, and probably did so
before VR was even a technical possibility.”
The message revealed more than just the
immediate reasons for HortonWho's precipitous exit, of course.
Those curious blank lines following Laurel's name, for
instance, were not HortonWho's doing but a judicious bit of
post-facto censorhip imposed by stingaree after Horton had
committed one of the more blasphemous speech acts it was
possible to author within the MOO: the forced exposure of a
fellow player's full real name. Evidently Horton Who meant to
invade Laurel's real life as disruptively as she had invaded
his, and if the attempt at letting all the MOO in on her RL
identity was easily enough contained, his message went on to
list other measures that might not be. “After close reading of
our interactions,” he warned, “Commonwealth police in this
country are to investigate several possibly felonious actions
by Miss__ . Feds in yours will likely be contacted. It will
become public.” The possibility of an Australian libel suit
was also raised, along with the observation that “the last
recorded settlement of a less damaging case alike in most
other details was in excess of $40,000.”
And there was more. The Xerox
Corporation itself, we were told, might be named as an
accessory in the imminent legal warfare, with the likely
consequence being that the full weight of the RL state
apparatus would soon come crashing down on “the cosy little
world you +think+ you inhabit.” That cozy little world was in
any case not a very safe place to spend time these days, since
“the closer it's drawn to RL, by the press, $$$, addiction,
social acceptance; the more unreal, irreal, destructive of the
real it becomes.” By which presumably he meant that more and
more the place would be attracting the likes of Laurel, a
victim, he believed, of a full rack of “delusions and
hysteria” whose psychological composition he proceeded to
delineate in venomously clinical detail. It was at our own
peril, he added, that the rest of us continued to MOO at all,
and as of this posting he would have nothing more to do with
any of us except outside the boundaries of this place. “Those
of you who have been spoken with know where to find me (and
yourselves),” he wrote, in a closing aside to the MOOers he
still considered friends. “You start by typing @quit.”
I had to smile when I read that final
line, knowing as I did just how long Horton had subsequently
managed to stay away. But the rest was not so amusing. The
document's more personal aggressions, particularly, made me
wince; and they had clearly done as much or more to stingaree,
judging by his swift and hard-edged response.
“I had been hoping to delay my decision
in this matter until I had collected further evidence,” the
mediator's lengthy explanation began. “However, Horton-Who has
forced my hand with his. . . open and vicious attack on the
character Laurel, and more importantly [on] the person who
controls that player.” With the forum for any conceivable
rapprochement transformed into an arena for just the sort of
vitriolic threat-mongering with which HortonWho stood vaguely
charged—and with the possibility of further dialogue in any
case now gone the way of the accused himself—Horton's newting
seemed to stingaree an obvious resolution. While essentially
just confirming the disputee's decision to withdraw from the
life of LambdaMOO, it also strongly reiterated the MOO's
disapproval of harassing behavior, and with any luck might
give everybody involved enough time to cool off and regain
some perspective on the whole episode.
There was one not-so-small problem with
the mediator's otherwise Solomonic decision, however: on its
own, HortonWho's final outburst was simply not enough to
verify the charges of severe and persistent harassment brought
against him, and so far nobody had been shown any other
evidence of newtable delinquency. Not that any had really been
required till now. In the sort of purely negotiatory dispute
this one had started out as—and especially in one involving
such deeply personal animosities—it was perfectly reasonable
to keep the details hidden from the public's prying eye. But
given the sharply judicial turn the case had since taken, and
given too the mandatory period of public review it would now
have to undergo, it seemed unlikely that the mediator's ruling
would stand unless some substantial and compelling testimony
was produced, in particular from the heretofore silent victims
whose cause Cro had taken up.
Which raised a related question: just
who was this Cro anyway, that he should be allowed to broach a
dispute in which he made no claim of direct damage at the
hands of the disputed? A cynical answer suggested itself. For
as most of the MOO well knew, Cro was in fact Crotchet—or more
precisely, “Cro” was one of several aliases registered to the
owner of Crotchet. And Crotchet was of course not merely one
of the MOO's oldest and most active wizards but the founder of
the very system governing this dispute. And if so formidable a
member of Lambda society were (let us say) to file a dispute
of dubious substance, what were the chances that the weakness
of his case would be overlooked, or that he would be spared
the punishments mediators sometimes meted out to those who
called spurious disputes? Better than most other MOOers'
chances, certainly, and possibly good enough that his friends
might be tempted to take advantage of them, prevailing on him
to make their weighty accusations by proxy and thus shielding
themselves from the risks and responsibilities they would run
in launching the dispute on their own.
The possibility of just such a
conspiracy, as it happened, was the first aspersion cast as
D:Cro's public airing-out got under
way. Avid mediation-watcher Nikto lobbed it in a roundly
skeptical message posted just after stingaree's decision— “In
a word,” he summarized, “this stinks”—and was immediately
obliged to duck, as first stingaree and then Margaret (a
CleanWellLighted regular and the first of Horton's alleged
victims to pipe up) tossed back spirited defenses of Cro's
role in the dispute. Both noted that Cro had called the
dispute entirely on his own initiative, as a concerned citizen
and friend, and whether or not he'd meant thereby to run cover
for HortonWho's accusers, added Margaret, all six of them had
subsequently stepped forth from Cro's shadow by officially
joining the dispute as “interested parties.” Nikto's response
was diplomatic but unyielding. He considered the arguments,
had a chat with Cro, and forthwith tendered an apology for
suggesting that the disputants had engaged in any actively
fishy collusion. He conceded, too, that his own familiarity
with the goings-on of the previous several months made him “as
sure as anyone can be about things MOOish” that the dispute
was not spurious. But he stood by his belief that Cro's
involvement set a worrisome precedent, and as the gathering
momentum of the discussion made clear, he hardly stood
alone.
Minnie in particular (drawn like a fly
to honey by the dispute's aroma of procedural irregularity,
and plainly eager to butt heads with the founder of the system
she hoped one day to demolish) heaped criticism on Cro. Yet as
other self-appointed peer reviewers chimed in with their
concerns, it was becoming plain that Cro's role remained
troublesome mainly because of the continuing inaccessibility
of the evidence. If the details of HortonWho's actions were
open for all to see, then the matter of Cro's standing would
no doubt be reduced to a largely technical worry—but where were the details? Over and over,
the question was asked by the accumulating onlookers. And over
and over the questioners in turn were asked—by other
spectators, by stingaree, by the interested parties
themselves—to trust the mediator when he told them that the
details he'd seen sufficed to warrant Horton's penalty.
Which isn't to say no explanations were
given for the veil of privacy, or that the explanations
weren't well worth considering. There was the. claim, for
instance, that much of the relevant data consisted of deeply
intimate RL information HortonWho had gleaned and maliciously
threatened to go public with. And more convincingly perhaps,
there was the argument that any general scrutiny of what had
by all available reports become an ugly and debasing state of
affairs would only serve to extend the degradation. As exu put
it: “I don't feel like having every nineteen-year-old on the
MOO with an opinion deciding if I was harassed enough, whether
I deserved it, or what constitutes harassment anyway.”
Yet even exu couldn't long deny that in
that unpleasant-sounding scenario lay something distantly akin
to the essence of judicial procedure in an open society, and
eventually she too found herself wondering aloud whether the
veil hadn't been drawn too tight in this case, and whether
some sane middle ground between “secret process and public
spectacle” couldn't be reached in time to salvage the
mediator's decision.
As the final phase of the review period
began, however, no such compromise was in sight. At 8:05 Palo
Alto time on the evening of the sixth day after Horton-Who's
explosive departure, stingaree started the clock running on
the twenty-four hours his decision would be open to official
votes of no-confidence, and by 4 o'clock on the following
afternoon the count was a slim two votes away from the five
that were necessary to overturn. Though Minnie, first in line
to cast her nay, had discovered, courtesy of the mediation
software's automatic conflict-of-interest detector, that her
litigious history disqualified her from voting on this
particular dispute (“Another reason this process has become
absurd ...” she sputtered), and though the stalwart Nikto had
yet to log in since the polling period started, the spirit of
their dissent seemed to animate the accelerating movement
toward dismissal. The three players who had managed to register their
rejections offered a variety of reasons for doing so, but
underlying them all was the same broad mood of unease that
only a fuller airing of the evidence was likely to dispel. How
unlikely was it, then, that at least two more players who
shared that unease would connect within the next four hours
and vote to over-turn? Not very. The prospects for the
survival of stingaree's ruling were looking bleaker than
ever.
In a sense, therefore, what happened
next wasn't actually much of a surprise. For given the urgency
of the situation and the persistence of the doubts surrounding
the dispute, what choice did its embattled protagonists really
have? They broke their silence. First Margaret, at ten to 5;
then twenty minutes later, exu and emmeline. Each posted a
detailed message to the mailing list enumerating her
complaints about HortonWho. Each described weeks or months of
sustained and unrequited hostilities, variously including
relentless taunts, poisonous MOO-mail, constant public
defamations, malicious invasions of privacy, and repeated
threats of worse to come, both in-MOO and beyond. Each listed
measures she had taken to evade Horton's harassment
(retreating from public rooms, blocking out his mail with the
@refuse command, refusing other
remote communications such as real-time pages), and each
recounted ways he'd managed to circumvent those measures
(sending mail from guest accounts, hacking his way into the
women's private rooms, or simply ranting about them in public
to the point that much of his venom reached their ears through
third parties anyway).
The testimony had its weaknesses.
Though VR interactions were easily and commonly captured to
offline files (or “logs,” as MUDders termed them), and though
existing logs of HortonWho's alleged verbal violence had been
alluded to throughout the discussion, none were now produced.
It being an undetectably simple matter to alter the digital
stuff of which a log consisted, of course, the files might not
have carried much evidentiary weight anyway, but their
presence couldn't have hurt, and the claim that Horton's abuse
was sometimes too artful to be recognized as such by anyone
but its intended recipient didn't exactly explain away their
absence. There were other problematic claims as well, some
targeting behavior too typical of daily MOOish discourse to
really be viewed with much alarm (“i've . . . been compared to
hitler, in a rather subtle way,” charged emmeline), some too
infused with MOOish surreality to know quite what to make of
without further explanation (“He made a puppet, named it after
me and described it to look exactly like me, and used it to
impersonate me in public,” wrote exu).
By and large, however, and considered
in sum, the statements given in the three messages painted a
picture too vivid to be altogether disbelieved. Not all the
pieces were there, perhaps, but you didn't have to squint too
hard to see the pattern they fell into, or the cumulative toll
they must have taken. The evidence that critics had been
clamoring for was for all intents and purposes on record, and
traffic on the mailing list, which had ramped up to a brisk
ten messages an hour before the testimony was posted, dropped
off to a nearly total silence in the three hours of voting
time that remained. More significantly, no further votes to
overturn were registered, and in fact two of the three already
cast had been retracted by the time the last of the
testimonial messages hit the list, so that when the 8:05
closing time at last arrived just one quiet no-vote still
clung to stinga-ree's decision. The tally implied a somewhat
more solid consensus than actually existed, as it turned out,
and in days to come invective pro and con would once again be
splattered across the mailing list as participants maneuvered
for the coveted last word. But from this moment on no message
could ever really be more final than the automatically
generated one that presently appeared, confirming stingaree's
decision as official. The newting of HortonWho had reached its
formal conclusion, and there wasn't much that could undo it
now except the steady passage of half a year's time.
I kept on reading, of course—the
onward, dialectic flow of the debate pulled me along no less
insistently than it pulled the debaters—but by this point in
my perusal of *D:Cro.vs.HortonWho I
had reached a conclusion or two myself. The question that had
brought me this far now had an answer of sorts, and the
answer, as best I could make it out, was yes: this dispute did
not bode pleasant things for
LambdaMOO's efforts to define itself as a community.
It wasn't that the conflict's leakage
into the outside world had, as I'd feared, done any special
damage to the MOO's implicit agreement to meet its own
home-grown problems with its own home-grown solutions. On the
contrary, the discussion in *D:Cro
had retained throughout an almost unshakable focus on
in-MOO matters, and even HortonWho's dramatic threats to
plunge the MOO into the middle of an international RL legal
scandal had failed to come true, as of a month and a half
after he'd made them (as indeed they never would). Nor was it
the dispute's undeniable lapses of due process that struck me
as so ominous— though these were several, and in a few cases
deeply unsettling. The inability of Horton to respond to his
accusers' testimony, for instance—and especially considering
the fact that it was those same accusers, or one of them
anyway, who had arranged that inability for him—was a
particularly glaring flaw in the proceedings.
But in the end, what most disturbed me
about the case, what seemed so insistently foreboding, was the
same thing that had always disturbed me about it, starting
from the moment I'd first learned of it. For as I came to the
end of my examination of the dispute, I found I could no
longer close my eyes to the painfully personal connections
that loomed at its core, and that I had once hoped to keep my
distance from. Not that they'd been paraded before the mailing
list's readership, exactly: even in the detailed final
messages of Margaret, exu, and emmeline, there'd been only a
small number of clues as to the possible reasons for
HortonWho's months of hostility. Yet to my mind, at least,
those few hints told a long, unhappy story.
The story's unhappiness might have
struck me less forcefully, I imagine, if its narrative hadn't
seemed to revolve around the two people who mattered to me
most in all of this. But ineluctably, it did, and so I
couldn't help but pick up on the signs and the suggestive
circumstances: the particular intensity of the harassment
described by exu; the fact that it had begun at a time when
all the other women attached to the dispute (Laurel included)
still knew HortonWho as a friend and not a fury; the fact that
it had begun, in fact, in January of that year, a time
coinciding roughly (as I and anybody close to exu knew) with
the end of her ten-month-long involvement with HortonWho.
These signs and others traced the sketchy version of events it
saddened me now to contemplate: the flame of obsessive rage
sparked in the embers of a dying love affair; its hungry,
indiscriminate spread from one relationship to another, the
fueling betrayals it must have sought from whatever
representatives of womankind were nearest to hand; betrayals
sometimes real perhaps, sometimes imagined, but always no
doubt magnified in HortonWho's mind by a lingering hurt that
possibly only now, with distance forced on him, might have a
chance to subside.
“I once thought that the one thing
about MOO that was real was its interactions . . . ,”
HortonWho had mused in one of the calmer moments of his
MOO-icide note. “I have considered that to be quite false for
some time now, at least since January 1994.”
I hadn't caught the significance of the
date the first time around, but on rereading the message now I
could hardly miss it. Nor could I ignore any longer the
disturbing sense of déjà vu Horton's words provoked, their
curiously contrapuntal echo of the ones Mr. Bungle had spoken
on the night of his toading, when asked to explain how he
could have done what he'd done. “It was purely a sequence of
events with no consequence on my RL existence”—wasn't that
what Bungle had said? And on its surface at least, wasn't
HortonWho's disavowal of the reality of human interactions in
VR very nearly a paraphrase? Very nearly, yes. But beneath
that surface, of course, the story was a different and
ultimately a more troubling one. For HortonWho was no Mr.
Bungle, not by a long stretch, and to understand what little I
did of his story was to know as much. It was to recognize that
the challenge he posed to the community wasn't that of a
player who failed to take seriously what was most serious
about VR—i.e., the hearts and minds of other players—but that
of one who had succeeded only too well in doing so, and had
subsequently retreated from that bittersweet success in one
great, thrashing howl of pain spread across five months, two
MOOs, and the lives of at least six former friends.
And while I'd always felt optimistic
about LambdaMOO's ability to rise to Mr. Bungle's sort of
challenge, by now I wasn't at all certain how well equipped it
was to handle the likes of Horton Who's . Responding to the
depredations of someone who had never really made himself a
part of the MOO's social fabric was a relatively simple thing,
after all—you just cut him off at the interface and that, more
or less, was that. But things got complicated fast when the
violence in question was as intimately entwined with on-going
virtual relationships as Horton Who's had been. The stakes got
higher, the feelings got deeper, the civics got thornier— and
under the weight of all this intensification the machinery of
LambdaMOO justice groaned more precariously than ever.
Nor would it do simply to fortify the
existing system. True, mediation might better weather the
storms of cases like Horton Who's if lasting solutions were
found for the sorts of glaringly unanswered formal questions
that had battered *D:Cro. (the
murky legality of third-party disputes, for instance, or of
confidential testimony). But it was also true, I was coming to
realize, that no matter how close the mediation system came to
procedural perfection, it might never quite feel adequate to
managing the complex webs of interrelationship that put the
reality in virtual reality. Indeed, the more explicitly the
rules of the system were spelled out, the more likely it was
to resemble what MOOers repeatedly insisted their virtual
lives were not: a game.
This might not have been much of a
problem, naturally, in RL, where the disjunction between the
bloodless formalities of the courtroom and the existentially
freighted conflicts they presumed to resolve was a matter of
mostly academic concern. But transposed onto the MOO, I
sensed, that disjunction resonated all too unsettlingly with
VR's essential ambiguousness—with the flickering fictionality
that framed its every moment, making those constant assertions
of its authenticity so naggingly necessary and those
occasional Bungle-esque denials of the same so disruptively
plausible. Trying single-handedly to navigate the perilous
waters of human connection was nerve-wracking enough under
such circumstances; relying on the guidance of what even its
defenders sometimes called a “toy legal system” could only, it
seemed to me, compound the anxiety. “Mediation LambdaMOO style
was never intended to be for handling issues this damned
serious,” Minnie had declared a few hours before the official
close of *D:Cro, and a few weeks
after it, conversing quietly with me inside my TV set, exu had
uneasily suggested that mediation was ultimately “just not
suited for all kinds of things, or even, I think, most kinds
of things.” I had to agree. And I had to wonder whether any virtual judicial system could ever
evolve into a truly satisfying answer to the problem of
virtual conflict.
Which isn't to say I thought much, by
this point, of the leading alternatives— though I'll admit
that I had at various times and to varying degrees felt the
tug of their utopian appeal. It was hard not to, frankly,
whether on the MOO or in any other online community I'd ever
poked my head into. The very building materials of such
places, it seemed—the strong yet infinitely malleable
structure of their underlying binary code, the powerfully
convincing presence of the words that fleshed them
out—encouraged the belief that there wasn't a problem within
their boundaries that couldn't be solved by either moderately
inventive programming or a sufficiently voluminous exchange of
dialogue. On Lambda, the various expressions of this belief
were too numerous and diverse to detail, but with respect to
the issue of virtual justice at least, all you needed was a
quick look at the *B:Disband
mailing list to grasp the basic arguments and the depth of
their popularity.
I'd surveyed that list myself, of
course, and as I said, the seductions of these utopianisms
weren't entirely lost on me. But if some of their gleam, as I
saw it, had already rubbed off amid the complications of the
Bungle Affair, the hard case of *D:Cro,vs.HortonWho had by now taken
the shine off altogether. For how could I believe in the
all-healing power of negotiation after witnessing the
spectacular breakdown of dialogue that had effectively sealed
HortonWho's fate? And what faith in the omnipotence of the
software fix could I hold on to after the impossibility of
techno-filtering Horton's intensely personal brand of
harassment had been made so plain? To be sure, both dialogue
and programming still commanded my respect as strategies for
dealing with virtual conflict. But as solutions? They were
partial at best, like the budding “toy legal system” itself,
and certainly no replacement for it.
Which left me at last, amid the many
disturbing lessons I was obliged to take home from my reading
of the case, with only one really meaningful response. I'm not
sure just when it came to me, whether it had taken shape in my
mind by the time I turned over the last page, dazed and
somewhat drained, that day in the office or whether it fell
into place sometime after that. But I do know that by the end
of the following day I had made my response official:
I had voted no on *B:DisbandMediation.
Only later would it occur to me that
that was the first time I had ever voted on a LambdaMOO
ballot. Later, too, it would occur to me to wish that I'd
savored that vote as the moment I ceased being merely a
spectator in the arena of Lambda politics and finally took a
small step into the circle of the participants.
But as best I recall I did not bring
much enthusiasm to the exercise. And ultimately there wasn't
much reason to. I wasn't voting so much for the existing mediation system as
against the idea that there was
anything significantly better ready to replace it, and given
the present state of things that was a fairly grim proposition
to be endorsing. Even conceding that mediation “LambdaMOO
style” would at its finest never be a wholly satisfactory
enterprise, it would still be a long time and a lot of work
before the system would begin to deserve a break from constant
criticism. In the meantime, it seemed clear, the attacks would
continue. Anarcho-utopian urges, only slightly diminished by
the occasional defections of disillusioned souls like me,
would continue to crash against the insistent evolution of
virtual law. Intricate and deeply intimate webworks of feeling
would continue to be caught up in the clumsy, experimental
mechanisms of that evolution, coming apart with grindingly
unpleasant effects. And all in all, the most rending aspects
of what I had seen unfold in *D:Cro
would continue to assert themselves, in one form or
another.
I was voting for all of this, and could
not pretend that I wasn't. For I had been warned, after all.
“The sparks from this will glow for a long long time,” the
purple guest had told me, and though I hadn't been sure what
he had meant then, by now I was afraid I had a much better
idea.
RL
NEW YORK CITY, JULY 1994
The Bedroom
You are in the basement level of an
overpriced and undersized East Village duplex apartment. It's
either cramped or cozy down here, depending on your mood. The
ceiling is low and the walls are never farther than a couple
arms' lengths away. Pine bookshelves cover one wall, three
dresser drawers (two black-lacquered and one cherry-stained)
line another. In the northwest corner there's a bed: a
waist-high platform painted white, a futon mattress also
white, white sheets, white comforter, two bloodred
pillows.
A black metal staircase spirals up to
the ceiling. A passage to the southeast opens into
The_Author's Fabulous Office Nook.
Jessica (sleeping) and The_Author
(sleeping) lie in the bed.
You see 19-Inch Television Set
here.
A little patch of morning sunlight
nudges in through a window next to the bed.
The_Author snores.
Jessica rolls over, half-awake, pulls
her body close to The_Author's and whispers gently in his ear:
“Stop it.”
The_Author stops snoring.
Jessica smiles and presses her face
against the warm skin of The_Author's neck and drifts back
into sleep.
The_Author snores.
The_Author is dreaming. In his dream,
he sits before his computer, watching words from exu slide
across the screen. They are angry words; she is accusing him
of betraying intimate information about her to some third
party, HortonWho perhaps. exu changes shape, becomes Kali,
goddess of destruction. “Now you will feel the wrath of Kali,”
she pages ominously. She types a command that causes the text
on The_Author's screen to shudder, as if in an earthquake. He
tries hard to think of something witty to say that might
defuse the situation. He decides to wake up instead.
The_Author shuts his mouth in mid
snore. Slowly opens one eye. Lets it fall shut again.
The_Author yawns.
The_Author says, “You know, I wish I
were awake enough to leave this bed, because I must say I have
never experienced so prodigious an urge to pee.”
Jessica raises herself on an elbow and
looks with groggy disbelief at The_Author.
Jessica says, “Please don't use words
like that this early in the morning.”
The_Author laughs. “Words like
what?”
Jessica says, “Like 'prodigious.'“
Jessica rolls over, away from
The_Author, back to sleep.
The_Author says, “Oh. Heh. Sorry.”
The_Author says, “I think it was all
that MOOing I did last night.”
The_Author isn't kidding either. These
intense, late-night VR conversations, he has noticed, have a
funny way of messing with the language circuits in his brain.
Something about the ambiguity of the medium, he figures, about
the way it hovers between speech and writing. After a couple
hours glued to monitor and keyboard trading words as fast as
finger muscles will allow, he can sometimes start to feel a
kind of meltdown going on inside him, as if the part of him
that usually does the talking and the part of him that usually
does the writing are getting all mixed up together. Sometimes
the feeling lingers after he has logged off, and he wakes up
the next day with a throatful of writerly cadences and
two-dollar words waiting to be coughed up like morning
phlegm.
The_Author rolls over and presses
himself close to Jessica, feeling her warmth the length of his
body.
The_Author tries to recollect the
details of the various conversations that kept him up till
2:30 last night.
The_Author remembers something else
instead: text shaking violently on a computer screen, an angry
goddess, a friend betrayed . . .
The_Author . o 0 ( Hey! My first MOO
dream! )
VR
4
Samantha, Among Others
Or TINYGENDER, A Love Story
I should tell you now, I guess, about
Samantha. Or tell you, anyway, as much as I know about her,
which is either precious little or nearly everything, or maybe
both, depending on how you look at it.
I know, for one thing, exactly what
people saw when they glanced her way: It's really her,
the brief description read, twitching her nose just like she did on the show.
You see a light dusting of white
powder on her upper lip, which might explain the nose-twitching, and an anxious dream of power
in her eyes. I know, too, exactly what she did the first
time she showed up on LambdaMOO. And exactly what she did on
the last. And roughly what she did on every visit in between.
I know that no one on the MOO knew her better than I did, or
had ever been closer to me than she was. Not exu, not even
Ecco.
But I may never know, I think, in any
final way, the things it mattered most for me to know about
Samantha. My intimate access to the facts of her online life
was a trivial achievement, after all. I'd made her, named her,
crafted her appearance, and animated her every step, her every
utterance on the MOO. How could I not have known her in the
ways I did? To put it plainly, she was me: a morph, in MOOspeak, or in a different
language alter ego. An “other
self.” And if the self I'd lived with in RL for over
thirty-one years remained in many respects a mystery to me, I
can't pretend my brief acquaintance with this new one ever
really let me grasp much more about her than the basics of her
virtual biography. Precisely who she was to me, and to the
world she lived in—these are the things about Samantha that I
struggle still to make some satisfying sense of, and suspect I
never will.
I'd had other morphs, of course, and
would have more. There was the dolphin— Faaa, I called him,
after the tragic, finny hero of the 1973 movie thriller Day of the Dolphin—and the rest: a handful of
text-bodies I'd written and erased on the fly, or kept around
for the purposes of an occasional, joking transformation. But
prior to Samantha my morph-making had not yet crossed the
gender line, and from the instant I first stepped into her, I
felt the difference about the same way you feel the sudden
lightness when an elevator starts to drop.
The moment still lives fresh in my
mind. I created her one winter evening not long after the
toading of Dr. Jest: replaced my hefty description of
Samantha's cousin Dr. Bombay (I'd written him as a walking optical illusion,
oscillating randomly between the sitcom's plump,
pseudoscholarly fop and the image of a lean old streetwise
back-alley medic) with her four-line wisp of text (It's really her. . .), typed a brief
command that rendered the sex change complete (@gender female), and saved the persona
to a new file under Samantha's name. And then I headed out to
show my creation to the world.
Or more precisely, I headed out to show
her to my friend Sebastiano. Not that I wanted him especially to see her, but someone
had to, and Sebastiano happened to be the only MOOer of my
acquaintance logged in just then. Besides which, I'd been
meaning to pay him a visit for some time. Sebastiano lived in
an airy cottage in the middle of Weaveworld, a rolling, woodsy
region of the MOO tucked in amid the fibers of a tapestry
hanging from a wall inside the barn, and he had promised to
show me around the neighborhood someday. The place had been
conceived in part, Sebastiano told me, as a sort of
subcommunity for Lambda's queer contingent, a realm where the
sympathetically oriented could build their homes and fill in a
landscape together, and I was curious to see how this
experiment in creative sociogeography was working out. And so
I joined my friend that night, and we went walking, he and I—a
thirtysomething gay computer scientist wearing the shape of a
sullen teenboy lust-object, and a heterosexual adult male
wrapped in a childhood recollection of pop-iconic
femininity—along the leafy, moonlit pathways of
Weaveworld.
At least I remember them as moonlit. I
have a lot of memories about that night, not all of them quite
accurate perhaps, but all still remarkably, sensorily present
to me. They linger largely as a series of lucid images, the
vibrant residue of a long and long-forgotten scroll of
monochrome text: our hike from Sebastiano's cottage down a
rolling green hillside, our pause amid a tidy, villagelike
cluster of little sandstone buildings, our passage through the
small town square and on to a vaguely tropical forest's edge,
where we sat on benches beneath the stars, watching an
automated monkey (Sebastiano's work) cavort among the trees.
But most of all what I remember is the curious, enveloping
sensation through which I apprehended these scenes, a
sensation so delicate I could barely pick it out from the
surrounding swirl of impressions and yet so insistently
attached to all of them I could hardly have failed to notice
it.
Or ultimately to have identified it.
For though at first I couldn't have begun to say just whence
this gauzy feeling came, by the time Sebastiano and I reached
the monkey trees I knew there wasn't any mistaking its source:
it was Samantha's skin—a woman's skin—and the feeling was that
of being in it.
I hadn't expected anything like this. I
hadn't thought, in fact, that I'd really be aware at all of
the particular morph I was in. I'd hoped, of course, that
Sebastiano might take note of my makeover and say something
appreciative; and I felt gratified when he did. But I'd
assumed that after that Samantha's presence would fade from my
imagination, coming quickly to feel the same way my other
morphs tended to—like costumes, donned in the spirit of the
vast, extended costume party LambdaMOO sometimes seemed to be,
but easily ignored once they'd made their splash.
Not that I didn't feel a kind of
closeness to those masks, or sense certain deeply embedded
aspects of myself carved into the surfaces of some of them. My
attachment to the dolphin Faaa, for instance, was surely not
without some lurking totemic significance. And as for Dr.
Bombay, my core persona, I had no doubt that the wavering
ambiguity I'd written into his description—its uneasy
suspension between intellectualized ridiculousness and
hardened competence— encoded all sorts of conflicting and
barely examined truths about my self-image, both in VR and out
of it. But in the end, however meaningful the statements these
morphs made about me, in my mind they by and large remained
just that: statements, attached to the phantom body I
projected into MOOspace no more or less intimately than any
slogan I might wear on a T-shirt.
Whereas Samantha—well, Samantha fit
that body so closely I couldn't really detect the place where
she began and the body ended. Nor did I very much want to. For
here was the second surprise about being Samantha: it felt
delicious. It felt soft, and graceful, and sexually alluring.
It felt receptive, and charming, and poised, and several other
ideally “feminine” things I'd thought myself too sophisticated
to imagine as the defining aspects of a woman's inner life.
Yet here they were, defining my experience of virtual
womanhood in ways my intellect seemed to have nothing to do
with, in ways that bypassed all the layers of irony built into
my half-parodic identification with a half-parodic TV
witch-mom and went straight to whatever part of me it was that
found the fictions of gender as solidly believable as the
ground beneath my feet.
Was I at all embarrassed then, that
night, walking around possessed by so predictable a notion of
what it felt like to be a woman? On some level yes, I suppose
I was. But mostly, I confess, I was enchanted. Enchanted with
myself, no less—or with this
temporary self, I should say, though it came to essentially
the same narcissistic thing. I chatted amiably enough with
Sebastiano about the sights and social affairs of Weaveworld,
but the truth was I'd lost all interest in the questions that
had drawn me there. By now I was talking mainly just to hear
myself talk, to hear the words pass through my head in
Samantha's voice, and if there was anything in particular I
wanted those words to be about, it really wasn't anything but
Samantha. I would have liked to say exactly what it was I felt
as I typed the text that moved her body around, to say just
what was going on in my mind as I stood up playfully on one of
the benches, walked along its surface, threw my head back to
look up with a quiet smile at the stars.
But the words were slow to come, and
when they finally did arrive they were not any I could call my
own. They lent themselves to me, is how I'd put it—rose up
into my thoughts out of the same basement warehouse of
mass-cultural memories I'd borrowed Samantha from. For a brief
Technicolor moment I saw Natalie Wood dancing self-enchantedly
before a mirror in her finest party whites, and then the
sentence just popped out, apropros of nothing my friend and I
happened to be discussing right then but somehow, evidently,
very much in need of being said:
“I feel pretty!” I declared, to the
bemused Sebastiano, to the unhearing robot monkey, and to the
warm night breezes I swear I felt caressing the smooth skin of
Samantha's outstretched arms. There was, of course, much more
that might need saying. For that matter, there still is. That
evening I had only begun to move beyond the shallowest
engagement with the ways a gendered self could mutate and
multiply inside the MOO, and to this day I can hardly say I've
plumbed the depths. But it wasn't long after Samantha's debut
that I began to acquire an ampler understanding of the
possibilities, and if I'm really going to tell you all I know
about her, I suppose I 'd better tell you roughly what that
understanding was, and how I came to have it. I suppose, in
other words, I'd better pause a while now to tell you what I
know about the brief but passionate encounter of a girl called
Lisbet and a boy called Emory.
Let me start, though, by admitting that
I knew the characters themselves not very well, or not at
all—I never met Lisbet, never even got a glimpse of her, and I
came in contact with Emory only three or four times in all my
virtual existence. Still, I was well acquainted with them both
in some of their other incarnations. Emory, as it happens, was
one of exu's morphs, a lanky, denim-clad kid she told me she
had modeled on the adolescent memory of a longed-for older
cousin. And Lisbet (“Preppy With a Past,” a mutual friend once
told me, “dark haired, white skinned, repressed”) in fact
belonged to the RL-male player I knew as Niacin, although it
seemed to be a matter of some indifference just which of his
aliases you called him by. He had a lot of morphs, and never
really lingered long in any one of them. In one form or
another, though, he'd been a friend of mine for about as long
as I'd known exu, which is to say about as long as I'd been
around the MOO.
In fact, it was about the time I met
them both that Niacin and exu themselves first got to know
each other. Not that I had anything to do with their
acquaintance—and not that it had that much to do with the
story of Lisbet and Emory. Not really. Those characters were
still undreamt-of then, and anyway there wasn't much about exu
and Niacin's relationship at first to differentiate it from
the thousands of other casual connections formed every day in
the public spaces of the MOO. They both were regulars at Club
Doome, the lively hangout tucked away inside the train set in
the guest room, and there amid the general banter they
sometimes found themselves trading quips about such mutual
interests as poststructuralist psychoanalytic theory,
contemporary avant-garde literature, and obscurely remembered
'70s pop tunes (exu was thirty-two in real life, Niacin was
only a couple years younger, and in the predominantly
undergraduate environment of the MOO, we elders tended to be
grateful for the presence of whatever peers our cultural
radars could detect).
Beyond such passing moments of
camaraderie, however, exu and Niacin might as well have been
logging in to two different MOOs, for all their virtual lives
coincided. exu, after all, was an experience-laden old-timer
by then, an active veteran of the complex maneuverings of MOO
politics and at the time well into her first full-blown
tinysexual relationship, the extended affair with Horton-Who
that already was instructing her in the exhilarations and
exasperations awaiting those who took virtual intimacy to its
limits. Niacin, on the other hand, was just another newbie
then—still blinking wide-eyed at the very fact of VR, still
only dimly recognizing the full range of social interactions
that the MOO made possible, content for now to pass his time
just being witty among the witty semi-strangers of Club Doome.
Inevitably his callowness would fade, but whether his virtual
existence would really change much in the long run was still
an open question. For many MOOers, the simple pleasures of
collective banter remained throughout their MOOish days the
most they ever asked for from the place, and from the looks of
things young Niacin might very well have grown up to be just
such a chat potato.
But then one day he took the leap that
was to vault him into another orbit altogether: he made his
first female morph. He called her Giustina and described her
as a delicate specimen of fallen eighteenth-century gentility,
and he wrote her a tattered but elegant silk gown and gave her
elaborate tresses that were just beginning to come undone. I
couldn't say just why he made her that way, or why he made
himself a female persona at all, any more than I could say
exactly what caused me to do the same, months later. I can,
though, tell you that by the social standards of LambdaMOO we
were neither of us doing anything particularly groundbreaking.
Indeed, a year before Niacin first switched his gender, Pavel
Curtis had already devoted a page or two of a paper on typical
MOOish behaviors to the phenomenon of male players
masquerading part- or full-time as females. So commonplace had
the practice become, he remarked, that “many female players
report that they are frequently (and sometimes quite
aggressively) challenged to 'prove' that they are, in fact,
female.” (“To the best of my knowledge,” he added,
“male-presenting players are rarely if ever so
challenged.”)
Pavel also took a number of
well-educated guesses as to why so many males might choose to
pass as females in VR, but he didn't have a lot to say about
what is probably the most meaningful answer to that question:
Because they could. It was a remarkably easy thing to do, in
point of fact—much easier certainly than it had ever been in
the physical world, where the telltale flesh and bones of the
cross-dresser created difficulties that, in a universe of pure
text, could largely be transcended by a simple change of
personal pronouns. And it was much easier too, for that
matter, than might be deduced from Pavel's reports of
spot-checks by self-appointed gender police. The truth is,
such outright paranoia was really just a deviation from a far
more nuanced norm, in which players generally took for granted
the marked fluidity of gender in VR, yet at the same time also
tended to take at face value the virtual gender of whomever
they were interacting with. It wasn't a question of
gullibility, mind you. It was simply that the players' need to
slot their fellow players into the conceptual pigeonholes of
gender turned out, in the end, to be more urgent than their
need to know the biological truth about them. And thus it came
to be the case that as a rule (and not without notable
exceptions), a “female-presenting” player was presumed female
until such time as someone went to the unlikely trouble of
proving otherwise.
Why wonder, then, at the numbers of
male MOOers who experimented with virtual drag? Or bother to
ask what particular urges led them to do so in the first
place? In real life, perhaps, the risk and effort and general
stigma associated with effective cross-dressing might require
of its practitioners a certain well-tended fire in the belly,
but in an atmosphere like LambdaMOO it hardly took much in the
way of inner compulsion to take the plunge. In fact it rarely
took a lot more than a whim, as far as I could tell: a passing
spell of boredom maybe, or a twitch of idle curiosity, and
suddenly there you were, your gender flipped, your description
rewritten, your new self loose among the MUDding crowds. And
only then did you begin to sort out what, if anything,
intrigued you about the experience.
Which isn't to say you might not have a
lot of sorting out to do. As Pavel had concluded, and Lambda's
collective wisdom confirmed, the payoffs of cross-gendered
MOOing for male players were many and varied, and potentially
rather knotty. Some players, of course, simply enjoyed the
extra attention given to women in any social setting, and
especially in one where men outnumbered them by about two to
one. Others liked the challenge of deception, testing the
limits of their ability to pass for female with a daring that
Shannon McRae, another participant ethnographer of Lambda
folkways, once wrote of as an improbable sort of” '90s
machismo.” Still others came to value the experience as a
glimpse of life on the far side of the gender gap—a firsthand,
eye-opening sampler of the routine harassments, double-edged
perks, and broad-brushed preconceptions most women encounter
every day. And naturally there were many players in whom any
number of these sometimes contradictory motivations could be
found commingling to one degree or another, which may begin to
give you some idea of what a tricky proposition it could be to
say just what was going on when real-life boys got it into
their heads to become virtual girls.
But it got trickier, and for Niacin it
quickly got about as tricky as it could. For of all the
various ways in which tinytransvestism engaged the male
imaginations of LambdaMOO, none complicated analysis quite so
thoroughly as the one that soon became the centerpiece of
Niacin's new life as an imaginary female.
Did I say complicated? The phrase is
adequate, I guess. But if you really want a feel for the size
and shape of what our boy was heading into, I suggest you
consider briefly the incident that got him going in the first
place:
Consider the girl he was that night—his
second female morph, or maybe his third, a tautly sketched
generation-Z neofeminist called Furie, about five eight,
chin-length black hair tucked into a black stocking cap
emblazoned HIPS TITS LIPS = POWER, black jeans, white T-shirt,
harness boots, black hooded Carhartt jacket, and on the back of her left hand, between the
thumb and forefinger, a small dark
blue tattoo in the shape of a gothic cross.
Consider, too, the unmistakable
attentions of a certain Blaize, a female-presenting character
who'd been friends with Niacin for a while now, who knew of
his cross-gendered creations, who even recognized Furie as one
of them the moment she met her in the living room that evening
(it wasn't hard—morphs changed a player's name and description
only, not the readily accessible object number attached to the
player's account). Who nonetheless found herself drawn to the
girl in a more than amicable way.
Consider, then, the fact that Niacin,
though still a netsex virgin after six months' MOOing, was
well-enough informed by now to know where Blaize's open
flirtations were headed. Consider the pent-up curiosity they
stirred in him. Consider his excitement, his anxiety, as Furie
flirted back. His half-panicked, half-suggestive exit to the
mansion's roof. The readiness with which Blaize followed. And
there, at last, the meeting of their virtual lips tits hips,
high up above the grounds of LambdaMOO, a swirl of textual
gropings exchanged almost as fast as network lag times would
allow and brought, alas, to a premature end when Niacin's RL
roommate had to use the phone and left him staring at his
abruptly disconnected computer, shaken, aroused, in
wonder.
And after you're done considering all
that, save a thought or two for this detail: it is not known
to me, nor was it known to Niacin with any certainty, what the
real-life gender of the character who deflowered him was. “The
word is that she was a he RL,” Niacin told me many months
later on an afternoon visit to my TV set, “but I never found
out one way or another. I sorta thought Blaize was a girl at
the time, but I was obviously aware of the possibilities to
the contrary.”
Obviously: he was one such possibility
himself.
All right now: how would you propose to locate on the
standard-issue map of human sexualities what happened between
Blaize and Furie that night?
I can tell you that in the real world
Niacin had always lived and lusted as a heterosexual. I can
tell you too that in the virtual world it was hardly unheard
of for straight men to log on as queer women and cruise for
girl-girl action, with the predictable result that much if not
most of the lesbian sex that took place on the MOO was
performed by smirking pairs of mutually deceived male players.
But Niacin was not so easily taken in, nor did his casual
recognition of Blaize's sexual indeterminacy suggest that he
was all that eager to be. He knew that even if Blaize was
actually a woman, the chances that she very firmly believed him to be one were far too slim to let
him claim their liaison had stolen him a peek into the secret
life of lesbians. Yet he also knew that even if Blaize was
really a man, he couldn't quite claim that he'd just
experienced his first homosexual encounter either.
What had it truly been then, underneath
the surface? A straight couple heated in their embrace by the
exoticizing mediation of a same-sex fantasy? Two men joined by
their feminine reflection in a postmodern variation on the
ancient, murkily homoerotic theme of the circle jerk? Or had
it, perhaps, been finally nothing else but what its surface
mutely insisted it to be: an unresolved pastiche of possible
bodies both real and imagined, a moment of attraction
suspended among the available categories of gender-marked
desire like an image lost amid a house of mirrors, bounced
endlessly from one to another to the next and back until you
knew that if you tried to find where the truth of it stood
you'd only end up equally as lost?
Well, maybe. Maybe not. In any event,
as we've established, Niacin never bothered to learn just what
flavor of body had reached out and touched him that night, nor
did he ever have sex with Blaize again. Exactly why their
history ended there I do not know, but I can tell you one
thing: it wasn't because Niacin had lost interest in the
possibilities their gender-warped assignation had introduced
him to.
On the contrary, he set out almost
immediately on what he would remember as “a really aggressive
girlmorph cruising phase”—a manic many weeks of seductions,
dalliances, brief affairs, half-hour stands. The
configurations of these couplings were never quite as
open-ended, though, as Blaize and Furie's multiply coded
rooftop tryst had been. Invariably Niacin chose partners who
presented male, invariably he believed them also to be RL
males, and almost as invariably he was careful not to disturb
whatever illusions they might cherish as to his own RL
womanhood. It was, in short, a rather tightly scripted
scenario he gravitated toward.
And what's more, whether he knew it or
not at the time, the script was not exactly an original one.
For here, again, the literature and the local lore had long
before codified Niacin's new pastime as a characteristically
MOOish phenomenon, with Pavel Curtis's brief but canonical
discussion of tinydrag more or less revolving around the
subject of those cross-dressers who contrived, as he somewhat
clinically put it, “to entice male-presenting players into
sexually explicit discussions and interactions.” Pavel's view
seemed to be that these false seductresses did what they did
primarily “for the fun of deceiving others,” and in some ways
Niacin's approach to his transgendered conquests vouched for
this hypothesis. To be sure, he never displayed the sort of
maliciousness that notoriously led some cross-dressers to log
the text of their grapplings with eager, clueless males and
then to post the resulting document of said males'
cluelessness in as public a virtual place as they could find.
But you only had to look at the women Niacin invented to sense
he took a certain craftsmanlike pleasure in overcoming
potential skeptics. There was never anything too flagrant
about their attractiveness, never anything that quite put them
over that line separating the run of female text-bodies from
what were sometimes called FabulousHotBabes, after a legendary
character once created by a prominent male MOOer to parody the
shameless porn fantasies in which (so common wisdom held)
transvestites on the prowl usually cloaked themselves.
Niacin's women were fantasies too, of course, but by the time
he hit the scene, it seems, the common wisdom had so convinced
most male players of their ability to spot the fictional
temptresses among them that to tempt successfully required
only a minimal respect for decorum, and maybe a little
style.
And style, I should note, was something
Niacin had more than the average MOOer's share of. I never got
the opportunity to read the short stories he liked to write
when he wasn't on the MOO (or otherwise slacking his way
through the Austin, Texas, software-company day job that was
his lifeline to VR), but I have no doubt that the people in
them were drawn with memorable concision—or that he would have
made an excellent writer of fashion-catalog copy as well.
Indeed, some of his most popular MOO descriptions were, like
Furie's, essentially nothing but the details of their clothing
and their hairstyles, presented nonetheless with such
precision and flair that they seemed almost the distillation
of a personality, the story of a character condensed, as it
were, into the moment just before its telling.
Further along in his morphmaking
career, Niacin's profiles would at times get more elaborately
literary, as for instance in the case of his middle-period
tour de force Electraglide, your basic
six-foot-one streaky-blonde half-Bengali snowboard goddess gurl, whose four-paragraph
description interwove the usual spot-on fashion touches (Deadbolt baseball hat. . . big K-Mart lumberjack shirt. . . majorly
bad cutoffs) with a neo-Beat
litany of lyrical brush strokes (Electraglide is about wind-burn. Electraglide is about speed.
Electraglide is strung so high that colors blur around her. .
. . Electraglide isn't doing shoes today. . . . Electraglide
is crazy). But even at their simplest, his creations
always sparkled with the artful care he put into them,
conjuring an image whose clarity the boys of LambdaMOO somehow
found easy to mistake for honesty.
Nor, as I've said, was Niacin merely a
passive witness to such mistakes. In his defense, I guess, it
should be pointed out that on at least one occasion he did try to open a male suitor's mind to
the possibility that the virtual female who stood before him
might not in fact be animated by the body of an actual one
(“Your clothes descriptions couldn't possibly be the work of a
man,” was the gentleman's blithely self-deluded reply). But
even then, you'll note, Niacin forbore from cutting to the
blunt truth of the situation, and more often he concealed that
truth with a considerably more active hand. He made up
convincingly mundane RL lives to go with his stylish VR
personae, for example, and he fed their details to his
partners. He “acquired” unused e-mail accounts from female
colleagues at work, and he used those e-mail addresses and
others to obtain from Lambda's tight-fisted registrar of
players a small legion of “spare” accounts—each one a numbered
object unto itself, each untraceable to the others, and each,
therefore, a tool well-suited to the fraudulent ends Niacin
now pursued.
But finally it has to be asked: Was the
pursuit itself in fact what spurred him on? Did Niacin thrill,
as the literature and lore might have us suspect, to the
deceptions he was working? Was he for instance pleased as
punch, do you suppose, to learn one day that a perfectly
unobjectionable young MOOer (call him Raytheon) had fallen
big-time for a spare of his named Alexandra—and not just for
the appealing, red-haired lass of Alexandra's
description-text, but for the RL woman with whom Raytheon
believed he had shared a string of intimacies, with whom he'd
exchanged stories about their respective real lives, with whom
he was now painfully, obsessively in love? Trust me, folks:
Niacin was not amused. He felt like a heel, in fact, and the
feeling didn't exactly abate when (some time after he had
nervously and without so much as a “Dear Raytheon” taken
Alexandra out of circulation) Niacin and the unsuspecting dupe
happened to become fairly good friends, obliging him regularly
to nurse his silent guilt in the telepresence of the boy whose
heart he hadn't ever meant to wound.
“I never
told him the truth,” Niacin confessed to me, a very long
while later, “and I still feel weird about it.”
Do not assume, then, that the practice
of subterfuge was all fun and games for Niacin. In fact, let's
clear this up right now: it wasn't even mostly fun and games. The truth is,
deception thrilled him only a little—and frustrated him sort
of a lot. “I wanted to be what I
represented as much as possible,” he later explained, and
hence his private knowledge of the falsity of his
representations proved “more of an annoyance than anything
else.” Niacin would frankly rather not have known that the men
projecting their desires onto his projections were being
bamboozled—if anything he would have preferred to be just as
caught up in the illusion as they were. But if this was the
only way he was going to experience how it felt to be on the
receiving end of a man's desire for a woman, then bamboozle he
must. For it was that experience, finally, and none other,
that he wanted most from his secret incursions into the sex
lives of other men.
Yes, but why, I hear you ask
impatiently, why exactly did he want that? A fair question, I
suppose, though I would have thought the answer obvious:
He got off on it.
Or as Niacin himself no less
matter-of-factly put it: “It was hot.” Beyond that, I'm not
really sure what to tell you. I could point you back to the
common wisdom, I guess, whose counsel obliged even the
sober-minded Pavel Curtis to acknowledge, in the end, that the
motivations of men who tinyvamp their fellow men might
possibly have as much to do with erotic impulses as with
pranksterish schadenfreude. “Some MUD players have suggested
to me,” he wrote, “that such transvestite flirts are perhaps
acting out their own (latent or otherwise) homosexual urges or
fantasies, taking advantage of the perfect safety of the MUD
situation to see how it feels to approach other men.” Pavel
deemed the notion “plausible,” and I for one would hardly
dispute its basic validity.
Nor, it seems, would Niacin.
“Homoerotic desire? Of course,” he told me once when I asked
if that had played a part in his cruiser-girl activities. “It
was no big deal.”
But there was also, surely, more to it
than that. After all, if his was just a simple case of
repressed homosexuality finally breaking out of its compulsory
heterosexual shell, then why wasn't Niacin seeking the company
of the MOO's many homosexuals? Why wasn't he “taking advantage
of the perfect safety of the MUD situation” to see how it felt
to approach men who were themselves unabashedly attracted to
other men—the likes of Sebastiano and his Weaveworld pals,
say? Was it really only lingering denial that kept his
homoerotic explorations so thoroughgoingly entangled in a web
of simulated heterosex?
I reserve for you the option of
believing that it was. Read on, however, and I think you'll
come to share my own conclusion that, in fact, the dormant
sexual appetite now awakened in him was a taste for nothing
quite so much as for that thoroughgoing entanglement
itself.
He kissed the boys, then, and sometimes
even made them cry, and all in all— those awkward teardrops
notwithstanding—he found sufficient titillation in his
cross-gendered forays to keep him coming back for more. But as
the weeks passed and what had been a discovery became a habit,
he started by and by to wonder if there wasn't, possibly, some
dimension of the experience that was eluding him.
You have to keep in mind, of course,
the sorts of situations he was falling into. Easily arranged,
hastily consummated, and necessarily not much deeper than the
seductive facades Niacin brought to them, his sexual
encounters during this period were somewhat—how to say
it?—limited in their power to engage the soul. Keep in mind as
well the sort of person he was falling in with. Self-selected
in large part from the barely postadolescent majority of
MOOish males (and naturally from the most hot-to-trot of the
bunch), Niacin's partners had, by the end of his first two
netsexual months, taught him a lesson about young straight men
in general that he might otherwise have gone to his grave
unschooled in. To wit: “How woefully unimaginative and
cloddish they are inna sack.”
Clearly, Niacin was ready now for
something a bit more challenging.
He was ready, in other words, for
Emory.
And Emory? What was he ready for?
Pretty much whatever, from the looks of him:
Having pissed
away what was left of the family money and nothing to show for
it but an old red and black BSA motorbike that he keeps in
perfect working order, he ended up
in the North Woods, where he does carpentry sometimes.
He keeps his
long, sandy hair tied back mostly. His eyes are pale blue,
with flecks of gold in them and
grey rings around the iris. High cheekbones, mouth quirked up
in an ironic grin. He's wearing a
black t-shirt tucked into a pair of tight, faded levis and
black workbots. In the pocket of
his shirt, a pack of Lucky Strikes and the tooth of a wolf.
The description was a classic of its
genre, in much the same careful way so many of Niacin's also
were. Archetypally butch, but almost delicately so; plainly
good-looking, but never plainly described as such; clearly
fictional, but of that sort of fiction that conveys a lived
familiarity with its subject matter—Emory was built for
netsex, it was obvious, and yet not quite so obvious as to
spoil the illusion of hard-edged, soft-centered,
unselfconscious manhood he projected. Had I myself come across
him before I knew who'd written him, I don't think I would
have guessed his author was a woman—and if I had, I'm sure I
would have figured her for an old hand at the cross-gendered
seduction game.
The truth, however, was that exu had
never really attempted a boy-morph before Emory. She'd made a
male or two before, but those were gods, not men— a Xango
(deity of thunder) and an Ogum (war) to round out her
Afro-Brazilian pantheon—and anyway she hadn't ever much
identified with them. In fact, for most of her MOOish life she
hadn't really identified with her few female characters
either. Instead, the gender she had mostly preferred to spend
her time in was, precisely speaking, neither masculine nor feminine. It was
hermaphrodite.
This was something of an unusual
choice—though hardly on account of its evasion of the usual RL
options. As it happens, the MOO's @gender command offered a fairly wide
variety of neither-male-nor-female possibilities, and players
not infrequently took the offer up. For example, in addition
to the hermaphrodites (to whom the gender-tracking subroutines
assigned the label either and the
pronouns s/he, him/her, his/her,
his/hers, and him/herself),
there were those who opted at least occasionally for neuter (it, its, itself; useful when
playing talking toaster ovens and the like), plural (they, them, their . . .; nice
for collective organisms: bee swarms, codependent couples), egotistical (J, me, my . . . ; no third person
references allowed, see also the royal
gender's we, us, our, etc., and
second person's you, your, yours . . .), or
the graphically noncommital splat (*e,
h*, h*s, h*self).
By far outweighing all of these in
popularity, though, was an invention known as Spivak, whose pronouns e, em, eir, eirs, emself had the
unique attraction of feeling and functioning much like one of
the standard gendered pronoun sets without, however, quite
bringing either of them to mind. Whether Spivak therefore represented an
absence of gender or simply a third alternative was a matter,
evidently, of some debate. I can recall putting the question
to a thoughtful spivak friend of mine one evening in the hot
tub and failing, not surprisingly I guess, to get a straight
answer out of em. On the other hand, I have since learned from
McRae's investigations that some spivaks—especially those with
active tinysex lives—had a pretty clear sense of emselves as
inhabiting a specific gender, with its own roles, its own
predilections, and even its own genitalia (think
tendrils).
Whatever the spivaks ontological
status, however, the option never much appealed to exu. “I
liked the idea of containing both, not being without,” she
said of her hermaphrodite period. To be a spivak, as she saw
it, was to efface one's real-life gender status, when what
she'd really wanted in those days was to keep that status in
play, unsettled, indeterminate. “For an entire year,” she
remembered, “not even my closer MOO friends were certain of
what my real gender was—and guesses were pretty sharply
divided. It was fun being gender
ambiguous.”
Yet in the end, she admitted somewhat
wistfully, what she'd liked best about that ambiguity was not
so very different from what seemed to attract many spivaks to
their choice. For whether a spivak saw emself as a
spaghetti-crotched mutant or a conceptual void, eir curious
pronoun-choice tended to have roughly the same effect on eir
dealings with other players as exu's hermaphrodism often did:
it shorted out the binary circuitry with which those players'
minds processed gender, rendering the very notion blessedly,
if temporarily, inapplicable. Or as exu later sighed: “People
treated me as a me rather than as a gendered being.”
And who could begrudge her her longing
for that unsexed state? I wouldn't dream of it. And yet I
can't help surmising that that same longing was in a sense its
own contradiction—that in it lay the closest thing there was,
that is, to an essential difference between the ways men and
women fucked with gender on the MOO.
It was a MOOish commonplace, of course,
that if men sometimes went female just to enjoy the mixed
privileges of “standing out,” by the same token women most
often flipped their bits in order to evade the constant
attention that rained down on virtual females regardless of
their real-world packaging. But what exu was talking about, I
think, was something a little deeper. It was an escape not
just from femininity but from the onerous primacy of gender
itself in most women's lives—from the constantly echoed
insinuation that the face of humanity, like that of God, will
always be a man's, and that a woman consequently might as well
resign herself to being all her life a female first and only
secondly a human being.
And if therefore it made some sense,
however paradoxically, to think of Spivak and either and the other disgendered
options as characteristically female choices, then what of
Niacin's headlong plunge into tinyfemininity? Might it not be
argued by a similar logic that he was chasing an experience
only a man could really find intriguing? By which I mean, of
course, not so much the experience of inhabiting the opposite
gender as that of consciously inhabiting gender at all— an
experience somewhat more alien to men than women, after all,
in a culture that still hasn't quite decided whether “man” is
a synonym for people in general or just the ones with penises.
Just as exu's fondness for hermaphrodism, then, might be read
as a woman's logical desire to flee the territory of
conventional sex roles at the earliest opportunity, so
Niacin's thing for virtual drag might best be understood as a
uniquely male romance with the thought of exiting the unmarked
vehicle of masculine identity for a while and, as it were,
exploring that territory on foot.
It's a hypothesis anyway. Whether it
applied to MOOish gender play in general is a question I leave
for future sociologists of the virtual to resolve. My own
research, if you want to call it that, never really got close
to conclusive. I asked around a bit, kept my eyes open, and
quickly fell in with the general consensus that there were in
fact a great deal more RL men playing virtual women than there
were RL women posing as virtual men (a phenomenon roughly
mirrored, by the way, and probably not coincidentally, in the
real world's ratios of drag queens to kings). But I never felt
as certain about the RL gender breakdown of the
spivak/hermaphrodite population. It might be true that most of
them were really women; or it might not. What was, however,
certainly the case was that the handful I got to know
firsthand, while indeed predominantly female in real life,
didn't exactly add up to a representative sample.
Let me restrict my observations, then,
to the particular, and simply note that however devoutly exu
may have wished to escape the constraints of RL gender, it
would not be long before she learned that LambdaMOO wasn't
really the place to make her getaway. I don't know if she came
to share my intuition that her VR eitherness was as much a reflection of
her fixed RL gender status as a release from it. But even if
she did, I can assure you it wasn't anything so wispy as an
intuition that finally shook her loose from her vaguely
Utopian attachment to virtual her-maphrodism.
What did it, of course, was Mr.
Bungle.
One wonders, idly, why exu's sexual
haziness failed in Bungle's case to do its job and spare her
his severely gender-coded attentions. Had he somehow
discovered the RL truth behind her ambiguous VR mask? Had he
just been guessing, like myself, that that sort of ambiguity
was more likely a woman's gambit than a man's? Or had he in
fact guessed nothing? Had he simply defaulted to the crude
paranoia of the queer-basher, lashing out at exu precisely because she was ill-defined, and
therefore threatening to the boundaries that maintain male
privilege?
One wonders. And yet for exu such
conjectures were somewhat beside the point. What mattered to
her, in the end, was not what Bungle had been thinking as he'd
dragged her androgyne self back into the poisonous web of RL
sexual power relations. What mattered was that he had thought
to do so at all.
“The Bungle Incident gendered me in a
nasty kind of way,” exu told me many times, in so many words.
“ That was part of the shock of it.”
She switched to female not long after that night, and
she never went back to hermaphrodism again. She didn't have to
give it up, of course. It wasn't as if Bungle had blown her
cover, after all, or even as if she'd felt she had a cover to
blow—the truth was, she'd never really cared that much who
knew her RL gender, so long as they'd respected her MOOish
indefinition. But Bungle had taken something from her
nonetheless, and even if it was only a certain naivete about
the possibilities for breaking free of gender's gravity in the
seemingly weightless space of VR, the quiet, hopeful thrill of
being either just wouldn't be the
same without it.
Mostly, she chose not to dwell on what
she'd left behind. But sometimes if you asked her about it a
kind of bitterness welled up again, and she might tell you
then that she could almost wholeheartedly agree with the grim
arguments of certain psychoanalytic feminists she'd read in
school: “That women are gendered precisely by Bungle's sort of
violence: by loss, lack, violation. We're made holes of from
the moment we become aware, and if we forget, we're reminded
soon enough.”
You can imagine, then, the ticklish mix
of feelings with which exu—female by something less than
choice for about half a year now—learned that her old pal
Niacin had lately taken up the habit of being a woman more or
less just for the fun of it.
Or can you? No, I suppose there is a
detail or two I'd better fill you in on first. Such as, for
starters: I'm afraid I may have misled you when I said there
was nothing all that special about exu and Niacin's friendship
in its early days. That happens, actually, to be true; but
unless you understand that a certain ambient flirtatiousness
tended to seep into even the most innocuous relationships on
the MOO—a byproduct, I'd guess, of MOOish pseudonymity and the
instant intimacy it nurtured—then you might have taken me to
imply that not so much as a spark of erotic feeling flashed
between the two new acquaintances. And there you would be
wrong.
There was a spark. And as the months
went by there gradually was more: a gently provocative edge
crept into the occasional crossings of their well-matched
conversational styles, a tension just insistent enough to
register in both their minds as something a little more,
perhaps, than the usual Club Doome bonhomie. “It was a game,”
exu recalled. 'A game of wit, consisting entirely of sporadic
verbal volleys. And it didn't matter which way the game
went.”
Actually, it wasn't even clear the game
was going anywhere at all. By the time of Niacin's rooftop
induction into tinysexual maturity, after all, exu still had
her virtual hands full with HortonWho, and in the weeks that
followed it certainly wasn't as if Niacin's dance card
remained empty either.
But when one afternoon Niacin
introduced exu to his newly minted Giustina morph, exu had a
sudden inkling of the destination toward which their aimless
game had actually been drifting all along. Giustina flashed
her aristocratic ankles, she tossed her half-undone tresses,
and if exu in her mourning cloak of biologically correct femaleness felt any hint of annoyance
at the spectacle of Niacin's giddy, snap-on girlyhood, it was
presently eclipsed, surprise surprise, by a vivid and most
unmournful urge. To be precise: “I wanted,” exu told me, “to
undo her hair the rest of the way, roughly, with my fingers,
while bending her head back and kissing her throat.”
The surprise, I should add, lay not so
much in exu's attraction to the image of a female body (she'd
had her share of same-sex liaisons in real life) as in the
possibilities that this attraction seemed suddenly to be
nudging her toward. Mr. Bungle had beaten all the fun out of
her dreams of living beyond gender, of course, but what was
this coquettish invitation Giustina's ankles were presenting
to her now? Could there really be a sequel to her ill-fated
foray into gender play— a new approach, this time not seeking
to silence gender's incessantly chattering voice, but to
amplify it instead, channeling it into a strange, cross-wired
loop of desire and letting it feed back on itself until its
own noise overwhelmed it?
Well, why not? That day exu chose not
to make her feelings known to Niacin/Giustina, but from then
on the next move in their game waited quietly in the back of
her mind. Weeks passed, exu's affair with HortonWho began to
teeter and Horton himself, for uncertain reasons, began to
show up less and less on the MOO. Niacin meanwhile leapt into
the arms of one young virtual dude after another, intrigued,
compelled, but edging every day a little closer to the limit
of his patience with their uninventive tumblings.
And then, at last, another spark: out
of some not very well-illuminated corner of Niacin's
imagination Lisbet sprang one day—white-skinned, dark-haired,
repressed; the preppy with a past. And while it's possible he
wrote her up with other aims in mind than escalating the
exchange of gentle provocations between exu and himself, it's
indisputable that this became, within a few hours of the
keystrokes that created her, the first notable accomplishment
of Lisbet's brief, unreal existence. For no sooner did exu lay
eyes on the girl's description than Emory began to take shape
in her mind, provoked into being by the implicit challenge in
Lisbet's cool, brittle exterior and imbued with just the aura
of wiry, tobacco-scented naturalism exu thought it would take
to meet that challenge.
In short, and not to put too fine a
point on it, Emory was conceived for the express purpose of
getting into Lisbet's pants.
Which goal proved not so very difficult
to attain, given the variety of circumstances conspiring to
bring it within Emory's reach. The long, subtextual flirtation
between his author and Lisbet's didn't hurt, of course, and
beyond that there was Niacin's almost Stanislavskian eagerness
to inhabit the personae he created, so that although he knew
full well who'd invented the boy-morph who suddenly was
hovering around his latest girl-morph, he couldn't help but
see Emory through the girl-morph's eyes, responding pretty
much as exu had planned to the wiry, tobacco-scented image
Lisbet's own tight-laced vulnerability had inspired. “Emory
made me totally wet,” said Niacin, and that was only the
effect of the boy's description. “Emory started remote-emoting
at me then, very discreetly and ornately,” and after the
desert of cloddish, postadolescent come-ons through which
Niacin had for two months been wandering, the subtlety of
exu/Emory's approach fell on him like a quenching rain: “I was
a goner. ...”
Indeed he was. But how far gone he
couldn't then have guessed; nor did exu have any notion,
really, of what she was so discreetly and ornately getting
herself into. They both had reason to believe, of course, that
they were adequately versed in the mechanics and dynamics of
virtual eros by now. They'd each been around the block a time
or two, by one route or another. But it is safe to say that
within minutes of Lisbet and Emory's first embrace, both
knew—both felt the knowledge coursing through their RL
bodies—that they had stumbled onto an intensity undreamt of in
their personal philosophies of tinysex.
“That first encounter practically blew
the roof of my head off,” was how Niacin put it. “As sex, it
was one of the most amazing experiences I've had, VR or RL.
... I almost passed out. ... I was at work, all faint and
shaky, practically coming in my pants. ... I was afraid to
move.”
And exu, though she tended to be a
little less indelicate in her descriptions of what happened
that day, was clearly reduced to a similar state of
distraction. Logged in from her workplace as well, she too
felt almost physically rent by the gap between her mundane
surroundings and the place into which her psyche had abruptly
been thrust, a place which—well, “What was it like?” I asked,
and exu:
“Like white hot. Like nuclear,” she
said. “It really was like melting into the screen.”
All right all right, I realize that
some among you are by this point shifting skeptically in your
seats, anxious for just a bit more in the way of documentary
detail— a scrap or two, let's say, of the text that traveled
between Austin and Seattle that afternoon so that you, the
most discriminating of my readers, can be the judges of what
was or wasn't white hot, nuclear, roof-blowing, etc. And let
me assure you that I feel your frustration, that I understand
your desire for a closer look, and that I certainly would
never, ever, mistake for mere voyeurism the spirit of purely
intellectual inquiry that so obviously has awoken that desire
in you.
But I'm afraid I'll have to ask you,
nonetheless, to be satisfied with the secondhand scraps I've
already supplied. Because for one thing: they're all the
scraps I've got (there were limits,
after all, to my two friends' openness about their sex lives).
And for another: even if I had a complete, unexpurgated log of
Lisbet and Emory's first tryst to show you, it almost
certainly would fail to convey whatever power inhered in that
event. I'm sorry, but it's true—transcriptions of tinysex are
a notoriously underwhelming form of erotica. Invariably, the
real-time dance of two heatedly thinking-feeling minds that
brings a decent textual shagging to life evaporates the
instant it's saved to disk. Invariably, what's left behind is
either at best a dry but not uninteresting prose poem or, in
the vast majority of encounters, a slapdash collection of
banalities that wouldn't even make the cut at the Penthouse letters desk. The upshot
being in either case—as it was undoubtedly in Emory and
Lisbet's—that you really just had to be there to get the
point.
But listen, if it's any consolation, I
can tell you these details: On that October day a woman
pretending to be a man made a kind of love to a man pretending
to be a woman; the woman knew that the man was pretending and
the man believed the same about the woman, and neither thought
the other was deceived on this account; and nonetheless the
man played his part carefully from beginning to end and the
woman too was careful all the while to keep alive the fiction
that she was a man. More than ever now, in other words, their
interaction was a game. And if you're willing to take my word
for it, I can tell you too that it was somehow precisely
this—their final self-abandonment to the principle of play, of
make-believe—that made that game at last so mind-shakingly
real to them.
It scared them, frankly. Holed up in
the Crossroads early the next day, Emory received a brief page
from Lisbet, who was at the same time chatting with a small
crowd on the hot tub deck. The message said: “I want you so
much I can't even be in the same room with you”—and though
there was surely an edge of playful, romance-novelesque
hyperbole there, the undertone of erotic dread was
genuine.
Actually, in the case of the man who'd
written Lisbet's message, that dread was not only genuine but
of a certain rather textbook variety. Amid the run-up to the
previous afternoon's tangle, you see, it had passingly
occurred to him that, though he tended to assume exu was in
reality a girl, the question of her real gender had in fact
never openly come up in all their months of friendship—and
now, in the aftermath of said tangle, he suddenly was
beginning to feel afflicted by the uncertainty. And no, I
wouldn't blame you one bit if you happened to find it just a
tad absurd that Niacin, after months of lifting his virtual
skirts for pretty much any able-minded RL male not otherwise
occupied, only now saw fit to suffer his first attack of
homosexual panic. But understand: the stakes had changed. “I
sensed the potential,” Niacin said, “for something other than
a quick fuck with Emory, a potential that was never there
before. And while fucking boys put me off not a bit, the idea
of having a thang with a boy was a
bit troublesome. Especially in the case of one who was a
closeish friend. ...”
Ultimately, then, Niacin's fear wasn't
quite so much the queasiness of homophobia as it was the
anxiety of any playboy plunged unexpectedly into deep
emotional waters. And in this, exu's anxieties were not much
different. Not that she was any kind of dilettante, of
course—her relationship with HortonWho had already taken her
into some not inconsiderable amorous depths. But what she'd
experienced the day before, with Lisbet, had felt like a whole
new territory. She'd stepped into a psychic landscape she
would only later have words to describe, and even then they
would be words bleary with mysticism and poetry: “burning
howling core of silent wind,” “complete sloshing of identity,”
“ego dissolution,” that sort of thing. What in God's name was
she thinking, then, setting off into this realm with a person
whose real face she'd never seen and whose real character she
could only judge on the basis of a long, intermittent exchange
of clever remarks?
But it was too late now for second
thoughts. exu's apprehensions were fighting a losing battle
against her desires; and Niacin's anxieties were no match for
the attraction pulling him back toward the place his game with
exu had finally led to yesterday. They met again, Lisbet and
Emory. And after that they met another time, and then another.
And soon you couldn't even call it meeting anymore: they were
in each other's company from the moment exu's workday began
until the moment Niacin's ended, trying their RL best to hide
the arousal of their physical bodies, attending to their RL
duties no more than they had to keep from losing their RL
jobs.
They were playing harder now, inventing
new characters and trying out old ones on each other. Niacin
was no longer Lisbet only, but sometimes also Giustina, or the
virile, bay-rum-scented Ishmael, or the lean old traveler
Wattson; exu might be Emory or Xango or the sea-goddess
Iemanja or even, on occasion, exu herself, whatever that was.
For Niacin there was an element of rediscovery—as if all the
permutations that had lurked unexamined in the heart of his
hurried grope with the mysterious Blaize were now being taken
out, each in its turn, and carefully, lovingly looked over.
“We were boy/girl, boy/boy, girl/girl,” he said. “I was boy
and she girl and vice versa ... we did every possible combo. .
. . We were like that for [weeks], shifting genders and
bodies, fucking like mad, totally in love.”
It was funny, in a way—the two of them
furiously shuffling their identities and at the same time
coming to know each other more intimately, perhaps, than they
had ever known anyone. Between fictions, real-life stories
were getting told: exu learned more and more about the
complicated progress of Niacin's RL love life (he was by then
six months into a stormy relationship with a woman who knew
nothing about his virtual excursions); and Niacin in turn
picked up details about exu's marriage that, among other
things, helped finally to settle his doubts about her RL
gender. But it wasn't really in these departures from
play-acting that exu and Niacin caught their deepest glimpses
into one another. Instead, it was in the play-acting itself—in
their fluid minuet of name changes and textual makeovers—that
they began to feel their innermost, least namable identities
laid bare. “For some reason,” said exu, “interacting through
the fictions got [us] into these weird, core selves that were
almost unbearable. Like the more fictional we were, the closer
to some wordless reality we got.”
And this was funny too, though perhaps
not in a terribly amusing way. For what could it possibly mean
to approach a wordless knowledge of another person through a
medium composed entirely of words? Could exu and Niacin ever
really arrive at such a knowledge, or did their headlong
flight toward it doom their affair to crash against a terminal
paradox?
It's a good question, if I do say so
myself—although I regret to report that it remains a purely
theoretical one as well. For in the end, the affair in fact
ran aground on a somewhat less esoteric sort of
contradiction:
“At a certain point my mind just
fried,” said Niacin. “The RL/VR split was making me crazy.
...”
And yes, it's possible he could have
handled that split a little better if he'd felt at all able to
discuss its VR side with his RL SO—as exu somehow managed to
with hers. But exu's policy of domestic honesty was not
exactly for the faint of heart, and when you got right down to
it Niacin's decision to keep his girlfriend in the dark about
his virtual sex life was arguably not the most selfish of the
choices he'd made since that life began. It wasn't easy on
him, anyway: obliged at the end of the day to try and switch
his feelings for exu off along with his computer, Niacin was
forced to live with the awkward impossibility of doing so.
Images of afternoon encounters bled through, inevitably, into
disorienting dinnertimes and even more confusing bedtimes, and
as both relationships progressed, the confusion only
intensified. He rode it as far as possible, he said, “feeling
totally fissured . . . but kinda relishing living on the edge
that way . . . until I just felt like I couldn't take it
anymore. ...”
And there the story ended. Two months
after Lisbet and Emory first met, they met again for the final
time. Or maybe they didn't. Perhaps it was Wattson and Xango
who met that day, or Giustina and Iemanja, or just plain
Niacin and exu. It could have been any of them by that point,
of course, and their interaction could have gone any number of
ways. Niacin may have offered explanations for the two of them
to haggle over, or he may have kept his intentions to himself
while they indulged in one last afternoon of dizzying play.
But it doesn't really matter which of the possible scenarios
he ultimately chose, because in all of them the outcome was
the same: the game would go no further from then on. Niacin
checked out—just disappeared into the real world for a good
long while and left exu to sift through the memories and begin
to try and put them in some kind of order she could make sense
of.
God knows she had her work cut out for
her. And if she took time out at any point to cry a little
while for Emory's sake, or even for her own, I don't recall
her ever telling me about it.
I do recall, though, something of my
state of mind as the details of Lisbet and Emory's story
started trickling my way. Samantha's maiden, moonlit walk was
several weeks behind me by then, and if my initial wonder at
that curious experience had already begun to fade, my slowly
accumulating knowledge of what exu and Niacin had been through
together did little to revive it. I saw now just how narrowly
I had opened the door onto the world of virtual gender play
that evening, and I began half-consciously to guess at the
things I might eventually feel (besides pretty) if I chose to
move further into that world. Would I discover in myself the
same VR-induced chaos of erotic tendencies that Niacin had
finally, in his weeks of kaleidoscopic experiment with exu,
come face-to-face with—that part of him he referred to (with
only the slightest whisp of a virtual chuckle) as his
“polygendered omnisexuality”? Would I arrive at the strange
state of ego-melting, postgendered grace that exu, for her
part, swore she'd reached amid the same kaleidoscopic
afternoons, in those moments when the game went white hot and
“whatever it is that links gender to identity got completely
displaced”?
I wasn't counting on it. But as I
settled into an awareness of the possibilities, I found myself
spending more and more of my limited MOO time as Samantha,
moving about the Lambda grounds not so much in search of
cross-gendered adventures as idly tempting fate to toss a few
of them my way. Fate was in no hurry to oblige, it seemed, but
I didn't mind. I continued to enjoy the almost fragrantly
delicate sensation of being wrapped in my own secondhand
notions of femininity, and by the time summer arrived and the
MOO at last became a daily habit, I was as often in Samantha's
skin as out of it—open still to whatever interactions she
might lead me into, and casually hopeful that somewhere among
them might lurk something as intense, as rich, or as
illuminating as exu/Emory and Lisbet/Niacin's encounter seemed
to me to have been.
But why should I pretend with you?
Surely you'll have guessed by now that if Samantha's story had
ever finally led to anything in the same league as Lisbet and
Emory's, I would have skipped the long digression and told you
all about it pages ago. And even if instead this comes as news
to you, well anyway now you know: what's left to say about
Samantha does not amount to much.
She did, in the end, have her share of
memorable encounters; that much is true. But they were hardly
what I'd call adventures, nor did they leave me feeling
especially enriched. On the contrary, what I remember most
about Samantha's ample portion of my first few weeks of daily
residence (for it was in her body, you might now be interested
to know, that I rode the scarlet balloon to the top of
Lambda's sky on that inaugural afternoon, that I subsequently
did much of my early scouting for a likely place to put the
Garden of Forking Paths, and that I later cast my vote against
Minnie's seductive dreams of technotopia) is a feeling of
increasing wariness, as more and more regularly, it seemed, my
female incarnation was approached by male strangers apparently
convinced that she had nothing better to do than supply them
with the time of day and other, perhaps more stimulating
varieties of data.
Wherever I might be, whatever I was
actually up to at the moment, their often stunningly graceless
overtures somehow managed to blunder onto my screen.
“Samantha, you are sexy,” a certain plaid guest observed out
loud in the middle of a crowded hot tub one evening. He then,
when this silver-tongued inducement failed to lure me away
with him to a more intimate setting, proceeded to curse me out
in surprisingly expressive comic-strip style (his exact words:
“$%@$%^%^&#^%&#&65”). And Plaid was hardly the
least tactful of them. “Would you like to have some fun with
my 10 inches?” a beige guest paged me once, from God knows
where and without even the courtesy of a what's-your-sign to
break the ice, while I was in the middle of a fairly involved
discussion with a friend on the deck outside the living room.
(“Why yes actually!” I paged back, “I just bought a new
cutlery set and I've been looking for something to try it out
on!”—but this proved too subtle for my would-be playmate, and
I was obliged finally to spell it out for him in two- and
three-letter words.)
The relentlessness of these intrusions
came as something of a revelation to me (yes, even after all
the real-life times I'd nodded sympathetically while
girlfriends fumed about the one streetcorner lothario too many
they'd put up with that day). And let me be frank, my fellow
men: it didn't exactly make me proud to be one of us. In
fairness, though, I should also note that not all my suitors
were quite such discredits to the sex. Nor, to be entirely
honest, was I always quite so unreceptive to their approaches.
I liked to think of myself as a basically nice person, for one
thing, and so, like many an RL woman I suppose, I found it
hard to very firmly rebuff a man who put at least a little
civility into his attempts to get to know me. But more to the
point: it wasn't like I never felt the least bit curious
myself about where those attempts might lead.
In fact, it had by then become a kind
of semiofficial policy of mine that if I was going to have
tinysex with anyone at all (now that Ecco was no longer
around, that is), it was going to be with one of these same
random lugs buzzing so reliably around the flower of
Samantha's femininity. It seemed the simplest way to go about
it, after all. I would scarcely have to lift a finger to get
my hands on a partner, and better yet, I wouldn't have to
worry much about any emotional complications either. I mean, I
wanted some adventure, sure, but I found my real love life far
too challenging as it was to want to risk the kinds of RL/VR
conflicts Niacin and exu had had to negotiate.exu herself
advised me against it, and she seemed to agree that if a
quick, pinhole glimpse of the exotic territory she and Niacin
had explored was enough to satisfy my curiosity, then a
cross-gendered tumble with a randy stranger would easily—and
safely—do the trick.
But it didn't take me long to figure
out that, for Samantha anyway, there could be no such zipless
tinyfuck: I simply lacked the nerve to pull it off. Nor was my
squeamishness a matter of deep-seated sexual hang-ups, I don't
think, or even of the ethical quandaries involved in letting
another man deceive himself as to my real gender. Oh, I
suppose I wrestled a bit with the moral issues, but was it
really my fault if some people
didn't know better than to believe everything they read on
their computer screens? No: what unmanned me, finally, was not
the prospect of a guilty conscience, but a rather less
honorable fear of being discovered and publicly exposed for a
fraud—an anxiety I didn't even quite realize was there until
it overcame me one evening while I was holding up Samantha's
end of a long conversation that had all the earmarks of a
virtual date. “You like horses, right?” had been the young
man's inaccurate but inoffensive opening line, after which
he'd suggested we get acquainted over a game of one-on-one
Scrabble in the dining room. A microscopic dew of nervous
sweat started to glaze my RL skin then as suddenly, in quick
succession, the Scrabble game ground to a halt, my date
murmured silkily that he'd “much rather just talk to you
anyway” (back in his room of course), and I proceeded to
imagine all the horrible things he was going to say about me
on *social and elsewhere once he
traced Samantha back to Dr. Bombay and did enough asking
around to put two and two together.
I managed, that night, to duck out
before things got too cozy, and I even managed afterward to
remain on friendly terms with the man in question, who called
himself Leshko, who claimed in real life to be a
thirty-one-year-old goldsmith and former heroin addict from
Chicago, and who seemed, to my immense relief, almost totally
unruffled when he did at last deduce my RL gender not too many
days after our first meeting. By then, however, I had already
abandoned once and for all my scheme to use Samantha as a
vehicle for tinysex. I still held on to the possibility of a
cross-gendered fling, but I no longer dared risk my MOOish
reputation by having that fling in a morph traceable to Dr.
Bombay. This meant, in effect, that I would have to postpone
any actual flinging until after I had worked out the
moderately complicated details of hacking myself an illegal
second character.
Between this change of plans, then, and
the increasingly tiresome barrage of Neanderthal pick-up
lines, Samantha lost a good portion of her original appeal for
me. In the time that remained of her existence (for her days,
like those of all my morphs, were numbered, though I did not
know it then), I think I slipped into her body on maybe four
or five more occasions. Of these, I will mention only one just
now.
It was in mid-August. I was in the hot
tub once again, with friends, and very much enjoying the
playful mood I had almost forgotten Samantha sometimes helped
me into, when suddenly two guests, a magenta one and a khaki
one, splashed boisterously into the water. These guests seemed
to be of about the same age and sensibility as MTV's notorious
teenage wastrels Beavis and Butt-head, and I imagine we would
have simply ignored the pair if one of them hadn't then
happened to address the other with that universal term of
teenboy endearment “fag.” With that, however, my friend
theroux-que-sault insisted on holding up a big sign inscribed
with the words No homophobic slurs,
please, to which the magenta guest insisted on replying
“Fuck you queer,” to which my friend Enver in turn replied by
teleporting both guests to a harshly described area of the MOO
called Hades.
Within a few minutes, the magenta guest
splashed back into the tub, and presently the bunch of us saw
on our screens the unappetizing sentence Magenta_ Guest
pisses in the water. I happened to have a voodoo doll on
me, so I retaliated with the sentence As if against its will, Magenta_Guestdrinks
its own piss water. To which Magenta made the
devilishly-clever rebuttal “Well, no”—which prompted from me
the equally Wildean “Well, uh, yeah.”
And it was at about this point, when it
appeared the goings-on could not possibly get any more
juvenile, that the magenta guest did the one thing that stands
out in my mind above all else that occurred that night.
“Samantha, can I pet your poodle?”
asked Magenta. “Please?” And then before I could even begin to
roll my eyeballs at the kid, it had happened: the magenta
guest had grabbed my poodle.
Whatever that was supposed to mean.
But of course I knew very well what the
gutter-minded little guest intended it to mean, which is why I
remember that moment so clearly. For though I couldn't help
chuckling at the inanity of the offense—and though we
immediately packed the offender off to hell again as casually
as you might shoo a fly—I logged out at the end of the evening
with a low flame of humiliation burning in me and a galling
new sliver of knowledge lodged in my heart. I had learned at
the guest's poodle-grabbing hand, you see, that if being in
Samantha's body had the capacity to make me feel pretty, it
could also let me feel a kind of ugly that a male body gave me
only limited access to. The deeply embedded gender fictions
that had brought the power of feminine sexual charm to life
inside me turned out to work just as well for the
powerlessness of feminine sexual subjugation, it turned out,
and as I lay awake in my RL bed that night with angry,
impotent fantasies of revenge floating lightly through my
head, it amused me to suppose that after having long believed
I'd successfully comprehended the curious, ambivalent rage of
Mr. Bungle's victims, I had at last been given the opportunity
to feel that very rage within myself.
But the truth is this: I was no more
certain then than I am today of the extent to which my
experiences as Samantha gave me firsthand experience of a
woman's perspective. Just as it was unclear what she was to
other people—the woman that the magenta guest and others saw,
or the costume that my friends saw—so it remained unclear what
she was to me: a man's fantasies of femininity turned loose,
or a taste of the disembodied cultural voice that speaks
inside a woman's head, that tells her how a woman acts, and
how a woman feels.
RL
NEW YORK CITY, JULY
1994
A Groovy Booth
You are in a high-backed, wood-paneled
booth in what is surely, this week anyway, the grooviest
little boho eatery on Ludlow Street. In the murk beyond the
confines of the booth, you can just make out the gist of the
restaurant's decor -- a peculiarly mid-'90s blend of
thrift-store drabbery and art-schooled elegance.
Jessica and The_Author are here.
Jessica takes a sip from her
martini.
The_Author chews the olive from his
martini.
Jessica smiles at The_Author.
The_Author smiles at Jessica.
The_Author wonders how to put this,
exactly.
The_Author says, “So. Uh . . .”
Jessica raises an eyebrow.
The_Author says, “So I've been
thinking, you know, and it's like -- well if I'm really gonna
do this whole MOO thing, OK, I mean I _am_ gonna have to at
least _try_ this whole tinysex thing, right?”
Jessica says, “Uh-huh. Which of course
you did already.”
The_Author gives her a quizzical
look.
Jessica says, “Remember? You, me, the
master bedroom?”
The_Author says, “Oh. Ha! Right. No,
totally, yeah. Of course I remember. Heh . . . But it's, uh .
. .”
The_Author says, “It's just that I
think I should try it with someone I haven't, you know,
actually had sex with in real life or, I mean, even _seen_ in
real life. You know?”
The_Author says, “I mean as a sort of
experimental thing?”
The_Author says, “Just to sort of see
what it's like?”
Jessica looks at The_Author with a
slight narrowing of her eyes and an even slighter grin.
Jessica says, “You want to just sort of
see what it's like to have netsex with another woman. This is
what you're saying?”
The_Author says, “Oh, no! No no no. I
mean, probably not. I mean, no, I'm thinking definitely that
the most interesting thing probably would be to do it in my
female morph with some, just, random guy.”
The_Author says, “Most likely.”
Jessica sighs.
Jessica says, “So what's your point,
Julian?”
The_Author says, “Oh. Well I mean I was
just wondering, you know? I mean how you would feel about
that?”
The_Author watches Jessica carefully.
He does not particularly want to be having this conversation,
but he has been advised it's for the best. exu told him so;
something about the need for negotiating boundaries and
anticipating potential disruptions and so forth. It all
sounded pretty sensible to him at the time. Right now, though,
he is not so sure.
Jessica shrugs, and gently smirks.
Jessica says, “Well what can I say? I
mean you _know_ how I'm feeling about This Whole Monogamy
Thing these days. Do whatever you want, I don't care.”
WesleyYourWaiterForThisEvening appears
as if from nowhere, two steaming plates of food in his
hands.
The_Author . o 0 ( Hm. Not quite the
answer we wanted to hear, nope. )
WesleyYourWaiterForThisEvening sets a
plate of Blackened Catfish with Zucchini and Rice on the table
before Jessica.
The_Author . o 0 ( Then again,
certainly not the answer we _didn't_ want to hear. )
WesleyYourWaiterForThisEvening sets a
plate of Grilled Pork Chops with Sauteed Spinach and Garlic
Mashed Potatoes on the table before The_Author.
WesleyYourWaiterForThisEvening chirps
“Enjoy” and disappears back into the murk.
The_Author begins to carve into his
Grilled Pork Chops, looks up at Jessica.
The_Author says, “So you don't have a
problem with this?”
Jessica, her mouth full of Blackened
Catfish, looks at him inquiringly.
The_Author says, “I mean with me having
tinysex on a, uh, on an experimental basis.”
Jessica swallows, shakes her head and
says “No problem,” and she's smiling as she says it.
The_Author notes, however, that this is
not the smile he loves. Not the one that melts and invites
him. It has a hint of formality in it, this smile, and he has
never seen her wear it except in self-defense.
The_Author grins back at her, more
broadly than he means to, and starts cutting up his Grilled
Pork Chops again.
The_Author thinks he may have lost his
appetite.
VR
5
How Did My
Garden Grow
Or TINYECONOMICS, Theoretical and Applied
In the early evening of the day after I
voted no on *B:DisbandMediation, I
found myself standing in a realm of pure possibility and
wondering (as one often does in realms of that sort) just how
I was to proceed from there.
The surroundings didn't offer much in
the way of clues. You are standing on a
path in a realm of pure possibility
was what I saw when I looked. And there was this advice as
well: You can stay here as long as you
like, hut it's boring, and more nerve-racking than you might imagine. Why not go
north? Or south? Sort the yarrow stalk, toss a coin, pray for guidance. Seek and
you will find.
But I knew better. I knew that if I
went south, for instance, I would find very little—just a few
patches of hazily sketched scenery followed by a featureless
wasteland of undescribed spaces. I knew, too, that if I went
north the prospects wouldn't be much better. I knew, in short,
that it was high time for me to get to work on the task I'd
been so blithely putting off for the last few weeks: I must go
forth now and finish my garden.
But as I said, exactly how I was to do
so remained a question. Nor was it now the same simple
question I'd once thought it was, back when the view from the
scarlet balloon had seemed to promise me a limitless space in
which to shape my monumental landscape. There were limits
after all, I had learned—as inevitably there must be. For
though I had the option, here within the MOO, of tucking the
Garden of Forking Paths inside a jewel box or a carrot seed or
even a passing thought if I so chose, out there in the real
world there was only one place it could be stored, and that
was the same small whirring disk of ferromagnetized metal upon
which every other object in the crowded MOOish cosmos resided.
Boundless though the imaginations that built LambdaMOO might
be, in other words, its material resources were finite. There
were only so many bytes of hard-drive space to go around, and
as I had lately and dismayingly come to understand, my share
of those bytes—my “quota,” as the.local jargon termed it—was
quite possibly never going to be large enough to accommodate
the grandiose construction I had in mind.
It was exu who had pointed out the
problem to me. It was sort of her job to, actually. As a newly
elected member of the Architecture Review Board (or ARB, which
rhymes with “barb”), she was one of about a dozen MOOers
officially charged with determining whose virtual creations
had the right stuff to qualify for increased allocations of
disk space. I knew very well of course that I was ultimately
going to have to apply for such an increase myself—at 130
kilobytes and rising, the garden had already bloated me
irrevocably beyond the initial 50-kilobyte quota granted each
new player on the MOO. But somehow it had never occurred to me
that the ARB might actually turn my application down. And it
was on this point that exu finally was obliged to set me
straight: she liked the garden a lot, as it happened, but she
regretted to inform me that other ARB members might not be as
willing as she was to overlook the project's almost absurdly
extravagant bulk.
“The thing is this,” she explained.
“There's this new economy of scarcity around here. It's utter
bullshit. Partly leftover hysteria about the recent population
explosion; partly other stuff. But the upshot is, the ARB is
giving out quota these days like hardly at all. Even when they
do, first-time applicants generally apply for no more than
50K—and you're gonna need, what, 100? 150?”
I got her drift, and I didn't much like
it. Sure, living over-quota wasn't the worst thing that had
ever happened to me. It wasn't even quite the “big fucking
pain in the ass” that exu sympathetically made it out to be.
But its effects were quietly and steadily debilitating
nonetheless: I couldn't create new objects, I couldn't add
programming to the ones I already had, I couldn't invent new
morphs. I was a virtual cripple, and what was maybe worse, I
was a bum—living on borrowed quota, squatting on public disk
space, dreaming of the day my finished garden would at last
earn me a full reimbursement from the ARB and make a
self-supporting citizen out of me again. Now exu seemed to be
telling me that day might never come, and you can imagine how
the news unnerved me.
DrBombay gives
you a fearful look, I emoted at her, and “Jeez,” I said,
“what am I supposed to do?”
exu frets
ARBishly, she emoted back. _Hates_
this.
“I wanna subvert this fucking fascist
ARB stranglehold on creative building, is the thing,” she
said. “And this is just the sort of situation that gets me
steamed. But don't worry for now, OK? I'm gonna ask some of
the real long-time ARBers if they have any ideas on how to get
you your quota back. They tend to be the biggest nazis of the
bunch—especially the ones that were appointed by Haakon back
in the pre-Bungle days—but I trust a few of them.”
“Sigh,” I sighed. “Well, see what you
can do. Nothing beyond the bounds of propriety of course.”
“Of course,” said exu, grinning.
“Meanwhile, you should prolly talk to Finn. Fellow ARB member.
Elected. He's got a petition for term limits for ARBers which
will hopefully shake loose some of the most severe fascists.
And he's way, way helpful if you can catch him in the
mood.
“Besides which,” she added, with
another grin, “you need to know him. He's part of the local
color.”
That much I knew. Almost from my first
day on the MOO, in fact, I'd been hearing people talk about
this Finn. Finn the outlaw, some called him. Finn the martyr,
said others. Finn the patron saint of anarchists and
libertines; Finn the hacker of wizbits and inventor of erotic
player classes. Finn the hero—or villain, depending on who you
talked to—of a distant piece of MOOish history called the
Schmoo Wars. Or something like that. His exact place in the
local mythologies hadn't been the easiest thing for me to keep
track of, but by now at least I'd gotten the message loud and
clear that it was a prominent one.
So naturally when exu offered to invite
this illustrious personage to drop by my not-so-humble
construction site for a look, I didn't dare decline. And thus
it came to pass that in the early evening of the day after I
voted no on *B:Disband-Mediation, I
found myself waiting at the heart of my garden for Finn's
imminent arrival—alone in a realm of pure possibility and
wondering, as I believe I've mentioned, just how I was to
proceed from there.
I wondered too of course just how, and
even whether, Finn was going to help me proceed. His celebrity
intrigued me, certainly, but at the moment what interested me
more was his authority. He was an ARB official, after all, and
even though exu was too, I couldn't really think of her as
anything but a friend, or of her occasional visits to my
garden as anything but social calls. Finn's impending
appearance, on the other hand, loomed in my mind as a kind of
preliminary hearing. My work, I sensed, was to be sized up now
by an impartial emissary of the board—inspected, dissected,
weighed in the balance, and in the end declared viable or not.
If the verdict was positive, I could go ahead as planned,
reasonably confident that exu's fears were exaggerated and
that I wasn't just digging myself into a lifetime of quota
deprivation. And if the verdict was not positive—well, so be
it. I had shelved my plans for the garden once before. It
wasn't like it would kill me to put this foolish dream of mine
to rest once and for all.
Thus then, in an attitude of stoic
reflection, did I approach the proceedings. Finn arrived,
introducing himself with a simple “Howdy!”, and had I bothered
taking a look at him I would have seen an equally
straightforward description—a 5'9” young man of lithe build with dark hair. . .full lips. . . eyes of blue
steel. . . a confident smile
and so on, cleanly written but otherwise unremarkable
except, perhaps, for the “I LOVE LORENA BOBBITT” T-shirt
fitted snugly to his chest. I did not look at any of this,
however, for I was otherwise engaged: almost the instant Finn
appeared my stoicism had crumbled, and it was taking all my
concentration now to keep from throwing myself prostrate at
his feet in an abject plea for his ARBly approval.
“It's a pleasure to make your
acquaintance!” I gushed, shaking his hand perhaps a little too
eagerly.
Finn grinned. A friendly grin? A
perfunctory grin? A grin shot through with the easy contempt
of the powerful for their supplicants? In the real world maybe
I could have read the peripheral details of his gesture for
some clue to my impending fate, but here there were no such
visual aids: Finn grins was all I
had to go on.
“Likewise,” he said.
Then he said nothing.
“Oh, yeah,” I managed, after a bit.
“Well, this is my garden. Pretty much all that remains to be
done here is to finish the descriptions of the various rooms.
There's something like, er, 128.”
I blushed, embarrassed to admit how big
the place was. But Finn said nothing still. No doubt he had
already typed @measure and gotten a
look at the garden's egregious byte-count.
“Let me take you on a tour of one of
the more finished wings,” I offered, eager to change the
subject. I headed north from the realm of pure possibility
into the “room” I called Yin (as opposed to Yang, of course,
which lay to the south).
Darkness
surrounds you—said the description there—deep and comforting. To the northwest (left) you sense something
may be happening. To the northeast (right) you sense something else may be
happening.Finn entered from the south, behind me. “What's
the idea here?” he asked. “Is there some kind of cosmic
divination going on?”
I told him then about the garden's
concept: about the branching paths and the way they modeled
the binary lines of the I Ching's hexagrams, about the unique
words of guidance waiting at the end of each of the sixty-four
possible pathways. I told him, also, how to use the garden's
“oracle” program to navigate the paths. “At every fork, type
one of three commands,” I explained. “ 'Toss' coins, 'sort'
yarrow stalks, or simply 'pray.' The oracle will tell you
whether you've drawn a 'solid' line or a 'broken' one, and
hence which way to go.”
These details were important, but what
I mainly wanted him to grasp about the oracle was that I'd
programmed it myself. Not that this amounted to any great
feat, you understand—the oracle was a mere ten lines of the
sort of code no nine-year-old programmer would brag about
these days. But it happened also to be the only actual code
I'd written into the project myself, and I knew enough about
the ARB's guidelines to know that original coding often made
the difference between approval and rejection. Without it,
even the most carefully crafted description-texts didn't count
for much, and for that matter, they could even count against
you. “Tinyscenery,” it was called—place-descriptions that were
nice to look at but impossible to interact with—and ARBish
literature tended to speak of it in much the same tones the
Bible reserved for practices like idolatry and fornication.
Myself, I liked to think that the 128 handsome
place-descriptions of which my garden was eventually to
consist would fit together far too interestingly to be
dismissed as the irredeemable heap of tinyscenery it might
otherwise resemble. But I knew, even so, that it couldn't hurt
to draw attention to the site's more obviously interactive
aspects.
It heartened me therefore to see Finn
linger, there in the darkness of Yin, and play with the oracle
for a bit.
He tossed the coins and the oracle
said: “The line is solid. Go right.”
He sorted the yarrow stalks: “Go
right,” it said.
He prayed for guidance: “Go right,”
again.
And then, for a fourth time, the
supposedly randomized program pointed him to the right, and I
started to get the feeling things were not prepared to go my
way tonight. True, four solid lines in a row didn't
necessarily mean the oracle was broken, but it did look weird
enough to cast doubt on my programming skills. And worse, the
weirdness wasn't even pointing in the proper direction: the
right-hand fork, I knew, led only into a desert of
still-undescribed rooms—one empty place after another telling
the visitor, You see nothing
special.
“Uh, heh, let's uh, let's go left
instead,” I said. “Screw the oracle.”
So left we went. Northwest:
It's winter.
Frost is in the air. To the west (left) stands a grove of
fruit trees. To the north (right) a
mountain rises.
From there we went left again, toward
the trees and into them:
You are in a
grove of skeletal fruit trees, stripped bare by winter. The
earth beneath them is black and
pungent, rich with the life force that will reanimate the
trees in spring. To the southwest
(left), a path leads on through the grove. Another one leads
to the northwest (right).
I chose the right-hand path this
time:
You stand at the
northern edge of a fruitless fruit grove. In the northeastern
distance Ken mountain rises,
snow-capped. A path leads west (left), toward a sound of
rushing water. Another leads north (right), across a gentle
upward slope covered with dry yellow grass, to a stand of firs.
I climbed the gentle upward slope:
You are in a
sparse stand of firs on the southwest slope of a hill. The
wind whispers in the branches. To the northwest (left) a path
slopes down to a grassy clearing. To the northeast (right) a path climbs the
hill.
I paused there, before the sixth and
final fork, and waited amid the whispering firs for Finn to
catch up with me. It took a mind-bogglingly long time—about a
minute or two.
“Goddamn! Are you as lagged as I?” he
asked when he arrived.
I wasn't. But I had to agree the lag
was pretty bad that night, and silently I cursed it for yet
another worrisome omen. People liked to say that lag was VR's
closest equivalent to real weather, and they definitely had a
point (if only because the lag and its vagaries occupied about
the same proportion of casual conversation in the MOO as the
weather did in real life). But the truth is, lag was more like
air pollution: it was ugly, it was hazardous to the healthy
functioning of MOOish society, and in the final analysis, it
was attributable to nothing but the activities of that very
same society. Debates sometimes flared up over just which of
those activities contributed most to the lag. Quite a few
MOOers seemed to believe it could all be blamed on the steady
swelling of the database files, spreading funguslike across
the surface of the hard drive as the number of inhabitants
grew and their creations proliferated. Others argued it was
something a little more complicated—most likely some factor of
the number of people connected at any one time, with an
equally probable correlation to the size and complexity of the
objects those people were playing with. But either argument
led to pretty much the same policy implications: small was
beautiful, and projects as humongous as the Garden of Forking
Paths had better show some seriously socially redeeming
qualities if their architects wanted room to build them
in.
Consequently, I couldn't help
interpreting Finn's complaint about the lag as a veiled
critique of my own burgeoning contribution to it. Nor did it
encourage me much that he'd said so little else in the course
of our walk, despite my chatty, running commentary on the
Taoistical significance of the various sights along the way.
My spirits sank as I imagined the scathing review he must have
been composing in his silence, and when at last I led Finn up
the rightward fork to the top of the hill, it only mildly
amused me to see how well the final vista matched my mood.
From the top of
a gently sloping hill, you look down upon a barren plain. The
sky above is overcast, hidden. As
far as you can see, it is the same: the closed face of the
sky, the lifeless earth, their
union at a horizon you will never reach.
There wasn't much more to say. Except
this:
“Type 'look within,'“ I said to Finn,
and then I did the same.
After a laggy moment or two, I saw on
my screen the cryptic but unmistakably gloomy counsel
associated with the I Ching hexagram P'i, or Standstill:
“Heaven and earth do not unite:/ The image of Standstill./
Thus the superior man falls back upon his inner worth/ In
order to escape the difficulties./ He does not permit himself
to be honored with revenue.”
Briefly I pondered the words. In
general they were taken to mean that the situation at hand had
reached a hopeless impasse, which frankly sounded about right
to me just then, and God knows the bit about not getting
honored with revenue didn't make the passage seem any less
painfully relevant. Still, it wasn't the I Ching's opinion I
had come all the way out to this hilltop to hear. It was
Finn's, and at this point I figured he might as well let me
have it.
“So what do you think?” I asked. “Does
this seem like a totally unconscionable byte-hog to you? Be
honest.”
And he was. But to my simultaneous
relief and consternation, his honesty delivered neither the
abrupt dismissal I had feared nor the unequivocal thumbs-up I
had hoped for. Instead, Finn patiently explained that it was
just too early to determine what the ARB's final judgment
would be. “This thing is damn large,” he informed me, but that
didn't mean it couldn't win approval in the end: “You're going
to have to convince us it's being used and enjoyed by the
public, and that it is in some way themely.”
I nodded politely, not exactly thrilled
to be shown the hoops I still had to leap through to earn my
quota biscuit, but not exactly devastated either. It was true,
I knew, that the sin of “unthemeliness” ranked even higher
than tinyscenery on the ARB's list of architectural no-no's.
But I also knew that all I really had to do to bring the
garden into conformity with LambdaMOO's “theme”—i.e., the
fiction that everything there existed on or around the grounds
of a vaguely magical mansion in the hills above Palo Alto—was
spruce up its little jewel-box container and find some
not-too-crowded tabletop or mantelpiece to put it on. As for
showing that the garden was a hit with the public, well, what
that appeared to mean was that I'd have to finish the thing
and then test-market it a while before I could even think
about beginning the official application process, and I
supposed I could live with that.
But when Finn further advised me to
meet with other ARB members before I did any more building,
something in me snapped. Suddenly, and with profound
irritation, I pictured an endless parade of bureaucrats
marching through my creation, each one offering “helpful”
suggestions and critiques while I took dutiful notes and tried
hard to keep smiling lest some dyspeptic Servant of the People
or another decided to dock me points for bad attitude.
“Aw fer shit's sake,” I said, unable
finally to contain my exasperation. “Well, at least it's nice
to be reminded there's other political issues around here
besides harassment.”
And actually, I sort of meant that:
there was a grim fascination in discovering just how little my
balloon-borne rhapsody on the marvels of LambdaMOO's
collective self-construction had anticipated the
conflict-ridden land-use issues that awaited me down here on
the ground. But despite Finn's own ongoing attempt at
legislating ARB reform, my newfound interest in the
sociopolitical dimensions of quota distribution evidently
failed to rouse his sympathy. In fact, he rather seemed to
take it personally:
“That's not fair,” he snapped. “We
can't approve every request these days. The MOO can't grow
forever. The more space used, the slower the MOO, the worse
off we all are.”
And he was right, of course, in the
long run. But that pretty much tore it for me. I didn't know
quite how much stock to put in the rumors of Finn's mythic
mischievousness, but right now I knew one thing for sure: if
he'd ever been even one-tenth the hell-raising anarch those
rumors made him out to be, his transformation into the
straight-faced mouther of civic pieties who stood before me
now was proof enough that something evil lurked in the heart
of the ARB.
I apologized, all the same, for losing
my cool. And in fact I would later come to recognize in Finn a
figure every bit as colorful as—and a shade more complicated
than—the Finn of legend. But for now our acquaintance had
taught me only that I wanted as little to do with the ARB as
possible. I simply did not have the stomach to keep on
canvassing its members for their approval; and more to the
point, I found I didn't have the heart to let their potential
disapproval stand between me and my foolish dream after all.
There wasn't any question in my mind about it now: I would
build my garden with or without the blessing of the MOOish
state—and with or without it (I heard a brave, small voice
inside me declare) I would get my quota back too.
Brave, did I say? Yes, and all the
braver given that I didn't have the slightest idea, just then,
that there was any source of quota in the whole wide MOOish
world except the state. But five
days later, as I sat on a beach by the virtual Pacific
complaining about the ARB's tightfistedness to exu and another
of her celebrity pals (the famous Doome: ARB member,
quasi-wizardly programmer, and owner-architect of the storied
night spot Club Doome), I learned that there was indeed
another way for an overweening novice builder like myself to
get his hands on more quota than he probably deserved:
“You could just talk to people and ask
them to give you some of theirs,” suggested Doome. “It might
be the only answer at this point.”
My RL mouth fell open. My RL eyes
widened. How could I have missed so simple and so brilliant a
solution?
Well, easily, as it turned out:
elementary though it was, the notion that players ought to be
allowed to transfer unused quota among themselves had only
recently become a reality on LambdaMOO, and it remained one of
the least conspicuous of the great post-Bungle social
transformations. A ballot vote had ushered it in five months
earlier (after weeks of vigorous campaigning by the ballot's
author, a cheerful young gadfly by the name of dunkirk), but
the wizards had been slow in bringing the new quota-transfer
mechanisms up to the mandated user-friendly standards, and the
practice hadn't yet caught on except among a small number of
pioneering sophisticates.
Still, even in this embryonic form,
quota-transfer was clearly an innovation of sweeping, even
radical, implications. For one thing, it spelled the end of
the ARB's state-sanctioned monopoly on the doling out of disk
space; and as I quickly and somewhat giddily realized, it also
therefore stood to take away much of the ARB's leverage over
individual creative decisions. Beyond these immediate effects,
however, lay the possibility of an even deeper challenge to
the MOOish status quo. For though dunkirk had been careful to
cast his petition as just another piece of LambdaMOO's ongoing
democratization, nobody had mistaken it for a simple political
reform. Quite plainly, quota-transfer was an economic reform,
and quite plainly it was one that opened the door to a
phenomenon whose world-transforming effects have long been
known to outmuscle those of any mere system of government.
I refer, of course, to money. For what
else had dunkirk's initiative made of quota but an incipient
form of currency? Like the heads of cattle passed around among
members of primitive herding societies, the MOO's most prized
material resource could now be traded freely from player to
player, and in thoroughly fungible, conveniently numbered
little chunks, no less. It wasn't MOO-money yet, to be sure,
but if ever there'd been a plum candidate for the job,
transferable quota was it.
My curiosity was piqued, to say the
least. There was something about the idea of virtual money
that made me itch in a part of my brain I couldn't quite
scratch: Wasn't money itself, I wondered, already a kind of
virtual reality? Didn't its quasi-magical transmutation of
worthless paper into genuine worth take place inside that same
flickering gap between fact and fiction that VR inhabited?
What then might it mean to reinvent money in VR's terms? Could
a virtual society have any real use for such a thing—or would
the desperate, necessity-driven suspension of disbelief that
made money function in the real world simply dissolve amid the
playful ambiguities of a place like LambdaMOO?
As it happened, this wasn't the first
time I had asked myself these questions. In fact, I dated my
fascination with virtual money to a moment several months
prior to my discovery of quota-transfer, when I'd heard a talk
touching glancingly on the subject at an RL symposium on MUDs
at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The speaker was
a man named Randall Farmer, who in the mid-1980s had helped
design and run an early, commercial experiment in online VR
called Habitat. Strictly speaking, Habitat wasn't a MUD, since
it used animated, two-dimensional graphics to represent
players and spaces, along with text-filled balloons hovering
over the players' heads to convey their speech. But it worked
enough like a MUD to merit the name, and all of the features
Farmer described—including the monetary system that caught my
attention—could easily have been ported over to the kinds of
MUDs with which I was familiar.
Indeed, I had by that point already
encountered a MUD or two in which pennies appeared randomly on
the ground, so that if you spent enough time walking around
looking for them, you might actually accumulate enough of them
to pay for a virtual cab ride so that you wouldn't have to
spend so much time walking around. But Habitat offered
something rather more elaborate. On every day that a player
logged in, Farmer explained, that player's Habitat bank
account was credited with one hundred units of the local
currency—virtual coins known as Tokens. Over and above this
minimum wage, he continued, “players could acquire . . . funds
by engaging in business, winning contests, finding buried
treasure, and so on.” And naturally there were things to buy:
weapons, dolls, magic objects of various sorts, available
mainly in vending machines called Vendroids, and redeemable at
buy-back stations known as Pawn Machines (for a reasonably
depreciated price, of course).
Here, in other words, was a rough stab
at a full-fledged economy, and I was intrigued by its workings
and its possibilities. But I found myself equally intrigued by
my own sense that Habitat's Token system somehow came closer
to being “real” money than that game of random pennies had.
Once again I was reminded of the peculiar fact that it felt
possible (as many MUDders besides myself have experienced) to
distinguish among relative degrees of realness within these
spaces in which everything seemed nonetheless to be at once
true and false. And I began to suspect that figuring out the
difference between “genuine” MUD money and “play” MUD money
might shine a good deal of light into the murky
semifictionality at the heart of VR's appeal.
Certainly Farmer's account of the
Habitat experiment offered ample food for thought in that
regard. For if the Token system looked like an interesting
first step toward a robustly organic virtual economy, its
failure to take off in that direction was no less interesting,
and seemed mostly related to the ways in which the dictates of
maintaining a believable make-believe world overrode the
possibilities for cultivating something like functional
markets. Some of these obstacles were really just temporary
glitches of course. There was, for example, the Habitat
world-builders' attempt to replicate the real-world phenomenon
of local price variations by arbitrarily establishing price
differences from Vendroid to Vendroid, which accidentally
resulted one day in the sale-price of crystal balls at a
certain Vendroid falling well below the amount being offered
for the same item at a certain Pawn Machine on the other side
of town. This was quicldy discovered by a small band of
players, who one night while the Habitat gods were sleeping
spent hours shlepping crystal balls between the Vendroid and
the Pawn Machine, buying low and selling high until by morning
they had increased the balance in their bank accounts by two
or three orders of magnitude.
Needless to say, that bug was fixed in
pretty short order, but the programmers were never able to
tackle a deeper problem—namely, that the economy they had
created was an absurdly and inevitably inflationary one. After
all, it didn't appear possible to compel the players to get
virtual jobs—they were there to
play—and hence it seemed necessary, if the Tokens were going
to circulate at all, to keep on doling them out, automatically
creating a hundred new ones out of thin air every time a
player logged in for the day. The result in the long run was
that Tokens grew increasingly worthless, while the objects
most valued by the citizenry turned out to be (I kid you not)
prosthetic heads, which players could win in contests and
adventures of different sorts and use thereafter to replace
their own heads as the mood struck them. Affluence became a
matter not of how much money one had in the bank but of how
many heads lined the walls of one's home, and nobody bothered
translating the value of those heads into Tokens, or creating
a Token-based market in heads, or indeed even trading heads
for anything but other heads, as far as I know. Habitat's
Tokens, then, ended up being just play money too.
Would quota-money meet the same fate?
Or would it manage to take Habitat's experiment to the next
level of virtual realism? And could I even say exactly what
that level might look like? I couldn't, but by then it seemed
clear to me that at the very least it would have to anchor the
monetary system in what felt most real about the MOO, namely
the human emotions invested in it. Desire, in other words—what
MOOers really wanted out of the place, and what they were
willing to pay for it—would have to be what regulated the
creation of MOO money at every point in the system.
This was pretty basic economics, I
suppose, but in practice it didn't seem all that simple to
implement. As luck would have it, I came across an interesting
attempt a day or two after my seaside visit with exu and
Doome, when I logged in to an experimental MOO called Pt.
MOOt, which was run out of the University of Texas and
predicated on the notion (among others) that if you did not go
out and acquire enough MOO money to buy some MOO food on a
regular basis, your virtual body would end up flat on its back
in the MOO hospital. Tying the circulation of money to the
player's fundamental desire to keep circulating seemed like a
sharp move to me, and I ended up spending a fair amount of
time there, testing the system out. Mainly I occupied myself
digging for gold in the virtual hills around the town of Pt.
MOOt (yes, digging: there was a command for wielding a pickax
and I spent hours typing and retyping it in hopes of finding a
nugget) or roaming the countryside in search of bees to
capture and sell to a bee-eating robot back in town who paid a
decent amount for them. But it wasn't long before I realized
that instead of selling the bees and nuggets to someone who
really wanted them, I was just selling them back to the
database whence they had emerged—so that in fact the whole
process turned out to be just a more complicated version of
Habitat's old mechanisms for creating virtual money out of
thin air.
It wasn't that interesting things
didn't happen in Pt. MOOt's economy. They did: joint-stock
corporations emerged, and games of chance, and needless to
say, the fact that Pt. MOOt managed to make the idea of taking
up a virtual occupation even passingly appealing was in itself
something of a coup. But none of this changed the harder fact
that the money there remained, at bottom, funny.
What I took home from my Pt. MOOt
foray, then, was a final, simple lesson: If LambdaMOO's quota
was going to evolve into anything that could meaningfully be
called real virtual money, it was going to have to do just
that—evolve. As in the genesis of LambdaMOO's self-government,
in other words, whatever monetary system might eventually take
root there would do so only when at last a broad social need
for it grew painfully obvious—and not simply because I or the
wizards or anybody else happened to think it might be
reality-enhancing, instructive, or just plain neat to try and
implement it.
All the same, I couldn't help thinking
that the possibilities implicit in the move to quota-transfer
really were, well, sort of neat. Though to be honest, maybe
neat wasn't exactly the word. Because I'll confess that for
all the purely intellectual fascination those possibilities
held for me, the one that ultimately loomed largest in my
imagination was this: that somewhere in the newly fluid,
protomonetary status of quota lurked some clever way for rne
to come into a big, fat, handsome pile of it, no strings
attached, and overnight if possible.
Let me not give you the impression,
however, that the problem of funding was my sole preoccupation
in those days.
On the contrary, my virtual life had
taken on a brisk, engaging complexity by that point, with
quota worries only one among a healthy assortment of ongoing
concerns and endeavors. Local politics, for instance, were
more than ever on my mind, what with ARB elections in full
swing and Minnie's antijudiciary campaign growing more
confrontational by the day. *B:DisbandMeditation had met with
resounding defeat in the end, but that had hardly seemed to
slow her down. She came back immediately with a leaner, meaner
version, a petition entitled *P:NoMoreMediation that abandoned
altogether any pie-in-the-sky attempts at automating justice
and focused laserlike on the rather simpler goal of
annihilating the arbitration system (Throw the Bums Out, if I recall
correctly, was the new petition's subtitle). At the same time,
she was doing her very best—intentionally or not—to gum up for
good the already gummy works of that haphazard system, filing
one possibly-useful-but-maddeningly-incoherent reform proposal
after another. The maddened arbitrators who had to vote on
these proposals responded with increasing impatience, and
Minnie responded with increasingly fevered insinuations of an
elitist conspiracy arrayed against her, and inevitably the
whole mess spilled out onto the pages of * social, where the resulting reams of
flame and counterflame began requiring much more of my
attention than I really wanted to part with.
Nor was I alone in my discomfort with
the situation. “I had a weird, middle of the night thought,”
exu paged me one afternoon. “Power on Lambda is being
exercised now primarily by Minnie. She shapes and frames all public discourse these days.”
Still feeling a little cranky about the
ARB's lingering power to shape and frame my public discourse (and looking
forward to casting my ARB-election vote for dunkirk, who
promised to strip the board of its discretion over anything
but the size of the total quota supply), I couldn't say I
wholeheartedly agreed with exu's analysis. But that Minnie was
a blight on the political culture? That much was fast on its
way to becoming a MOOwide consensus. There were even, in some
quarters, dark grumblings to be heard that drastic
measures—including ominously unspecified acts of virtual
violence—might be necessary to alleviate that blight.
Myself, though, I could care only so
much about the public life of the MOO. After all, I had my
private life there to look after too. And what that mostly
seemed to entail right now was the very private business of
acquiring an illicit second character. I had decided to call
her Shayla: she would be a raven-haired and piercingly
clear-eyed Irishwoman, a pickpocket and a vagabond, and the
vehicle (I hoped) of as many untraceable cross-gendered
conquests as I might find the time and interest for.
But first I had to get her embodied,
and as I had anticipated, this was not an entirely
uncomplicated proposition. To sign up for the new account I
needed to submit a working Internet e-mail address, which in
itself was no big challenge— as long as I was willing to
submit my own. But in that case, the automatic
character-creation system would officially register Shayla as
a second character of Dr. Bombay's. And though in principle no
humans except the LambdaMOO registrar (and, as always, the
wizards) would have access to that information, that was
already more humans than I wanted in on the secret. The trick,
then, if I was going to keep the clandestine relationship
between Shayla and the doctor hidden from even the all-seeing
wizards, was to get my hands on a second Internet account, and
one that didn't have my name attached to it.
Borrowing a friend's account was
certainly not the way to go (I'd have to trust the friend to
forward me the new character's password without peeking; fat
chance). Nor was I shameless enough (or, let's face it, clever
enough) to outright steal one. There remained to me,
therefore, only the tender mercies of the free market, which
in its infinite bounty soon delivered my solution in the form
of a struggling local Internet access provider, desperate for
new subscribers and happy to hand out a one-month trial e-mail
account to anything that claimed to breathe, no questions
asked.
1 signed up as Rod Switt (a slight
alteration of a dimly remembered college dormmate's name) and
made my application for a LambdaMOO character posthaste.
Certain flaky-looking aspects of my new provider's hook-up
flagged the application as a suspicious one, and I was obliged
to spend an anxious few days e-mailing even flakier
explanations to the skeptical Lambda registrar (a post held at
the time by the venerable wizard Sredna, a one-time RL
girlfriend of Pavel's and the closest thing the MOO had to a
den mother). But in the end she sent “Rod Switt” his new
password anyway: I mouthed a silent, triumphal “Yes!” as the
code came up on my fraudulent e-mail screen, experienced a
brief twinge of guilt for having pulled the wool over the
long-suffering Sredna's eyes, and promptly checked Shayla into
the little red hotel inside the Monopoly set in the dining
room.
She would not make her debut as a
tinyvamp till several weeks later, though. It's possible I
lacked the nerve for it just then, but what I told myself (and
what was true in any case) was that I lacked the time. There
was Dr. Bombay's own increasingly busy social calendar to
manage, for one thing, and even that was swiftly getting
crowded out now by the one activity that—finally—was taking
precedence above all others for me: the long-postponed
construction of the Garden of Forking Paths.
By then I was devoting hours to it
daily—many more than I was spending with my friends on the
MOO, and on average nearly as many as I spent at my real-life
workplace. Indeed, I would have gladly quit my office job
right then and there, I think, had someone told me of a way to
make my living as a full-time virtual gardener. The work
delighted me: I did it offline mostly, sometimes writing down
the scenery on notepads at my desk, sometimes on a laptop
computer as I reclined on the living room futon, but always
feeling myself drawn into a virtual space as vivid and as ripe
for exploration as the MOO itself was.
Perhaps even more so, by that point.
Like many a player before me, after all, I was coming to
recognize that my sense of virtual place grew more diffuse in
very near proportion to the rate at which my virtual social
life grew more concrete. The more my friendships multiplied
and deepened, that is to say, the less I interacted with the
environment in which those friendships were unfolding.
Instead, I spent more and more of my MOO time holed up inside
my television set juggling three or four private conversations
at once—all of them conducted remotely of course, via the page command, and none of them,
consequently, located anywhere in particular. exu would be
talking at me from her nook in the roof of the barn, Niacin
from the midst of one of his hot tub dips, S* from the
unlinked bead of seawater she called home, and each of them in
turn might be engaged in yet another broadly scattered handful
of conversations. Add to this already well-dispersed scenario
the technology of multiMOOing—which allowed us to make
simultaneous connections to our Lambda and Interzone hangouts,
bouncing back and forth between the two worlds with
vertigo-inducing ease—and you can see why my conception of the
MOO as a specific place had begun to blur even as my sense of
it as a specific community sharpened.
Perhaps you can also see then why I so
enjoyed the hours I spent working on the Garden of Forking
Paths. I missed the richly environmental quality that had
helped attract me to the MOO in the beginning, and the garden
served in some ways to bring it back. My focus on the
landscape there was total, and although much of that landscape
still existed only in the murkier corners of my imagination,
whatever did finally coalesce into written scenery seemed all
the more intensely present to me for having sprung from my own
creative efforts. With every daily batch of new descriptions
(and every late-night run onto the MOO to paste them in), I
was shaping a geography I knew as intimately as any sculptor
ever knew the contours of her latest marblework: the barren
trees and snowy mountain slopes of the wintry northwestern
quadrant I'd shown Finn; the rocky canyons and flame-hued
woods of the autumnal northeastern section, which I set to
work on next; the bamboo groves and cool damp caverns of the
vernal southeast after that; and as the end of my work drew
near, the first patches of the bee-loud meadows and heat-baked
sands that would fill the summertime southwestern quadrant
when at last I finished.
In my mind, and on the MOO, I walked
the pathways through those landscapes many times. Familiar
though they were to me, the scenes I happened on along the way
still managed now and then to take me by surprise. Sometimes,
frustratingly enough, the surprise was learning that a
particular detail or some turn of phrase just didn't work, and
that I'd have to go back to my notepad then to ponder and
revise. But other times what caught me short was nothing more
or less than the ancient, mundane miracle of VR in full
function: words meeting mind and sparking delicate, bright
worlds into existence.
It was in those moments, mostly, that I
felt the passing desire to leave all else behind and wander in
the Garden of Forking Paths, uninterrupted, for another year
or two at least. But real life insisted on interrupting, of
course—and for that matter, virtual life did too. I was
finding, in particular, that I could no more put the nagging
problem of my quota debt out of my mind than I could
realistically abandon my day job. And with the garden heading
toward completion there remained no easy solution in
sight.
All along, I had been steadily
following Doome's advice—approaching likely donors for as many
bytes as they could spare. The likeliest had been the handful
of my RL friends who had set up accounts on LambdaMOO, then
never bothered much to use them. They left their characters
sleeping and their rooms untouched, and best of all they left
small piles of quota gathering dust and waiting for me to come
along and scoop them up (it only took a friendly phone call or
two). By now, though, I had fully tapped that reservoir of
funds, and all I had to show for it was an insufficient 60
kilobytes.
Another 15K had come my way through
somewhat more desperate means: I'd sold my ARB vote to a
candidate who plainly had no other qualifications for the
office than the size of his bankroll. He'd ended up losing
anyway, so the transaction didn't weigh too heavily on my
conscience, but still, it wasn't the sort of trick I cared to
turn again.
Nor did I dare attempt the frankly
sleazier maneuver of transferring Shayla's ill-gotten quota
over to Dr. Bombay's account, as tempting as I found it.
Quota-transfers were a matter of public record, and already my
entirely legal donations from inactive friends had aroused the
suspicions of a certain hyperactive do-gooder by the name of
Memphistopheles, who'd sent me MOO-mail threatening to report
me to Sredna unless I could prove these “friends” weren't
actually bootleg spare characters of mine. In the end, a good
word from exu had saved me from the wrath of Memf, but I'd
learned my lesson: if I didn't want the MOO's small army of
busybodies nosing around after Shayla's secret identity—and
looking to turn it into a public scandal—I'd better limit her
generosity toward Dr. Bombay to the occasional kind
thought.
In any case the couple dozen kilobytes
I could have skimmed off Shayla's account would have left me
well short of the additional 100K I still needed. And so I was
stumped. None of my active MOO friends had a byte to spare, it
seemed. Nor could I really start asking strangers for
donations until I had a finished product to show them. And
why, I began to wonder, should I have to submit this sprawling
labor of love to anyone's approval anyway? Why should a
faceless public have any more right than the ARBocrats to
determine the final value of the garden? There had to be a
better way to fund the completion of my work, I felt, but what
could it be?
The problem gnawed at me, and gnawed,
until at last it evidently gnawed a small screw loose. This
came to light one afternoon while I sat frustrated before my
computer, unconnected to the MOO and hard at work on one of
the occasional articles my ineluctable day job compelled me to
write. In a routine fit of impatience and disgust with the
words too-slowly filling up my screen, I cast my gaze away for
just a moment—and suddenly was overpowered by a vision:
I saw myself constructing a machine,
and on the surface of the machine I saw bright colors, and
ornamental I Ching hexagrams, and a brass-plate label large
and prominently affixed. And on the brass-plate label was
embossed a single word, and the word was “Quotto.” For this
was no ordinary machine I was constructing, no: it was a
machine built out of MOO-code and designed for the
extraordinary purpose of selling tickets in a lottery of
quota. And in my vision I saw that I must place this machine
in the living room of LambdaMOO, and that the multitudes would
flock to it then and buy their Quotto tickets for the low low
price of one thin kilobyte each. And they would buy those
tickets week after week, month after month, until the jackpots
overflowed with fabulous amounts of quota while I, my fair
share taken weekly off the top, grew fat with kilobytes as
well.
The proceeds from this “quottery” would
pay my garden debt many times over, but personal gain would
hardly be my ultimate goal. Instead, I would take my
staggering riches and use them to start a grant foundation in
the public interest. I would call it alt.ARB, or something
just as clever, and I would let the people know that every
humble builder who had ever had a brilliant project scoffed at
and denied by the soulless bean-counters of the Architecture
Review Board could turn to my foundation for a helping and
unquestioning hand. Thus then would I, Dr. Bombay, go down in
LambdaMOO history: not only as the inventor of that great,
enduring entertainment of the masses—Quotto!—but as the hero
who at last laid low the ARB's undemocratic sway over free
expression on the MOO.
The vision, as I said, was
overpowering. I could barely focus on the RL work at hand for
all the thoughts of instant MOO-wealth racing through my head.
How I managed to complete the job at all that day I'll never
know, but I did, and no sooner had I finished e-mailing my
draft over to the office than I logged on to Lambda and
teleported to the Crossroads to tell exu about my plans.
She listened patiently. And when I'd
finished painting the picture of my imminent fame and fortune,
she gently informed me that although I might indeed be
remembered someday as the originator of Quotto, I couldn't now
or ever claim to be the first MOO citizen to have come up with
the idea of a grant foundation.
This let some air out of my sails, but
I perked up again when I learned the name of the player who
had beaten me to the punch: it was none other than dunkirk—
the founding father of the new MOO economy, lately
unsuccessful in the ARB elections but still one of Lambda's
leading political thinkers as far as I was concerned. “He's
been talking to me about starting a quota bank,” said exu.
“Nothing very thought out, but kind of a people's ARB. Sorta
like yours only more along the lines of a lending institution.
I'm not so sure it's the greatest idea, myself. For all its
faults, I think the ARB does serve to encourage quality
building around here. But you might want to try and brainstorm
with him.”
Before I could even answer, dunkirk
appeared, summoned by a page from exu and emerging from the
bowl of a small silver pipe that materialized in mid-air. And
if the conversation that followed wasn't quite the historic
meeting of the minds I guess I hoped it might be, our
encounter proved a fruitful one all the same, dunkirk liked
the lottery idea, for one thing, and he encouraged me to go
ahead with it. He had also done a lot of thinking about the
relationship between quota and currency, however, and he
warned me against any approach that took the two as strictly
analogous. “Quota is not quite like money,” he said, which of
course I knew, but then he ventured to explain why, and the
way he put it hit me with the force of revelation:
“Quota is not quite like money because
it is both the representative medium and the actual signified
thing,” dunkirk said.
And no, it wasn't exactly the pithiest
of revelations—or even a very profound one, truth be told. But
somehow I had failed till then to meet its implications
head-on. I had failed to see in plain terms that, above all
else, the phenomenon we call money is a semiotic system—a
system of signs—and that like all such systems it depends on a
slippery but critical distinction between the signifying
object and the thing it signifies.
Even in my intuition that VR and money
worked a similar conceptual magic, I hadn't quite grasped
dunkirk's point, but now I saw the connection clearly: just as
the possibility of endlessly imaginable universes like the MOO
was rooted in the parlous gap between words and the world they
were invented to describe, so too the genesis of money lay in
the fateful slippage that occurred when some particularly
valued kind of object suddenly came to stand for almost any
kind of value imaginable. I saw, in other words, that quota
would never become MOO-money until it stopped being just a
mute quantity of hard-drive kilobytes and started signifying
everything those kilobytes might possibly be worth to
MOOers.
And I began at last to see just how the
subtle workings of social evolution might eventually lead the
MOO to this historic threshold. The details came to me more
slowly than the initial insight did, but by the following day
enough of them had fallen into place that I was eager to meet
with dunkirk again and lay this second vision out for him. exu
again made the social arrangements, dunkirk popped out of his
silver pipe, and I began, there in the Crossroads, to sketch
the scenario I felt certain would lead to the spontaneous
generation of a full-blown money system on the MOO.
“OK. Let's say a person is desperate
for quota for a very large project s/he's working on. S/he is
so desperate in fact that s/he turns to the world's oldest
profession for funds. . . .”
“Uh, hunting?” cracked dunkirk.
exu giggled.
I persisted: “S/he @digs herself a
cheap motel room and sets up in business.”
“Actually, I think photosynthesis came
before hunting,” dunkirk mused.
“Har har,” said I. “So anyway, this
person sets up a place where other characters can come and get
their chlorophyll transformed into energy or some such thing,
and ... no that's not it.”
exu. oO ( Well
you see, Timmy, when a-pistil loves a stamen very, very much
... )
I sighed IRL. I should have known
better than to put sex in the middle of my scenario, since the
subject rarely failed to set off one of those bouts of
free-associative joking that always threatened, on the MOO, to
run away with any line of thought more than a couple of ideas
long. But I wasn't giving up. I sensed that beneath the
wisecracks my audience was interested in what I was saying,
and I still had a lot of it to say. I was about to explain to
them that where my hypothetical MOOprostitute would have
started out wanting quota simply because s/he needed the disk
space, soon s/he might have clients who needed quota simply
because they wanted to keep on visiting the MOOprostitute. I
was going to explain how kilobytes would then no longer just
be kilobytes, how the union of signifier and signified in
quota would begin to come apart, and how the two would shortly
go their separate ways, to circulate at last in a fully
monetarized economy.
It didn't have to begin so tawdrily of
course. Nor would it, in all likelihood. For the purposes of
my argument, MOOhooking merely stood in for any number of
possible catalyzing enterprises, and since its practitioners
would have to compete with the crowds of willing amateurs
already hanging out in the hot tub, it wasn't even the most
promising of them. Popular hangouts like the tub itself, for
instance, were rather harder to come by than tinysex partners,
and sooner or later their owners would follow that fact to its
logical economic conclusion. What would happen, then, when the
quota-hungry builders of the most sought-after locales started
charging for the right to gather in them? What would happen
when Club Doome started costing half a K or so to get into? Or
when the programmers of certain widely played-with toys
started asking rental fees for the use of their products?
What would happen was that programmers
and builders would no longer be the only players with a
natural need for extra disk space—the masses of players who
had always wanted mainly just to hang out and play would
suddenly need it too. They would need it merely to maintain
the quality of their MOO life, and that would now mean going
out and earning it somehow. They might go hire themselves out
as wageworkers on some master programmer's project. They might
take up a berth in some former tinyhooker's now bustling house
of ill-repute. They might go into a rapidly expanding banking
industry. They might even escape the need to earn a living at
all by hitting that big Quotto jackpot someday. But they would
never, any longer, be able to get by without some steady
supply of kilobytes, because from now on it would be quota
that made the MOO go around.
All this I was going to explain to
dunkirk and exu. But in the very moment that my fingers moved
to continue typing out my explanation, fate blocked the way: a
sudden wave of the heaviest lag I'd ever experienced came
crashing down upon us all. My screen froze solid, and no
amount of pecking at the keyboard could unfreeze it.
Eventually I had to force a disconnect and spent another
several minutes trying to log back on to the lag-ridden MOO.
When finally I connected again, bringing Dr. Bombay out of the
brief coma he'd lapsed into, dunkirk was still out like a
light—and would remain so for the rest of the day. exu and I
moved on to other topics, and as it happened I never did get
another chance to discuss with dunkirk my vision of the future
history of MOO-money.
Which was just as well, it turned out.
For I decided later on that evening to take a look at the
mailing list on which dunkirk's quota-transfer ballot had been
debated before it was passed, and when I did I realized just
what an unschooled naïf I would have seemed had circumstances
allowed me to go on holding forth. My whole scenario, more or
less, was laid out on the list already, hashed out and
rehashed in far more detail and breadth than I could have
managed. It was all there: prostitution, money-lending, entry
fees for Club Doome and the hot tub, and many things besides.
Stock exchanges, contract law, taxes, welfare payments—along
with almost every other conceivable trapping of a modern
market economy—were all projected onto the future of MOOish
society, and their ramifications drawn.
It was a sobering experience, diving
into the arguments of that list. I quickly learned that in my
manic conceptual rush from Quotto to the upper reaches of high
virtual finance, I had missed many complicating questions. How
would inflation be kept in check, for instance, once the value
of quota was no longer solely grounded in the fixed supply of
hard-disk space? Or on the other hand, and perhaps more
problematically, how would a free-wheeling quota-based economy
affect the database's growing consumption of that supply?
Wouldn't unused disk-space now flow more quickly into the
hands of those most likely to use it, and wouldn't that
tendency unleash an unprecedented flood of development, quite
possibly exacerbating lag and other environmental ills beyond
the limits of the tolerable? And what about the already
troubling extent to which programmers enjoyed a privileged
status on the MOO? Could a monetary system possibly do
anything but further polarize that nascent class structure,
casting programmers in the role of capitalists and
nonprogrammers as the disenfranchised working stiffs?
dunkirk and other quota-transfer
enthusiasts offered reassuring answers on all those counts.
But the more I read, the less convinced I was that any of
those answers addressed the larger issue lurking behind the
questions. The point wasn't, finally, that the critics didn't
think a virtual money system could work—it was that they
didn't really want it to work. And
the reason they didn't want it to work was easy enough to
grasp: most people's experiences with the RL money system were
not exactly delightful. The system generally delivered their
daily bread and then some, true, but rarely without extracting
its pound of anxiety and sweat, and always, it seemed, at the
expense of the sort of genuine community many people looked
for in the MOO. “If quota transfer does become a type of
monetary system,” wrote one dissenter (the eloquent space
alien Nikto), “I believe we'll find that we won't have the
utopia that some [of its] advocates seem to envision. Look
around the real world. Free-market systems do not level the
playing field, do not erase class distinctions. Them what has,
gets. It will be no different here.”
No less tellingly, the great
hypothetical ticket-taker himself, Doome, had already posted a
small dissent of his own, just a few messages before Nikto's.
“I think it's kinda neat how Club Doome is being used as an
example of how the 'quota=money' possibility could be used,”
he wrote. “But for the record, if it -does- become a
'quota=money' situation, I don't ever intend to charge quota
from the patrons of Club Doome . . . :)”
It was when I read that, I guess, that
I finally realized just how delirious my last two days of
quota-crazed epiphanies had been. It wasn't that I felt
particularly chastened by Doome's generosity—or that I
thoroughly agreed with Nikto's grim prediction—but in them
both I believed I now saw why quota would never mutate into
money quite so spontaneously as I had been imagining. Five
months into the era of quota-transfer, dunkirk still seemed to
believe that just a little more time and a little more
debugging were all that stood between his invention and its
widespread adoption as a tool of daily MOOish life. But after
my encounter with the *B:Quota-Transfer
list, I couldn't help thinking that the real obstacle was
a far less technical one. Quota-transfer promised any number
of conveniences, and it even promised to make a few lucky
MOOers fabulously quota rich, but it also threatened to import
the multiple miseries of the RL economic system into a realm
whose inhabitants could never quite stop hoping to build a
happier world there than the real one. And as long as it
harbored that threat, quota-transfer would remain the object
of LambdaMOO's irreconcilable ambivalence—too appealing to be
banished, but too dangerous to do much more than play
with.
Which isn't to say the problem of how
to divvy up the MOO's “natural” resources—its hard drive in
particular—was something that would just fold up and go away
if we all promised not to charge admission to our rooms. Money
system or no money system, the problem remained; and I, with
my quota debts still mounting, remained immersed in it.
The only difference now, of course, was
that I dared no longer hope for any slick commercial scheme to
come along and lift me out of my predicament. The Quotto
machine, which only yesterday had held my imagination in its
thrilling grip, seemed more ridiculous than riveting to me
now. By this point I had given the idea sufficient thought to
realize that only the most improbably full-blown of money
systems would ever provide the broad distribution of greed and
cash flow necessary to make a quota lottery profitable. And
besides, even if I wanted to go ahead and program the damn
machine anyway, I couldn't. In my eagerness to get myself back
under quota, you see, I had been overlooking one simple but
insurmountable problem: the operating system wouldn't let me
write a stitch of new code until such time as I contrived (ha
ha) to get myself back under quota.
And so there wasn't really anything for
me to do but leave my fever-dreams of wealth behind and
return, once more, to the place that had driven me to dream
them.
I was in the garden the very next
evening, pasting in descriptions of the final, summer
quadrant. It was slow and somewhat tedious work at first, but
as the night wore on, I felt a buoyant, brightening energy
begin to hum within me. And the more it hummed, the more
convinced I grew that this was not to be just another evening
of modest, incremental additions to my slowly growing
master-work. I hadn't thought this moment would arrive for at
least another week or two, but by the time midnight rolled
around there wasn't any doubting it: this very night, I was
going to finish the Garden of Forking Paths.
I went and kissed Jessica good night
and told her not to wait up for me, and then I sat back down
in front of my computer, my mind awake with expectation. It
was the busiest time of night, the tail end of the East Coast
MOOers' after-dinner session overlapping with the start of the
West Coast's shift, and between the resulting, bearish lag and
the various pages I kept getting from chatty friends, it was
all I could do to hammer out a couple brief landscapes in the
first three hours after midnight. But around 3:30 the crowds
thinned out and the lag died down and I began to make real
headway. One place-description after another came to life
inside my head and spilled out into the geography of
LambdaMOO: An earth-dark hillside etched with soupy,
pea-green, terraced rice paddies. A small, dune-draped lake
island watched over by a chapped, abandoned lighthouse. A
fruit grove bursting with improbable abundance, awash in the
colors and the smells of mango, orange, basil, tulip.
I kept on dumping detail-laden
landscapes into the abstract, undescribed locations of the
garden until at last, a couple hours after daybreak, there
were no more locations left to landscape. My work was done,
almost, except for one important revision, which I'd been
meaning to take care of for some time and hastened now to make
complete. I made my way back to the center of the garden, and
there I sat and thought a bit. And after I was done thinking,
I typed a command or two that wiped out my original, vague
description of that spot (You are
standing on a path in a realm of pure possibility . . . ),
and then I typed these words:
You are inside a
small, open-walled summerhouse built in the Chinese style.
Eight slender white columns support the octagonal roof of the
structure, and a lengthy rice-paper scroll hangs attached to
the column in front of you. On the scroll there is a good
deal of writing; outside there is
nothing to see but dim, swirling mists. And two paths: one leading north, one leading south. You
are facing east.
I sat back and looked at the place
again. It wasn't bad. The swirling mists were a little corny
maybe, but the rest was more than serviceable. The hanging
scroll would offer detailed instructions on how to navigate
the labyrinth, once I wrote them up, and the eight-sided shape
of the building would give the visitor a nicely subtle
introduction, I thought, to the octal patterns of the garden
and of the I Ching itself.
But what I liked best about the new
description, I suppose, was that it did for that small portion
of the garden what I had finally succeeded in doing to the
garden as a whole: It transformed it from a place made of the
airy, unspecified stuff of possibility into a place shot
through with the color and texture of its own particularity.
It made it real, in other words.
And yes, it's true there was a kind of
melancholy in that transformation. There always is. Any one
creation, after all, owes its existence to the myriad
alternatives left uncreated, and the Garden of Forking Paths
was no exception. An infinity of possible gardens had had to
die that mine might live, and had I been in a more mournful
mood just then I suppose I might have stopped to mourn them. I
might have fallen prey to the paralysis of regret, setting out
to wander the finished landscapes in an interminable round of
revisions, seeking endlessly to recover this or that lost
piece of the possible.
But I had no regrets that morning. None
to speak of, anyway. The additional quota debt I had
accumulated in that single, final burst of landscaping was
roughly 25,000 bytes more than I'd been counting on, and I
wasn't sure at that point how—or even if—I'd ever find a way
to get myself back out of it. But I wasn't thinking about that
now. Nor was I fretting much about the future of the MOOish
economy, or about the growing tensions between the
bureaucratic nature of the ARB and the populist spirit of the
post-Bungle times, or for that matter about the possible
absurdity of any attempt to shape a functional society in a
world half grounded in imagination, the medium of pure
possibility itself. All I was thinking, really, as I sat there
eyeing in my own imagination the corners and the contours of
that small, open-walled summerhouse built in the Chinese
style, was that this would do for now.
I heard the sound of Jessica's alarm
clock going off in the bedroom behind me, and I heard her
rising groggily out of bed, and I took one final look at the
words on my computer screen before it was time for me too to
ready myself for the RL business of the day. I smiled and
thought that this would do just fine.
RL
NEW YORK CITY,
AUGUST 1994
East 10th Street Between First and
A
You are on a block of nicely spruced-up
Lower East Side tenements running east to west, their heights
uneven, their faces mostly brick, some painted and some not. A
smattering of young and struggling ginkgo trees dots the
sidewalks here. No parking space is left untaken.
Places of interest: The Famous Russian
Baths of Tenth Street, at The Building Where The_Author
Lives.
The_Author emerges from The Building
Where The_Author Lives.
The_Author blinks into the morning
sunshine. Looks like it's gonna be another scorcher.
The_Author walks west.
go west
First and 10th
This is the coiner of First Avenue and
East 10th
Street. You can go north or south along
First Avenue.
You can go east or west along East 10th
Street.
You see Buddy here. The_Author is
here.
Buddy catches your eye discreetly.
Buddy says, “Wassup, yo. Smoke?
Coke?”
ignore buddy
follow author
The_Author goes west.
You cross First Avenue, nimbly dodging
traffic as you go.
East 10th Street Between Second and
First
You are on a nicely spruced-up block of
Lower East Side tenements, running east to west, their heights
uneven, their faces mostly brick, some painted and some not. A
smattering of young and struggling ginkgo trees dots the
sidewalks here. No parking space is left untaken.
The_Author is here.
The_Author is on his way to work. He's
thinking of nothing in particular as he goes. Which means,
these days, that he's aware of a presence, a kind of phantom
continent, lying sunken just beneath the surface of his
thoughts: the MOO. It's with him everywhere he goes now.
The_Author walks west.
Second and 10th
This is the corner of Second Avenue and
East 10th
Street. You can go north or south along
Second Avenue.
You can go east or west along East 10th
Street. The_Author is here.
The_Author goes west.
You cross Second Avenue, nimbly dodging
traffic as you
go.
East 10th Street Between Third and
Second
You are on a Lower East Side block of
nicely spruced-up row houses, running east to west, their
heights uneven, their faces brick, some painted and some not.
A phalanx of healthy ginkgo trees forms a leafy green arcade
almost the full length of the block. No parking space is left
untaken.
Places of interest: St. Mark's
Church.
SweetJane (nodding) sits on a stoop at
the west end of the block.
The_Author is here.
The_Author, as he walks, now turns his
full attention to this unseen presence that accompanies him.
He ponders, for the nth time, the mystery of its location, the
way he feels it at once inside him, here, and outside,
somewhere vaguely to the far west, and knows, as well, that he
is fooling himself if he thinks it's really anywhere at all.
He goes on fooling himself anyway.
The_Author ponders now, for the first
time, something else about this presence: the gravity it has
been taking on in recent weeks. In the beginning, he recalls,
his daily visits were driven at least in part by something
like a sense of duty, but not anymore. The MOO compells him
now all on its own. It pulls at him when he is not logged on,
and pulls with greater strength the more his head fills up
with its dramas, its complexities. The MOO is getting denser,
both inside him, here, and outside, somewhere vaguely to the
west.
The_Author notices the junkie nodding
on the stoop.
look sweetjane
SweetJane
Standing on a corner, suitcase in her
hand, blah blah blah, hey listen that was twenty fuckin' years
ago, you know, a girl can't stand on that corner forever,
sooner or later she's got to _go_.
This one went down, from the looks of
her, but maybe not so far she couldn't still come back up:
bleached blond, the roots barely showing, nice summer dress a
little rumpled, like she just got canned from a halfway decent
secretarial gig. You wouldn't put her a day over thirty-five,
and you won't find the track marks unless you look pretty
hard.
She is barely conscious.
Carrying:
battered paperback
The_Author passes by SweetJane, close
enough to make out the title of the book she holds in her hand
(and was apparently reading just before she winked out).
look book in sweetjane
You see a funky old copy of the
self-help classic _Women Who Love Too Much_.
The_Author sighs and walks on.
The_Author wonders what phantom
continent SweetJane is visiting right now.
VR
6
The Schmoo Wars
Or TINYHISTORY, and the Ways a Programmer May Shape It
There were some, I am sure, who had
said it was just a matter of time, and even I hadn't failed to
detect its dark, unwholesome imminence hanging in the
lag-choked LambdaMOO air. But all the same, the hacking of
Minnie, when it came, came as a pretty nasty shock to me.
I learned about it on the day after I
finished landscaping my garden, and I learned about it in the
same way almost everybody else on the MOO already had: it was
all over *social by then, like a
big burst of red paint splashed against a wall and slowly
drying into history. It had happened five days before, in the
wee-est hours of a mid-August morning, while I had lain asleep
and dreaming still, no doubt, of Quotto riches. The exact time
of the occurrence was nowhere specified amid the frantic,
angry messages that reported it, but the remaining details, as
best I could make them out, were these:
The attacker probably logged on as a
guest—and just as probably was a regular player, using one of
the guest characters to cover his or her or his/her or its or
eir or possibly h* tracks. Minnie was also logged on at the
time, but shortly found herself disconnected and remained
unable to reconnect for the duration of the attack. After
Minnie was forced off, the attacker exploited an
as-yet-undetermined security hole to gain direct access to her
account and every object associated with it. Minnie, you'll
recall, had done a lot of building in the days before she
became a full-time political agitator, much of it dedicated to
public use, and some of it, like the richly featured “hotter
tub,” quite widely enjoyed till now. But now, while Minnie
attempted uselessly to access her account, the hotter tub and
most of Minnie's other projects were being systematically
disfigured or destroyed. The attacker went through her
creations one by one, erasing code, rewriting descriptions,
deleting entire objects, and finally—in a crowning gesture of
negation I'll have more to say about in time—reducing the
character-program that was Minnie herself to a three- or
four-line shell of code, stripped of description, all
possessions, andany capability of speech or action. When
Minnie finally succeeded in logging on again, she couldn't
even access the look command to see
what had happened to her; she had to log in as a guest just to
take in the extent of the devastation her character had
suffered. In the words of one wizard summoned to the scene not
long thereafter, the victim had quite literally been “hacked
to bits.”
Eventually, and with no small effort on
the part of TomTraceback, Finn, and others deeply acquainted
with the technical arcana of the database, the player object
called Minnie was restored to some functional semblance of its
former self. The rightful owner of that object, however, was
still a bit of a wreck, if her ongoing performance on * social was anything to judge by.
Since the early hours of the aftermath, it seemed, she had
been asking the wizards for information that might help her
track down the hacker, and whether she'd been asking politely
or not I couldn't say; but when her nemesis the wizard
Crotchet replied in a public post that the wizards had already
done as much for her as Haakon's “New Direction” obliged them
to, and that she'd have to look for any further remedies
“within the bounds of the petition and arbitration systems,”
she sort of unambiguously lost it. Her rage flew out more
naked and unhinged than I had ever seen it fly: in screenful
after screenful of bitterness and long, half-finished
sentences, she railed at Crotchet and the power structure she
believed him to represent. She blamed him and his allies for
what had happened, claimed that their unrelenting hostility
toward her had in essence given the hacker “permission” to
attack, and promised to make them pay for their
complicity.
“. . . I'll see Xerox, Pavel [Curtis],
you, in real life court,” she wrote in one message, and in the
next she swore she meant it: “I have the resources (both
financial and ethical), the time, enough faith and knowledge
of what rl law is, what the application of real life democracy
and individual voice in a VR environment was _supposed_ to
translate into here (and how you HAVE been using this for your
own ego/power needs), enough faith in [the ability of] 'normal
intelligent players' to see the truth (as they have when my
efforts have been pointed out to them in one-on-one
situations, they SEE what the real story is—oh, have they been
SHOCKED when they have seen ...”
The rant went on, in message after
message. She never bothered to explain just what the legal
basis for her RL suit might be; she had too many other things
to say. Too many threats to make, conspirators to denounce,
obscure and arguable injustices and injuries to nurse. As I
waded forward through her messages, I felt whatever sympathy
I'd started out with draining away. Her anger was coming out
all ugly, warped, and I just wanted to get through and past it
now as quickly as I could.
But then, toward the end of that first,
bilious flood of posts, she turned the focus back to the
ultimately inarguable injury that had just been done.her, and
there I could not help but empathize. The damage inflicted on
the objects she had built, she now explained, would not be
easily repaired. The security flaw the hacker had exploited
could very well still lurk somewhere within them, and finding
and uprooting it did not appear to be a simple matter. Some
techie types were telling Minnie that the only really safe way
to proceed was to scrap the entire oeu-vre and start again
from scratch, if at all. Others said that such prescriptions
were extreme, but that a complete recovery would still require
a long, painstaking period of studying the objects for holes.
In either case, the very thought of something similar ever
happening to my own newly finished piece of Lambda real estate
sent a chill into my bones.
“The creations here,” wrote Minnie,
“all creations of ours, from our real lives and how we
experience them in this medium, are our 'children.' My
children were killed. A year's worth of BUTT BUSTING WORK,
because of an unstable person's getting 'permission' from the
methods and styles of those people here who haven't a clue how
to live 'communally.' Thanks to Finn, to Tom, some of my
'children' have been resuscitated, but are 'scarred'. . .
.
“The bottom line? 'LambdaMOO is not
safe for children and other living things.'“
God, Minnie could be sappy when she
wanted to be, and I have no doubt that when she wrote those
words, she very much did want to be. But as I read on through
the messages that had piled up on * social, I soon learned that the notion
of MOOish creations as children had a more than merely
sentimental relevance to Minnie's case.
In general MOOish usage, as a matter of
fact, the notion was a strictly technical one, and deeply
rooted in the way the database was structured. To put it
simply, every item, or “object,” in the database was said to
be a “child” of some other object. And what that meant was
roughly this: each object was in fact a little bundle of
programs, and though that bundle might have its own
capabilities and data coded into it by its human owner, it
also had capabilities and data that it “inherited” from
another such bundle, which was called its “parent” and was
assigned to it at the moment of its creation.
Thus, for example, the set of programs
representing my own character, Dr. Bombay (also known as
object #53475), was born a child of the “builder” player class
(#630), a “generic” object that gave him the ability to do
things like @dig rooms and keep
track of quota. In turn the generic builder was descended from
alFarad's generic player class (#3133), which gave various
additional powers to the builder player class and all its
children (Dr. Bombay included). alFarad's player class itself
descended directly from the generic player (#6, or in the
programming shorthand reserved for certain elemental objects,
simply “$player”), which conferred such basic player functions
as talking, walking, and teleporting on its many descendants.
And finally, at the top of this family tree, there was
$player's parent: $root (#1), the fundamental object itself,
endowing every last little thing on the MOO with the simple
attributes (location, name, description, movability) that
defined existence within the limits of the MOOish
universe.
“We are all children of $root,” I was
told once by a wise old programmer (well, MOO-old anyway; I
think he was twenty-four in real life), and I got the sense he
meant the mysticism of the phrasing only half in jest. For
there really was something just the slightest bit sublime in
what he was saying: beneath the conflict and confusion and
banality of the players' daily interactions, beneath the
loopy, fragmentary geography those players had built up around
themselves, an elegant oneness shaped the logical structure of
LambdaMOO, now and for as long as the database might live. You
could flood that database with a thousand different novel
sorts of objects (if you had the quota), you could change
those objects' lineages a thousand different times once you'd
created them (if you knew how to work the handy @chparent command), but you never
would perturb the infinitely extensible order of things in
which each of those objects had its place—and through which,
by the mediating grace of $root, each was ultimately related
to every other.
In object-oriented programming circles
(and the acronym MOO, remember, stood for “MUD, Object
Oriented”), this sort of universal hierarchy was sometimes
called an ontology, and that made sense. The MOO's hierarchy,
in particular, had a striking similarity to such classical
ontologies as the medieval Great Chain of Being, in which each
entity in the cosmos depended for its existence on a higher
level of entity, which in turn depended on a higher level, and
so on, and so on, all the way up through armies of angels to
the lap of God. But just like the Chain of Being, the MOOish
ontology faced a tricky question once it reached that highest
level: on what exactly did the ultimate source of being itself
depend? Medieval scholars answered that question with the
neat, if paradoxical, trick of letting God depend upon
Himself, but LambdaMOO's designers turned for their solution
to a darker, older model. They fashioned their ontology in
such a way that the $root of all being rested upon being's own
negation—upon the void, or more precisely, on a nonexistent
object they called $nothing (#-1).
And $nothing, let me say, friends, was
a strange, hair-raising thing to contemplate. “It is an
invalid object, insubstantial in the database,” said the wise
programmer. “But it's a valid parent, used as an abstract for
'nothing.' So when something doesn't have a parent, it's
parented to $nothing.” In other words, $nothing was the
perfect parent for $root, which in order to be a proper object
had to have a parent, yet in order to be $root had to have no
proper objects standing over it in the hierarchy of descent.
Thus then did $nothing serve, however insubstantially, to
anchor $root in its rightful place atop the MOO's chain of
being. Thus too, though, was it a kind of abomination for any
other object but $root to be directly parented to $nothing.
For once @chparented to $nothing,
an object was no longer in the lineage of $root, and therefore
stood apart from the great, overarching family in which all
things MOOish found existence. It became a thing as
wraithlike, featureless, and invalid as $nothing itself. And
while this was indeed a twisted state of affairs for any
object to fall into, it could really
screw around with things when the object in question was a
player.
Some claimed, for instance, that by
temporarily changing your own player object's parentage to
$nothing, you could pervert the natural order of the database
in such a manner as to acquire unholy amounts of wealth and
power. “If someone knows what they're doing,” said the wise
old programmer, “they can push themselves to the void and come
back as something 'inhuman' in the context of the database. No
registered name, as much quota as they like. Maybe even make
themselves a wizard.” But such a scam, if it was even truly
possible, was not for any but the lucky few, the adepts. For
the great majority of players, the only likely way to emerge
from so close a brush with $nothing was as a burnt-out residue
of playerhood, a husk—a three- or four-line shell of code, in
short, stripped of description, all possessions, and any
capability of speech or action.
And if you were beginning to wonder why
I'd strayed from my account of Minnie's hacking into these
obscure realms of the technical, well, wonder no more. How
else could I have readied you to grasp just what it meant to
learn, as I now did, the precise nature of that “crowning
gesture of negation” mentioned earlier? How else could I have
hoped you'd understand it wasn't just a sappy sort of tingle I
felt running up my spine when I discovered that the essence of
the crime against Minnie was that she had been rendered—if
only for a little while— a child of $nothing?
This bit of news turned up on * social courtesy of that same wise
old programmer who, much later, would induct me into the
deeper mysteries of the MOOish ontology, and who also, by the
way, was Finn. His post hit the list at the end of a longish
string of messages that had followed in the wake of Minnie's
outburst, none of them particularly sympathetic. No one had
actually come out and said she'd had it coming to her, but the
implication was there: she'd been a thorn in the polity's side
too long to ask for its condolences now, said some; her
amateurish programming skills had left her and her objects
wide open to attack, said others. But Finn, at last, burst in
upon this chorus of judgment with an exasperated
vengeance.
“Are you people actually supporting the
hacking of Minnie's character?” he fumed. 'Are you supporting
her being chparented to $nothing?”
And there it was: the first public
mention of Minnie's close encounter with $nothing-ness. And as
I took it in, I felt the aforementioned tingling of my spine
and knew, as I said, that it wasn't just the weird poetry of
the programming jargon that was doing the tingling. I sensed a
new understanding of the MOO taking shape inside me, just
tentatively enough that had Finn not proceeded there and then
to more or less spell it out for me, it might have faded back
out of my mind as quietly as it had appeared. But Finn went
on:
“Many folks made a big deal about
'MOOrape' a few months ago, equating RL rape with naughty
words here on the MOO. What happened to Minnie here is the
closest you'll come to a virtual rape. Real violation. An act
of violence, not sex.”
And sure, I might have quibbled with
the offhand implication that the crimes of Mr. Bungle had
amounted to no more than an exchange of naughty words. But at
the same time Finn's point made me realize how incompletely I
had learned the lessons of my encounter with the Bungle
Affair. I had assimilated pretty well the fact that in a world
built wholly out of language, the power of language is
magnified in ways both devastating and illuminating. But what
I hadn't quite appreciated was this: the language from which
LambdaMOO was built was of two very different kinds. The
writer in me had of course been quick to recognize the power
of the “naughty words” Mr. Bungle wielded against his victims,
for they had been composed in so-called “natural” language,
the kind that writers and other humans have always used among
themselves, one imagination speaking to another. But the other
language spoken on the MOO—the rigorously logical language of
the database itself—had failed to make the same impression on
me.
True, I had in a grand and fuzzy way
perceived that what I thought of as the “magic of the MOO”
derived in large part from the logic of computer code. But
when it came to acquainting myself with the day-to-day
importance of the MOO's actual programming language, I'd
pretty much taken a rain check. And now Finn was pretty much
informing me the check was due. Now, after months of ignoring
the language of the database as studiedly as I could—after
having poured thousands of lovingly crafted words and only ten
indifferent lines of code into the making of my garden, and
after having voted no on *B:DisbandMediation largely out of
knee-jerk scorn for its faith in the ability of programming to
shape human behavior—I was obliged to recognize that that
language could be wielded just as forcefully as Mr. Bungle's
words of violation had been. In its vocabulary, words like parent, child, and $nothing might not have the deep
associative resonances they would if spoken to a human being,
but I had only to review the damages inflicted on Minnie to
see what sort of power those words conveyed when whispered
straight into the heart of the machine our little world was
conjured from.
I could ignore that power no longer, it
was clear; not if I wanted to understand how power really
functioned in MOOish society. It would not be necessary, I
decided, to become fluent in the language of the database
myself, but I resolved thenceforth to pay much closer
attention to the social roles of those who had attained such
fluency—to their positions and their tactics in the political
skirmishes of the MOO, to the parts they had played and were
still playing in Lambda's long, strange virtual history.
This decision meant, to start with,
that I must now pay much closer attention to Finn. Because I
had the feeling that if any single event in Lambda's virtual
history had anything to teach me about the power of the
programmer, it was that mythic moment usually referred to as
the Schmoo Wars. And of course, if anyone had anything to
teach me about the Schmoo Wars—well, it was Finn, now wasn't
it?
And so, not long thereafter, I made a
point of calling on young Finn and asking him to tell me some
of what he could recall about those days. And not long after
that, I made another visit and asked him if he'd tell me more.
And in time I made visits to other players—veterans, sideline
observers, informed commentators— all of whom had their own
versions of those famous events to report, so that within a
few weeks time I had acquired an ample collection of
recollections indeed.
Herewith, then, I submit to you the
tale those recollections tell.
It begins, as tales will, at the
beginning. And in the beginning, naturally, was the code. And
naturally, the code was with Pavel.
And Pavel saw that it was good, because
he'd been looking for something like it for a while now. Ever
since he first learned about MUDs, in fact, and started toying
with the idea of setting one up on a computer at the Xerox
Palo Alto Research Center, where he worked, Pavel had been
closely examining the various strains of MUD software
available to would-be gods (as MUDders sometimes called the
people whose computers sustained their digital worlds). To the
fanatical game-player in him, there was much to admire about
these so-called “MUD server” programs and the adventurous
realms of dragon-chasing fantasy they brought so vividly to
life. To the professional programmer in him, however, existing
MUDware mostly looked like weekend coding projects hacked
together by fanatically game-playing undergraduates, which
indeed it mostly was. For his own system, he wanted something
with a little more technical sophistication. On top of that,
he wanted something with a lot less emphasis on fanatical game
playing and a lot more room for collective world building. And
when the day came that he stumbled across a piece of software
called MOO—a new kind of MUD server with a powerful,
object-oriented programming language built into it—he decided
he had more or less found the something he was looking
for.
So he got hold of the source code to
that first MOO server—written by a Canadian undergraduate
named Stephen White—and with the blessings both of White and
of his own employer, he spent the next couple months knocking
it into the sort of shape the professional programmer in him
could live with. And when he was done doing that, he compiled
the code into a working piece of software, loaded the software
onto a computer hooked up to the Internet, and typed into that
computer a command that said, in effect, “Let there be
LambdaMOO.”
The date was October 30, 1990, and the
place was rather primitive. In the middle of it stood a rough
stab at the mansion, Pavel's first creation after building
himself a character (which would eventually go by the name of
Haakon, but which for now let's just call object #2). His
plans for the structure were based almost room for room on his
own home in the hills near Palo Alto, and though in years to
follow it would, as you already know, acquire a densely
lived-in and impossibly ornate encrustation of annexes,
extensions, towers, tunnels, worm holes, secret chambers, and
pocket universes, right now it was just the barest core of a
ten-room split-level California ranch house with a single
wizard wandering its lonesome passageways, checking for
bugs.
The place got cozy quickly, though.
Pavel invited various friends and colleagues to take up
residence (almost all of them professional programmers like
himself, or pros in training), and they promptly set about
building things up. On the ninth day, Pavel's ex-girlfriend
Jane Anders arrived, became enaj (object #66), and began
making plans to add a VR version of Pavel's RL hot tub, which
#2 himself had neglected to supply. To the subsequent delight
of untold generations of players, enaj had object #388, the
hot tub, up and running within a few weeks. By January, she
had applied her formidable programming skills to the
completion of a working model of Pavel's swimming pool (which
brought the number of objects in the database to #1428), and
not too long thereafter someone dug a small, enchanted cavern
beneath the pool, complete with dangerous dwarves and hidden
treasure. Other friends of Pavel's busied themselves inventing
such basic amenities as teleportation and paging, as well as
an extensive system of “help” files to assist future players
in the use of these inventions and others.
And all the while more friends kept
turning up, and friends of friends, and soon the friends of
friends were joined by strangers who were only chasing down a
rumor they had heard, out on the Net, about a kind of
programmers' paradise— a place where everything was made of
code, and everyone knew how to code, and every day the very
laws of physics of the place were tweaked a little by some
clever hacker or another.
A short time after that, Pavel decided
the moment had arrived to make an official announcement to the
Internet at large, declaring LambdaMOO at last open to the
general public. This was in February of 1991, according to
some old-timers, although considering the fact that back then
MOOers paid less attention to the passage of RL time than they
did to the steady, object-numbered growth of the database, it
is perhaps more accurate to say that LambdaMOO went public
some time around #2400.
In any case, the announcement wasn't
quite the world-changing event many existing residents
half-feared it would be. Pavel, now officially known as Haakon
(and less officially as Lambda, the name of the “civilian”
character he logged in to when not required to exercise his
archwizardly powers), had steeled himself for an influx of
uncouth, chat-happy newbies. He had even deputized enaj into
his small staff of wizards for the express purpose, among
others, of dealing with the expected increase in social unrest
and bad programming (she took the wizardry title Sredna, under
which name, you may recall, she would one day be duped into
giving me the illegal spare character Shayla). But though the
uncouth newbies did arrive in droves, and though the number of
petty conflicts and broken objects requiring wizardly
attention did begin to creep steadily upward, by and large the
MOO remained as attractive to the more technologically
sophisticated sort of MUDder as it had always been.
If anything, in fact, the appeal was
only greater now. For not only did the gathering crowds of
idle socializers provide a budding little mass audience for
the ingenious feats of the programming elite—they also
provided the key ingredient required for any elite to properly
exist as such: a non-elite. Not that anyone was about to come
right out and put it quite that way. As in many a small
community, whatever divisions existed then stayed hidden
beneath the social surface, and the surface remained a mostly
friendly one. “In the early days the biggest arguments
revolved around whether to use U.S. or Australian spellings in
the names of programming functions,” Haakon/Lambda later
recalled, adding with a certain wist-fulness that, back then,
the place had still been intimate enough that he could (and
did) personally greet each new player upon arrival.
A similar nostalgia tended to creep
into the recollections of other wizards and their cronies, and
if you listened to them long enough you might come away with
the impression that those first months after LambdaMOO's
public opening were a Golden Age—a time when MOOers lived in
peace and productivity and had no need of any rules or
disciplinary structures other than (it went without saying)
the natural respect accorded by the chattering new arrivals to
their technically accomplished elders.
But in fact the need for a more clearly
defined social order was already becoming apparent. Unspoken
local norms were quickly emerging, and the wizards were
spending much of their time explaining them to the newbies
who, in blissful ignorance, routinely transgressed them. In
sympathy with his wizard friends, the ancient alFarad (#45)
proposed to Haakon that a help file on “manners” be written up
and made required reading for new MOOers. Haakon agreed, and
made it so—and lo, help manners
became a sort of MOOish Code of Hammurabi, surviving well
into the age of post-Bungle democracy as the informal law of
the land. Which was surprising in a way, since the document
was in some of its particulars a baffling one. What was a
newbie to make, for instance, of the stern proscription
against hunting for “magic numbers”—a practice in which
creators of objects built and destroyed dozens or even
hundreds of objects in quick succession, rapidly running up
the database's object count until they acquired an elegant
number like #5000 or #6666 or #10101? Nobody unfamiliar with
the MOOish tendency to fetishize the object count as the
natural measure of virtual history could possibly guess what
the fuss might be, and even some MOOers well versed in local
ways thought the issue a somewhat ridiculous one. Yet
experience had taught that magic-number hunting was a
perennial source of strife, and help
manners was in that sense wise to discourage it.
Also wise were the document's more
common-sense rules for conflict-resolution, such as the famous
dictum “'Vengeance is ours,' saith the wizards,” which
enshrined the civilizing principle that disputes should be
settled by official judgment rather than bare-knuckle feuding.
There was no way, of course, to thoroughly eradicate the
newbies' natural tendency to disturb the peace (kids will be
kids), but the publication of help
manners went a long way toward keeping that tendancy in
check.
More and more, however, the MOO was
being visited by players whom apparently no amount of
rule-making could dissuade from raising hell. Some of these
arrivals—like the bands of marauding fratboy types who blew in
from the finest engineering schools in the land and set about
afflicting the living-room crowd with screenfuls of all-caps
nonsense and assorted sexual harassments—were easy enough to
deal with through other means. Haakon or Sredna, say, would
give them a few friendly words of counsel (which they would
ignore) and then would simply kick them off the system as many
times as it took to make them tire of coming back.
But others were more persistent—and
more devious. Widely and vehemently reproached for ripping
through all the object numbers from #14000 to #14999 in his
quest for the magic #15000, a player by the name of Gottesmord
responded to the condemnation with an obsessed vindictiveness.
He took to playing mind games on people, issuing vague threats
and deploying multiple characters to confuse and dismay the
objects of his resentment, enaj being one of his favorite
targets. Frequently he staged fights between his own
characters and then called on the unwitting enaj to intervene
in them, revealing the charade only after she'd wasted hours
of earnest effort on resolving the dispute. Once, he even
visited her in the guise of one of his spares, pretending to
be a sympathetic stranger, and volunteered to help work things
out between her and Gottesmord. She took the bait, spent a
long, soul-searching evening engaged in “mediated” discussion
with her tormenter, and nearly resigned her wizardship in
disgust after he gloatingly revealed his deception.
Eventually Gottesmord was toaded, as
was another famous bad boy of the time—Satyrik, who was said
to mostly log on very drunk, and who in his various run-ins
with the wizardry took such an intense disliking to the wizard
Crotchet that he finally made his way to Crotchet's RL home
and left an ominous-looking “voodoo” offering on his porch,
along with roughly scrawled threats against the wizard's wife
and children.
That things were getting slightly out
of hand by then was obvious, perhaps. But where exactly they
were heading was a more uncertain matter. Till now, the
escalating breaches of civility in and around Lambda House
suggested nothing more, all things considered, than the
accelerated rate of random offense and indecorousness that
sets in when any successful house party hits its stride. The
possibility that this growing rowdiness might presently lead
to agitation of another order altogether—that some
as-yet-unknown transgressor of the local norms was soon to
spark a controversy so wide-ranging as to introduce into
LambdaMOO's still relatively homey atmosphere the rudiments of
what could only be called class struggle—did not appear to be
much on anybody's mind at the moment. Nor, at the moment, was
it necessarily anything more than a
possibility.
But at some point it became an
inevitability. What that point was, exactly, may be debated by
historians to come, but for my money there is really just one
moment worth considering: The one in which Finn announced, to
an unsuspecting virtual world, that he had invented
Schmoo.
Did Finn himself suspect what he was
loosing on the MOO? Perhaps. He certainly wasn't likely to
mind if the social status quo got shaken up a little. He had
arrived on Lambda about four months earlier, at the height of
the wizards' fondly remembered Golden Age, and frankly hadn't
found things all that golden, himself. Not that he didn't like
the place. On the contrary: after an early few months MUDding
around on smaller, less flexible servers (where he'd
discovered the joys of tinysex and virtual dragonslaying) he
had stumbled into the open-ended universe of LambdaMOO as if
into an epiphany. Here was a realm, he felt, where he could
give free rein to the creative urges roiling in him—as he
could not IRL, where he was slogging through freshman year at
a state university near his hometown in West Virginia and
finding himself bored to the brink of expulsion. He soon was
MOOing almost every chance he got—teaching himself to program,
designing and redesigning his character, building himself an
elaborate Gothic tower annexed to the mansion, and generally
relishing the possibilities implicit in a place as malleable
and complex as LambdaMOO. “All gnarled and infinite,” he
called it, three years later, still enthusiastic even though
(or possibly because) his RL circumstances hadn't much
improved in the meanwhile. By the time I got to know him, he
had dropped out of school and moved back, unemployed, into the
basement of his parents' house, where he kept vampire's hours,
rising from his bed around 11 P.M. each night so as to have
the family's single phone line to himself. He was active on
Lambda "nearly every waking moment," he claimed, and didn't
seem to want it any other way.
"MOO is for me," said Finn. "It's for
all the creators. You can change the world here, not just live
in it."
But early on in his new virtual life,
Finn discovered there was one aspect of the MOO he couldn't
very easily change: its social structure. And that was a
shame, in Finn's opinion, because the people he perceived as
sitting at the top of that structure—the technical
sophisticates who'd been the first to colonize the MOO—were
not his sort of people at all. They were a soulless bunch,
from what he'd seen of them—more interested in algorithms than
in artistry, or even fun. They had a typical hacker's taste
for cutting wit, ironic and dry, which dominated public
expression on the MOO and left little room for the sort of
"quirky, ribald humor" Finn went in for. And worst of all, at
least from the perspective of a technological innocent like
Finn ("I was just some kid with an Apple ][ whose only
programming experience was in BASIC"), they seemed a lot less
eager to share their ample expertise with unschooled newbies
than to ridicule them for not already being experts
themselves.
You may rest assured, of course, that
the players Finn thus spoke of would dispute this portrait in
nearly all its particulars—and not without reason, for Finn
was nothing if not a hothead in his early days. But all the
same, he wasn't the only MOOer who found the existing social
climate back then somewhat oppressive, exu, for instance, who
arrived a little while after him, would later remember that
era as "the Reign of Snide Programmers Terror, when all
nontechies were subject to showers of verbal abuse." exu and
others mostly grinned and bore up under all the free-floating
attitude, however, whereas in Finn it rankled, and became the
basis for an abiding grudge against the MOO's techno-literate
establishment. "I did not get along with them, no," he told
me. "Moreso, I was disgusted by them. They were like high
school geeks who now had their chance to be the in-crowd. Like
they never learned a lesson being ridiculed in high school.
They _wanted_ to be hip. They wanted to gather in little
circles and smirk at the others. Except these people didn't
have any sort of coolness on their side. No social skills.
They had a proficiency in manipulating digits."
Was Finn then out to prove something
when he downloaded the programmer's manual and began immersing
himself in its esoteric details? Was he trying to show that,
if he wanted to, he could be just as good at juggling bits and
tweaking algorithms as the snidest of the überprogrammers? Finn denied it. "I
don't program to sharpen my logic skills," he insisted. "I
program because that's the mode of creation here. I program to
CREATE."
Even so, of all the things he could
have chosen to create in the beginning, there were few that
would have tested his technical abilities as thoroughly and as
publicly as the one he picked out, finally, for his first big
programming project: a full-blown player class.
What could he have been thinking? There
were proper sorts of objects for a novice programmer to start
with, and player classes definitely weren't among them.
Typically, you tried your hand at first on something simple
and unobtrusive, like a five-line pair of fuzzy dice you could
toss now and then for your own amusement, or a dozen-line box
of "edible" jelly donuts you could pass around when friends
dropped by your room (eat donut,
they might type, and on their screens perhaps they'd see
the words You bite into the
sugar-powdered morsel, savoring the goo that oozes from its
flaky heart and swallowing with guilty satisfaction).
After that, if you were starting to
feel ambitious, you could move on to programming for the
public at large. Suppose, for instance, that you'd done a
little tinkering and produced a pair of jelly-filled fuzzy
dice (object #16000, say), which you could either play craps
with or feed to your friends, as mood and circumstances
dictated. Well, that was a versatile little object indeed, and
maybe other players, less adept at tinkering than you, might
want to have one just like it for themselves. So you typed a
quick command and presto: #16000 was made "fertile," meaning
that anyone who wanted to could now create a child of it, just
by typing @create #16000. The
infertile child thus brought into the world had its own
distinct object number (and whatever name and description its
new owner chose to give it) but was in all other respects a
carbon copy of its parent. Meanwhile the parent now faded,
conceptually speaking, from the realm of the particular,
existing essentially as an archetype whose only real purpose
was providing usable copies of itself.
It became, that is to say, a generic
object—which was precisely the kind of object you wanted to
make if you wanted to make a name for yourself as a
programmer. The more children an object of yours generated,
after all, the more players were out there enjoying your
handiwork and, hopefully, talking it up. Nor did it always
require all that much in the way of programming skill, truth
be told, to score a big hit with the MOOish crowds. To my
knowledge, no fuzzy jelly dice were ever put in circulation on
the MOO, but gadgets of roughly equivalent simplicity were
often widely used. Most of them did practical things like
alert their users when a friend logged on, or enable them to
look at objects without being in the same room as them (such
tools were typically programmed as "feature objects," or FOs,
whose capabilities could be plugged directly into a MOOer's
own player object without using up the quota needed to create
a child). But if you didn't mind risking the disdain of
serious programmers, there was one exceptionally easy way to
almost guarantee broad popularity for your work while
contributing absolutely nothing of practical value to the MOO:
you could build a bonker.
For some reason MOOers, especially new
ones, just could not get their fill of bonkers, which were a
lowbrow form of entertainment similar to voodoo dolls, only
without the sadistic edge. Once programmed, a bonker served
essentially one purpose: it was to be taken to the living room
or some other crowded place and swung merrily at the head of
the nearest player, thus causing that player to produce an
involuntary, preprogrammed utterance or action of some sort.
Fart-inducing bonkers were frequently deployed, as were
bonking technologies designed to make the bonkee sing a random
line or two from the oeuvre of some particularly popular
recording artist. The possibilities were not exactly endless,
but demand for novel sorts of bonkers seemed insatiable, and
even if you just combined a few existing functions into one
multipurpose bonking machine, you could easily have a MOO-wide
hit on your hands.
Or so a good many beginning programmers
seemed to believe. The MOO was littered with their hopeful
efforts—devices whose invention was hastily announced with a
note on the refrigerator door, and whose descriptions
invariably went something like this one, gleaned from a quick
glance at "Bobbit's Kool Nirvana Bonker" (#87551), an object
dedicated to spreading the words of the late great Kurt
Cobain, among several other more obscure purposes:
You see a really
Kool FO. It is a nirvanabonker <nirbonk> and it has more
than 160 diffrent bonks. . . . It
has all of their albums on it and has alot of there other songs not on albums too. It is more
than a nirvana bonker though. You can Bughug people, Kill, people, Send
people into the sewer <person>. . . . Also you can smash somebody to aflat spot
with a wooden hammer. More verbs are coming. Tell all your friends about
this KOol FO :). Nirvana Rules.
Well, now: Could Finn have possibly
done worse?
Had he but chosen to try out his
nascent programming knowledge on a simple bonker, I have no
doubt he would have produced a masterwork of its kind. Had he
attempted something with just a touch more socially redeeming
value—some modestly useful little feature object, say—he might
have even earned the first glimmerings of respect from his
programming betters. From there he could have gone on
gradually acquiring a solid reputation, moving slowly,
patiently, up the scale of difficulty in his choice of
projects. A generic room whose lighting changed with the time
of day? A helicopter made to dart precisely amid the drifting
balloons of Lambda's sky? Who knows? Perhaps it might have
been Finn instead of Zami and Dif who later programmed these
remarkable inventions. So that eventually, his place among the
MOO's top programmers assured, he could at last have taken up
the challenges of inventing his very own player class without
arousing so much as a whisper of doubt about his readiness to
do so.
But no: Finn had to aim for the top
before he'd even grazed the bottom. He had to go ahead and
build his version of the one object players depended on more
heavily than any other, next to $root: their digital body. For
that was really what a player class provided—the form and
functionality that made a player object what it was, that
brought to life the vehicle through which a person spoke and
moved and tinkered and bonked and did whatever else a person
did in the virtual world.
It was among the rasher things a rookie
programmer like Finn could do, in other words, to invite the
mostly naive public of the MOO to put its bodily well-being in
his rookie hands. But that's exactly what he did when after a
few short weeks of work he switched the fertility bit on his
magnum opus from 0 to 1 and started telling everyone in
shouting distance that a brand-new player class called Schmoo
was open for business. And there are those who'd say this
reckless deed alone was sin enough to justify the storm of
animosity that soon came raining down on Finn. Schmoo was not,
after all, a model of programming virtue, as even Finn himself
would concede (though only much, much later). The thing was
buggier and less secure than any player class had a right to
be, and probably Finn should not have marketed it quite so
vigorously as he chose to do. At least not to the newbies
anyway.
But the truth is, even Schmoo's worst
enemies never claimed that they were moved primarily by
concern for public safety. Just what it was that actually
motivated them is a question we will soon enough consider in
some detail, but for now I offer you Finn's short answer,
according to which there were really just two things you
needed to know about the controversy.
Number one: Schmoo's enemies, to a
player, were members of the social circle Finn had already
come to think of (and despise) as Lambda's technocratic elite.
Some were wizards (Crotchet, for instance), others were not
(like Rhay, a cofounder of aCleanWellLightedMOO, and
BriarWood, the up-and-coming programming whiz who would later
be the first of Minnie's many political antagonists). But it
was clear to Finn that they all enjoyed a social prominence
founded largely on their expertise—and that they couldn't
stand the fact that someone so completely uncredentialed
should have had the nerve to move in on their turf. "They
resented me," said Finn, "as an unwashed upstart—someone
without any 'proper' schooling in the ways of computer
science.
"Someone who also had a very popular
playing class," he added. And that was basically the other
thing you needed to know about the controversy. Because
despite its undeniable flaws, the player class called Schmoo
was, sure enough, turning out to be a runaway hit. And if you
knew that much, then you could easily deduce that something
other than the quality of its construction must have been
compelling all those MOOers to change their parentage from
existing player classes to the upstart Schmoo. And once you'd
made that deduction—well. Then all you had to do was take a
quick look at the features Schmoo provided and you'd know just
what that something was, and why it might not sit so
comfortably with the guardians of decorum on the MOO.
I'll put it in a nutshell: this object
turned its children into sex machines.
The time has come then, I suppose, to
say a word or two about the subject of Finn and tinysex. And
even it it's not the time, this is going to have to get said
sooner or later, so we might as well just say it now and get
the whole indecorous business over with.
Right, then: Finn was a virtual sex
fiend. End of story. No arguments there, not even from the
player himself, who, though he might take issue with my choice
of words, was certainly delighted to regale me with enough
first-person testimony to warrant those words and then some.
Allow me to repeat them then, just so there's no confusion
about this: the man was a virtual sex fiend.
Or as a longtime MOO acquaintance of
his somewhat more generously put it to me, "Finn just is netsex." If he was logged on, odds
were better than even he was at it, and even if he happened to
be standing right in front of you engaged in some entirely
nonprurient activity, the odds were still not bad: Finn was a
master of the various MOOish means of being in two or more
places at once, and frequently at least one of those places
was the site of some salacious encounter or another. He might
be multiMOOing, hanging out on Lambda writing code or making
innocent chitchat even while he was getting all hot and
bothered over on some other MOO. He might be paging
simultaneously with multiple partners, discreetly setting up
his next encounter at the same time he was bringing his latest
to a climax. He might even, on occasion, be multiple partners himself, moving
deftly between his primary digital body and a spare one in an
admirable if not entirely selfless effort to satisfy some
tender young virtual thing's desire to be fucked by two guys
at once.
And by the way, yes: Finn's partners
were always women. At least as far as he knew. Or anyway at
least as far as he knew at the time they were his partners.
Well, OK, actually sometimes they confessed to being RL males
right there in the middle of the postcoital glow, or even in
mid-coitus itself, which Finn had to admit took some of the
fun out of the experience for him. But only some. "Sex is
loose here for the most part. Like a dream," shrugged Finn.
"And you don't discriminate in a dream. Woman. Erection.
Mount." So if occasionally the woman in question turned out to
be not quite the woman she seemed, well, that happened in
dreams too. And anyway the point was not so much what sort of
body sat at the other end of the connection—it was rather, so
far as Finn was concerned, what sort of text that body was
capable of putting on your screen. "Here, all the senses are
tied to what you READ," said Finn. "Words are your
environment. As in a dream—the illusion is reality."
Ah yes: reality. Philosophically
speaking, it was a concept Finn could talk about with a fair
degree of sophistication. Sexually speaking, however, it was
not a thing he ever claimed to be much qualified to talk about
at all. "I've had one 'girlfriend' iRL," he told me, referring
to a young woman he met in a creative writing class and slept
with for a while. "It didn't work out. I'm a very solitary
person," he explained, although in fact the problem partly
seemed to be that he was too attached to his none-too-solitary
MOOish life to really hold up his end of an RL relationship.
"After we'd have sex I'd try and ease away back online soon as
possible. Sigh." In the end, the girlfriend simply couldn't
compete with Finn's unending stream of MOO liaisons. And how
could she? "Here, everyone is perfect. If you want them to
be," said Finn, with a virtual grin I took to be just slightly
self-ironic. ("And when they get on your nerves," he added,
"you can @gagthem.")
And so, while RL sex went basically
nowhere for Finn, online he lived the kind of hyperactive sex
life young straight men usually only pretend to be living,
whether in their fantasies or in the locker room. The fact
that Finn, in comparison, was only sort
of pretending may seem like a minor distinction to you,
but it was apparently major enough to keep him coming back day
after day, year after year, to an endlessly revolving feast of
sexual encounters, each beginning in a hormone-driven dance of
seduction and ending a few hours or a few days later with Finn
dazed and confused, but ready soon enough for the next
prospective partner to cross his radar screen. "I lust like a
lunatic, and wake up bewildered," said Finn. "I come, spill my
seed, empty the lust, and I wonder what the Hell I've done.
What I've said, what I've promised, that I wanted this woman
to come _meet_ me. . . . It's kind of like lycanthropy. I'm an
animal when I'm horny. And then I wake up naked in the dirt
and think 'Huh?'"
Finn wasn't kidding when he spoke of
spilling his seed, either. Nearly every time he had netsex, he
told me, his orgasm was simultaneously virtual and real,
thanks to a combination of agile "manual assistance" and
concentrated self-control. "I live the fantasy in my head. I
hold myself back until all the verbal cues say GO! and then I
come. Here and . . . here." Impressed, and somewhat concerned
for the safety of his computer keyboard, I asked him once as
indirectly as I could just how much spilling he was doing.
"PINTS AND PINTS AND PINTS," he roared back—jokingly of
course, but if you thought about it, the total volume of
emissions over his MOOish lifetime was probably a lot more
than that, and Finn was quick to assure me he took great care
with his aim.
"I shoot in the basket," he said,
grinning as usual.
All right, so Finn was not exactly the
romantic type. But it would be unfair of me to leave the
matter at that, because as crude as Finn's erotic sentiments
could be, he did nonetheless bring to the business of online
copulation what I would have to call an almost painfully
refined aesthetic sense. It was a curious dichotomy in him: on
the one hand netsex was for Finn a dose of raw, unbridled id,
a kind of "delusion, rage, dervish daze" that let him get as
loose and nasty as he wanted to be; but on the other hand, and
maybe more importantly, it was also a "writing exercise" that
demanded a high degree of improvisatory precision— and made
him highly sensitive to the missteps of a sloppy collaborator.
"When someone isn't coordinating," he told me, "when they lose
track of where the body parts are and suddenly they're across
the room and hanging on the ceiling or something," well, in
all honesty, it was enough to make him want to fake a sudden
disconnection and call it a night.
"The most important aspect of netsex
... is AWARENESS," Finn insisted. "Knowing where you are in
the VR, what's around you, what the others are doing." It
didn't seem like much to ask, but in practice Finn found that
partners able to sustain that sort of awareness weren't easy
to come by. Those who excelled at it were rarer still. "If our
words mesh," as he put it, "if we breathe the same
poetry"—then that was a joyous occasion indeed, and when it
happened, it was capable of bringing him as close to the brink
of romantic attachment as he ever got, online or off. But
mostly it didn't happen. And early on, that fact led Finn to
an epochal conclusion: there were a lot of MOOers out there
who could use some help with the subtle art of pulling off a
virtually convincing roll in the hay.
Thus, patient readers, did the gooey
trajectory of Finn's most intimate predilections come to
intersect with the course of MOOish history. For what do you
imagine was the earliest and ripest fruit of Finn's desire to
spread the virtues of virtual realism among his fellow
netsexers? Why, Schmoo of course—the player class that
introduced into the world of MUDs that revolutionary
tinysexual tool known as virtual nudity.
Granted, "revolutionary" may be
overstating it. To be honest, by the time I arrived on
LambdaMOO, virtual nudity had long since faded well into the
woodwork of daily life there. It could be found built into a
couple of popular playing classes, and it served, as it always
had, a relatively simple purpose: it allowed its users to
morph certain key aspects of their descriptions, thus making
it easy for them to represent their bodies in varyingly
appropriate states of dress, undress, and, optionally,
arousal. Among those players who might have any use for
virtual nudity, opinions varied as to its merits. Some
players, I was told, never went into a tinysexual encounter
without it, while others considered it a crutch, and
antithetical to the free play of imagination that made such
encounters worth going into in the first place. As for those
players who were immune entirely to the seductions of netsex,
they might at most have had a chuckle at the very existence of
virtual nakedness, if they had any reaction to it at all. It
was not, in short, the kind of thing the MOO I knew was likely
to go to war about.
And yet the verdict of the MOO's
collective memory was clear: the Schmoo Wars had been fought
because Finn's player class could take its clothes off.
Which isn't to imply that the MOO
elites who took up arms against the Schmoo were puritans or
prudes. Finn thought they were, and never missed an
opportunity to say so, but the truth is they liked RL sex as
much as anybody (indeed, if gossip could be trusted, they
seemed to like to have it with each other as often and in as
many dyadic permutations as real geography and their own
sexual orientations permitted). Nor was it the case, exactly,
that they feared the anarchic energies sometimes unleashed by
sex. After all, the MOO had been getting more and more unruly
from the moment its population started growing, entirely
without the aid of Schmoo. And though it's true that incidents
of sexual harrassment had long comprised a sizable chunk of
that unruliness, nobody seriously believed a player class
dedicated to the promotion of tinysex was by its nature also
bound to promote disrespect for the terms of the MOOish social
contract.
What it came down to really was a
question of style. Which in turn came down to what such
questions usually come down to: a question of class. Which is
to say that among the upper social strata of LambdaMOO,
tinysex just wasn't done. It was a newbie thing, a waste of
time, and a trivial distraction from the nobler pursuits of
hacking code and trading dry ironisms. Nobody minded terribly,
of course, if the swelling ranks of the arrivistes persisted
in indulging this goofy habit of theirs—any more than if they
went on mucking around with such other low-class pastimes as
bonking or playing virtual Scrabble. But one thing had to
remain understood: on LambdaMOO it was the programmers who set
the cultural tone, and as long as they did, the culture of
LambdaMOO would forever be defined by more important things
than tinysex.
You can imagine, therefore, the shiver
of exquisite distaste that must have passed among the
programmers upon their learning that the noble pursuit of
hacking code had been perverted to the goofy ends of the
netsex crowd. It was as if a forbidden legitimacy had suddenly
been granted to the gauche subculture of the nonprogrammers,
as if their tacky value system had been hardcoded into the
very ontology of the MOO. Which come to think of it, it pretty
much literally had been—and at a frighteningly high level of
the ontology to boot. With the creation of Schmoo, you see,
netsex was no longer just some shady activity relegated to the
private rooms of the disenfranchised. It was an identity, of
all things, and worse than that, it was an identity honored by
the highest authority in the land: the database itself, which
now recognized a netsexer (in the form of a child of Schmoo)
as surely as it knew a wizard from a guest.
God knows this little coup of Finn's
came as a breath of fresh air to some. "With his design of a
fuckable player class," exu would later recall, and fondly,
"he brought the Specter of Pleasure to this ironic and
cerebral place." But for the ironic and cerebral types who
more or less ran that place, it had the makings of a small
disaster. Finn was right, I think, to feel that his hubris in
aspiring to the heights of technical expertise had offended at
least some of the reigning techies, but had that been his only
offense, the techies could have easily laughed it off. No, it
was Finn's fusion of high MOO tech and low MOO culture that
had taken things a step too far: he had crossed—and blurred—a
line whose clarity the elite's position in the MOOish world
depended on. Followed to its ultimate conclusion, Finn's
transgression could lead to just one outcome, and it was a bad
one. Not the typical worst-case scenario for embattled elites,
to be sure: they would not be banished from the MOO, nor would
they, strictly speaking, find themselves stripped of their
powers. They would still be the wizards, and the
well-connected friends of wizards, and they would still, in an
administrative sense at least, be in charge. And yet, at some
much deeper level—a cultural one, let's say—LambdaMOO would no
longer be their home. What they had made of it would slowly
sink beneath the rising tide of sex machines and fart-bonkers,
until at last the MUD that once had been a programmer's
paradise officially became, God help them all, a synonym for
silliness.
There was only one thing to be done.
The legitimacy that Schmoo conferred would have to be taken
back, and pronto. And that meant that Schmoo itself would have
to be delegitimated—by any means necessary, certainly, but by
preference with the uberprogrammer's delegitimating weapon of
choice: fine-tuned ridicule.
Whence the subtle nature of the Schmoo
Wars' opening salvos, which consisted, as far as anyone can
recall, of nothing more than a few smirking comments, made
mostly in private but never quite so privately that they
didn't by and by get back to Finn and anybody else remotely
curious about the opinions of the more important people on the
MOO. The opinions in this case did not range widely: Finn was
a buffoon and/or a sleazebag, his programming was lousy, and
the very notion that the MOO had any need for a netsex-ready
player class was variously silly, stupid, and repulsive. No
doubt these judgments were rendered with far greater wit than
my summary suggests, but the precise wordings, I'm afraid, are
nowhere to be found in the historical record. History does tell us (well, Finn told me) that
in time the mockery expanded into other, more creative realms
of expression. Objects were made that parodied Finn's. Rhay
built a "Schmoo-Land" containing a comically exaggerated
Gothic castle, based on the tower Finn lived in. Crotchet
whipped up a bogus player class called "SuperSmurf," which was
not very super at all, having no features built into it
whatsoever.
But wait. I'm getting ahead of the
story here. For if it's certain that the anti-Schmoo forces
did eventually broaden their attacks, it's also probably true
that by the time they did, Finn had already more than returned
their fire. The MOO's collective memory goes a little fuzzy
around such fine points of chronology, but as I said before,
Finn was a hothead—and hardly likely, therefore, to take even
the slightest of his enemies' barbs lying down. Nor was he
likely to feel too terribly intimidated by the mighty arsenal
arrayed against him. Sure, his antagonists had sarcasm,
cultural hegemony, and possibly even the @toad command on their side—but what
of it? Finn had a secret weapon the likes of which the MOO had
never seen, and that was Schmoo itself. Or more precisely, it
was the growing number of players who identified themselves as
Schmoo and who, in doing so, provided Finn with the raw
materials of that highly combustible power source known in
modern parlance as identity politics.
What else to call it? We've seen
already how insistently RL attitudes toward gender played
themselves out in VR, in ways both floridly inventive and
poisonously crude. And even though, in curious contrast,
real-world dramas of race, ethnicity, and nationality largely
kept their distance from the MOO (at most, one now and then
bumped into some slightly creepy, and probably white, O. J.
Simpson impersonator in the living room, or heard a tepid
complaint from one of the Brits or the Australians about the
predominance of American culture on the MOO), that didn't mean
MOOish society was incapable of brewing up its own robust,
in-house versions of tribal conflict.
The Schmoo Wars proved that. And Finn,
more to the point, seemed almost consciously intent on proving
it. From the outset he had equipped Schmoo with features
designed to strengthen the bonds of fellow-feeling among the
users, to highlight their identity as Schmoos and encourage
them to gather around it: a special @who command allowed them to see which
other Schmoos were on the MOO at any given moment, while the
"Schmoo Shout" feature let them chat with all the logged-in
Schmoos at once, as if on CB radio. There was even a mailing
list just for Schmoos, called *Schmoo
of course. And last but not least, once the hostility of
the aristohackers began to make itself apparent, Finn had at
his command the most powerful tribe-building tool of all: a
known enemy.
He didn't hesitate to make the most of
that tool. In his communiques to the teeming children of
Schmoo (how many were they now? dozens? hundreds? the
historical record refuses to say), he started playing openly
to their sense of second-class citizenship as newbies and
nonprogrammers, while at the same time flattering them as a
generally groovier class of people than the repressed and
oppressive foes of Schmoo. Wisely, he gave the enemy a name,
and a catchy one too—the "Power Elite," he called them,
minting a phrase that quickly entered the daily vocabulary of
the MOO and never left it. The collectivity of Schmoos,
meanwhile, was given a suitably groovier label (the "Schmoo
Love Cult") and with it a sense of self that must have been a
pleasure to indulge. Their spirits high, their resentments
focused, the Schmoos were fast on their way to becoming a
political force to be reckoned with—and already made a feisty
cheering section for Finn as he sallied forth onto the mailing
lists to do rhetorical battle with the Power Elite.
For the Schmoos, and for the MOO, this
was an interesting moment. My friend Sebastiano—who didn't
arrive on Lambda till after the Schmoo Wars were already
ancient history, but who knew a lot about ancient history
generally—compared it to the rise in popularity of the
orgiastic cult of Bacchus in classical Rome, around 180 B.C.
"The bachinalians," he said (for he was better at history than
at spelling), "were not only being very sexual, but more
imporantly, they were becoming a seperate powerful community.
And Schmoo users were becoming a community under Finn's
leadership." As a cofounder of the separate and very sexual
community of Weaveworld, Sebastiano looked back on the growing
power of the Love Cult as a heartening development, but his
analogy also pointed to the risks the Schmoos were running as
they grew. After all, he noted, the Roman authorities
ultimately responded to the rise of the Bacchanalians by
suppressing the living daylights out of them.
And sure enough, the anti-Schmoo
attacks in time began to target not just Finn and his
invention but the community that had coalesced around them
both. One hesitates to call it persecution, although indeed
some Schmoos reported that hostile anti-Schmooers were
harassing them in the public spaces of the MOO, and that in
general they felt pressured to "prove that they were
interested in more than just netsex." For the most part,
however, the campaign against the Love Cult was waged not so
much with open hostility as with sporadic, well-placed
propaganda, aimed at infiltrating doubts about the cause into
the hearts and minds of Schmoos. The critics took to posting
on *Schmoo, which was a great way
to get Finn's goat, you bet, but also enabled them to tell the
Schmoos directly about the risks involved in using a player
class produced by so untested a programmer. Finn's technical
skills were roundly maligned, but perhaps more damagingly, his
ethical fiber was also questioned. How could the Schmoos be
sure they ought to trust him? Did they not realize that the
owner of a player class had privileged access to each and
every one of its children, and to all the data written into
them? Had they never considered the possibility that Finn, a
confessed tinylibertine, had invented Schmoo for the sole
purpose of peeping at hundreds of players' private
descriptions of their naughty bits? Defections from the Schmoo
Love Cult began to mount.
And Finn struck back with glee. He took
to keeping a list of the defectors, and he railed against them
as heartily as he'd been laying into the Power Elite. They
were all "Infidel Slime" now, Finn's latest term of art for
the enemies of the Schmoo nation, and Finn, I can only
surmise, was having the time of his life.
How could he not have been? Flere he
was, this soon-to-be college-dropout from East Bumfuck, West
Virginia, standing right square in the middle of the closest
thing he'd ever seen to real live history, at the head of an
army of fun-loving newbies amid the heat and dust of his
favorite kind of war: a war of words. For that was what the
Schmoo Wars really were at this point—an almost daily exchange
of arguments and insults and harangues. And while Finn's
technical abilities were then still very much a matter of
debate, I can assure you there was never any question about
his verbal skills. Finn loved to throw his words around, and
he threw them well, and until this moment he had never in his
life been called upon to throw so many in the service of so
righteous a cause. It beat the hell out of creative writing
class, that's for sure. And if it had kept on going this way,
the truth is it probably would have ended far more happily for
Finn.
But in the end, it wasn't verbal skills
that decided the outcome of the Schmoo Wars. In the end, the
war of words became a war of code, as once again—and not for
the last time either—the native language of the MOO emerged to
trump the native language of the MOOers.
It was BriarWood who made the first
move of the end game.
He made it one day after he'd been
studying Schmoo's source code for a while, examining the
workings of a particular command called @peruse, which was a kind of
remote-vision feature that made it easy for Schmoos to read
the description of any object anywhere on the MOO. The
anti-Schmoo crowd didn't care much for @peruse, although it's not clear why.
They found it anti-VR, perhaps, or maybe antiprivacy. In any
case they were always figuring out ways to write themselves
some sort of shield against its gaze, while Finn in turn was
always figuring out ways to code around the shields they
wrote. The end result of all this effort being that the
anti-Schmooers got pretty familiar with @peruse's code, and pretty quick to
find the weakness that would let them write their latest
shield. Which I suppose was just what BriarWood was looking
for on the day he made the first move of the end game. Except
that on that day BriarWood discovered something else entirely.
He found a gaping security hole, leading through @peruse straight into the heart of
Schmoo itself.
Now, when you found a hole like that
there was no question what you were supposed to do: you had to
tell the object's owner about it immediately. Because a hole
like that meant anybody who found it could just waltz right
in, and take control of the object, and do any number of
unpleasant things with it. Like erase its description, say.
And replace that description with an obscenely phrased insult,
for instance. And thereby make the object's owner look like a
sloppy, second-rate programmer, for example. Which of course
was something BriarWood would never, ever do. Except to
Finn.
I asked BriarWood once why he had not
done as etiquette required that day and told Finn about the
hole. "I was Infidel Slime," he shrugged. And besides, he had
a point to make. He'd been thinking for a while about creating
a parody of Schmoo, something along the lines of Crotchet's
SuperSmurf player class, only actively "evil" instead of
merely lame. The idea behind the invention wouldn't be to
abuse its hapless users so much as to make them understand how
easily they could be abused—to
"teach them a lesson about trusting the owners of player
classes." But now that he'd gone and cracked Schmoo, there
really wasn't any need to go to all the effort of designing an
entire player class just to teach that lesson. He could
demonstrate the problem just as graphically on Schmoo itself.
And so he did. The next MOOer who happened to look at Schmoo
after BriarWood was done with it would notice nothing
different except its new description, which subtly yet
unmistakably reminded all who gazed upon it that a generic
object was only as trustworthy as the security measures built
into it:
"This," read the revised description in
its entirety, "is the fucking Schmoo player class."
Finn changed the description back
immediately, and he also managed, pretty quickly, to find and
patch the hole in @peruse. Nor did
BriarWood escape justice altogether. Etiquette was etiquette,
after all, and even if he was a
well-connected friend of wizards, BriarWood had breached it in
the extreme. He was handed a reprimand, therefore, by some
higher-up or another—perhaps enaj, who ranked about as high up
in the power structure as a player could, but who nonetheless
had something of a soft spot for the rabble-rousing Finn. ("He
was fun," she told me later, and not even such a bad
programmer, she allowed, as some of her friends made him out
to be.)
But Finn was hardly appeased. BriarWood
had gotten "a wee spanking," as Finn put it, when by rights he
should have been punished no less severely than Finn's own
creation had been violated. What could you expect from the
Power Elite, though? That was how they operated, the weasels,
going on and on about the rules of the MOO but never failing
to bend them when it served the interests of one of their own.
If Finn wanted vengeance, in other words, he was going to have
to get it himself.
And get it he did. It took a little
while—security holes don't grow on trees— but soon enough Finn
found a way to break into BriarWood's player object. And once
he'd found it, he didn't waste any time putting it to use.
Into the object called BriarWood, Finn wrote a few new lines
of code, the effect of which, in functional terms, was to boot
BriarWood off the system every time he tried to log on. For
Finn, however, the terms of MOOish crime and punishment
supplied a somewhat more satisfying way of putting it:
BriarWood had effectively been newted.
Not so effectively, though, that Finn's
avenging code wasn't quickly found out, and easily removed.
BriarWood's player object was restored to health in no time,
and all things being equal, Finn probably would have suffered
no more stringent punishment for what he'd done than BriarWood
had received for his act of trespass.
It just so happened, however, that all
things were not equal. Because although Finn finally had done
no worse to BriarWood than BriarWood had done to him, there
was a difference in their methods of attack, and it was all
the difference in the world. Indeed, I'd hardly be
exaggerating if I said that the world itself hung in the
balance of that difference, for the world we are concerned
with here was after all a virtual one, and in the course of
taking his revenge Finn had done something that had the
potential to shake that world to its very foundations. What
Finn had done to get control of BriarWood's player object, it
turned out, was nothing so innocuous—so unambitious—as merely
cracking the object itself. No: Finn had once again aimed
higher than he really should have. In one fell act of
programming, he had cracked not only BriarWood's object, but
its parent, and its parent's parent, and all its parent's
parent's ancestors, every one of them, right up to and
including (this was the heavy part) the Ur-ancestor $root.
Finn had hacked the MOO, in short.
Or more precisely, he had hacked a
wizard bit. Which in functional terms meant that he had found
a way to convince the system he had wizard privileges, and in
the somewhat more satisfying terms of MOOish crime and
punishment meant that he had committed the most unpardonable
sin there was. Bar none. Even at the height of the uproar over
Bungle's crimes, for instance, there'd been considerable
agreement that his deeds fell short a notch or two of the
gravity of hacking a wizbit. And long after Haakon had decreed
the abdication of the wizards from the realm of social
discipline, they still reserved the right to move swiftly and
summarily against anyone discovered breaching system security
at the wizbit level. "@newt first
and ask questions later" was the policy, and insofar as such
newtings were only temporary, it was a surprisingly
uncontroversial one. Some wizards liked to justify it as a
matter of "national security" ("I'm the CIA," enaJ/Sredna once
said to me about her mandate to protect the server, "I don't
have to follow due process"), but by and large the players
didn't need RL analogies to appreciate the seriousness of a
hacked wizbit. It was enough to know that anyone who possessed
one could play havoc with the MOO—could erase any object at
will, could spy on anyone's communications, could rewrite
anyone's programs and could even, if she so desired, bring the
whole place crashing to a sudden halt.
Finn remained uncharacteristically
quiet, therefore, about this latest of his coups. He wanted to
hang on to the wizbit as long as he could, and he certainly
didn't like the thought of what might happen to him if he were
discovered with it. But after he got done fixing BriarWood's
wagon, Finn couldn't resist the urge to take his newfound
omnipotence out for a spin or two, or three, to roam the MOO
invisible and godly and to poke and probe into those dark
corners of the database where only wizards were allowed to go.
It was an understandable urge, of course, but it would prove
to be his undoing. For it wasn't long before his pokings and
probings caused the MOO to crash—a spectacularly grim event
under any circumstances, and in this case especially
unfortunate for Finn, inasmuch as his digital fingerprints
were found all over the crime scene once the server was
brought back online.
Finn swore up and down he'd never meant
to force a crash—"I'm a knowledge addict, not a terrorist," he
told a reporter for the Lambda
MOOspaper—but that didn't do much to soften the hearts of
the wizards. His goose was cooked, and in the end it was none
other than his sometime sympathizer Sredna who did the
carving. At the moment, she wasn't feeling very sympathetic
toward him at all, and she probably would have toaded him on
the spot if she'd thought she could afford to. But in Finn's
case toading would have produced too much collateral damage.
It would have erased Schmoo instantly, which certainly might
have pleased some of the more radical elements of the Infidel
Slime, but which just as certainly would have made instant
orphans of all Schmoo's children, resulting in a lot more user
complaints than the wizards really needed to deal with at this
point.
So instead Sredna newted Finn. She
newted him, and though she did not specify the length of time
for which he was to remain newted, it seemed clear enough that
forever would be just fine with the wizards. As for Schmoo,
they decided to transfer ownership of the player class to a
more cooperative young programmer by the name of CHATtle, who
quickly set about making it more "user friendly"—adding help
files, toning down the rebel cult appeal, that sort of
thing.
"He cut its balls off," Finn was later
heard to grouse, although that wasn't strictly true: the one
thing CHATtle left almost entirely untouched was, ironically
enough, the controversial netsex feature that had set the
whole conflagration going in the first place.
Here, then, is how the MOO's collective
memory records the moment: the Schmoo Wars were over. The
Power Elite had triumphed. Finn stood bereft of all he'd ever
owned in the virtual world and doomed to an exile that might
never end. But for what it was worth, the children of the
player class called Schmoo could still get naked anytime they
wanted to.
I onced asked Rhay to describe the
Schmoo Wars for me, and he answered flatly: "The most
overromanticized period in MOO history." I didn't argue with
him, nor could I have. I hadn't been there, after all, and
Rhay had. He had seen the Schmoo Wars with his own eyes and
from the front lines, and I was obliged, therefore, to take
his word for it when he told me that the whole thing had
really been no big deal.
I was obliged, and still am, to accept
as fact that at the time, nobody really felt themselves to be
fighting some sort of epic battle for the soul of the MOO. And
that for that matter sizable segments of the Lambda population
(including many Schmoos and various members of the so-called
Power Elite) considered the conflict between Finn and his
antagonists to be no business of theirs, and a childish
business at that. And that finally, whatever broad
sociohistorical significance may now be extracted from the
Schmoo Wars was almost certainly written into them by the
long, collective process of retelling through which a petty
feud between a few young men with too much time and cleverness
on their hands was afterward transfigured into the stuff of
legend.
And yet, if I have preferred to tell a
version of the story somewhat more in keeping with the legend
than with these mundane facts, I feel no obligation to
apologize. You wouldn't have learned much from the drier
version, and anyway it was the legend, ultimately, as much as
the Schmoo Wars themselves, that shaped the course of
LambdaMOO's subsequent history.
A long hot summer of political
agitation followed in the wake of Finn's newting, inspired in
large part by his increasingly mythic memory. With Finn's
theatrics of class rebellion echoing in their imaginations, a
group of highly articulate but not especially technical
players (who would eventually take to calling themselves by a
name we've heard before: the MOO Underground) now began
hassling the wizards in earnest about reforming the MOO's
disciplinary mechanisms. "Free the LambdaMOO Seven!" was their
rallying cry—a call to repeal the newtings and toadings of
various brusquely punished MOOers, among them the old
troublemakers Gottesmord and Satyrik, but also including two
of Finn's longtime associates (Hackamore and Waif, both newted
on suspicion of aiding and abetting) and most importantly Finn
himself, who now made a terrific icon for the
anarcholibertarian set. With his exile, the Promethean
dimensions of Finn's saga were at last complete: he had
wrested the divine gift of techne
from the programming elite, and for putting it in the
service of mortal desires he had been condemned to an eternal
agony of . . . well, no, it wasn't like he was chained to a
rock with vultures ripping out his liver every day, but still.
Finn was slightly more than human now, and therefore it was
slightly more than just a joke when (for instance) a few
adherents of the Underground built a larger-than-life Finn
effigy one day and carried it around the living room, like the
patron saint at a Catholic feast day, demanding his
return.
(And wait—those two budding
MOO-anarchists there, helping carry the giant Finn doll
around, haven't we seen them somewhere before? Why yes, it's
HortonWho and exu, newly acquainted amid the fun and fervor of
the movement, and at this very moment beginning their long
fall toward ill-fated passion! Chalk up another momentous
consequence to the legend of the Schmoo Wars, then, though in
this case not perhaps a strictly sociohistorical one.)
Summer turned to autumn, and what
appeared to be the fruits of all this unrest began to ripen.
Rumors circulated among the MOOers that a core subgroup of the
Power Elite had decided to set up a MOO of its own, where they
could program in peace far from the mounting social
complications of Lambda. And when aCleanWellLightedMOO opened
its doors in late October, what could anyone think but that
the rumors had been true? The CWL crowd insisted that the only
thing about Lambda they were trying to escape was the
worsening lag, but the whole mood of the new place—its
emphasis on orderly, realistic building, and on coordinated,
"serious" programming efforts—suggested otherwise. It was
exactly as if the denizens of CleanWellLighted (among them
Rhay, enaj, Crotchet, and Rhay's good friend TomTraceback)
were conceding that the worst possible outcome of the Schmoo
Wars had after all come true: that Lambda-MOO was no longer
really their home, and that in any case, it was certainly
nothing remotely like a programmer's paradise anymore.
Still greater concessions were soon to
follow. A few weeks after the CWL inauguration, Haakon
published "LambdaMOO Takes a New Direction," the document that
formally handed responsibility for the social direction of the
MOO over to the MOOers themselves. The wizardocracy had now
come to an official end, and consequently the wizards would no
longer be conducting the sorts of summary newtings and
toadings that had so vexed the MOO Underground and its fellow
travelers. What's more, as a sort of codicil to Haakon's edict
it was informally agreed that the chief demand of the
Underground would now be met, without conditions: the
LambdaMOO Seven were granted amnesty en masse.
Which meant that after six months of
indefinite banishment, Finn was back— the undisputed victor,
finally, over a humbled Power Elite, and a man prepared to
take his place now as a leading citizen of the brave new MOO
he had so dramatically helped to bring about.
And never mind what Haakon told me
years later (incredulous that I or anyone else could ever
believe otherwise): that the so-called MOO Underground and the
Schmoo Wars and the mythic memory of Finn had had no influence
whatsoever on the wizards' decision to abdicate; that in fact
the wizards had abdicated simply because it was too much work,
finally, to try to manage the social affairs of a group of
people as large as the Lambda population had become. What
Haakon told me may very well be true, and indeed I see no
reason not to believe it's true. But I also see no reason to
believe it's truer than anything else I've told you about the
Schmoo Wars. Because Fm pretty sure that in the end, the
truest thing that can be said about them is that they marked
the beginning of a much larger, much longer struggle between
two equally compelling truths about how power functioned on
the MOO. For if the reigning truth before Finn arrived had
been that LambdaMOO was more or less what it appeared to
be—somebody's house, with house rules and an implicit
understanding that power rested ultimately with the owner of
the place—that truth had serious competition once the Schmoo
Wars came along and dramatized the fact that LambdaMOO was
also an increasingly complex society, with power ultimately up
for grabs among a variety of interest groups.
The contradiction between those truths
wasn't easy to resolve, because of course, LambdaMOO answered
readily to both. As crowded and diverse and downright weirdly
intricate as it had grown to be, the MOO couldn't help but
behave in almost every possible way like an autonomous and
rapidly developing society. Yet all along, and long after the
outlines of Pavel Curtis's Silicon Valley home were barely
recognizable beneath the years of secondary architectural
growth, the MOO remained essentially his own private house
party, lodged inextricably within the confines of a computer
he could pull the plug on any moment he chose to. That Pavel
chose instead to mostly keep his nose out of the business of
the MOO was one of the reasons the place had gotten as
interesting as it had, but it never quite settled the deeply
unsettling question that haunted nearly any discussion of
politics on the MOO: wherein did real power finally reside? In
the hands of those who struggled, collectively or otherwise,
to secure it? Or in the hands of the archwizard and his
trusted inner circle alone, to be relinquished or not as they
saw fit?
We will see soon enough, in the fateful
denouement of Minnie's long campaign against the Power Elite,
that this unanswerable question continued to erupt into
MOO-rending conflict long after the tumult of the Schmoo Wars
had subsided.
But first, there is a personal matter I
must attend to.
RL
NEW YORK CITY,
AUGUST 1994
Times Square Subway Station
You are underground. Concrete beneath
your feet, above your head; an orchard of I-beam columns all
around you. Smell of ozone in the air and naked bulbs throwing
hard electric light all over everything. You can catch the N
and R trains here. Go upstairs to transfer to the 1, 2, 3, 9,
or crosstown shuttle.
You see The Madding Crowd here.
Jessica and The_Author are here.
It's like a frickin' sauna here.
The Madding Crowd mutters and mills.
look crowd
The Madding Crowd
What the fuck are _you_ looking at?
Jessica sweats.
The_Author sweats.
The_Author looks impatiently up the
tracks.
Jessica says, "Can't wait to get home
to the MOO, huh?"
The Author chuckles mirthlessly, still
looking up the tracks.
The Madding Crowd rumbles and
roils.
Jessica says, "And how's your love life
coming along anyway?"
The_Author turns and raises an eyebrow.
The_Author says, "My _what?_"
Jessica says, "Your love life. Any
action there? Anything I should know about?"
The_Author feels his teeth clench and
his temperature rise.
The_Author says, "Look. I _told_ you. I
will _not_ be having any love affairs on the MOO. If I have
netsex at all, it's only going to be so I can see what it's
like. It's _research_, all right? _God_."
Jessica glares.
Jessica says, "Fine. You don't have to
get so hostile about it."
The_Author says, "Well _you_ don't have
to get so sarcastic about it."
The_Author says, "My 'love life.'
Jesus." The_Author looks away, fuming. Jessica looks the other
way, fuming. The Madding Crowd swelters and swirls. Jessica
sighs.
Jessica allows herself a sidelong look
at The_Author.
Jessica says, "Well I just think you
should know I don't think of it as research."
Jessica says, "I think of it as
sex."
Jessica says, "And go ahead and do it.
Because I told you I don't consider this a monogamous
relationship at the moment. Remember?"
The_Author remembers. Five weeks ago --
not long after he began inhabiting the MOO in earnest, as a
matter of fact -- Jessica declared over breakfast that the
time had come for them to open up the possibility of seeing
other people. It was the only way, she said, that she could
stand to go on living with someone so unwilling to commit to
her. He didn't think she meant it. He thought she was just
being dramatic. He still does.
The_Author says, "All right, first of
all: whatever. You want to live in a nonmonogamous
relationship, feel free to do so. But don't expect me to join
you in it. I have no plans or intentions to get involved with
anybody else and I never have."
The_Author says, "And secondly, as for
netsex: forget it. I thought the idea didn't bother you, but I
was clearly wrong. So never mind. If you're gonna get this
freaked out about it, I'll pass, thanks."
Jessica looks at The_Author with
something like astonishment.
Jessica says, "No way. No fucking way.
You're not going to put this responsibility on _me_. _I'm_ not
the reason you're not going to have netsex. You want to know
what the reason is?"
The_Author glares.
Jessica says, "You're afraid to."
The_Author fumes.
Jessica says, "You're afraid it would
be too real."
The_Author glares, and fumes, and
sweats, and almost cries.
The Madding Crowd chatters and
churns.
VR
7
S*
Or TINYSEX, In the Author's Experience
You'll want to know when it all began,
of course.
Of course: one wants to know. One wants
a moment etched as if in crystal that promises somehow to
explain, to excuse, to ratify the whole ungovernable cascade
of thoughts and impulses and small, life-altering actions that
follows. A moment, say, like the Christmas Eve four years and
two girlfriends before I ever kissed Jessica's lips (three
years, indeed, before we ever exchanged a word) when I saw her
standing with a mutual friend in the light of a midnight Mass
and knew, with the absurd presumptuousness some attractions
inspire, that we were going to be lovers.
In that moment, naturally, I did not
know what I would long thereafter know: that the young woman
standing in the church aisle wearing her beauty like a
brilliant afterthought would turn out also to be blessed with
a no less brilliant wit, and with a congenially dark erotic
imagination, and with a heart not so entirely ringed with the
thorns of a certain wounded wariness as to bar me from the
deep wells of affection within it. Nor did I know (though by
that point in my sexual career I should really have been able
to guess) that despite these ample gifts I would nonetheless
end up spending much of our time together torturing the both
of us with nagging, obsessive doubts whose focus on Jessica
was too neurotically misplaced to dignify here with any
further description, and whose real origins in a certain
wounded wariness of my own will come as no surprise to anyone
who's ever seen the inside of a therapist's office. I had no
idea, in short, how frail the certainty of that Christmas Eve
would prove to be, nor indeed how many times I would grasp in
panic at its memory before it finally started to sink in that
my whole sad history of ambivalence came down to this: that I
had never in my life quite learned to move beyond those
light-headed first awakenings of desire. I had never learned
to accept the fact that any attraction worth pursuing would
never remain as simple as the moment that engendered it, would
always be challenging me, in fact, to recognize in its every
moment the outset of a journey into unfamiliar territory.
By which I really mean to say, I guess,
that if even amid the tangible reality of RL bodies it doesn't
quite make sense to locate an attraction's true beginning in
any single instant, how can you expect me to pinpoint such a
place in the phantom history of a virtual affair?
I mean, what should I tell you—that I
was attracted to S* from the moment I first saw her? And what
then should I claim to mean by that, if what I saw was only
words? If what the words described was only one among the
several bodies I would come to know her in? If even I can't
say exactly which of them it was I finally came to know, many
weeks later, in the most intimate way a virtual body can be
known?
Well, I'll tell you anyway, because it
happens to be true: my desire for S* began its slow rise to
inevitability on the day we met. It was an early afternoon on
Interzone and I was visiting with exu there. Or rather, I was
waiting in the abandoned grocery story that exu inhabited on
Interzone for her to return from some RL distraction or
another, and it was while I waited that S* happened also to
drop by for a visit. She didn't call herself S* then, nor in
fact did she ever—it was I who would one day call her that,
but never to her face, and for reasons I couldn't then have
guessed at. For now, the only name I knew her by was the one
her present character bore, and that was Serpentella.
I figured Serpentella must be another
friend of exu's, but I thought I'd have a look at her before I
introduced myself. So I looked and saw the body of a
sullen-eyed bleached blonde in her early twenties who made her
living as the Amazing Snake Woman in a perpetually failing
carnival. Just having come from work,
the description went on to explain, she wears a silver lame' bra on her pale
torso, and her legs are encased in
a papier mache serpent's tail. Her hair is cropped close to
her skull, to accommodate the blue
nylon mermaid wig that dangles from her left hand. If you look
at her closely, you'll notice the many silver earrings and the
pierced navel. .. but then again,
if you look at her that closely, she might do something
extremely unpleasant to
you.
"Hello," I said then. "Quite the
description, dear."
I don't know why I called her dear. I
think it's what I dimly imagined my own Interzone persona
would say (I called him Dr. Benway, after Burroughs's famous
nitrous-addled surgeon, and had described him as This really old skinny guy in diapers) but I think too something in the
dead-pan, comic-book lyricism of the stranger's description
told me this was someone I was going to like, in one way or
another.
"Thanks," she answered, for some reason
grinning wickedly. "I'm happy with it."
"Goodness, such a wicked grin," said I,
and then I said, "Pleased to meetcha, if I haven't
already."
One never knew, after all. But no: "I
don't think so. ..." Pause.
"I mean, I don't think we've met before
. . ." she added quickly, floundering as we all did at times
amid the routine ambiguities of text-based chat. "I'm pleased
as well. . . heh."
I suppose I found her awkwardness
charming, though she plainly didn't mean it to be. She put it
down to mid-morning caffeine deprivation, actually (for it
seemed she lived three time zones to the west of me), but that
didn't stop me from doing my corny best to be charming back: I
typed @create $thing called "a cuppa
joe," and then I described the new-made $thing as Rich, black, piping hot, you hear the voice of Juan Valdez calling
in the distance . . ., and then I handed the fresh cup of
virtual Java to Serpentella, who laughed and thanked me for
it—at which point exu reawoke from her RL stupor, and our
private introductory moment came to an end.
And no: it wasn't exactly marked by
fireworks, was it? But then, I wasn't really looking for any;
not at that point anyway. And even so, I left Interzone that
afternoon with the half-formed sensation that somewhere inside
me—somewhere amid the Rube Goldberg mesh of mechanisms that
guided my fumbling heart—a wire had been tripped, and a timer
set quietly to ticking.
A few weeks later I learned that
Serpentella was called Solanas on LambdaMOO. And bit by bit I
learned, as well, an RL fact or two about the person behind
those names.
She lived in Vancouver, for one. She
was a first-year graduate student in French literature there.
She was, as advertised, a woman. She had green eyes and a
curious tattoo in the small of her back.
I learned these things, for the most
part, from exu, who had gleaned them firsthand during a recent
visit the Vancouver woman had undertaken to finally meet her
various Seattle MOO friends face-to-face. I did not seek these
data out, nor did I press exu for more. They interested me of
course, though not as much as you might think. Or anyway not
as much I would have thought, had I not already learned a
firsthand thing or two about the ways attraction functioned
inVR.
For I must tell you now that Solanas
was not the first MOO player I'd felt drawn to sight unseen.
There had been others—only two, but those had been enough to
show me just how loosely the phenomenon of virtual desire
depended on any knowledge of the RL body desired.
The first was exu, as you may or may
not be surprised to hear. We were never more than friends,
officially—but who's to say there's ever been a friendship
worth the name in which some murmur of eros didn't lurk? It
lurked in ours, that's for sure, and in the beginning it did
more than that: new to LambdaMOO, enchanted by its fluidity
and playfulness but still somewhat shut out of it all by my
own ungainly newbiehood, I gravitated toward this warm,
quick-witted, and MOO-savvy new acquaintance with an eagerness
that soon became an unmistakable infatuation—complete with
anxious, RL blushes (and other, less G-rated physical
responses) whenever she so much as typed a standard MOOish
greeting-hug my way. I had no idea what exu really looked like
then, nor really any sense that it could make much of a
difference if I knew. It was only after my crush had somewhat
abated that I met her face-to-face, during her brief visit to
New York with Kropotkin, and though I found I couldn't take my
eyes off her—so fascinated was I with this sudden, raw
intimacy, this standing there with nothing between us except
air—I can't say I felt anything like physical attraction. The
real-life exu just was not my type. And even so, the erotic
undercurrent of my affection for her never really died out. It
only ebbed and flowed, a wayward tide, rising and falling in
answer to a distant body that hardly needed to be seen to make
its gravity felt.
And then there was Ashley-Melissa, who
strode into my field of virtual vision on another memorable
Interzone afternoon, materializing suddenly in the midst of a
small gathering in exu's grocery store. She said a few brief
hellos, then just as abruptly as she had appeared she
disappeared again, leaving her description to shimmer on
inside my head: Insolent, affected pout
with sheen of wild cherry lip gloss. Pink wraparound mirrorshades. Body
wave, slightly brassy frost & tip, feathered bangs. Her arms are covered in wash-off
tattoos of spaceships, snakes, and cartoon characters, all in different stages of
fade. She wears a hot orange midriff tee with Black Watch Tartan mini-kilt and combat boots.
Her coltish teenage legs are scratched and scabby. Strung on a dirty piece of twine
around her neck are silver-dollar sized pieces cut from old school lunchboxes: Farrah,
Robocop, Woody from the Bay City Rollers, Scooby-Doo.
"Who was that?"
I asked exu, smitten I think not so much by the image
itself as by the shape of the mind I glimpsed between its
lines—the mind of a woman about my age, it had to be (if the
'70s kitsch details were anything to go by), with a fond eye
for the pathos embedded in pop detritus and a keen feeling for
the worlds of promise that can appear to lie just beyond a
first look at another person. The sort of mind, I guess it
seemed to me just then, that very well might fit mine the way
a lock fits its key.
"That," exu replied, "was Niacin," and
from the curtness of her tone I could tell at once how little
her former lover's ever-expanding repertoire of polygendered
personae amused her anymore. Myself, though, I had to laugh.
Sure, the joke was on me, but it was a good one all the same.
Niacin had caught me as he'd caught so many men before: fair
and square, in a bright reflection of his admirer's own
desire. And now at least I had the chance to get away
unburned, the momentary flash of that desire reduced by exu's
timely intervention to nothing more than a valuable lesson in
the power of self-delusion.
Or so I thought. It turned out, though,
that the attraction Ashley-Melissa sparked that day was a
curiously enduring thing. The mind I'd seen at work in her
description remained the same, after all, excepting of course
the assumptions I'd made about its gender. And even that
distinction—significant though it seemed to me as a man of
hitherto unwavering heterosexuality—ended up a bit of a blur
in the long run, smudged over time by Niacin's constant
shifting back and forth between girl and boy, so that the
better I got to know him, and the more I saw of his many,
delectable morphs, the closer my aborted feelings for the
creator of Ashley-Melissa crept back toward the threshold of
awareness, maturing as they did so into an ambiguous
concoction indeed. I mean, what was it, really, that was
drawing me to this person? Was it the women he made? Was it
the man who made them? Or was it the seductively indefinite
relationship between the two? In time I felt the attraction
clearly enough to understand that all these things, in fact,
were tugging at me; but which of them tugged hardest I never
could quite say.
What I can
say, though, is this: it's very unlikely I would ever have
come to feel the way I did about either Niacin or exu had my
only contacts with them been face-to-face. And if you feel
like drawing from that fact some sort of heartwarming,
humanistic moral—you know, about the beauty that lies waiting
to reveal itself to those not blinded by the accidental shapes
biology bestows on mortals such as we, or whatever—then by all
means be my guest. Personally, however, I tend to think that
what I learned from these early attractions was more or less
the same home truth I later got to know as one of LambdaMOO's
most cherished maxims: "In VR, it's the best writers who get
laid."
By which I mean that while my knowledge
of exu's and Niacin's physical bodies played at most a
negligible role in rousing my desire for them, the same can
hardly be said about the bodies they built themselves out of
the only building matter LambdaMOO supplied: the written word.
And no, I don't refer here simply to the bodily images made
explicit in their description files. I'm talking, rather,
about the way the visible body functions in the world of
matter as a kind of definitive icon of the self, and about the
way that in a world of text it abdicates that role,
inevitably, to language. In VR, just to restate the obvious,
your words are no longer merely what you have to say—they are
your very presence, they're what manifests you in the virtual
world, and how you use them, consequently, tends to shape that
world's perceptions of you in much the same way how you look
frames what the real world thinks. Well-rounded, colorful
sentences start to do the work of big brown soulful eyes; too
many typos in a character's description can have about the
same effect as dandruff flakes on a black sweater; and neither
these nor any similar textual attributes, of course, turn out
to be much more reliable as indicators of a person's real
worth than their physical counterparts have ever been.
Please don't misunderstand: exu and
Niacin are my friends, and it is far from my intention to
suggest that they are anything but fine, upstanding human
beings. Nor am I suggesting that it should be news to anyone
that language can play a major role in the intricate theater
of seduction. I only mean to note that when it comes to
solving the complex equation that establishes a sexual
attraction, the subtle variable of a person's "inner beauty"
counts no more heavily in virtual reality than it does
anywhere else. The fact that RL bodies weren't around to
distract my erotic gaze, in other words, hardly means I now
directed it straight into the depths of Niacin's and exu's
souls. On the contrary, what that gaze was drawn to, still,
was surfaces. It lingered over the shapes of phrases: over the
clarity and verve of exu's conversational style, say, or the
elegance and detail of Niacin's morphwork. And if I had to
identify one single factor as the core of my desire for these
two invisible people, I would say that, yes, it was precisely
this charged attention to the contours of their textual
bodies. And that the rest, of course, was what it always is,
only more so: projection, fantasy, the attribution to another
person of this or that magical quality missing in myself, all
helped along tremendously by the central role of imagination
in the very functioning of a low-bandwidth universe like
LambdaMOO, and all nonetheless interwoven with a delicate,
indispensable thread of genuine human connection. .
My point being, I guess, that with
Solanas the ingredients of my attraction weren't ultimately
very different ones. Once more, it was a virtual surface my
desire latched onto. It was a voice jumping into the
late-night punning circles on Interzone with poise and a
cutting enthusiasm; it was a lean but carefully sensual
descriptive style ("Should it be 'leathery thump' or 'thump of
leather'?" she paged me with seductive innocence one evening,
soliciting input on a bit of ambient noise she was writing
into one of her virtual rooms); it was a hard-edged
friendliness that only went so far, that figured in my mind's
eye as a smooth and egg-white shell, inviting me to look for
cracks—or even make them, if I had to.
And of course I made them, eventually,
though the truth is that I never really had to. I could have
let things go the same way they had gone with exu and with
Niacin—could have let desire do no more than seep into the
fabric of our friendship, uneventfully. But instead I let it
pull me straight into the middle of the one typical MOOish
emotional dilemma I had promised myself never to experience
firsthand. And since I may be tempted in the pages that follow
to try and pass my motives off as alibis—to imply, for
instance, that their origin in the hard domestic turbulence of
my real life made them somehow overpowering within the dreamy,
weightless atmosphere of the MOO—let me here repeat myself as
plainly as I can: I did not have to do it.
But I had my reasons, like I said. And
it's a fact they didn't have a lot to do with LambdaMOO.
The Living/Dining Room
You are at the ground-floor level of an
overpriced and undersized East Village duplex apartment. A
cheap Scandinavian loveseat hugs one wall and across from it a
brick-faced fireplace fills most of another. Next to the
fireplace a black metal staircase spirals down into the floor.
To the south you see a small kitchen area. To the north a
plate-glass door looks out into a small backyard.
Jessica and The_Author are sitting in
the loveseat.
Jessica has something to tell
The_Author, and she's telling it. Her words flow lightly but
deliberately, with a flatness to their tone that's hard to
read, even if the words themselves are unambiguous.
Jessica says, "Anyway, Eduardo's still
in Mexico City. He'll be back in a couple of weeks when
classes start. I really don't know what will happen then."
Jessica seems to have said what she had
to say.
The_Author stares at the fireplace and
he says nothing. He tries to remember what this Eduardo looks
like. He met him once: A colleague of Jessica's from the
Spanish and Portuguese department. A shyly amicable man of
about thirty, he recalls. Handsome in a way that teetered
between boyish and dissolute.
The_Author stares at the fireplace and
still he says nothing.
Jessica says, "So that's it? The
conversation's over?" The_Author looks at Jessica.
Jessica is giving him a look he knows
very well: lips tight, half curled into a hint of a bitter
smile, eyes icy and eyebrows slightly raised. It is a look of
fiercely guarded expectation, actually, though he almost never
fails to mistake it for contempt.
The_Author says, "Well what the hell am
I supposed to say?"
Jessica looks away, exasperated,
hurt.
The_Author says, "No, seriously. Jesus.
It's not like I'm the one who just sat down here and announced
I slept with someone else two months ago and oh - by - the -
way - I'll - probably - be - sleeping - with - him - again -
in - the - very - near - future - thought - you'd - like - to
- know."
The_Author glares at her and tries to
enjoy his anger while it lasts, because already he can feel it
giving way to self-reproach, and fear of loss, and raw confusion.
Jessica turns her eyes back toward him
and the look is different now, not so familiar.
The_Author sees weariness in her face,
and remorse, and normally these might signal the onset of
tears and reconciliation, except that now they're mingled with
a new, unsettling calmness that promises nothing. That expects
nothing. That only watches him.
Jessica says, "All right. You're right.
We don't have to talk about this anymore right now."
The_Author doesn't reply. He stares at
the fireplace and tries to understand some things.
The_Author makes some headway.
The_Author understands at last, for
instance, that this "experiment in nonmonogamy" she's been
talking about has been no bluff.
The_Author understands that even so,
she hasn't exactly been honest about it either.
The_Author understands, in any case,
that on some level this is still an experiment of sorts -- a
desperate, despairing test that he could put an end to just by
telling her he's ready, finally, to let go of the shroud of
paralyzing doubt he's clutched so closely to his heart
throughout their days together and long before.
The_Author can't tell Jessica any such
thing, however, because even now he is not ready to let go.
And the one thing that he still doesn't understand is why.
Jessica says, "I'd better get
going."
Jessica lays her hand on The_Author's
for a moment.
Jessica stands and gives him a
tentative, solicitous smile.
The_Author glances at her and faintly
smiles back, too uncertain now of what he really feels to do
or say anything else.
Jessica disappears down the black metal
staircase to the basement level of the apartment.
The_Author goes back to staring at the
fireplace, and needless to say, this being mid-August, there
is no fire in it.
I learned of Jessica's affair on the
morning of the day before Minnie informed the wizardry that
she'd been hacked to bits. Five days after Minnie's hacking I
completed the basic architecture of the Garden of Forking
Paths. And two days after that I became aware that my attitude
toward Solanas had quietly transformed itself from one of idle
interest into something bordering on active pursuit.
It was in the midst of a late-night
visit to Serpentella's quarters that I began to get the
picture. All evening we'd been paging pleasant, vaguely
charged repartee at one another as we'd gone about our
separate Interzone business—I muddling through a desultory
conversation with my sometime hot tub colleagues Enver and
theroux-que-sault (who politely pretended the whole while that
they weren't also carrying on a private conversation of their
own), she putting final touches on a new cafe-style hangout
she had built amid the ruins of the run-down carnival she
lived in. I'd joined her there at last and found the place
impressively dingy: bug zappers zapped out loud from time to
time and those mysterious leathery thumps could be heard as
well, the sound perhaps of a riding crop falling to the floor
somewhere in the back. A supremely bitchy robot-waitress
worked the room, refusing to take orders. I sat down next to
Serpentella on a low-slung, dilapidated couch and as I did so
felt a tension in my gut that I hadn't felt in quite some
time, but whose meaning I could hardly mistake. The mood
seemed right, after all, the setting was optimal, and suddenly
I realized that throughout the last few days of escalated
flirtation I had been waiting for precisely such a moment to
emerge. Now here it was, and to my only minimal surprise I
found that I was working up the nerve to make a pass at
Serpentella.
I didn't make it, though. Not then. The
sudden arrival of her friend Alva rendered any such maneuver
out of the question, and frankly that was just as well with
me. I didn't have the slightest idea how I would have
proceeded anyway, beyond making some sort of gushing
protestation of enthusiasm for her MOO-constructions and
seeing where things went from there. But the moment remained
an awkward one for me nonetheless. Serpentella's friends Orf
and Luna followed closely on Alva's heels, and before I knew
it our tête-à-tête had metamorphosed into a party of which I
felt myself to be anything but the life. I sat there
tongue-tied, very much in touch with my inner teenager, and
wallowing in an almost perfect re-creation of the alienation
and thwarted puppy lust I recalled just then as having been
the emotional hallmarks of every freshman-dorm social
gathering I'd ever suffered through. Eventually I gave up even
pre-tending to take part in the festivities, bid everyone a
hasty good night, and typed @quit.
And more than anything else, I think, it was the sour
aftertaste of adolescent frustration I brought to bed with me
that night that told me just how purposeful a turn my feelings
for Solanas had finally taken.
I now stood face-to-face, in other
words, with a question I had not yet had to give much serious
thought to: what would it mean to act upon such feelings?
I hadn't wanted to face this question,
you understand. I think I've made it clear, in fact, that I'd
gone out of my way from the start of my MOOish sojourn to
dodge it altogether, or at least to arrange things so that I
might at some point be able to commit the act without having
to worry about the feelings. And even though Jessica insisted
that I was kidding myself in that regard, even though she'd
told me to my face that no amount of anonymity and
gender-bending could drain my intended netsexual experiments
of their emotional content, both for her and me—well, she
could insist whatever she wanted to insist. My conscience
remained unmoved: I knew exactly why I had acquired my Shayla
spare, and it wasn't for anything but the most level-headed of
investigations into the curious late-twentieth-century
technocultural phenomenon of tinysex.
All right, maybe not the most level-headed of investigations.
And yes, it's true I couldn't guarantee that once said
investigations got under way I wouldn't find myself at least a
little stirred up by the experience, on some affective level
or another. Still, there was never any doubt in my mind that
if and when I finally got around to taking Shayla out for a
roll or two in the hay, the excursion wouldn't amount to
anything remotely impinging on Jessica's place in my
heart.
But Solanas already was a different
matter. The very fact of my attraction to her told me as much.
And while I'm well aware that these days public opinion on the
subject of computer-mediated adultery runs a sweeping gamut
from those who consider it a laughable contradiction in terms
to those who've cited it as grounds for divorce, I can't say
it ever occurred to me to argue with my own gut feeling that
any virtual involvement with Solanas would be a kind of
infidelity. As for just what kind it would be, that too seemed
clear enough after the briefest consideration: it would be a
virtual infidelity, naturally, and hence an infidelity whose
import, like that of all things virtual, would hover somewhere
between that of the real and that of the imaginary, never
quite attaining the freighted consequentiality of RL deeds but
also never quite escaping the inevitability of RL
consequences. The only real remaining question, then, was how
to live with those consequences.
And this was not an easy question to
decide. It simplified things somewhat that on LambdaMOO there
seemed to me to be just two general schools of thought on the
matter. Each had its share of adherents, I suppose, and each
adherent his or her own spin on the basic tenets, but I
couldn't help thinking of the two broad currents as,
respectively, the Niacinian and the exuist philosophies of
extramarital tinyadventure. Why I did so may of course be
readily apparent to those of you who recollect the couple's
divergent approaches to the RL dimensions of their torrid
affair, but for the rest of you I'll recap: Niacin, remember,
told the woman he lived with nothing about his virtual
escapades; exu told her husband, Kropotkin, everything that
could be told without seeming to be cruel. Niacin tried his
futile best to keep the VR and RL regions of his heart from
spilling over into one another; exu tried her forthright best
to keep the lines of negotiation and accommodation open with
Kropotkin (who, I should add, was also more or less openly
engaged in a MOO affair of his own). Niacin rather quickly
caved in to the pressures of his psychic split, and bailed;
exu presumably might have carried on in comparative stability
for months, as previously she had with HortonWho.
On Niacin's side of the ledger, in
other words, lay psychic schism and moral queasiness; on exu's
side were relative resilience and what seemed to me an
admirable honesty. And you might think, therefore, that it
would have been a simple matter for me to opt for exu's
strategy. You might also think, I imagine, that Jessica's own
openness about her ongoing affair had in any case already made
the decision for me.
But I thought other things. I thought,
for instance, about a certain night in July soon after my
visit from the purple guest—and long after exu had moved on
from both Horton and Niacin to a third MOO love, with
Kropotkin also well into his second—when I'd sat in the hot
tub juggling two or three mindless conversations with the
usual assortment of chatterheads while at the same time
keeping one eye on a trickle of laconic pages coming from the
Crossroads, from exu, informing me that also at the very same
time, in real life, her husband was storming out of the house
in an unprecedented rage, a rage I understood to be in some
way related to the aforementioned processes of negotiation and
accommodation. I thought about how I'd paged her asking if she
was all right, and gotten only a stoic exu will survive in answer. I thought
about how I'd tried at that point to steer things back to our
usual irony-tinged banter ("Oh I'm sure he will survive," I'd
grinned, for exu happened to be gendered male at the time,
"but will he get thru the nite w/o thinking dark thoughts
about the ultimate possibilities for human relationship?") and
about how little irony I'd detected in her reply (exu is thinking them now, actually. But has most of his
life. Had a few years of rest is all).
I thought about the wave of empathy
that had swept through me then (DrBombay squeezes your hand, I had
typed, the words flying out from the hot tub to the Crossroads
to the spare bedroom in a quiet Seattle neighborhood where exu
sat before her computer, thinking dark thoughts), and about
the understanding I had acquired along with that empathy, so
that from then on I could no longer fondly imagine that exu's
RL honesty about her VR relationships guaranteed her any less
emotionally battering a love life than Niacin's secrecy did
him.
But more to the point, perhaps, I
thought it possibly a little premature of me to think that in
the end I'd have to choose between the two of them at all. My
adventure with Solanas was still not much more than a notion,
let's remember, and now that my close call amid the bug
zappers and the leathery thumps had alerted me to where that
notion was headed, I wasn't very sure I cared to follow. True,
I might find it easier said than done to stop myself from
going there. Already I could feel that I had gone a sort of
rudderless—as if some structural, guiding part of me had
snapped when Jessica broke the news to me that morning. And
whether the force impelling me from then on toward a virtual
entanglement was just an itch to even the RL score, or whether
it was something not as simple—some suddenly unshackled urge,
say, to have a fuller taste of that unique blend of intimacy
and distance that had always been (why not confess it now?)
the thing that most appealed to me about MOOish
relationships—I didn't get the sense that my will alone would
be strong enough to resist it.
I only knew that there were other
forces pushing in the opposite direction. I knew that despite
what Jessica had done, was doing, and despite my own confused
reaction to it, I longed more than I longed for almost
anything to live in loving peace with her, and with myself.
We'd both done enough hurting by then—we'd hurt each other,
and we had just plain hurt—and I wanted not to do any more of
it. And though there may be some among you who don't see what
could have been the harm in trading textual fantasies with a
pseudonym whose owner lived 3,000 miles from me, I saw it
clearly enough. I'd traded every shot I'd ever had at real
love, after all, for fantasies of one kind or another.
And so for now the balance of forces
remained in equilibrium, and I was able to delay a while
longer having to decide whether I was at heart an exuist or a
Niacinian. I told Jessica nothing about that night in
Serpentella's café, and strictly speaking I hid nothing from
her either. I hoped as well, and very much, that I might go on
having nothing to hide.
Two weeks later, on a Friday afternoon,
Jessica informed me that Eduardo had returned from Mexico City
and that she would be seeing him on Sunday night.
I took the news in stride. I had
decided by then that we'd get through this all right, that
Jessica just needed to explore her feelings, find her
bearings, sow some wild oats or whatever it was she was going
through, and that I would wait the whole thing out with
patience and, as always, with ambivalence. Besides, I had my
MOOish life to keep me occupied in the meantime, and it was
going well. A few days before, I'd filled in the last details
on the Garden and posted a note on the refrigerator in the
kitchen announcing that my creation was open to the public.
Already I was getting rave reviews from perfect strangers, and
quota donations too, and what with all the gratification these
responses gave me, the thought of complicating my life with
tinysexual liaisons of any sort lost much of its appeal. I had
begun, curiously enough, to feel happier than I had in a long
time.
That night, though, after Jessica and I
had gone to bed, I lay awake in the grip of a kind of
heartache, a yearning for someone or something that I couldn't
quite identify. And then a name rose to my lips and settled
there, unspoken.
It was exu's.
In the morning I logged on right after
breakfast, but exu wasn't to be found. I remembered then that
she and Kropotkin were spending most of the weekend out seeing
the bands at Lollapalooza's Seattle stopover—with Solanas, in
fact, and with Alva, who were both down visiting from
Vancouver. There wasn't really anybody else around all day,
and in the night I couldn't sleep again, and exu's name was on
my tongue again, and the same yearning, again, was in my
heart. But now there was a bitterness inside me too. I thought
about how Jessica would be out with Eduardo the next evening,
and then with a kind of grim satisfaction I thought, "Let's go
on now as Shayla and let's just see if anyone will fuck
me."
So I did. I got up in the dark and went
upstairs to Jessica's computer and while she slept I woke up
Shayla. A male player by the name of Mordecai-Q paged me
almost immediately, having peeked at my description. "You look
interesting," he said, and he invited me to join him in his
room (which he called the Singles Den, if you can believe it).
I looked at his description then and found myself unable to
return his compliment. Hi there Shayla
howya doing? it began, and the programmed personal
reference wasn't bad, but things went downhill from there: Well here I am.21 years old, 5'S", 126
pounds, sandy-blond hair, brown eyes. I study Electronic
Engineering in Fullerton, California. If you want to get to
know me better just page or if your
in the same room talk to me. Thanks for being interested in me
and maybe I will hear from you soon.
I joined him anyway. He turned out to
be every bit as dull as his description promised. And awkward,
too. He hugged me suddenly, unbidden, with no explanation and
no follow-through. I tousled his sandy-blond hair a bit while
our tedious chat dragged on, and this seemed to draw him out
some. Mordecai-Q shyly takes you by the hand and leads you
in a slowdance that seems to last forever, he emoted—and
that might have been nice if it hadn't so obviously been just
the output of some modified bonker program somebody else had
written. He apologized for not asking first before taking my
hand, and when I jokingly replied "Help! Help! I've been
date-raped!" he asked:
"Are we on a date?"
I was getting depressed.
I played on gamely, though:
"Hugs—dancing—hanging out in the 'Singles Den'—I'd say it
qualifies. Why not?"
"Well," said Mordecai-Q, "I've never
been on a date before."
I had to leave. I was starting to feel
sorry for Mordecai-Q, and guilty for toying with him like
this. He was asking for my RL mailing address now, but I
begged off, telling him it was my policy not to mix the real
world with the virtual.
"Come on," he said, "I'm not some weird
guy or something."
I smiled at him then, although I didn't
feel very happy, and I said, "Honey, relax. Life is
complicated enuff around here without adding extra layers.
That's my approach. If yours is different, that's cool, but it
isn't mine."
And then I said good night and went
home.
But before I logged off altogether I
slipped over into my Dr. Bombay account and left a message for
exu. There were two sentences in it, one in the subject line
and one in the body, and they went:
Subject: "I miss you."
Body: "I really do."
In the morning I woke up regretting
that message. Why in the world, I asked myself, did I have to
go stirring things up on that front when it was still tricky
enough keeping my feelings about Solanas in some sort of
manageable perspective? I had no answer. I spent the day
drinking too much coffee, and mostly on the edge of tears.
By the time the evening arrived I was
missing exu again pretty bad. Jessica left the house around
ten for her rendezvous with Eduardo, and by eleven I was
logged on and quietly thrilled to see that exu was back. I
understood a little better now why my crush on her had so
pangfully returned, and the main reason didn't seem all that
tricky after all: I was miserable, simply, about Jessica of
course, and pining for a shoulder to rest my miserable head
on. And exu's happened to be the softest, most inviting
shoulder I knew just then.
But pouring out my heartache to her
proved to be a moderately challenging proposition that night.
She had a lot of social catching up to do after her weekend
away, it seemed, and so I was obliged to unburden myself
through intermittent pages and whispers as we multiMOOed
together, moving back and forth between the Lambda and
Interzone scenes and trying to keep up with the usual flurry
of aimless witticisms. She seemed impatient with me, I
thought, and though in fact she was giving me a rather heroic
chunk of her time, considering the distractions, and though
she furthermore explained that any weirdnesses in her tone
were probably due to a nasty, teeth-grinding batch of "herbal
Ecstacy" she'd taken at Lollapalooza earlier in the day, I
began to worry that I'd alienated her irrevocably with the
needy subtext of my MOO-mail message.
And then, around one in the morning,
Jessica returned and came downstairs and gave me a distant
smile. She looked flushed, a little, though whether with
alcohol or pleasure I didn't care to guess, and as she eyed
the lines of text scrolling up my screen, she rested one hand
on my shoulder and leaned a little lazily on me.
You feel the
ghost of Ecco hanging around, I typed for exu's benefit
(inserting the event into the ambient wordscape with a program
known as the "God" feature), and exu asked with sudden
animation "Is she really there???"—for she had often told me
how much she missed Ecco's presence on the MOO. And I nodded
and said "Yeah, she sez hi," and then exu said a hearty hello
back, and then, just like that, Jessica was sitting in my lap
and typing on my keyboard, so that Dr. Bombay was her now, and
I was only me, with my arms folded quietly around the softness
of her belly and my eyes peering out from behind her back to
watch the two women carry on their chatty, bubbling reunion. I
watched and said nothing, feeling displaced and a little
forlorn, feeling shut out from the warmth of both of them and
not sure which of the two to feel more jealous of, and wanting
nothing more right then than just to go to bed.
Which we did, Jessica and I, soon
thereafter.
The next evening Solanas was back in
Vancouver and on the MOO again, and I sensed that I was no
longer really even trying to keep my feelings about her in
manageable perspective. We met in the living room, which
seemed especially talkative that night, and there amid the
manic, undirected chat of at least a dozen oversocialized
undergraduates I threw my arms around her, giving her a big
welcome-home kiss. When she returned the greeting with a
polite peck on the cheek, I pouted ostentatiously, and only
half-jokingly. She smirked, then she embraced me and gave me a
long, passionate kiss, but it was only a preprogrammed one,
like Mordecai-Q's slow dance. I staggered around in my best
pantomime of an amorous daze, and I rolled around at her feet
like a love-struck puppy dog, but I didn't actually care much
for this game. That familiar tang of male-adolescent
frustration was welling up beneath its playful surface, and
threatening to leech the fun out of it entirely.
So I morphed into Samantha, and
suddenly, subtly, the fun seemed to shift to another level. I
felt pretty again, and in this context pretty felt powerful—as
if I had permission now to be not only allured, but alluring
as well. My self-mocking, supplicant Bombayishness fell away
and I became, as much as I was capable of becoming, the
self-possessed and sharp-tongued charmer I imagined Samantha
to be.
We played some new games then. I
alluded mysteriously to the few details about her RL body I
had picked up from exu—the color of her eyes, for instance,
the curious tattoo. This seemed to fluster her a little, and
to intrigue her, and she invited me to leave the living room
with her for the relative quiet of the entrance hall, where
for no particular reason we began to improvise a larky scene
of dueling femmes fatales: I spat bitter, noirish melodrama at
her while her lower lip trembled in faux-distress; she
switched into her überwomanly Wanda La Rouge morph (a
FabulousHotBabe in red bustier and microminiskirt with a
half-smoked cigarette dangling from her ruby red lips) and
advanced on me with sultry menace as I did some trembling of
my own; there was even applause from an onlooking guest or two
when it was all over.
"I'm tired of being in public," Solanas
whispered to me then. "I'm going home. Come and hang out if
you'd like."
I did. Her home, as I've mentioned, was
a bead of seawater floating somewhere in the unlinked regions
of LambdaMOO. It was a warm and private place, though not so
private as to shut out a volley of artless come-ons being
paged at me just then from someone named "Fawn," in "The
Lesbian Palace." I mentioned the distraction to Solanas, who
laughed and said, "You must be convincing in that body."
"It's a type," I replied, flashing that
perky-edgy, Elizabeth-Montgomery-on-half-a-gram smile that
more or less defined Samantha for me. "You go for it or you
don't. But if you do ... look out."
"Dangerous, hm?" she asked.
I thought about that one for a bit,
then I said:
"Oh, not moi per se—it's the attraction
that's dangerous. you know?"
And then I changed the subject. I
sensed a mood of steadily intensifying possibility inside that
bead of seawater, and I was enjoying it far too much to want
to try and actually make something of it. Solanas seemed to be
enjoying herself as well. We kept on talking for another hour
or so, still play-acting some, still making wisecracks, but
mostly, and really for the first time since the day we met,
just talking.
It felt surprisingly easy to do.
In fact, it felt intoxicatingly easy to
do.
And yes, to be honest, it also felt
more than a little bit dangerous.
"Well, darling," she said at last,
around 3:45 A.M. my time, "I have to get up for work at 8. So
fly off on your coke spoon and let me get to bed. Quit being
interesting already."
I flew off. Jessica had been asleep for
four hours by then.
The next day began amusingly and ended
in a purgatory of RL rage and tears. The amusing part was much
too short, as it always is, but it had enough to do with the
hellish part to merit some retelling here:
It happened shortly after I logged on
in the early afternoon. I saw no sign of Solanas that day, nor
any of exu, but Niacin was there—in his Ishmael morph— and I
thought I'd page him for a visit. Instead, though, and I'm not
sure why, I took a remote peek at his description first, and
what I saw made me think again: Ishmael was naked from head to
toe, his manhood (large, thick, and
nicely shaped) aloft in the virtual breeze, and his
attention evidently on other things than idle conversation,
for I noticed too that he was not alone, and that his visitor
(one Bionica) was also in the buff and in a graphic if
somewhat prosaically rendered state of arousal (It looks as though there is some moisture
between her legs). I'd thought Finn would have built more
privacy than this into his nakedware, but what the hell, the
result was kind of fun from where I sat—a mild, cheesy turn-on
not dissimilar, I imagined, to watching two lovers go at it in
silhouette behind a drawn window blind. And after all, I
thought, they'd never know.
But I was definitely mistaken about
that. "Bad boy!" Bionica paged me, almost instantly, and
almost as quickly I remembered how easy it was to program a
player object to alert its owner any time someone else
accessed its description file. I felt embarrassed, certainly,
but not as much as I felt entertained: MOOish social
technology in all its constantly evolving imperfection was
forever serving up such moments of unintended comic relief,
but I hadn't experienced many quite as rich as this one. I
chuckled IRL, then I remote-emoted DrBombay turns the color of tomato soup
back at Bionica, and then I forgot about the incident for
the rest of the afternoon.
Out at dinner that evening, however,
with Jessica and her best friend Hillary, I was inspired by
the effects of gin, vermouth, and a certain glum tension
hanging over our table to recount the story in some detail,
thinking at first that it might lighten things up—and only
gradually thinking better of it. Hillary listened with a
glassy simulacrum of amusement while both of us watched the
storm gather in Jessica's eyes. It hung there until I'd
finished with the anecdote, and it hung on all through dinner,
and it finally broke the moment Jessica and I stepped alone
into our apartment. She said then, with quiet vehemence, that
she wasn't sure she could stand it anymore. She said that
frankly she could care less if I was getting my rocks off
spying on virtual people having virtual sex, that wasn't the
point. She said the story just reminded her again, that's all,
of what a voyeur I was at heart, of how incapable I was of
making love, real love, with all of me not just my cock, to a
real person who was really there and not locked safely up
inside some image or some fantasy or some goddamned
possibility et fucking cetera.
I didn't take the critique very well, I
have to say. I fought back bitterly, and we kept at it long
and hard, well into the night and all through the next
morning. We fought with a violence that stopped just short of
being physical (but only just), and we fought with a
desperation that reduced us both at various times to cringing,
pleading parodies of wounded animals, our faces slick with
tears and snot. We fought, I guess, because we didn't know
what else to do.
And when we couldn't fight anymore, and
after we'd been human again for a couple hours, Jessica told
me she thought it might be best if she spent the coming
weekend over at Hillary's, just to chill out for a while and
get some time to think. And I agreed.
I was logged on again by the middle of
the afternoon, though the MOO and its weightless complications
seemed a frivolous distraction to me after what I'd just been
through. I ended up in Club Doome, where a crowd of
seminotable old-timers had collected serendipitously: exu was
there, and Doome himself, and MaoTseHedgehog and Wooga, not to
mention the very old and quota-wealthy Mailstrom, who had
lately donated 50K to my garden and thereby elevated himself
to near-divinity in my eyes. I thought I might glean some
pearls of historical wisdom from this rare gathering, but
aside from an underlying mood of auld lang syne the chat
turned out to be the standard MOOish fare: the usual pointless
puns, the usual oblique references to current events both in
VR and out of it, and of course the usual disputatiousness
concerning Minnie (whose unsettling saga was just then
building toward a particularly unsettling new chapter).
In the midst of this, Solanas paged me
and we flirted back and forth a bit, but my heart wasn't in
it. It was the first time we'd spoken since my visit to the
bead of seawater, and when she alluded admiringly to the aura
of dangerousness I'd wrapped myself in that night, a kind of
exhaustion overcame me. I felt powerless to live up to the
persona I'd been inventing then, and not very much inclined to
try.
"Ah, that was just Samantha talking," I
paged, and I wasn't really kidding. "But thank you
anyway."
"Oh dear," she replied, "and me already
ten mins. late to work on account of a boy who turns out to be
utterly safe. If I'd known, I'd not have stuck around so
long."
She wasn't quite kidding either, I got
the feeling. At any rate she said good-bye immediately, and
disconnected.
But then, when I logged on the next
evening, I got a friendly page from a morph of hers called
Shelley, a spivak, who said to join em in eir bead of seawater
when I got a moment, because e had something e wanted to give
me. And when I got a moment I joined em, and e handed me an
object whose description read, in part, A delicate silver hoop, designed to adorn a
pierced eyebrow. It was a gag of sorts—a playful reference
to the age gap between us, which was too small to matter much
but big enough to make Shelley (or Solanas, or whoever) feel a
little more proprietary than me about such Generation X
accoutrements as piercings and tattoos—and e'd attached a wee
but angst-ridden figurine of Gen-X pop idol Trent Reznor to it
for an added laugh. But I was touched, for real. I morphed
into Samantha, typed the command don
hoop, and admired the bangle now seamlessly integrated
into my description. Shelley had a look at it too and clapped
eir hands in delight, and I hugged em, and thanked em.
But I didn't hang around for long. It
was Jessica's last night at home before she went away to
Hillary's, and I wanted to be sure we went to bed together: I
wanted to hold her warm, solid, gently breathing body in my
arms as she fell asleep.
The next morning Jessica packed some
things and left the house, and once or twice that afternoon I
caught myself on the verge of thinking I would never see her
again. It was a foolish thought, of course, and easy to shrug
off.
Less easily dismissed, though, was my
growing conviction that the fractured state of my emotional
affairs had finally made tinysex of any kind a complete
impossibility for me. I spent most of the afternoon, in fact,
resigning myself to this development, talking it over with my
friend Elsa on the front porch of her sunny cottage in the
Lambda woods somewhere. She knew something of my RL troubles
already and she learned now, in broad and unspecific outlines,
about my virtual frustrations: I told her about my inability
to abandon myself to anonymous MOOsex with the Mordecai-Qs of
the world, and about the fruitlessly oscillating
approach-withdrawal pattern I had fallen into with
Solanas/Shelley. I told her I was still curious about tinysex,
though, and since I remembered her telling me once that a
former MOO lover had given her the collected logs of their
more memorable netsexual encounters, I asked her if she might
let me have a look at one or two of them some time.
The request must have seemed a pathetic
one, and I suppose it was, but her rejection of it was polite
enough, and it came with a sort of consolation offer: "Would
you like me to take my clothes off instead? I love showing
people, and wouldn't mind that."
So I watched as my friend Elsa removed
her clothes, one layer at a time, and I could see then why she
enjoyed showing off her virtual nakedness. It was lovely:
nothing overheated or prurient, just the clean lines of a
moderately appealing body described with affection and
honesty, right down to the artificial leg that Elsa said she
also wore in real life, and that she took off last of all,
revealing a limb amputated above the knee, with an impressive
scar on the front of the thigh. I thanked her as she dressed
again, and I complimented her on her work and joked a bit
about the mild lather her display of it had gotten me
into.
But if anything, I now felt even sadder
than I had before. I felt as if the most scathing of Jessica's
accusations stood at last irrevocably confirmed: I was a
voyeur through and through, and even in the allegedly
liberating context of a world without material bodies, I could
never be anything more.
It was, therefore, with my expectations
of adventure lowered pretty much as far as they would go that
I encountered Shelley at 4:30 on the following afternoon and
initiated a chat that was to continue more or less
uninterrupted until approximately 8 o'clock the next morning,
by which time it would have gone a very adventurous distance
indeed beyond the bounds of what is normally considered polite
conversation.
I had stayed away from LambdaMOO the
night before, depressed by the scene with Elsa and by the
emptiness of my apartment. There'd been a Beavis and Butt-head
marathon on MTV and I'd decided to watch that instead. Then
after a while I'd started flipping between the MTV and the
porno channels. Then eventually I'd locked in on the porn and
proceeded to masturbate myself into a thoughtless stupor that
had ended, finally, in a dreamless sleep around 4 A.M.
And in the morning I had felt about as
wholesome and desirable as you might imagine I would.
But now, as I said, it was late in the
afternoon, and I (in the hot tub) was paging pleasantly with
Shelley (in the bead of seawater), and things didn't seem
quite so dreary anymore. There was a casual velocity to our
interactions today, a steady, just-perceptible acceleration
toward increasingly self-revelatory ground. "You're welcome to
come hang out here, you know," Shelley paged me finally, and
so I came, and pretty soon e was—she was—giving me a brief
tour of all the selves that she had been on LambdaMOO, at one
time or another. Shelley and Solanas I knew, of course, and
Wanda La Rouge as well, but now for the first time and in
quick succession I met Soren (a bony, flaxen-haired teenage
boy with sunken, moody eyes), and Annelise (a winking portrait
of late-Victorian neurasthenic girlhood, her face shimmering
with the ethereal pallor of future suicide), and selenaea (her
earliest morph, a purring, female werecat with teeth that cut
like razors). And as I met them all, her already cluttered
image in my head grew yet more crowded and confused, while at
the same time I sensed with increasing clarity the presence of
a single, shapeless, seventh character who moved beneath the
play of surfaces, who did the others' talking for them, who
had no name unless it was perhaps that one simuous letter that
almost always persisted when the surface changed.
It was this person that I wanted to
know better now: it was S*. I started pressing her for
more—for stories, for confessions—and predictably enough I
focused my interrogation on the subject of her experiences
with tinysex. DrBombay has this pathetic pre-Foucauldian notion that
knowing details about a person's sex life is somehow the key to knowing their true
self, I emoted. Indulge him,
wouldja?
And she did. But it turned out there
wasn't much for me to know. "Let's see," she said. "Two
experiences with actual fucking. Both resulting from casual
flirtation in the Hot Tub as I recall. One of the guys took me
to a beach somewhere. I thought it was terribly silly both
times. Wandered around the apartment, got a beer, played with
the cat. Returned to the computer to moan now and then.
"Didn't do much for me at all," she
added, as if she needed to. But then we moved on to more
ambiguous categories of sexual interaction, and as we did the
material got a little richer, and the interrogation became
something more like a conversation again. I told her, without
naming any names, about the variety of erotic feelings MOOish
people had inspired in me—about my tinycrushes on exu, on
Ashley-Melissa, on her. She said, "Yes, I think there's
something about this place that kind of fosters crushes," and
she described two "intense relationships" with men in VR that
had both fizzled once she met them IRL. I talked a little bit
then about my own intense relationship, the RL one with
Jessica, and about its current difficulties. She said she was
sorry to hear things were going badly, and she seemed to mean
it. She said she didn't know much about being in a couple,
though. She said in real life she had only ever had "affairs."
She said that was pretty much the way she liked it.
And then she said, "Oh yeah. I just
remembered another experience that probably counts as netsex,
although in a rather nontraditional way." She said that once,
as selenaea the werecat, she had "pounced" on a MOOish
acquaintance, had pinned this person to the ground, and had
spent a leisurely while playing with em as if with captured
prey, raking claws and teeth across the surface of eir skin
while e trembled in terror.
"Yow," I said. "That sounds, um, pretty
intense to me."
I wasn't lying.
She had morphed into selenaea by that
point, and as she stood there radiating feline grace and
menace, she eyed me with a speculative grin. I cowered
expectantly and, I hoped, invitingly. But I cowered in vain:
some unseen distraction seemed to draw her off, a page from
somewhere in the MOO perhaps, or a phone call IRL, and I felt
suddenly exposed, ridiculous. I needed to get out of there, to
get some dinner, and I told her so.
"OK, happy feeding,", she said after a
bit, almost as if the menacing and cowering of just a moment
before had never happened. Almost: except that as she said it
she extended a forepaw and rested it on my neck, just under my
ear, then pulled it lightly across my throat, four razor-claws drawing parallel reddish
lines in Dr. Bombay's skin. I took a sharp breath IRL when
she did that, and not in terror either. Not exactly.
I logged off then, dizzy with hunger
and uncertainty. I ordered Chinese take-out, watched MTV for a
little while, and wondered whether it would really be such a
hot idea for me to go back onto the MOO.
Of course I did, though, before too
long.
Of course: S* was still there (Shelley
again), and I joined her almost immediately. The lag on Lambda
had gotten pretty bad by then, so I opened up a second
connection to Interzone and made my way to Serpentella's café,
where she sat waiting for me on the dilapidated couch. She
showed me some new things she was working on—a candy machine,
for instance, that dispensed chocolates with live spiders
inside them. We played with that one for a while, and I
suggested an enhancement or two, and then we sat back down on
the couch and got to talking again. I proposed we gossip, and
we did: about exu and her new MOOlover, the famous Doome;
about Niacin and the stormy, extended romance he had lately
carried on for several months with Alva; about HortonWho and
other likable pains in the ass. S* mentioned in the midst of
this that she was pouring herself a glass of wine out there in
her apartment in Vancouver, and I said "excellent idea" and
"brb" (for "be right back") and went upstairs to pour myself a
shot of rum.
"To gossip," I said upon my return, and
DrBenway raises his glass.
Serpentella
clinks her screen came back at me, and it wasn't long
thereafter that I started feeling tipsy. We both began to
commit a lot of typos then and I to get a little mushy. I
found myself reminiscing about the day we met, and confessing
what I'd had in mind the last time I'd been sitting on this
couch, in this cafe, with her. "I don't believe a word of it,"
she said, and grinned, and told me she was pouring herself
another glass of wine.
The constant popping of the café's bug
zappers had lost its charm by then and I didn't mind saying
it, so S* suggested we retire to her Interzone home. I
followed her out of the café, into the adjoining freak show,
past a silver lamé curtain and up into the large glass tank
that Serpentella lived in, surrounded by red velvet and her
comic-book collection. We settled into a comfortable chaise
longue there, and she mentioned she had music on now, out
there in her apartment in Vancouver. I begged her to put on Exile in Guyville, by the young and
prematurely world-weary indie-rock sensation Liz Phair, and
sing the lyrics for me, for I had lost my only copy of the
record somehow and missed it sorely, and I knew from our
predinner conversation that S* was also a fan. I suppose the
fact that all the songs on the record seemed to be about
either ill-considered affairs or terminally damaged
relationships might have influenced my choice as well, but I
don't remember thinking about it much, and S* seemed happy to
oblige.
Serpentella
[sings]: I woke up alarmed. I didn't know where I was at
first. . . Just that I woke up in your arms, and almost
immediately I felt sorry . . .
I smiled: the song was "Fuck and Run,"
and one of my favorites. S* kept feeding lines to me
intermittently as we talked on into the early-morning hours,
and I sang back now and then, hearing the music only in my
head. It made a good soundtrack. We were retracing all the
main threads of the day's conversation now: the complications
of other people's tinysex lives, the injuries and regrets of
our own RL relationships. As well, we both talked now with
increasing ease about the long meandering path of flirtation
that had brought us to this room together, comparing notes and
trading recollections the way new lovers often do once the
threshold of physical intimacy has been crossed and the veils
of everyday politeness have been lifted. The only difference
being, of course, that no such intimacy had occurred. We were
not lovers, and as far as I could tell we were not going to
be: we both seemed to want something more than conversation to
happen now, but either we didn't want it badly enough, or we
didn't quite know what it was.
Serpentella sang: / can feel it in my bo-ones . . .
And Dr. Benway finished the line: . . .
I'm gonna spend my whole life
alone.
I smiled then and gave her a big kiss.
She smiled back, leaned sloppily against me. But there was no
momentum there: the two gestures scrolled slowly up our
screens, followed only by further lines of playful, probing,
but increasingly languid dialogue. We'd been together for nine
hours straight, not counting my dinner break, and it was plain
now that the acceleration that had taken us this far had cut
out finally, and left us coasting. I began making noises about
logging off. I began, too, to prepare myself for the emptiness
I would inevitably feel when I did—the familiar, ashy
awareness of having stepped up to the brink of intimacy and
pulled away again without making the leap. It was nice to know
that this time at least my pulling away was in some sort of
loose accord with my better judgment, but it still seemed a
little too much like every other anxious getaway I'd ever made
for me to feel very good about it.
All the same, I stretched my arms and
made as if to go.
S* grinned. "Bored, darling?"
"Not bored, my dear. Dead tired."
She hm'd and poked me in the ribs, to
test. I jumped, though only sluggishly. "You wouldn't happen
to be ticklish, would you?" she asked. I denied it, lying, and
asked her the same.
"Oh god. Horribly, horribly so," she
replied. Expectantly? Invitingly? I couldn't be sure, but I
did know this: suddenly I didn't feel so tired anymore.
I flashed a wicked grin and held my
fingers up over her, like Bela Lugosi.
She fled to the other end of the chaise
longue.
I followed.
She cowered.
I tickled her mercilessly then: ribs,
armpits, belly, back of knees, whatever she exposed in trying
to cover up whatever else I'd been tickling. She shrieked and
squirmed and said at last, "What, am I supposed to say uncle
or something?"
She grinned.
"Ah shaddap," I said, and I grinned
too. Then I bent down and kissed her again—only this time I
made it long and hard.
She didn't respond.
I kissed her some more.
And still nothing happened.
I sat there watching my computer screen
for signs of life. It seemed like I watched for a good long
time. And then I saw this:
Serpentella
raises an eyebrow. She wraps her arms around your neck, and
kisses you back.
I let out a long breath, IRL. And then
I wrote:
DrBenway sighs
deeply and melts into your arms, pressing his body against
yours.
The anxious pause again, but not so
long this time:
Serpentella
tangles her fingers in your hair and grazes her teeth across
your lower lip.
And I:
DrBenway touches
the back of your neck lightly, nibbles at your ear....
And after that, there were no more
anxious pauses.
In fact, there were no more
interruptions of any kind, really, until two hours later, when
at last I shut my computer down and padded off into the dim
morning sunlight of my empty bedroom, not feeling so empty
after all, myself.
Not feeling so empty after all.
How very nice, I hear you say, but just
what was our Dr. Benway/Bombay feeling at that moment then?
What exactly was he thinking as he pulled the sheets up over
himself and drifted off to sleep? And more to the point, what
precisely had he been feeling, and thinking, and for God's
sake doing in those two conspicuously undocumented hours
between the nibbling of Serpentella's ear and the turning off
of his computer?
Dear reader: Please don't misunderstand
me when I say that now and then your curiosity gets a little
burdensome. For what I mean by this is only that I don't by
any means take lightly my authorial obligation to satisfy that
curiosity— and that I recognize the need, however onerous, at
times to sacrifice my own sense of personal decorum to this
responsibility.
I understand, moreover, that the last
few years of winking public discourse on the subject of online
eroticism may have raised the level of your inquisitiveness
beyond what it might otherwise be, and I am also not
unconscious of the fact that vast portions of that discourse
have been liberally salted with distortions and
miscomprehensions of one sort or another. I am willing to
admit, therefore, that in my haste to draw a veil over what
was (after all) a very private moment in the MOOish lives of
S* and myself, I may have left certain legitimately pressing
questions unanswered. And if for no other reason, finally,
than a lingering attachment to the fiction that my virtual
experiences bore some possible resemblance to a level-headed
investigation into the curious late-twentieth-century
technocultural phenomenon of tinysex, I am prepared now to
address at least a few of those questions.
To start with then: All that stuff
you've heard about "one-handed typing"? Forget it. Or rather,
try and look at it from where I sat, that early morning: my
eyes riveted on the screen, my fingers tense on the keyboard,
my body caught up in a rhythm that was not the taut, sustained
excitement of RL sex but a series of intermittent, gusty
arousals, each cued to the appearance of a new emote from S*,
each soon dispersed amid the hardly trivial work of composing
a follow-up line that both made physical sense and didn't take
too long to finish. Do you suppose then that in the midst of
all this rapid-fire reading, writing, and spatial reasoning
(which by the way produced well over a hundred separate and
often fairly complicated emotes in the ninety minutes or so it
took to reach our virtual finale) I managed also to attend to
the subtle biomechanics of bringing myself to a real-life
climax?
I did not. And frankly, though my hat
is off to the mighty Finn and all those other tinysexual
pentathletes who claim their every orgasm in VR has its
simultaneous counterpart in RL, I don't know that I would have
availed myself of their techniques that morning even if I
could have figured them out. Oh, my loins were engaged, no
doubt about it—but I can't say the thrill that thrilled me
most was a genital one. I wouldn't even say it was sexual,
necessarily. I'm not sure just what category of thrill I'd put
it in, to be honest, but I can pretty much tell you what I'd
call it:
Lucidity.
I never felt more lucidly embodied in
VR than I did during those ninety minutes with S*, is what it was. Together, in the
concentrated attention we turned on one anothers' virtual
bodies and our own, we conjured up a MOOspace that surpassed
in clarity even my most vivid memories of early visits, when
the sights and sensations of VR had still been fresh to me and
striking to my imagination. And while it's true that in itself
this cocreative process wasn't what you'd quite call sex
(indeed, it seemed at times a little more like comedy, as when
Dr. Benway's description forced us to reckon with the fact
that I was wearing diapers throughout the proceedings), there
was definitely something sexy about it. It was as if we'd
stumbled onto the secret source of all the free-floating
libidinal energy in the MOO—and it turned out to be the simple
possibility that sometimes the act of representation itself
can be erotic.
Ah yes: I see your crap detector
flashing even now, quite properly advising you that anyone who
mentions representation and the erotic in the same sentence
most likely just means smut. But honestly, I don't. In fact,
if anything sets my crap detector flashing it's the glib
assumption—commoner than it ought to be in the aforementioned
winking public discourse—that tinysex and all its online
variants are just some new-fangled, propeller-headed form of
pornography. And yes, I realize there will be some among you
who share this assumption, perhaps not even glibly either; and
no, I don't expect to change very many of your minds. But
folks, you know me pretty well by now. You have seen me
drooling in abject voyeurism before the cathode jigglings of
the late-night soft-core cable channels, and if personal
decorum didn't stop me from letting you glimpse that pretty
scene, it's certainly no obstacle to my telling you now that I
have sampled and even devoured porn in many forms besides the
televisual: I have stared at the magazines and rented the
videos, I have dialed the phone lines and downloaded the image
files, I have perused the purloined Victoria's Secret
catalogs, I have suspended my disbelief in the "letters from
our readers," and I have sat numbly in the postclimactic
backwash of all these activities, wondering what in heaven's
name it was that had seemed so compelling about them only
moments before.
Do you think then, you doubters, that
there's any chance you might just take my word for it when I
tell you that what I saw and felt and did that morning in the
bluish glow of my computer was not in fact pornography?
Beyond that, I won't argue the point. I
don't in any case need to convince myself about it. Sure, it's true that
in the thick of things the question hovered in my mind—and
never more than at those moments when I couldn't help noticing
the unfortunate influence of all those "letters from our
readers" on my tinysexual vocabulary. But from the moment I
switched off the monitor, there was no longer any doubt in me
about the difference: I could feel it in my bones, and on the
surface of my skin, and in my head, my feet, my fingers—a
feeling quite unlike the anesthetic aftereffects of porn, and
not nearly so familiar to me, no, but instantly recognizable
all the same. How could I not have recognized it, after all?
Every time I'd ever crossed the line between the possible and
the actual, every time I'd gone at last from the cold comfort
of wanting to the warm danger of having, every time, in short,
that I had first held a woman I desired in my arms—I had come
away with this selfsame speedball combination of satiety and
lightness coursing through my body.
And so I didn't even have to think
about it; I just knew. My body knew. That even though its eyes
had seen no one, and its ears heard no one, and its hands
touched no one—still it had been held, and closely, by another
body, and it had held that body closely in return.
That, then, was what I was feeling as I
padded off into the dim morning sunlight, if you really want
to know. As for what I was thinking—well. I have told you that
I did not feel as empty as my bed, but
I knew very well who was missing from it, and who belonged
in it. And what I thought, as I pulled the sheets up over me,
was that I loved her too much to tell her what had just
happened—or to pretend that nothing had.
RL
NEW YORK CITY,
SEPTEMBER 1994
The Bedroom
You are at the basement level of an
overpriced and undersized East Village duplex apartment. It's
either cramped or cozy down here, depending on your mood. The
ceiling is low and the walls are never farther than a couple
arms' lengths away. Pine bookshelves cover one wall, three
dresser drawers (two black-lacquered and one cherry-stained)
line another. In the northwest corner there's a bed: a
waist-high platform painted white, a futon mattress also
white, white sheets, white comforter, two bloodred
pillows.
A black metal staircase spirals up to
the ceiling. A passage to the southeast opens into
The_Author's Fabulous Office Nook.
Jessica (sleeping) and The_Author
(sleeping) lie in the bed.
You see 19-Inch Television Set
here.
The lights are out and it's pitch black
in here.
The_Author is dreaming.
The_Author treads water, in his dream.
His head bobs just above the surface of a broad seawater cove.
High red cliffs ring the cove, unclimbable; there are no
beaches anywhere, no visible means of exit from the water.
The_Author likes it here. The water's
warm and he has company. He can see other heads bobbing in the
distance, spread out across the cove in a sparse
constellation. He converses with them, casually; sound carries
very well here at the water's surface, and he is on a
first-name basis with the others, all of them: exu, S*,
Niacin, Elsa, Kropotkin, Alva . . .
The_Author, in the morning, will
catalog this as his third MOO dream.
The_Author will go over the list in his
mind. Dream One: exu as Kali, making words shake on his
computer screen. Dream Two: The_Author wandering through the
hallways of a dusty, antique mansion, looking for Finn. Dream
Three: this floating in a cove of distant, bobbing heads.
The_Author will note with interest how
the settings change, how his unconscious seems to struggle
with the task of representing LambdaMOO -- first showing him
the text his eyes see, then showing him the place his mind's
eye sees, then giving him, at last, a picture of something he
has never actually quite pictured, but always somehow sensed:
the abstract substance of the network, the medium in which the
MOOer floats, warm, weightless.
The_Author will ask himself, someday,
which of these images of the MOO is the truest, and he will
find he doesn't know the answer.
The_Author is not looking for any
answers at the moment, however.
The_Author is dreaming.
The_Author treads water, in his dream.
He converses with the others, casually. He hears a distant
roaring, steady, growing louder. They all know what it is,
that it will be there soon, and that there will be nothing
else to do when it arrives except to dive, and wait, and hope
they come up breathing after the tidal wave has passed.
VR
8
Toad Minnie
Or TINYLIFE, and How It Ends
Now it came to pass that on the evening
after my long night's journey into daybreak with S* (although
for reasons having nothing to do with that particular event),
Dr. Bombay and his morph Samantha parted ways.
Their parting was a somewhat melancholy
affair, but it was ultimately nothing if not businesslike: I
morphed into Samantha's shape, I saved a copy of her
description to my desktop hard drive for posterity, and then I
shifted back to Dr. B and, without a further thought for the
matter, deleted the cocaine-addled sorceress-cum-homemaker
from my catalog of morphs. That done, I did the same to the
dolphin, Faaa, and then methodically I moved on down the list
of my remaining morphs, deleting this one, that one, then the
next, until, at last, no more remained. There was only me, and
I, as I had really always been, was Dr. Bombay—the central
self around whom all the others had revolved.
Lord knows, I wouldn't have committed
this small massacre if I hadn't had to. As a character, Dr.
Bombay felt naked and rather dull to me without his
now-deleted companions. But the hard truth was, I simply
couldn't afford to keep them around anymore; for I was broke.
By which I mean, of course, quota-broke—and no, not really any
more so than I'd been at any other moment in the long and
irksome quota-bankruptcy into which the Garden of Forking
Paths had plunged me. Except that now I could no longer kid
myself that this was just a temporary condition, soon to be
rectified somehow by the intercession of whatever rudimentary
market forces could be said to operate on LambdaMOO. The
Quotto scheme had been a delusion from the start, needless to
say; but even the flow of contributions from the garden-going
public, which for a while had seemed so promising, was slowing
down now with a grim finality to less than a trickle. I was
still 87,000 bytes over-quota, and it was clear at this point
that I would be a very senior MOOer indeed before I ever made
that deficit up through private donations. The way I saw it,
in other words, I had no choice: I must at long last swallow
my pride and make a formal appeal to the crabbed beneficence
and exalted judgment of the Architecture Review Board.
Which meant in turn, as exu helpfully
explained, that the morphs were toast. There wasn't any way
around it: one simply did not go before the ARB and ask for
extra disk space without first thoroughly purging oneself of
superfluous kilobytage—"superfluous" being, apparently, a kind
of shorthand for morphs, old MOO-mail, and bonkers. Especially
bonkers. Which was unfortunate, I guess, since if I'd had a
pile of the latter in my possession, I could have made a great
show of sacrificing them and maybe thereby have managed to let
my little coterie of morphs survive unnoticed. Not having even
a single bonker to my name, however (and never having been
much of a MOO-mail hoarder in any case), I found my options
pretty well reduced to one: the morphs must go.
And so they went. And I, thus slimmed
down to the lean and hungry profile proper to a
quota-supplicant, submitted my request for 87K and change.
Two very interesting weeks would pass
before I finally got an answer.
Let us now, however, put those weeks on
hold, set back the narrative clock a bit, and take a second
look at that late-summer afternoon on which, to my chagrin, I
was caught spying on the nakedness of Ishmael/Niacin and of
his occasional net-sex-pal Bionica. I have already told you
nearly everything worth mentioning about that lovely scene,
but I must also tell you now that it was not my only memorable
encounter on the MOO that day. There was one other, and I
think it might be useful, as we navigate the curious course of
MOO-historical events to follow, to have heard a little bit
about it at this point. So:
About an hour past my debut as a
virtual peeping Tom, while I was pleasantly conversing with
Sebastiano in his handsome Weaveworld cottage (The floor is polished hardwood, but the walls and
rafters are rough hewn timber which still exudes the smell of
fresh cut pine. Large windows with weathered shutters are
always opened wide. You see a bookshelf with some curious
titles in it, a cluttered desk, and a simple but comfortable futon bed in the corner),
the following inscrutable message appeared on my screen,
paged at me from the mansion's coat closet by an unknown guest
character:
"Hi. You may, if you wish, connect to
192.168.1.1, where we can talk, from time to time."
What could it mean? The numbers didn't
puzzle me—they had to be the address of some MUD somewhere—but
why the guest would just assume I'd want to go and meet it
there was an enigma.
"You sure that page was for me?" I
replied.
A pause.
"Absolutely sure."
I shrugged an RL shrug. "Wheel How
mysterious," I paged, not certain I wanted to play this game
much longer, but willing to go along with it for now.
"Heh. Not for nothing were Chandler's
mysteries set in California, huh? NYakkers are too
cautious."
A wheel or two began to turn inside my
head. The guest knew where I lived, the Chandler reference
rang a certain bell, and then came this:
"Hey, you can bring Sebby along," paged
the guest, referring to Sebastiano with a familiarity that
pretty much gave the game away. "In fact, I'd enjoy chatting
to the both of you, it's been a while. . . . It's simply that
I can't chat here."
A broad grin spread across my RL face.
"Say . . . what time is it where you are?" I coyly paged.
"Would it be somewhere between, oh, Tasmanian Standard Time
and Outback Daylight Savings?"
"Precisely, good Dr.," came the reply,
and in my mind's ear I heard the gruff and baritone Australian
accents I had always imagined for the voice of HortonWho, the
sometime geist and full-time newt, the lover of Philip Marlowe
mysteries, of post-poststructuralist philosophy, and once upon
a time, of my dear friend exu.
I was glad to see him, and he was
right: it had been a while. Fifty-six days, to be precise,
since his last clandestine visit disguised as the purple
guest. It felt like ages, and I was eager to get caught up
with him, to find out what he'd been doing with himself in all
these weeks of exile.
It didn't take long. I opened a
connection to the address the guest had given me, typed my way
through a brief login process, and thereupon encountered
Anthony—for that was Horton's RL name, and it was what he
called himself in this, his very own private MOO, located on a
desktop server somewhere in the environs of Melbourne.
Sebastiano followed quickly after, hugs and pleasantries were
traded all around, and in short order Anthony made plain
enough what had been occupying him of late: he was preparing
for an all-out, one-man war on LambdaMOO—"a war of strategic
intervention," as he put it, whose methods were to consist of
a dizzying weave of technological and political attacks, and
whose aims were to coalesce around the single, paramount goal
of overthrowing Lambda's present system of government, such as
it was.
Step one toward this goal, apparently,
was the MOO in which we stood—a pristine, lag-free place where
Anthony could strategize in undisturbed security. He had built
no structures there that I could see; only the room we met in,
which he'd given the name "nowhere" and left with its
featureless default settings intact. You see nothing special, said the
description, but in fact I saw the opposite: in its unbounded
emptiness the place was strikingly eerie, and I couldn't help
picturing it as a sort of ghostly version of Superman's
top-secret Fortress of Solitude, the Arctic redoubt to which
the Man of Steel sometimes repaired in order to brood upon his
lifelong exile from the planet Krypton.
I don't imagine Anthony thought of it
in quite those terms, but it was plain he'd been doing a lot
of brooding lately, for he was now more bitter than ever about
the incursions Laurel and her supporters had made into his
real life. "They caused more damage than I can really describe
without boring your tits off," he said, though he didn't seem
to mind telling us in detail how particularly galling it had
been to lose his old university Internet account (thanks, as
you'll recall, to Laurel's letter of complaint to his former
system administrator)." That link was a strategic resource,"
lamented Anthony, who claimed he'd lost some 60 megabytes of
personal data along with it, confiscated summarily by the
sysadmin and never returned. Still, the experience had not
been without its uses: if nothing else, it had taught him that
he ought no longer to rely on any single access provider for
his connection to the Net. He had since made "alternate
arrangements," he said—"a triply redundant" set of Internet
accounts now linked him and his fortress-MOO to the world,
protecting him against any future attempts by his enemies to
shut him out of VR again. "When I come back at them (as I
surely will)," said Anthony, "it will be a soundly based
attack."
And a deviously complicated one as
well. I cannot say for certain that I fully understood the
details of his plan, but the essence was this: he was going to
poke a finger into the heart of LambdaMOO's internal social
contradictions, and then he was going to wiggle that finger
vigorously until the whole thing fell apart. In more concrete
terms, it all had something to do with an as-yet-unrealized
invention Anthony was calling "little monsters." These, once
perfected, would be LambdaMOO programs endowed with all the
usual abilities of normal Lamb-daMOO player objects, except
that in their case, an actual LambdaMOO player account would
not be necessary in order to manipulate them. Instead, they
would take input from anyone on any MOO (and send the output
back from Lambda) via a network-communications feature that
was integral to the data-base. Strictly speaking, in other
words, they would not be players but virtual communication
devices, and since HortonWho's almost-historic dispute against
the link to aCleanWellLightedMOO had more or less established
that such devices were not themselves subject to MOOish
discipline, the little monsters would be free to roam the MOO
entirely untouchable by Lambda's messy justice system.
Not that the vestigial Power Elite
wouldn't do their damnedest to rub them out, of course. But
this was evidently also part of Anthony's master plan. As he
gleefully observed, the moment anyone tried to bring a dispute
against one of his net-puppets, he would straightaway "crank
up HortonWho.vs.aCleanWellLighted-MOO again, via proxy," and
watch with pleasure as the CWL crowd went into a frenzy of
hair-splitting attempts to draw the line between their own
communications link and his. He readily conceded that their
efforts might in time sueced, and that a judgment banning some
or even all of the little monsters might at last be won, but
in that case his adversaries would then face the even tougher
challenge of enforcing such a ban. "If you look at the problem
of detecting such players, it's very difficult," said Anthony,
explaining that the only way to go about it would involve a
lot of labor-intensive close examination of object code. Not
an impossible job, to be sure, but then the purpose of his
monsters, ultimately, was not to make themselves
indestructible—it was to make the existing social system so
chaotic and exhausting that eventually nobody in her right
mind would even try to make it work. "The point is this, DrB,"
said Anthony. "Wars are not won by killing people, they are
won by economic collapse of the enemy."
I had to laugh. "You're perfectly
mad."
"Am I? I suppose it's possible," he
granted, and he did a cheerful little mock-Hitlerian strut by
way of acting the part ("Heute, der Sudatenland," he
declaimed, "morgens LambdaMOO!"). But then he sobered up a bit
and added: "Doesn't make me mistaken however."
And no, all things considered, it
didn't. In its particulars, I decided, the invasion of the
little monsters really was just a
little too baroque to ever get off the ground; but in its
general outlines, Anthony's recipe for revolution made no
small amount of sense to me. For one thing, precedent attested
to its viability: after all, even in Haakon's depoliticized
account of the wizards' long-ago abdication (according to
which their withdrawal from the social sphere had been a
unilateral and purely administrative decision), it was clear
that the increasing amounts of time and effort required to
manage the player population had been the deciding factor. And
whether or not you believed Anthony's only slightly less
credible version of that momentous event—according to which it
had been no one else but he (as chief negotiator for the rebel
MOO Underground alliance) who finally made the wizards see
just how untenable their role as autocrats had become—it
wasn't hard to picture him single-handedly plunging the MOO
into sufficient chaos to bring down yet another social order.
He plainly had the cussedness for it, and besides, as a
general rule (which he himself now sagely articulated) "it's
easier to make-ungovernable than to govern."
There was, moreover, an additional sort
of historical momentum to Anthony's plans. In his tactical
retreat to a private MOO, and in his strategic decision to aim
his attacks at the boundaries between LambdaMOO and the rest
of the Net, he was in a way only anticipating the future that
no less a figure than Pavel Curtis foresaw for MUDdish VR:
that long-dreamt-of day when "distributed MUD-ding" became a
reality, when every MUD would spread out seamlessly across as
many internetworked personal computers as it had inhabitants,
and every MUD-der would supply the disk space and other
hardware necessary to maintain her own MUDly existence. From
Pavel's managerial perspective, needless to say, the benefits
of such a scenario were substantial: once players didn't have
to share the resources of a single computer, such
administrative burdens as quota allocation, server security,
and Internet bills would largely disperse into thin air,
becoming the locally (and easily) managed problems of the
players themselves. From Anthony's perspective as a grizzled
anarcholibertarian warrior, however, the appeal was possibly
even greater, and he made no secret of his eagerness to see
the collective quandaries of Lambda's virtual democracy
someday dissolved into the individual struggles of a thousand
interlinked but ultimately autonomous little mini-MOOs. "MOO
politics will be different when everyone can run their own,"
he had declared upon welcoming me into his Spartan hideout.
"It becomes less a state thing than a propertarian thing."
Now, let me say this right up front: in
my two or three decades as a politically conscious human
being, I have never quite decided for myself the relative
merits of the "state thing" versus the "propertarian thing."
God knows, in any case, I've never been one to advocate the
indiscriminate dismantling of governments, especially when the
only organizing principle offered in their stead is that of
private ownership. This said, however, I must now confess that
on that particular late-summer afternoon, my sentiments
regarding the state of governmental affairs on LambdaMOO were
such that, had the grizzled anarcholibertarian warrior known
to most of MOOdom as HortonWho marched forth from his fortress
of solitude on that very day and forthwith realized his
cherished dream of smashing the MOOish state, I don't believe
I would have shed so much as a virtual tear.
Now let me tell you why. It's common
for the bloom of a young man's political optimism to fade as
middle-age and its sundry disillusionments approach, so I
won't belabor that ancient story here, except to say that in
the warp speed of a MOOish life the tale might naturally be
expected to run its course more quickly than usual, and that
after two months of daily immersions in VR I had by now been
living MOOishly quite long enough to have covered that course
almost in its entirety. My early, easy enthusiasms for
LambdaMOO's democracy (the birth of which I had, after all,
eyewitnessed as an impressionable newbie) had since been
steadily worn away at by the often difficult realities of
taking part in that democracy—by my frustrations with the ARB,
for instance, by my discomfort with the awkward workings of
the justice system in the case of HortonWho and others, by the
onerous work of keeping up with all the growing plethora of
civic mailing lists, and by my occasional suspicions that for
all the textual dust kicked up by the more politically minded
of my fellow MOOers, the vast majority of virtual citizens
could not have possibly cared less about any of this.
Until a certain moment of the day
before my visit to Horton's private MOO, however, my native
hopefulness about the prospects for Lambda's political health
had never entirely deserted me. But then, in that unhappy
hour, I had laid eyes on a document entitled, with a blunt but
eloquent simplicity, Toad Minnie.
Or rather: *P:ToadMinnie. For
the document was a petition—an official attempt by citizen
Memphistopheles (the very same who had once terrorized me with
his threats to report my suspicious quota-transfers to the
authorities) to put before the LambdaMOO electorate the
question of Minnie's continued presence among us. If vetted by
the wizards as technically feasible, the petition would be
opened for signing. If signed by enough qualified players, the
petition would become a ballot. And if then voted for by twice
as many players as voted against, the petition's unambiguous
title would be enacted: the character called Minnie would
(along with all her virtual possessions) be deleted, and every
effort would be made to keep her real-life "typist" from ever
logging on to LambdaMOO again.
I'm not quite sure why Memf's request
appalled me so. It wasn't as if there'd never been a petition
to have a player toaded before. The petition to wipe out Dr.
Jest had after all been one of the earliest in the history of
Lambdamocracy, and it had hardly seemed unsettling at the
time. True, there had been no arbitration then, and nowadays
everyone pretty much agreed that disputes were the only proper
way to seek social action against individuals. But as Memf
correctly pointed out, the individual arbitrators had proven
themselves profoundly reluctant to mete out punishments as
harsh as toading, so that in practical terms nobody but the
entire citizenry could really be asked to toad someone as
formidably controversial as Minnie.
All the same, I was appalled. Memf's charges were
amply documented and they were largely reasonable ("a long
history of vindictiveness, paranoia, slander, harassment,
lying, and cheating; but especially her compulsive spam"), but
as far as I could tell, they amounted to the implication that
Minnie was a pain in almost everybody's ass. This, frankly,
did not seem to me to be a capital offense. And even if it
was, let's face it: Memf's timing was creepy in the extreme.
It had not been three weeks since Minnie was hacked; the
perpetrator hadn't even been identified yet, let alone
punished. And now Memf was proposing to effect through
democratic means exactly what Minnie's assailant had attempted
via cruder methods. He might just as well have been asking us
to award the hacker a medal—and honestly, I think that had he
actually proposed as much I wouldn't have found his petition
quite so troubling. At least its essential thuggishness would
have been more readily transparent to the voting public. As it
was, however, I found myself wondering whether *P:ToadMinnie didn't in fact represent
the end of MOOish civilization as I knew it—a heavy load with
which to tax a simple, embryonic piece of legislation, I know,
but like I said, my faith in Lambda-MOO's democratic process
was already somewhat sunken. With Memf now opening up the
possibility that that process would from here on in be taking
its lead from the virtual equivalent of hit men, my faith at
last reached bottom.
And so it was that on the following
day, as I came away from my curious rendezvous with
HortonWho/Anthony, a part of me was positively rooting for the
success of his half-baked scheme to wash away the governmental
structures of the MOO in a wave of unprecedented social
chaos.
It didn't even occur to me, somehow,
that the wave was already beginning to break.
No matter: I got the picture soon
enough. On the following weekend Minnie launched the opening
salvos of a dazzling if typically misfocused counterattack,
and the MOOish body politic thereupon commenced displaying
symptoms of what I can only think to call a nervous breakdown.
More on this later.
In the meantime, let us not forget just
how eventful that same weekend was on the smaller scale of my
own virtual existence. For we have come back now in our
loop-de-looping way to the moment of my long night's journey
with S*, and to the evening subsequent thereto in which it
came to pass that Dr. Bombay and his morphs Samantha, Faaa, et
alia parted ways and that I threw myself, at last, upon the
mercy of the quotacrats.
There's not much more to say about the
morphs. They were gone and I missed them—though not terribly,
since I knew that once I got back under quota there was
nothing to stop me from reviving them. Far more worrying,
consequently, was the still-uncertain outcome of my quota
request, although in fact there isn't presently a lot to say
about that subject either, inasmuch as I was to get no answer
from the ARB, as I've mentioned, for another couple weeks. We
are left, therefore, to consider that personal matter that
most preoccupied me in the interval— the aftermath of my date
with S*.
About which, frankly, there isn't much
I can tell you with any certainty, though I can tell you this:
in the moment I awoke that Sunday morning, roused by the sound
of Jessica's key turning in the front door as she came back
from her strategic hiatus at Hillary's house, I knew for a
fact that there would be no more such trysts for S* and me. I
had tentatively told her as much upon our parting earlier that
morning, but now the queasy, clutching feeling in my stomach
as I welcomed Jessica home made it official: I did not want
this. Not this strange, intangible confusion of erotic
spheres. There was no perfume on the pillows, no excessively
rumpled bedding, no lipstick traces on the stemware to bear
the record of my infidelity (if that in fact was what it was),
but even so I felt its presence in the house as if a mist of
it had seeped out of my PC in the night and left its slightly
alien residue on everything in sight.
It had no place here. And yet if I
proceeded to have my virtual affair with S* there was no other
place that it could happen. Sure, the MOO was everywhere and
nowhere, all at once, but unless you counted my occasional
brief escapes into VR at work, my
MOO was ultimately nowhere else but in this house:
downstairs, to be precise, in the little office space where my
computer sat, about ten steps away from the double bed that
marked the heart of this, the home that Jessica and I were
after all still trying our loving, flailing best to make
together. I felt angry with her, it's true, and hurt by her as
well, and sorely tempted anyway by the exotic prospect of a
MOO romance. But there was no way, in the end, that I could
bring myself to go on making half-imagined love to another
woman right here under the roof we shared. I would have had to
have been an exuist of the bravest sort, or a Niacinian of the
most detached, to pull it off—and now I knew, at last, that I
was neither. So that was that.
But if I thought, and I suppose I did,
that in arriving at this conclusion I had finished grappling
with the consequences of the night before, I was mistaken.
This grew apparent to me over the next day or two, as that
queasy, clutching feeling in my stomach gradually matured into
a quiet but imperative sense of guilt, and I began to wrestle
with an urge to confess all to Jessica and in confessing win
her forgiveness. My wiser nature told me not to bother, but as
you may have noticed, ours was not a situation in which
anybody's wiser nature was getting much of a hearing. In any
case, when Jessica came home on Tuesday evening, in tears and
misery, to tell me that it was all over between her and
Eduardo and that she wasn't sure, but it might be over between
her and me as well, I knew we had hard work ahead of us—work
that for better or worse I would never be able to get through
if I didn't first clear my heart of its distracting cargo of
dishonesty. And so I took a deep breath, suppressed an
involuntary mental image of Jessica storming downstairs to
smash my computer in a jealous fit, and told her I'd had
tinysex with a female MOOer while she was away.
There was no fit, of course. She took
the news with calm, and even with a little curiosity, as if
the info-age novelty of the liaison outweighed for the moment
anything it might happen to have to do with our relationship.
She asked me how it had been, and I said, hesitating for a
moment first to gauge how much she really wanted to know, that
it had been nice. That it had been pretty much as she'd
insisted it would be—like sex, not with an image or a fantasy,
but with a person. Then she asked me who this person was, and
I said nobody she knew, but that I wouldn't say the name in
any case. I didn't see the point. And neither did she, I
guess. She shrugged her shoulders then, and with the merest
trace of acidity she said that, well, the funny thing was that
the way she'd spent the weekend anyhow was not, in fact, at
Hillary's getting her bearings and sorting things out as per
the stated itinerary, but at Eduardo's—filling up on carnal
knowledge of the plain old-fashioned sort.
At which point I began to cry, which I
suppose I had a right to do. The odd and maybe even slightly
ridiculous truth, however, is that it wasn't from the pain of
Jessica's revelation that I was crying, or even from my
sadness at the generally battered shape our love was in by
then. It was relief that made my tears flow, really. Relief at
learning, after all my abstract speculations on the possible
RL consequences of tinysex, that for now at least my
confession had provoked no worse than this, and that our love
still stood a chance at all.
Even so, I soon figured out that my
coming clean hadn't made life altogether simpler for me.
Jessica knew now that a more-than-hypothetical attraction
existed between me and someone on the MOO, and I knew too that
her initial equanimity wouldn't last long if she thought I was
spending much of my MOO time with that particular someone. I
had told Jessica I would not be having any more netsex with
S*, because I knew myself that it was true—but I had made no
promise to stop talking to her. And I don't think that I could
have, either, just then.
On the following evening S* and I got
our first chance for a real conversation since Sunday morning.
There was much to be discussed, I knew, but as it happened
Jessica was sitting just upstairs at the moment, working on
her own computer, and I felt too nervous, too constrained to
do much more than dance around the important stuff with
cryptically flirtatious small talk. I kept thinking I heard
Jessica's footsteps coming down the stairs, and even though
the footsteps never really came, I finally felt too flustered
to continue talking. I told S* (or Sama, as she was calling
herself that night) that I'd have to be going, and I told her,
briefly, why; and she replied that she hoped she wasn't
causing problems, and that she realized this must be "a rather
confusing situation" for me.
"Confusing, yup," I said.
But not for her?
It irked me suddenly, and more then I
wished it did, to imagine that the events of Saturday/Sunday
last had left her entirely unrattled—safe and untouched behind
that smooth white shell of hers. I had to ask:
"You're not the least confused I
trust?"
"The least confused? Or in the least
confused? There's a difference, you know."
"In the least," I answered, grinning.
"Sheesh."
She grinned back: Sama corrects papers for a living, you
know. She remained uncracked. But then:
"No, I'm confused," she admitted.
"Processing things.
"That wasn't my usual behaviour," she
said.
DrBombay nods.
Nor his.
Then I said, "Well."
I said, "I _do_ have to go.
I went.
Predictably, I guess, things only got
more complicated after that. S* continued "processing," and
two days later I received a lengthy MOO-letter from her.
"Yes, this IS in fact about What
Happened," the letter began, "so if you don't feel like
dealing, please ignore what follows." I swallowed nervously
and read on.
"I don't think that we necessarily need
to categorize what happened," Sama wrote, in what turned out
to be a mild and perfectly reasonable reproach for the
skittishness I'd been displaying around her ever since our
night of tinysin, "because I personally find definitions of
that sort to be taxing to come up with and ultimately useless.
I do, however, need to have some sort of idea of what's going
on in your head. The alternative, as I see it, is to ignore
that we spent the better part of a day together, or perhaps
box it away as some sort of hothouse intimacy that flourished
for a moment, and return to what you called our 'surfacy'
relationship. I'm sure that there are other, and quite
possibly better, alternatives, but I'm also quite sure that I
can't continue in this sort of haze of not knowing what the
hell is going on. It doesn't sit well with me, and the more it
stretches out, the more inclined I am to throw my hands in the
air and say 'fuck it,' which I think would be rather a
shame."
Her letter ended with further apologies
for bringing up possibly unpleasant matters, and for the
strange flurry of extra spaces that had somehow floated into
her text. I spent the better part of the next afternoon
composing a reply. I didn't know a whole lot better than S*
did, frankly, what was going on inside my head, but I managed
to pull a few coherent sentiments together. What I hoped for
us, I wrote, was that we might be able to remain friends in a
way that "honored the intimacy" we had established the week
before without, however, entailing any sort of emotional
involvement that might remotely be construed as threatening
the stability of my RL relationship. It was an awkward
formulation, to say the least, and I had to perform a variety
of verbal acrobatics to make it sound even remotely credible.
Nor had I made the job any easier by informing Jessica the
night before, in yet another spasm of compulsive honesty, that
I would be taking this time to work on a letter "resolving
things" between S* and me. The tension looming in the
apartment now—as I sat writing at my computer and as Jessica
banged around noisily doing weekend chores—was not exactly
conducive to clarity of thought and purpose. I had the
distinct impression, in fact, that I was in the process of
resolving nothing whatsoever, and that if I actually sent this
letter I would only be drawing myself deeper into psychic
territory I was ill-equipped to chart.
I typed the send
command and paused for a moment with my finger on the enter key, remembering a conversation
I had had with exu three days earlier, after I'd told her
about me and S* and how uncomfortable it had suddenly gotten
to MOO from home. She had sympathized (exu knows the squirmy at home feeling)
but pointed out she'd warned me more than once against
letting my emotions get mixed up in my netsexual research.
"You told me so," I conceded. But I wanted to explain, and
gropingly attempted to, that the confusion wasn't just a
matter of the awkward overlap between the MOO and my RL. It
was more that there was something about VR itself—about the
way real lives and bodies melted into it, never quite erased
but always shrouded in a liquifying haze of code and text and
scarcely checked imagination—that left me powerfully uncertain
about the nature of the emotions I'd invested in it.
"Or rather," I groped, "uncertain of
their . . . weight?"
I didn't know exactly what I meant, but
exu seemed to.
"Yeah, 's like I said before," she
answered. "Nothing has any actual size here. "Or border," she
added. "Or standard of measure."
Three days later, with a finger poised
to send my letter on its way to S*, I thought about those
words again, for a moment or two. And then I pressed the enter key.
Meanwhile, back at the sociopolitical
level:
*P:ToadMinnie,
having been vetted fairly quickly by the wizards, now
stood gathering signatures while a more than usually torrid
firestorm of debate proceeded to rage around it. Somewhat to
my surprise—and not a little to my gratification—the opinions
saturating the bandwidth on *social
and on the petition's own mailing list appeared to be
running heavily against the measure. Memf defended it as
stalwartly as he could, and though by far outnumbered, he was
ably seconded by the tireless rhetorician Ducko—a
well-respected (and well-con-nected) programmer who, in the
course of two bitterly contested disputes with Minnie, had
amassed a wealth of meticulous arguments against her right to
go on walking the face of the MOO. Ducko and Memf took turns
outlining all of Minnie's alleged crimes—her acts of slander,
spurious disputes, manipulations of the arbitration system,
and other more or less general subversions of the MOO's
democratic apparatus—and between them they produced almost as
much square footage of text as all their many antagonists put
together.
Their heroic output wasn't winning them
any popularity contests, though. "Why do I feel like I've just
fallen into the middle of a scene from _Lord of the Flies_
when I read this list?," wrote Sartre on *P:ToadMinnie, finding in Memf and
Ducko's high-minded arguments nothing but a load of "displaced
adolescent aggression." Other comparisons were hardly so kind.
"Memf, Hitler would be proud of you," wrote Gretch. And sure,
that sort of thing was par for the course in any online
set-to, but there was also no denying that this particular
debate was stirring up much more than its share of allusions
to Nazis, inquisitions, lynchings, and the KKK—or that the
bulk of them were aimed at Memphistopheles and his supporters.
Even the most cool-headed members of the opposition couldn't
resist getting in a subtle ad-hominem here and there,
stingaree, for instance, having determined, after long and
sharply reasoned consideration, that Memf's arguments "fail to
show anything except that minnie has a poor grasp of manners
and strong opinions about the way LM should function," added
point edly: "one could claim the same about some of her
opponents."
It might have been easy to conclude, at
this point, that Minnie was as good as saved. Indeed, with
stingaree publicly opposed to her toading (the very same
stingaree, remember, who had not shrunk from turning HortonWho
into a six-month newt, a sentence still among the harshest in
the history of the arbitration system), and with the general
direction of the mailing-list traffic tending anyway toward a
rout for Memphistopheles and co., what else could I conclude?
Well, for one thing, that the mailing
lists were not the only place where politics happened on the
MOO. After all, you didn't have to be as paranoid as Minnie or
Horton to see that power, in this particular virtual society,
flowed through all sorts of nooks and crannies on its way to
the light of public record. Though I suppose it helped. During
my visit to his secret ice castle, as a matter of fact, the
former HortonWho had lectured me on this very topic,
explaining patiently that the abundance of mailing lists so
characteristic of the new MOO democracy ("one per petition,
one per dispute") had in fact been more or less intentionally
created to provide a smokescreen for the backroom machinations
of the MOO's true power brokers. "Pavel's masterstroke," he
called it: the fragmentation of public discourse into "an
endless proliferation of newsgroups," endlessly dissipating
the political energies of the hoi polloi, and much more easily
controlled than the anarchic give-and-take of live
discussion.
"It's quite . . . ironic . . . ,"
Anthony observed (dramatic ellipses his own, and no doubt
accompanied IRL by a meaningful elevation of at least one
eyebrow), "to consider that LambdaMOO's principal value is its
realtime interactive text. . . while +all+ of the overt
political behaviour is channeled through mailing-lists....
"In fact, of course, all the really
important decisions are made in realtime, and then a coherent
public image is thrown up on the recording devices."
He paused.
"This, I believe, is what Minnie refers
to as the conspiracy," said Anthony. And he believed,
furthermore, that strictly speaking she was right to call it
that, although he hastened to add that he didn't really think
there were any fewer conspiracies, on the MOO, than there were
MOOers. Only that some of those con-spiracies just happened to
have more . . . well, more leverage than others.
His ultimate point being, I gathered,
that if some subset of the Power Elite had already decided, in
some murky unrecorded conversation somewhere, that Minnie was
to be got rid of, then gotten rid of she would be—whether by
ballot, by arbitration, or by the return of a certain midnight
hacker. And never mind the pseudodemocratic spectacle of the
mailing lists or its apparent promise, in this case at least,
that decency would prevail. "Minnie's ass is grass," insisted
Anthony, "unless something changes."
Myself, I couldn't claim to see things
quite so clearly, but I could see in any case that Minnie's
fate still rested on more than just the course of rational,
open debate. There were 7,000 voters out there, most of whom
had never laid eyes on * social or
for that matter even heard of Minnie. And while it might be
argued (and often was) that this only proved how inappropriate
it was to make a MOO-wide referendum out of her case, among
certain segments of Memphistopheles's camp the only challenge
posed by this great unruffled mass of citizens was how to get
them feeling personally threatened by Minnie in as short a
time as possible.
It was to this end, evidently, that an
anonymous chain letter was launched, insinuating that Minnie's
ceaseless, rambling diatribes, posted daily to assorted
political newsgroups, were almost single-handedly driving the
lag rate up to its presently insufferable levels. The claim
was a dubious one, and Memf was swift in disavowing it—but not
swift enough, perhaps, to undo the damage it had done.
Everyone despised lag, after all—and how many gullible new
voters, once introduced to the notion that there was actually
some villain they could blame their
laggy suffering on, might cherish that notion all the way to
the ballot box?
Nor did the Minnie-bashers really even
have to go to such truth-bending lengths to sway the heedless
masses to their side. Ducko, for instance, was presumably only
stating the facts when he threatened to quit the MOO for good
and take his many useful bits of programming with him unless
Minnie's hash was in some way permanently settled. Not that he
put it quite that way on * social,
of course. There he was at pains to make us understand he
was only trying to make a point: i.e., that the choice was not
simply between driving Minnie off the MOO and letting her
stay, but between driving her off and allowing her to go on
driving other, more productive players off with her
cantankerous, vindictive ways. "We will either lose nice
people or not-nice people," wrote Ducko, summing up what
struck me as a chilling but at least coherent line of
reasoning.
For the benefit of those who didn't
read * social, however, Ducko had a
blunter argument to make: he commenced to shut down, one by
one, all the fertile objects he had programmed, starting with
an especially popular feature object of his called "@honey" (which displayed the name of
the user's sweetheart on demand and was a big hit with young
lovers of all ages). The shutdown, meant to give us all a grim
foretaste of life without Ducko, didn't go over too well among
the politically aware ("you sir, are at heart, nothing but an
oily blackmailer," wrote Maltese_Falcon on *social, laying it on a bit thick as
usual). But out there in the wilds of the living room and the
hot tub, where fartbonks, O. J. jokes, and pick-up lines
passed for enlightened discourse, who knew what effects
Ducko's tactics were having? Who knew, again, how many
chat-happy newbies would effectively be choosing, come voting
time, between the continued existence of some player nobody
really seemed to like much anyway and the continued
functionality of their very own handy-dandy @honey FO?
In short, for all the fire Minnie's
would-be toaders were drawing on the mailing lists, it was
still too early to predict their defeat. They had the power of
the programmer on their side (as Ducko's none-too-idle threats
demonstrated) and they had the advantage of Minnie's abiding
unpopularity as well (which, for all the names being flung at
them, still far outmatched their own). Perhaps it was even
true, as Minnie had so often insinuated, that they had the
tacit support of a wizard or two. After all, it was well known
that Ducko was great pals with enaJ (she had even entrusted
him with certain quasi-wizardly duties on occasion) and
furthermore it was starting to look
just the slightest bit fishy that the wizards' investigation
into Minnie's hacking still hadn't turned up anything more
conclusive than the Internet site the perp had logged in from.
Perhaps, all things considered, Anthony was right, and Minnie
had picked a fight with forces that— "unless something
changed"—would finally and inevitably crush her.
Perhaps. But rest assured that Minnie
was doing her damnedest, as she always had been, to make sure
something changed. Her response to Memphistopheles's petition
was, as I've mentioned, as effectively disruptive a piece of
political intervention as she had yet unleashed upon the MOO.
What was possibly the most confounding thing about it, though,
was that to all appearances it had nothing to do with
Memphistopheles's petition whatsoever. Indeed, against
stupefyingly long odds, Minnie had thus far maintained an
airtight public silence on the topic. Instead, her daily (and
sometimes hourly) missives to *social
in the wake of *P:ToadMinnie's
appearance were almost wholly devoted, so it seemed to me,
to a different sort of proposition altogether: making exu
miserable.
Well, yes: so it seemed to me. Though
let's be honest here—my perspective on the matter may have
been the slightest bit distorted by sentiments of a personal
nature. The truth, to put it as objectively as I can, is that
Minnie had her sights set on much bigger game than my best MOO
friend. She was in fact primarily occupied, as ever, with
exposing the unbridled corruption and venality of the MOO's
ruling classes, and it was only the luck of a very bad draw
that put exu in the way of her reformatory zeal this time
around. Well, that, and the backroom machinations of a certain
grizzled anarcholibertarian newt.
It happened like this. On the Sunday of
that same eventful weekend of the long night's journey, the
morphs retired, et cetera and so forth, Minnie posted a small
bombshell to *social and left it
there to detonate upon contact. Ostensibly, the message
concerned the same thing all her messages had been about of
late: the unbridled corruption and venality of Laurel (who by
no coincidence happened currently to be disputing Minnie, on
charges of barraging players with unwanted political
MOO-mail). Specifically, according to Minnie, Laurel's
crowning act of malfeasance consisted of her having indulged
at least once, under cover of an unregistered second character
she called screwball, in the questionable practice of signing
a single petition two times. And now, lest anyone take this
lapse of integrity on Laurel's part to indicate anything less
than a widespread contempt for democratic principles among the
MOOish elites (Laurel's membership therein evidently dating
from the days of her campaign to criminalize MOO rape, to
which Ducko had rallied with particular fervor), Minnie
presented the readers of *social
with the aforementioned incendiary device. It was a brief
message containing evidence of similar double-signing by none
other than a duly elected member of the ARB: exu.
Now, serious as this accusation was, it
wasn't the charge itself that made Minnie's message so
provocative. It was the evidence: twenty-four lines of logged
real-time dialogue between the duly elected ARB member Doome
and a mysterious interlocutor (identified in the transcript
only by the generic "you" with which VR addressed each one of
us: You say. . ., You go . . .), in
which Doome confessed quite off-the-record to knowing that exu
had an unregistered spare named Draculetta, whose signature
Minnie later found affixed, bold as brass and not too far from
exu's, at the bottom of a petition floated a few months before
by Doome himself. The conversation was plainly a private one,
and plainly recorded by the nameless "you," who also plainly
was not Minnie ("you" 's conversational style being too
urbane, for one thing). And inasmuch as the ancient VR social
crime of nonconsensually publishing private logs still had a
far more compelling aura of taboo about it than the novel
political one of which exu stood accused (for who among us
could not think, with a blush or a grimace or both, of some
intimate conversation or two we would much rather not see
splashed all over the mailing lists?), it was perhaps no
surprise that the swarm of agitated responses generated by
Minnie's message circled largely around the identity of the
player who had betrayed Doome's confidence:
"Minnie, who is the 'you' in the logs
you posted?"
Over and over the question was put,
while Minnie steadfastly refused to answer or even address it,
until for a while there it got to sounding like the official
slogan of the mailing list, repeated every ten messages or so
with a vehemence that faded gradually, as the days passed,
into weary exasperation:
"Minnie, who is the 'you'?"
The thing is, everybody knew who the
"you" was. There was after all no mistaking the cool intensity
of "you" 's interest in what, exactly, Doome knew about exu
and how, exactly, he knew it (among the more revealing lines:
You ask, "Are you sure you're not boffing exu?").
And besides, for those not fully up to speed on the
soap-operatic details of MOOish history, Doome had named the
name almost immediately anyway, in a message posted just a
short while after Minnie's: it was HortonWho, of course.
Which explained a lot. Starting with
why Minnie would suddenly be picking a fight with exu, of all
people (one of the few public officials still willing to say
nice things about her in public), and possibly extending to
why she was being so bafflingly unwilling to respond to her
interrogators, or for that matter to her would-be
executioners. Because if Minnie was now in league with
HortonWho, who could say what other forms their cooperation
was taking? Might he not be feeding her more than just tidbits
from his archive of logs? Advice on strategy, perhaps? I
remembered Anthony's cheery prediction that "LambdaMOO will
collapse of its own internal contradictions :)," and I
remembered too his equally cheery plans to hasten that
collapse, and I wondered if Minnie wasn't now, in the seeming
perversity of her silences, simply taking a page from his book
on virtual guerrilla warfare— keeping her hand in things just
actively enough to push the right buttons here and there, then
stepping back to let the ensuing controversies tear the power
structure apart. Who knew? Maybe Anthony had scrapped the
"little monsters" scenario altogether and decided to let
Minnie be his agent of social chaos instead.
Well, if that was the plan, it
definitely appeared to be working. Folks were getting tired of
the "Who is the 'you'?" game, which was obviously getting
nowhere in its appeal to Minnie's sense of etiquette, and were
beginning to turn their attention to the substance of her
accusations. Laurel and exu both, in fact, felt sufficiently
chastened to post apologies to *social:
the double-signings had been unintentional, they
swore—acts of carelessness, not of depravity—but they were
inexcusable acts all the same, and they would certainly never
happen again. This quieted some of the incipient grumbling
among the readership, but hardly all of it. And when Laurel
challenged her critics, in effect, to haul her into
arbitration now or forever hold their peace ("If no one files
a dispute in the next 7 days on this issue, I'll consider the
matter closed. Thanks"), she quickly got a taker from among
the cream of the old-guard Power Elite: Rhay himself, no tool
of Minnie's for sure, and apparently in a genuine snit about
Laurel's transgression ("This abuse of the ballot system means
my voice is worth less because I play by the rules. My
proposed resolution to this abuse is to remove voting
privileges from Laurel and screwball, and any other known
second characters").
exu officially signed on as a
codefendant a day or two later, figuring it was only a matter
of time before she too was dragged before an arbitrator.
"Thought I'd just streamline my martyrdom a bit," she
explained on the *D:Rhay.vs.Laurel
list, tongue gamely in cheek, lest any chink appear in the
wisecracking, level-headed unflappability that denned her
public persona. The private exu, however, was beginning to
look pretty well flapped. Between Minnie's singling her out as
an icon of nefariousness and HortonWho's gleeful merchandising
of her private relationship with Doome, exu was feeling, so
she told me, like "there's this two-headed shark with its
teeth sunk relentlessly into my leg." She seemed edgier than
I'd ever known her to be, and ever so slightly snappish,
though I couldn't say I blamed her. Can't say I'd have blamed
her, in fact, if she'd lost it altogether and stormed out onto
*social hurling great flaming
tirades at Minnie and anyone who typed like her.
What exu actually did next, though,
wasn't quite so easy to understand: she filed a dispute
against Minnie's hacker. Which is to say she filed a dispute
against whoever it was who had logged on as the yellow guest
on the night of August 17 and trashed Minnie and all her
stuff. Which is to say she was quite possibly pissing in the
wind. There being no easy way to deduce from an Internet site
address alone the identity of the person connecting from it,
the yellow guest could in principle have been almost anybody
on the MOO or off it. And yet... what if the wizards knew more
than they were letting on? What if the hacker's identity was,
in fact, an open secret, well-known among the old-guard Power
Elite but unacknowledged publicly for the simple, double-edged
reason that (a) the victim happened to be Minnie and (b) the
assailant happened to be one of them? For many a MOOer, these
were no idle speculations. They were in fact hardening rapidly
into articles of faith (with the wizard Crotchet and a certain
fringe-PE bad boy named Yeehah topping the list of suspects),
and exu, veteran that she was of the old campaigns to
overthrow the wizardocracy, had fallen in among the
faithful.
But did that really quite explain why
she was going out of her way, at just this moment, to stick
her neck out for Minnie?
DrBombay looks
at you incredulously, I emoted from across the MOO, the
day she told me about the dispute. "Bucking for sainthood are
you?"
exu muahahas
was her response. There was a method to her kindness, she
explained, and it seemed to revolve around the possibility
that Minnie, mystified by exu's failure to respond to her
provocations in the expected flamethrowing manner, might just
decide to leave her alone—and might even desist entirely from
letting Anthony pick out any more targets for her. "What
better way can you think of to thwart Horton's Master Plan?"
exu asked. But ultimately, and this is the part that sort of
blew me away, the driving force behind her curious project
actually seemed to be a genuine desire to see Minnie's hacker
brought to justice—and to see a blow struck, into the bargain,
for every second-class MOO citizen who'd ever lacked the right
connections to get a fair deal out of this brave MOO democracy
of ours. Or as she put it: "I really don't want to see an
upper-class whiteboy rapist get away with it."
I grinned back at her in.astonishment.
"May you never cease to amaze me," I paged, and my admiration
was sincere. I think, indeed, that my respect for exu's
performance as a MOO-politico—for her common sense and her
compassion, for her ability to bare-knuckle it with the best
of them without abandoning her sense of humor or her
principles—had never been deeper than it was in that
moment.
But there was an uneasiness nagging at
me, too. What exactly, I found myself wondering, was this
upper class to which exu referred? She meant it half in jest,
I guessed, but I couldn't help wishing that the phrase still
meant something a little more weighty—that it still rang loud
and true the way it might have back in exu's days of running
with the Underground. I didn't know for sure how much the
class equations of the MOO had changed since then or even,
frankly, whether they had changed at all. But I knew this
much: my brain was coming closer by the day to blowing a
circuit from trying to keep track of all the players,
factions, and associated agendas swirling twisterlike across
the MOO's political landscape, and it would have been a
tremendous relief to me just now if I could have suddenly seen
the place divided neatly into the Rulers and the Rest of Us.
But how could I? The lines of battle seemed to be getting
blurrier all the time, and my own best friend, the player
whose wisecracking, level-headed commentaries had always
managed to make the lines so clear for me, was starting to
look pretty blurry her-self. Her unquenchable anarchist
sympathies, for instance, were sitting more and more
incongruously with her own steady ascent into the firmament of
MOOish power—a rise that had started with her role as lead
performer in the Bungle Affair, had proceeded on through her
present tenure on the ARB, and now continued to advance a
notch or two with her every well-aimed intervention in the
great debates that seemed, these days, to be as much a route
to prestige and clout as being friendly with a wizard ever
was.
Not that she wasn't, increasingly,
friendly with wizards as well. In fact, the terminally cynical
might suggest that nothing in her political resume quite
outshone her good luck in having picked a VR lover who, as of
just this week, had unexpectedly been inducted into the ranks
of the MOO's fallen but not yet fully disempowered
technological nobility. Yes: Doome was now a wizard. For as if
the general tumult surrounding matters of governance wasn't
already enough, Haakon had picked this moment to name three
new assistants—Doome, Dif, and (to the sputtering indignation
of Finn, who swore he wouldn't have taken the job anyway but
wouldn't have minded being asked,
for heaven's sake) Briar-Wood. But if this turn of events
might once have unambiguously confirmed exu's entree into what
might once have unambiguously been called the Power Elite, it
wasn't clear to me, under the present circumstances, whether
exu's relationship with Doome served her political ascent any
more than it had served his—or for that matter, whether it
served either of them as anything but an agreeable way to keep
warm through the virtual night.
In any case, for me, as for the rest of
the MOO, the real interest in Doome's (and Dif's and
BriarWood's) sudden elevation to the wizardry lay elsewhere.
For Haakon didn't often make his archwizardly presence felt
these days, and when he did, the MOO took notice, reminded
once again that all the scraps of power they were fighting
over were as nothing compared to the ultimate sovereignty of
He Who Might at Any Minute Pull the Plug on Us All.
And so a tizzy of conjecture and
concern swept through the MOO as word of Haakon's latest
appointments spread. Questions were raised (though ever so
politely) as to the methods and criteria by which the
archwizard had made his final choices. A petition was written
(though never passed) calling for the right to override by
popular ballot any future wizardly nominations. Haakon put in
a rare appearance on *social, where
he patiently explained his selection process, and he even let
it be known that he would not object in principle to the veto
scheme. But none of this quite settled the anxieties he'd set
loose. A rumor started circulating to the effect that Haakon
was in fact preparing another of his coups d'etat, and that he
had already assigned to his new under-wiz Doome the job of
scrapping LambdaMOO's hopelessly chaotic system of government
and rebuilding it from scratch ("Here we go again!" Sebastiano
paged me, certain that the rumor must be true). It turned out
Haakon had merely been proposing to overhaul the hope-lessly
chaotic arbitration system, with a
view to plugging all those nasty loopholes Minnie had for so
long been both criticizing and exploiting. But even this would
represent no minor wizardly intrusion into the social sphere,
and the very fact that Haakon was considering it at all only
served to heighten the prevailing impression that Minnie—and
the permanent state of uproar surrounding her— had brought
LambdaMOO to the brink of some fundamental, wrenching
crisis.
In the middle of all this exu and I
snuck away one day, to a quiet little MOO I'd found running on
a university server in Portugal somewhere. I'd built myself a
little white-washed Iberian country house there and a
character called Dr. Bombain, and exu visited as a guest. The
lag was almost nonexistent, the privacy luxurious, and we
talked at length and at leisure for the first time in too long
a while. Predictably enough, we fell to pondering the mess
poor LambdaMOO was in, and naturally enough we proceeded to
wondering how it had ever gotten there.
So much had changed since the days of
Mr. Bungle, exu reflected. The population had boomed, the
texture of life had grown more "urbanized"—more cosmopolitan,
more brutal, more anonymous. There were a lot more interesting
people around, said exu, but at the same time there was a
bigger and unrulier mob of them, and she doubted whether the
likes of Bungle would have caused much of a stir any more.
These days it evidently took the likes of Minnie to throw the
whole place into turmoil, and this in itself, we agreed, said
something meaningful about what LambdaMOO had become. But what
exactly?
The question appeared to have been
eating at exu, although perhaps not in quite so abstract a
form. "I'm trying to figure out," she said, "why I wanted
Bungle toaded, and Horton, but not Minnie?... She's certainly
caused more grief to more people."
I thought about that. And presently a
bit of jargon left over from my one college sociology course
came to mind, and it occurred to me that maybe the distinction
exu was looking for lay somewhere in the difference between
what social theorists sometimes called Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft—often translated as
"community" and "society." Gemeinschaft, to the best of my
recollection, implied a relationship among individuals that
was based on fellow feeling, personal obligations, and
implicit standards of behavior. It was how very small towns
worked, and primitive tribes, and quilting bees. Gesellschaft,
on the other hand, bound individuals together under the rule
of written law, of abstract institutions and impersonal rights
and responsibilities. It was how Sweden worked, and damn
little else. The rest of the world's social groupings combined
these two modes in varying degrees of relative predominance,
not always easily sorted out one from the other. In
LambdaMOO's case, however, it seemed safe enough to say (and
so I did) that in the wake of Bungle the reigning social
paradigm had lurched violently away from the cozier,
gemeinschaftlich end of the spectrum and gone careening toward
the more abstract gesellschaftlich, And if that was true, then
what was Minnie finally guilty of—in all her manic crusades to
clean up our democratic institutions—but embracing the new
paradigm more wholeheartedly than the rest of us were ready
to? "In her kooky fucked up way," I mused, "she's taking LM
seriously as a society, but screwing with it as a community in
the process."
Curiously enough, this seemed to be
just the analysis exu had been angling toward. Guest likes that, she emoted. "Do you
think maybe you could post something on *soc to that effect?"
I was flattered, but I demurred, pleading dread of
controversy. DrBombain loathes flames,
I told her, and it was true enough. But there was at least
one other reason why I wasn't eager to go repeating what I'd
just said in front of all the MOO, and that was that I only
half believed any of it. In pretty much the same way,
actually, that I only half believed exu and I were sitting
together in a little whitewashed Iberian country house, I was
coming to doubt that sociological analyses of any sort could
ever tell the whole truth—or even a wholly satisfying
one—about what had become of LambdaMOO. Because if the MOO was
in some sense genuinely a society now, it was also, in another
sense, still just a bunch of people coming together to pretend
they were a society. And seen from that perspective, all my
German-inflected theorizing might look pretty silly sitting
next to the far more appropriate insight of the exasperated
player Sartre, with which I was finding myself more and more
in agreement: things were getting way too Lord of the Flies around here. Too
much of the simple camaraderie and animosity of the playground
was getting dressed up in too much of the grown-up language of
the polis—of governors and governed, of crime and punishment,
of campaigns and conspiracies—and the mismatch was starting to
wax just the slightest bit grotesque.
And maybe that was the real reason exu
felt compelled to draw a line between Minnie and the
MOO-villains of days gone by. I'm pretty sure, at any rate,
that it was mine. I knew there were important differences
between the grief Minnie was causing and the damage Bungle and
Horton had done, but just now, to be honest, it wasn't any of
those differences that kept me from wanting to see her toaded.
It was the fact that I simply didn't feel like seeing anybody toaded any-more. Or rather, to
put it more truthfully, that I simply didn't feel like
witnessing even one more collectively determined, duly
debated, and officially sanctioned social decision enacted on
the MOO for as long as I lived. And yes, I'm aware that wasn't
the sort of attitude a good MOO citizen should try to
cultivate. But what can I say? At the moment I wasn't feeling
very much like any sort of MOO citizen at all. I was feeling
more like, well, like exu's friend. And wondering what I could
do, short of wading personally into the godforsaken morass
that was MOOish politics, to help her through this nasty
stretch of her MOOish life.
DrBombain hugs
you and holds you, I finally offered, and wants to protect you and honest to gosh feels the most
overpowering affection for you sometimes.
It wasn't much; just a warm, sappy
gesture and the certainty of my friendship. But it was how I
felt, and I figured it might come as some small comfort to her
anyhow, and so it seemed to: exu thanked me for it. We sat
then, suddenly both shy, making chitchat and enjoying the
quiet of the Portuguese MOO.
Guest supposes
it should get a character here. I nodded.
"It could be our private rendezvous," I
said solemnly. "We could start a ... a CONSPIRACY!" I stifled
a giggle IRL. The guest just rolled its eyes.
Now: some people liked to say the MOO
was only a game, and some people liked to say it was as real
as RL itself, and both sets of people, if you ask me, were off
the mark. Finn had a better idea, I think: he liked to say the
MOO was like a book.
By this, Finn sometimes meant that it
was like a particular book, the name of which was Les Liaisons Dangereuses and the
subject of which—the labyrinthine sexual and political
intrigues of eighteenth-century French nobility—reminded him
uncannily of social life on LambdaMOO (not that he'd actually
gone and read this book, you
understand, but the movie version gave a pretty good idea of
what it was all about, and plus you got to see Uma Thurman
pretty much naked). More often, though, what Finn meant by the
comparison was something far more general: he meant that we,
the people of the MOO, were all characters in a great,
multifaceted novel of our own construction. That we were all
of us, as we went along, writing our plots and subplots, our
dialogues and set pieces, and that the sum of all these was,
in essence, a narrative tome of staggering proportions.
Naturally, like any good analogy,
Finn's succeeded not so much by being right as by being more
right than it was wrong. It captured certain meaningful
similarities between literature and VR—two parallel universes
of text, each rooted in play but somehow also more (much more)
than playful—and yet you didn't have to look too hard to see
the differences. There were plenty of them, large and small,
and I could spend a good few pages elaborating on them all, if
I wanted to. But just now all I want to do is draw your
attention to what seems to me the single most important way in
which the MOO is not in fact like any book, and that is this:
you can hardly ever be sure, in VR, when the story is going to
end.
With books, of course, it's easy.
Consider, for example, the one you're holding in your hands.
No need to stop and count the pages—you can tell with just a
glance that there are not too many of them left now. You can
tell we've reached that moment in the narrative where plots
and subplots should by rights be winding down toward their
final resolutions.
But how was I supposed to tell? How
could I know with any certainty, at this point, that my tiny
life was coming to a close? My MOOish days, unlike these
pages, were not numbered, and no final resolutions loomed on
their horizon. All I could really say for sure was that it was
getting time for me to take a break from LambdaMOO. I had been
logging on daily now for all but three of the last ninety
days, and for an average, lately, of about twenty-five hours a
week. I had set out, maybe you recall, to "glimpse whatever
there was of genuine historical novelty in VR's slippery
social and philosophical dynamics," and I had glimpsed my
share, I think. But now the novelty was wearing off. The MOO
no longer felt exotic to me, and there was little left for me
to learn from it except, day by day, whatever I might need to
know to keep on living in it.
Which was a tough enough assignment in
itself, believe me. In particular, my phantom relationship
with S* increasingly was taxing my abilities to make heads or
tails of it. As I had feared, our awkward attempts at a
MOO-mail post mortem had only led us deeper into the same
emotional confusion we had meant to escape, its weightless
indeterminacy closing steadily in on us as we progressed. We
were spending some part of almost every day in conversation
now—some days in breezy imitation of a blissfully
uncomplicated friendship, some days in dangerous proximity to
the edge of that attraction that had made any such friendship
impossible from the start, some days in numbing examination
and cross-examination of our respective motives and
intentions. Sama wonders if this is going to turn into a race to see who
can cut and run first, she wondered one day. But neither
of us ran, and the cuts never went deep enough to force the
clarity of any sort of definition on whatever the hell it was
we thought we were up to.
Likewise, the course of MOOish politics
was looking more and more illegible to me. For a moment there
I'd been half-certain that the Minnie troubles would end, and
imminently, in some decisive outcome pivotal to the history of
the MOO. I don't know why. Maybe it was the precedent of the
Bungle crisis that had led me to think so. Maybe it was the
earful of apocalyptic theorizing I had gotten during my visit
to Anthony/HortonWho's private nowhere. Whatever the reason,
it eluded me now, and I began to suspect that the present
crisis might in fact go on indefinitely—that Minnie herself
might be nothing more than a symptom of irresolvable dilemmas
built into the strange project of virtual democracy, and that
the wave of discord she appeared to have ushered in might very
well go rolling on regardless of the final vote on * P:ToadMinnie. Banish her, and someone
else could easily step up to take her place at the center of
the storm. HortonWho himself was certainly a likely candidate
(his newting was due to be lifted in less than three months),
but almost anybody with a bone to pick and a surplus of time
and energy would do, and God knows the MOO had no shortage of
players who fit that bill.
And so it was with a somewhat
diminished sense of the historic that I continued to keep an
eye on current events. Memf's petition, I learned one day, had
garnered enough signatures to become a ballot, and though I
was not thrilled to learn this, I couldn't be bothered to
wrestle with the question of what it meant for the soul of
LambdaMOO. I simply cast my no vote and moved on to what I now
considered the more involving aspects of the controversy—i.e.,
anything to do with exu. Having resolved that the most useful
role I could possibly play in all this was to offer her the
occasional word of support or consolation, I kept that role in
mind as I went on watching public life unfold on the MOO. I
made a point of subscribing to the mailing list of exu's
dispute against the mysterious Minnie-hacker, and paid as
close attention as I could bear to pay while that particular
quest for justice ran aground on technicalities and general
indifference. The proceedings against exu and Laurel for their
double-signings proved more eventful, ending in a sentence of
several weeks' revocation of their voting rights and the
curious assignment of Doome himself to write the software that
was to do the revoking. I didn't know whether to think of
Doome's part in the manacling of his own netlover as a
conflict of interest, a noble sacrifice, or just sort of
kinky, but I knew that none of this had been very much fun for
exu, and I did what I could to make my sympathy felt.
All of which is basically to say, among
other things, that I would not be leaving any gaping hole in
the fabric of LambdaMOO if I checked out for a week or two.
exu would soldier on just fine without my meager assistance;
whatever S* and I were playing at showed no signs of coming to
a head any time soon; my other friendships, my garden, the
giddy realms of the hot tub and the living room (into which I
still enjoyed an occasional afternoon foray in the guise of
Shayla, for a laugh) would suffer little from my absence—and
all would still, in any case, be there when I returned.
And like I said, I was ready for the
break. I was ready to take stock of everything I'd experienced
and studied and felt over the last three months, and I was
ready, too, to take a certain trip I'd been planning for a few
weeks now, the final lesson, as I imagined it, of my education
in the meaning of VR: I was going to Palo Alto to gaze upon
the server. I had already made arrangements with Pavel, and I
had bought my airline tickets, and when I came back, I
supposed, it would be with some sort of ultimate enlightenment
about the MOO in hand. I would be ready then, at last, to
leave all pretenses to research behind and let my life on
LambdaMOO lead me where it might.
But I never did come back.
Not really. I went to California and a
week or so later I returned, and it's true I still made visits
to the MOO after that. But the visits were scattered, and
brief, and largely for the sentimental purpose of preserving
Dr. Bombay from the reaper's scythe. I chose, in the end, not
to pursue my MOOish life any further, and though I think I'd
just as soon leave it at that, I suppose that after all we've
been through together, dear reader, I do owe you some sort of
explanation as to why my virtual biography ends here.
All right, then: it was the ARB that
drove me off, I'm tempted very much to say. The case could
certainly be made. About a week and a half prior to my
departure for the West Coast, and precisely two weeks (as
promised) from the day I deleted Samantha, the ARB MOO-mailed
me its decision on my quota request, and its decision, in a
nutshell, was no: we do not love thee, Dr. Bombay.
Thumbs down, in other words. Or rather,
three thumbs down to five thumbs up (with one abstention),
which in the obscure arithmetic of ARBish rules of order added
up to a grand total of Nein, Danke.
Nyet, that is.
Negatory.
Hit the road, Jack.
I was not amused. The ARB members, per
procedure, had posted their votes to a restricted but publicly
readable mailing list, and I scoured their comments to try and
figure out what had gone wrong. By the dates attached to their
messages I learned that the first member to cast a "no" had
been none other than Mem-phistopheles, and this of course
immediately raised his ranking in my personal list of Most
Despicable MOOers to its all-time high. "It is just too
profligate," was the little lynch-mobster's
oh-so-considered-(yeah-right) opinion of my virtual life's
work, and his fellow nay-voter Raimi sourly agreed: "The 200k+
[construction] with its 129 rooms is equivalent to recreating
Isengard." Isengard? Good God, the
indignity! My subtle, artful embodiment of the I Ching's
unfathomably profound wisdom equated with a scale model of
some hobbit-castle or something}
How could I not, I ask you, have taken such rejection as a
none-too-subtle hint that there was ultimately no place for me
on LambdaMOO? How could I not, in seeing my greatest
contribution to this vexed community thus spurned, have felt
the ties between the MOO and me begin to come irrevocably
undone?
Well, I didn't. To be perfectly honest
about it, the ARB's verdict didn't upset me nearly as much as
I'd thought it might. There were
more yes votes than no votes, after all, and many of the
comments from the yes crowd were glowing ("very original, well
thought out. . . beautifully written," that sort of thing).
Hell, even Memf confessed, in his comments, to "mixed
feelings" about his vote and to admiring the garden itself, in
spite of its unforgivable size. And considering that Memf and
the other two no-voters were nearing the ends of their terms
in office anyway, I knew that if I just waited till after the
current round of ARB elections and submitted my request all
over again, I could probably count on a favorable judgment
soon enough.
In short, there is no way that I can
truthfully blame the ARB for my decision to walk away from
LambdaMOO. And so I am left, I guess, with no alternative but
to tell you what the actual reason was:
I did it for love.
Yes, I know it's cornball. But I'm
afraid it's true. Of all the possible motivations I have
subsequently sifted through, the only one that really sticks
is that I left because my love for Jessica required it. In
part, I mean this in a fairly pragmatic sense: if we were
going to make any sort of honest effort to patch things up
between us, it wouldn't be well served by my continued
conversations with S*. I could no longer successfully pretend,
either to myself or Jessica, that these were necessary to the
process of untangling whatever knot of mutual cathexis our
night of tinysex had tied us into, for it was growing all the
time more obvious that they only kept the heat between us
smoldering indefinitely. Yet neither could I bring myself to
put an end to them. I only grew more furtive in my contacts
with S*, avoiding extended conversation with her except when
Jessica was out of the house or I was MOOing from work. This
did my conscience little good, and it hardly kept Jessica from
looking daggers at me whenever she passed through my office
space on her way to the bathroom and happened to spot so much
as a random page from Sama on my screen. (That Jessica now
knew any of S*'s names at all was further testament to the
near-impossibility of keeping virtual emotional entanglements
safely boxed away inside VR—or at any rate to my stupidity in
leaving a printout of one of Sama's MOO-letters lying around
on my desk one day.)
But ultimately, I think, the
distractions I needed most to leave behind were deeper ones.
They were the seductions natural to any world built from the
stuff of books and maps: the siren song of possibility, the
vivid presence of the half-imagined, the freedom of words and
thought to fly beyond the here and now and trace the shape of
every road not taken. Such are the basic ingredients of the
human condition, I know, the spiritual inheritance of an
animal uniquely adapted to the strange and wonderful
environment of signifiers, yes—but now and then, let's not
forget, these gifts can also drive a human being just a little
crazy, and so they had done to me. Jessica was here, and now,
and beautiful, and I would lose her if I didn't here and now
shake off my chronic homesickness for all those half-imagined,
siren-singing roads untaken. The MOO hadn't given me that
malady, of course, and in a way it may have even helped me
move toward getting over it: how could I have spent all that
time in the Garden of Forking Paths, after all, and not have
sensed that I was somehow trying to teach myself the wisdom of
embracing the path my life had put me on? But now fate was
daring me to try and finally live that wisdom, and I had the
feeling that it wouldn't make the challenge any easier if I
went on dividing my home life between the hard-walled place
where Jessica and I began and ended every day together and the
supremely malleable dream estate of Lambda House.
Thus, anyway, do I explain to myself at
this late date my half-unconscious decision to quit the MOO.
Nor can I, therefore, claim to look on it with much regret.
Because if that choice really was a part of my investment in
the possibility of a real-live, lifetime love affair, all I
can say is that it's paid me back more richly than I ever
dared imagine. I will not bore you with the details of my
present happiness, or of the more or less conventional course
I followed to it—the messy months of reconciliation, the long
and finally futile skirting of the marriage question, the
exchange of vows, the honeymoon, and then: the deep and
day-to-day surprise of learning how much freer love may flow
when it's more tightly bound.
Suffice it to say that I am overjoyed
my story ends this way. But I'll confess I wish it wasn't how
I was obliged to end this book. For some of you will have
already jumped to the conclusion that I intend to make a moral
of this ending. And some, no matter how much I protest, will
draw that moral anyway. You know the one I mean: that nothing
genuine can come of any place so thoroughly infused with
unreality as the MOO. That “virtual community” is at best a
pleasant oxymoron and at worst a threat to all that makes
authentic human connection meaningful and vital. That virtual
reality itself—both in its MOOish form and as the mythic end
point toward which the simulation-driven technoculture of late
modernity converges—finally represents no more than a false
escape from what is difficult and scary about living with real
people in real life. And that, therefore, the only thing
standing between this increasingly mediated society of ours
and its wholesale decay into a technological fantasyland may
be such small, brave acts of sanity as my own withdrawal from
LambdaMOO.
So goes the more elaborate version of
the moral, at any rate, encountered usually in lengthy,
bookish commentaries on the perils of the Information Age. The
cruder and more common version, on the other hand, can
sometimes be heard even within the MOO itself, where now and
then a random guest or an unassimilated newbie or for that
matter a fed-up old-timer may ascend the nearest soap box (as
it were) and proclaim to all within shouting distance the
standard formulation:
1"You people need to get a life!"
In my experience, however, this
sentiment is more often muttered at a greater remove, and in
the softer tones of pity or bewilderment, by people whose only
knowledge of MUDs is based on what they hear from friends, or
see in magazines, or read about in books. Yes, books. Like
this one. By which I very much do mean that I'm aware how long
you may by now have been wondering when I'd get around to
addressing those questions that so often pop first thing into
the mind of someone newly acquainted with the world of MUDs,
such as: Do these people not in
fact have lives? Can anybody possibly invest such time and
energy in such a place and not be in the throes of a
miserable, soul-wasting addiction? Ought there to be a law or
something against this stuff, lest the best years of our
nation's youth be lost to building castles in the digital air?
And so forth.
Nor have I left these questions
dangling for lack of answers. I could have early on brought up
the amply researched findings of MIT psychologist Sherry
Turkle, who concluded that in many cases MUDs serve players as
a kind of therapeutic environment, allowing them to come to
grips with issues of identity and desire that might otherwise
go on to hobble them in real life. I could have further noted,
per both Turkle's and my own observations, that the intense,
forty-hours-a-week-and-up MUD habits that can so alarm
outsiders are often transient in nature, coinciding with and
easing periods of difficult adjustment in a MUDder's life, and
usually subsiding once the RL troubles have been resolved. I
could have also pointed out the useful skills and broadening
contacts that can be acquired in a place like LambdaMOO, could
have told you heart-warming anecdotes about young people whose
successful programming careers began literally with building
castles in the digital air, or whose escapes from drab,
small-town existences were given impetus by otherwise unlikely
truck with friends from foreign lands and foreign contexts,
with philosophers logging in from London or with research
scientists connecting live from Antarctica.
And failing all that, I could have
simply reported what any long-time player knows: that barring
the occasional exceptions (the tales of academic careers
derailed by runaway VR addiction, the case or two of clinical
insanity masked by VR's friendly glow), most MOOers lead RLs
no more or less well adjusted than the average person's. They
mostly hold productive, full-time jobs, or pursue productive,
full-time educations; and for what it's worth, they very
rarely ever, in the flesh, turn out to be the unbathed,
awkward, painfully unattractive, and possibly drooling shut-in
geeks of popular imagination.
And yet observe: DrBombay has refrained, throughout an
entire book-length commentary on the MOOish way of life, from
making any of these arguments. Why is this? Can he really
think them not worth making? Can it really be that he finds
the standard concerns about the quality of MOOers' existences
so frivolous as to merit no consideration on his part?
No, friends. It's just that all along I
have been hoping the existences thus far considered would be
argument enough. I have offered you three hundred pages and
more of violent conflict, of loves and lusts, of friendships
deep and intricate, of corny jokes and heady debates, of
creative labors large and small, of efforts variously sincere,
manipulative, misguided, brilliant (and all of the above) to
shape a world in which the quirks and passions of eight
thousand people at a time might coexist—and I have trusted in
these pages to convince you, sooner or later, that MOOers do
indeed have lives.
And if you still aren't quite
convinced, allow me to offer you one last page from the book
of MOOish history. For this, I think, was finally what
persuaded me:
On the evening of October 12, 1994, the
voting on *B:ToadMinnie came to a
close, and the results, made public at 9:36 p.m., showed that
the ballot had failed by a margin of 2 to 1. Minnie had been
spared; and more than that, her right to remain among us—even
as she went on chasing her dark, half-imagined conspiracies
and her frantic visions of a shining MOO upon the hill; even
as she drove us all quite nearly bonkers in the process—had
been resoundingly affirmed.
I read the news while I was still in
Palo Alto, logged in briefly to the MOO through a Xerox
network terminal just upstairs (and a universe away) from the
Lambda server humming in the basement. The strength of the
voters' rejection surprised me somewhat, but not as much as my
own reaction to it did: I felt proud, almost embarrassingly
so. I had thought, by then, that I had given up on LambdaMOO's
democracy, and maybe I had. But when I saw how fiercely that
same democracy had ultimately clung, in the face of powerful
distractions, confusions, and manipulations, to the simple
decency of letting Minnie remain a part of it, it made my
heart swell. I felt as hopeful for the future of that small
society, right then, as I had a year and a half before, when
its bold new shape had just emerged from the crucible of the
Bungle Affair.
The contrast between the two moments
was a stark one, of course. The post-Bungle order had after
all been founded on the destruction of a character—on a
principled act of exclusion from the still-unformed
commonwealth of the MOO—whereas the vote on *B:ToadMinnie had ended in salvation,
and with an equally principled act of inclusion by a MOO now
well accustomed to thinking of itself as a polity. But the
present episode, I suspected, was just as valuable an object
lesson in collective self-rule as the first had been. Indeed,
it would later occur to me that in an age of waning personal
involvement in community and government, it was hard to
overvalue the rare, empowering taste of politics in action
that so many MOOers had been afforded by the Bungle Affair,
the Minnie Mess, and all the minor crises in between. MOO
society was, if nothing else, a hands-on political education
for its members, and if that education has in the long run
contributed even infinitesimally to a greater and wiser level
of political participation IRL, then I don't see how any of
the other real-life benefits that may accrue from living
virtually—the free psychotherapy, the programming experience,
the broadened horizons—could possibly surpass that one in
importance.
But truth be told, I wasn't caring much
about the state of real-world politics as I learned how
LambdaMOO had voted that day. The decision not to toad Minnie
struck me simply, and movingly, as a watershed in the
evolution of my virtual world. The MOO was still an infant
society in many ways, and like all infants it had had to
learn, at one point, to define itself in opposition to some
thing, some principle, someone. That someone had been Mr.
Bungle, of course, and without the MOO's rejection of him
there might not have been a MOO democracy of which to speak.
But a developing self must also learn, once confident in its
identity, to accommodate the fears and frictions that
inevitably come from living in community; and until the day I
read the *B:ToadMinnie results, I
hadn't been sure the MOO would ever reach this second
stage.
There could be no doubt about it now,
however: The MOO had grown, not just in size but in its soul.
And as there is perhaps no more defining feature of a living
thing than what might best be thought of as a kind of soulful
growth, I knew then something I had hitherto only been able to
suspect: that LambdaMOO itself, somehow, somewhere along the
path from its genesis in the mind of Pavel Curtis to its
luminescence in the minds of thousands, had gotten a life.
I had gotten one too, by the way, amid
the thousands of minds and the months of my immersion. And if
you still are wondering what the value of such a life could
possibly be, all I can really say is trust me: it didn't take
the promise of a healthier mind or a better job or a sharper
sense of civic duty or any other conceivable RL dividend to
make it feel like a life worth living. Nor did it take a
sudden intimation of the perils of the Information Age to make
me feel like leaving it.
I left, in the end, because two lives
was more than I could handle at the time. That's all.
I left because the tiny one had grown
too big for me.
RL
SOMEWHERE IN THE
HILLS NEAR PALO ALTO,
OCTOBER 1994
The Living Room
It is very bright, open, and airy here,
with large plate-glass windows looking southward over the pool
to the greenery beyond. On the north wall, there is a rough
stonework fireplace. The east and west walls are almost
completely covered with large, well-stocked bookcases. An exit
in the northwest corner leads to the kitchen and, in a more
northerly direction, to the entrance hall. At the south end of
the east wall, there is a sliding glass door leading out onto
a wooden deck. There are two sets of couches, one clustered
around the fireplace and one with a view out the windows.
Pavel, Pavel's_Wife, and The_Author are
here.
Pavel gestures toward the plate-glass
windows to the south.
Pavel says, "And out there, as you can
see, is The Pool. Right where it's supposed to be."
Pavel says, "No broadsword-wielding
kobolds lurking underneath it, though. As far as I know."
The_Author moves closer to the windows,
peers out.
The_Author says, "And _that_, I
presume, would be the Hot Tub?"
Pavel nods.
The_Author grins.
The_Author is enjoying this little
tour. There's nothing especially revelatory about it,
certainly, but after his anticlimactic visit to The Server
three days ago, he isn't expecting much in the way of
revelations anyway.
Pavel gestures toward the northerly
exit.
Pavel exits to the north.
Pavel's_Wife exits to the north.
The_Author exits to the north.
go north
The Entrance Hall This small foyer is
the hub of the house. To the north are the double doors
forming the main entrance to the house. There is a mirror at
about head height on the east wall, just to the right of a
corridor leading off into the bedroom area. The south wall is
all rough stonework, the back of the living room fireplace; at
the west end of the wall is the opening leading south into the
living room and southwest into the kitchen. Finally, to the
west is an open archway leading into the dining room.
Pavel, Pavel's_Wife, and The_Author are
here.
Pavel says, "Entrance Hall." The_Author
smiles, glances around.
Pavel meanders down the corridor to the
east.
Pavel's_Wife meanders down the corridor
to the east.
The_Author meanders down the corridor
to the east.
go east
Corridor
The corridor goes east and west.
There is a door to the north leading to
the powder
room. Pavel, Pavel's_Wife, and
The_Author are here.
Pavel gestures northward.
Pavel says, "The Powder Room. Just a
small bathroom really."
The_Author peers in through the Powder
Room's open door. He is surprised to see a room there at all,
actually. He never paid much attention to the text in this
part of the corridor.
Pavel wanders down the corridor to the
east.
Pavel's_Wife wanders down the corridor
to the east.
The_Author wanders down the corridor to
the east.
go east
Corridor
The corridor from the west ends here
with short flights
of stairs going up and down to the
east. South leads
to one of the master bedrooms. Pavel,
Pavel's_Wife, and The_Author are here.
Pavel heads south to the bedroom.
Pavel's_Wife heads south to the
bedroom. The_Author heads south to the bedroom. go south
Master Bedroom
This is the main master bedroom,
overlooking the pool to the south through a sliding glass
door. There are louvered doors leading west, and a north exit
to the corridor.
Pavel, Pavel's_Wife, and The_Author are
here.
Pavel spreads his arms wide.
Pavel says, "And this, of course, is
the Master Bedroom."
The_Author's eyes widen.
The_Author exclaims, "Hey! This is
where I first had MOOsex!"
The_Author turns -- giddy with the
memory, homesick suddenly for Jessica and Ecco both -- and
grins broadly at his hosts.
Pavel does not grin.
Pavel's_Wife also does not grin.
The_Author . o 0 ( What did I say?
)
The_Author says, "Um, so . . ,"
The_Author says, "Would it be all right
if I took some pictures?"
Pavel looks at Pavel's_Wife.
Pavel's_Wife looks at Pavel, then at
The_Author. She smiles politely.
Pavel's_Wife says, "Sure, I don't see
why not. If you could just, though . . ."
Pavel's_Wife says, "If you could wait
till we get back to the other parts of the house? I'd kind of
like to keep this room a little private."
The_Author says, "Oh. Oh, God, yes, of
course."
The_Author is quietly kicking himself.
He gets it now. This is _their_ home. Not his. _Their_
bedroom. Not 8,000 MOOers'. Of course. And yet . . .
The_Author realizes he can't quite
convince himself. There is a piece of his mind that knows he
has been here before -- has lived here before -- and will not
be persuaded otherwise.
Pavel says, "Shall we?"
Pavel heads out to the corridor.
Pavel's_Wife heads out to the
corridor.
The_Author heads out to the
corridor.
@join author
The Living Room
It is very bright, open, and airy here,
with large plate-glass windows looking southward over the pool
to the greenery beyond. On the north wall, there is a rough
stonework fireplace. The east and west walls are almost
completely covered with large, well-stocked bookcases. An exit
in the northwest corner leads to the kitchen and, in a more
northerly direction, to the entrance. At the south end of the
east wall, there is a sliding glass door leading out onto a
wooden deck. There are two sets of couches, one clustered
around the fireplace and one with a view out the windows.
Pavel, Pavel's_Wife, and The_Author are sitting on the couches
near the windows.
Pavel is telling stories: about MOO
politics, about MOO history.
The_Author is listening, laughing now
and then, taking notes.
The_Author is also not listening. He is
looking: past Pavel at the surfaces of this house, the walls,
the couches, the well-stocked bookcases. His eyes are telling
him it's all real, but there's a piece of his mind that knows
it can't be. Nothing looks exactly as it ought to. Things are
out of place here, rearranged, as when a memory from waking
life becomes a parody of itself when you're asleep. Becomes a
dream.
The_Author is wide awake, of course,
but this, in the end, is how he will remember the house he
sits in now: it is his fourth MOO dream. It is his last.
The_Author rises to go, finally.
The_Author exits to the north.
Pavel exits to the north.
Pavel's_Wife exits to the north.
go north
The Entrance Hall
This small foyer is the hub of the
house. To the north are the double doors forming the main
entrance to the house. There is a mirror at about head height
on the east wall, just to the right of a corridor leading off
into the bedroom area. The south wall is all rough stonework,
the back of the living room fireplace; at the west end of the
wall is the opening leading south into the living room and
southwest into the kitchen. Finally, to the west is an open
archway leading into the dining room.
You see a globe here.
Pavel, Pavel's_Wife, and The_Author are
here.
The_Author stands, taking his leave of
Pavel" and Pavel's_Wife.
The_Author doesn't seem to notice
anything remarkable about this room. He detects no change in
the scenery since he last was here.
You do, however.
You see a globe here.
look globe
A Globe
A large globe of planet Earth. It's
mostly blue with
big brown and white splotches. 'Enter
globe' to get a
closer look.
enter globe
You step into the globe ....
Earth
A big blue-green planet.
Within Earth you see: Africa, Asia,
Australia, Europe, North America, South America, and
Antarctica.
enter north america
Home of the (cough) brave where the
buffalo used to roam. . .
Within North America you see:
USA, Canada, Central America, Greenland, Caribbean, North
Pole, and Indian_home.
enter usa
USA, North America
The place where everybody thinks they
are better then everybody else. And I _DO_ live here so
shaddup you worthless pile of . . . .
Within USA you see: Georgia, Missouri,
Vermont, Maine, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New
York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Washington, D.C.,
Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina,
Florida, Ohio, Kentucky, Alabama, Louisiana, Arkansas,
Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, North
Dakota, South Dakota, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico,
Montana, Idaho, Utah, Arizona, Nevada, Washington, Oregon,
California, Hawaii, Alaska, Nebraska, Colorado, Mississippi,
Tennessee, Delaware, Wyoming, and New Hampshire.
enter new york
New York, USA
The Empire State!!!
Within New York you see: Albany, North
Babylon, Oceanside, New York City, Rochester, Bronx, Yonkers,
Syracuse, Brooklyn, Brewster, Ithaca, Long Island, Alfred,
Binghamton/Vestal, Larchmont, Medina, Gloversville, Jamestown,
Flushing, Schuylervi11e, Annandale-on-Hudson, Schenectady,
Troy, Deansboro, Coxsackie, and Chappaqua.
enter new york city
New York City, New York
The greatest city in the Tri-State
area!
Within New York City you see: Tribeca,
Manhattan, nyc,
Staten Island, east village, Center of
the World, and
Silicon Alley.
enter east village
east village, New York City
The place to be. Don't accept any
substitutes. Within east village you see: 13th Street squats,
East 10th Street Between First and A.
enter east 10th street
East 10th Street Between First and
A
You are on a block of nicely spruced-up
Lower East Side tenements running east to west, their heights
uneven, their faces mostly brick, some painted and some not. A
smattering of young and struggling ginkgo trees dots the
sidewalks here. No parking space is left untaken.
Places of interest: The Famous Russian
Baths of Tenth Street, The Building Where The_Author
Lives.
The time is 2:35 a.m. EST.
The date is March 31.
The year is 1998.
You brush the dust of three and a half
years off your sleeves.
enter building
You find the entrance to The Building
Where The_Author Lives left conveniently ajar, almost as if
someone were expecting you. . . .
The Building Where The_Author Lives
You are in the first-floor corridor of
a nicely spruced up Lower East Side tenement. There are many
apartment doors in here, but only one stands conveniently
ajar, almost as if someone were expecting you. . . .
enter ajar
The Living/Dining Room
You are at the ground-floor level of an
overpriced and undersized East Village duplex apartment. A
cheap Scandinavian loveseat hugs one wall and across from it a
brickfaced fireplace fills most of another.
Next to the fireplace a black metal
staircase spirals down into the floor. To the south you see a
small kitchen area. To the north a plate-glass door looks out
into a small backyard.
go down
The Bedroom
You are in the basement level of an
overpriced and undersized East Village duplex apartment. It's
either cramped or cozy down here, depending on your mood. The
ceiling is low and the walls are never farther than a couple
arms' lengths away. In the northwest corner there's a bed: a
waist-high platform painted white, a futon mattress also
white, white sheets, white comforter, two bloodred
pillows.
A black metal staircase spirals up to
the ceiling. A passage to the southeast opens into
The_Author's Fabulous Office Nook.
Jessica (sleeping) lies in the bed.
You see 19-inch Television set
here.
It's dark down here. A sliver of light
shines in from The_Author's Fabulous Office Nook.
go nook
The_Author's Fabulous Office Nook You
are in a small space surrounded by crowded bookshelves. There
is just about room enough in here for two people. There is a
desk, its white-laminate surface barely visible beneath a
clutter of papers, books, bills, coffee cups . . . To the
south, a bathroom; to the north, a bedroom.
The_Author is seated at the desk.
You see computer, printer, and
telephone here.
Halogen light streams down from
overhead.
The printer is printing.
The_Author gazes intently at the
computer screen, his right hand folded across his stomach, his
left hand slowly rubbing his chin.
The_Author looks up at the ceiling.
The_Author looks back at the
screen.
The_Author sighs and swivels slightly
in his chair, and it is then that something flickers at the
corner of his eye and causes him to swing around and give a
little yelp of surprise.
The_Author looks directly at you.
You wonder what The_Author sees. Don't
you?
look me
The_Reader
You see a shimmer of anonymous
intelligence, a swirling barely visible in the air, like heat
waves rising from midsummer blacktop. Now and then the waves
almost take on the shape of a face -- The_Author's best
friend, The_Author's freshman English professor, the nice lady
who works the counter at The_Author's favorite bagel store --
but the image never holds.
It is awake and looks alert.
The_Author blinks, rubs his eyes, looks
again straight at you -- and sees nothing but the bookshelves
that surround him.
The printer stops printing.
The_Author shakes his head, turns
slowly back to the desk and pulls a sheaf of pages from the
printer. He sits there leafing through them for a moment or
two.
The_Author sighs and sets the pages
down on the desk before him.
The_Author yawns, rises, switches off
the light.
The_Author exits to the north.
look
The_Author's Fabulous Office Nook
You are in a small space surrounded by
crowded bookshelves. There is just about enough room in here
for two people. There is a desk, its white-laminate surface
barely visible beneath a clutter of papers, books, bills,
coffee cups . . .
To the south, a bathroom; to the north,
a bedroom.
You see computer, printer, and
telephone here.
There is no light but the glow from the
computer screen.
sit desk
desk
You are seated in an ergonomically
designed office chair. On the desk before you: a computer, a
printer, a telephone, a clutter, a sheaf of pages.
get pages
You pick up the sheaf of pages. There
appears to be some writing on them. There is just enough light
in here to read the writing.
read pages
You begin reading the sheaf of
pages.
EPILOGUE
March 1998
Throughout the fall of 1994, as it grew
more and more obvious to me that I was never going to go back
home to LambdaMOO, there were moments when I wavered, pausing
in the midst of whatever I was doing at my desk to fire up the
modem and open a connection to the MOO's familiar login
screen. "PLEASE-NOTE," the words on the screen would advise me
(for the umpteenth time), "LambdaMOO is a new kind of society,
where thousands of people voluntarily come together from all
over the world. What these people say or do may not always be
to your liking; as when visiting any international city, it is
wise to be careful who you associate with and what you say. .
. ."
Beneath these words was the usual brief
disclaimer absolving Pavel Curtis and the Xerox Corporation of
responsibillity for any statements or viewpoints encountered
within the MOO, and this was followed by an even briefer
status report indicating the approximate length of the lag and
the number of players connected at that moment.
Beneath that line the cursor blinked,
waiting for me to type the word "connect" and then my
character name and password. I rarely did. Sometimes I logged
in as a guest and looked around awhile, incognito; I could
read a few screenfuls of *social that way, or just drop in on
Dr. Bombay and look at him sleeping. Other times I ran a quick
@who command without even logging in at all, just to see if
any of my friends were on. They often were, of course, but I
almost always convinced myself I was too busy to log in and
get caught up in conversation. The pull of LambdaMOO was
weakening, I could feel it. My odd, lonely geistings grew more
and more infrequent, and I began to wonder if I really
understood anymore, or if I ever had, what had been the
attraction or the meaning of it all .
But then one day in mid-December I
connected to the login screen and knew again what LambdaMOO
had been about. "The lag is approximately 12 seconds," said
the status report. "There are 248 connected." The number of
players wasn't a whole lot larger than it usually was, but it
was the largest I'd ever seen, and suddenly the thought of all
those people inside the MOO -- of all the connecting and
hassling and horsing around that was going on right then and
there -- just melted me a little. I logged in as Dr. Bombay
and checked immediately to see who was on, but nobody there
was anyone I knew. So I read mailing lists for a little while.
I took a look at Niacin's latest character-description, and I
looked at exu's and S*'s, too. I teleported to the living room
and wandered: out through the entrance hall, down the
corridor, into the library. I kept hoping some friend of mine
would show up and page me for a chat. But no one did. I typed
@quit, eventually, and felt the slightest bit like I was going
to cry.
At some point in that same month I
upgraded my Internet connection and for the first time was
able to access a new and, at the time, still relatively
unknown virtual space -- a global library full of brightly
illustrated "pages" of information, each one linked to another
in a free-form mesh that appeared, potentially at least, to
spread forever in every direction. It was called the World
Wide Web, and though it seemed then not much more than an
intriguing possibility, I have since come to think of it as
the tidal wave I'd dreamt would sweep across the MOO. In the
early months of 1995, the Web burst into popular consciousness
in a flurry of magazine covers, initial stock offerings, and
cocktail-party conversations, and as its fame and fortune grew
it swiftly remade the Internet in its own vivid image. The Net
that MUDs had flourished in -- a place of unadorned text and
self-contained sites spread out among the universities and
research centers of the world -- gave way to a place of
swirling color, sound, and commerce, a free-flowing sea of
information that was growing so vast so quickly that the great
engines of media hype could barely keep ahead of it in their
rush to exaggerate its importance.
Tucked into an ever-smaller corner of
this fast-evolving picture, the world of MUDs was looking more
and more like a quaint, old-fashioned diversion. That anyone
had ever thought the future of cyberspace could be glimpsed
within that world (and in the year or two before the Web took
off, plenty of intelligent people had entertained that very
thought) began to seem increasingly implausible. As for the
MUD that I'd called home, it too was fading from the cultural
radar. The nimbus of media attention that had for a time
surrounded LambdaMOO evaporated altogether, and after a while
it grew easy enough for anyone who'd ever heard talk of the
MOO to forget that such a place had ever existed.
But I remembered, diligently. My MOOing
days were done, but I kept going back to them, poring day
after day and month after month over the notes and transcripts
and official documents that I'd accumulated in my time on
Lambda. I was trying to shape them all into some kind of order
that made sense of what I'd experienced there; I was trying to
turn it all into the sentences and paragraphs and chapters of
a book. Yet the longer I spent immersed in my memories of
LambdaMOO, the more foreign the place itself became to me. I
geisted in and out from time to time, when I needed to check
some historical or architectural fact; I made sure I woke up
Dr. Bombay often enough to keep him alive, sometimes indulging
in a quick chat with whatever pal was on when I logged in. But
I no longer felt even the passing twinge of homesickness for
the MOO that I had felt on that mid-December day in 1994. With
every day I sat (through the months, and then the years)
revisiting what I had known of LambdaMOO, my life there
drifted further away from me, deeper into my past.
* * *
And then one day the book was finished,
more or less, and it occurred to me to wonder what had become
of LambdaMOO in the years that I'd devoted to writing its
portrait. I had some vague notions. Various rumors of crisis
had reached me over the months. I had heard, for instance,
that Pavel Curtis was declaring an end to the experiment in
self-rule and was bringing back the wizardocracy. I had heard
that Curtis was quitting Xerox and leaving the fate of the
server up for grabs. I had heard that no one could abide the
MOO and its eternal social turmoil anymore, and that the
players were on the brink of voting to shut it down for good.
But every time I'd happened to pop in for a peek, the MOO had
looked to all appearances as healthy as it ever had. The
landscape, at its core, was still about what I remembered, and
at its edges it was still evolving at its usual brisk,
haphazard pace. There were always a couple hundred players or
so connected when I logged on, and there were often a couple
ballots up for vote. It was the same old LambdaMOO, as far as
I could tell.
But maybe I couldn't tell. Maybe the
years of absence had dulled my sense of what was what on
LambdaMOO. Or maybe I'd forgotten that nothing there was ever
really what it seemed.
I decided to ask around. My periodic
@who checks told me almost everybody I had known on the MOO
still had an active account there, and I was curious in any
case to find out what had happened with all of them. So I sent
some e-mails, made some phone calls, got in touch one way or
another with the old friends and acquaintances of my virtual
existence. And this is what they told me:
They said that LambdaMOO has never
really been the same since the days of Minnie's
almost-toading.
They said as well that nothing has
really changed.
They said that Minnie remains, still
actively pursuing her unique notions of truth and justice,
though no one seems to pay her much attention anymore.
They said that all the wizards, pretty
much, are still around, but that the rumors of their return to
power have been greatly exaggerated.
It turns out, nonetheless, that there
was a kernel of truth to those rumors: in early 1996, the
archwizard Haakon did indeed intervene once more in Lambda's
social affairs, delivering an edict that abruptly canceled his
earlier withdrawal into a realm of purely technical decision
making. It sounded ominous, but on closer examination it was
clear that all the edict really did was codify something
everyone had already figured out by now: that in a world so
thoroughly dependent on the workings of technology, there was
in fact no such thing as a purely technical decision.
Thenceforth, Haakon proclaimed, the wizards' fiat power was in
full effect -- they would do whatever they had to do to keep
the database running smoothly, no more or less, and would no
longer sweat the social implications of their actions
overmuch. As far as Haakon was concerned, the purpose was
merely to put an end to a lot of pointless soul-searching and
recrimination that had pushed the job of wizarding to the
brink of thanklessness.
In any case, LambdaMOO appeared to take
the announcement in stride. The wizardly fiat was ultimately
never put to any significant use; the democratic institutions
of the MOO -- the ARB, the mediation system -- soldiered on
unimpeded, and the petitions kept on coming, one or two a
month. And yes, the electorate really was given the
opportunity, at one point, to decide whether to shut down
LambdaMOO for good. The ballot failed more resoundingly than
any other ever has.
Which isn't to say that social peace
now reigns in Lambda's corner of virtual reality or that the
citizenry is uniformly happy with the way things have turned
out there. HortonWho, for instance, never did forgive the
place for sending him into exile, as far as I can make out. He
revived his character as soon as its six-month newting was up,
and he still logs on nearly every day, still doing so from his
home in the outskirts of Melbourne (or so I presume; he
prefers nowadays to keep the details of his RL to himself).
But the revolutionary fervor of his early MOOing days has been
replaced with what appears to be a permanent state of
melancholic disillusionment, interspersed with spirited forays
onto the mailing lists to make the case for his dark version
of MOO history. As he told me in a recent e-mail, he's come to
think of the MOO -- and cyberspace in general, I suppose -- as
just the latest in a long, sad saga of new worlds discovered,
conquered, and drained of all their promise and possibility.
The radically liminal nature of VR, he believes, its
irresolvably ambiguous oscillation between fact and fiction,
reality and imagination, is being flattened out and tidied up
to make the virtual dimension safe for general consumption.
"I've come to believe that this is how history works," he
wrote, "and how the new is appropriated into the status quo.
Ambiguities are hunted down and exterminated with the same
rigorous intensity as that with which the buffalo were
exterminated."
He was somewhat vague about the guilty
parties, nominating in no particular order "the state, the
comfortable sleeping masses, the will to solutions, corporate
reality." But he left no doubt that I and my story-hunting
colleagues in the media have also had a part in the snuffing
out of VR's once wide-open indeterminacy. "It's not your
fault," he said. "But after you came looking for pelts, and
traded trinkets with us, the covered wagons of conventional
reality followed along the trails we'd blazed. The trails were
cut by animals, the animals have been driven out by suburban
sprawl. . . . How could it be otherwise?"
Not surprisingly perhaps, Horton's
fellow anarch and rabble-rouser Finn is also unimpressed with
Lambda's current state of affairs, though his complaints,
typically, are a little more down-to-earth. "There's nothing
you can sink your teeth into these days," he says, pointing to
a general absence of the sort of MOO-engulfing controversies
he once thrived on. "Politics I guess is dead. People have
settled into the arbitration disputes; they get a kick out of
that for a while, but they're mostly frivolous disputes and
people just wanting to get attention." Real life, meanwhile,
has taken on more interest for Finn. He finally moved out of
his parents' basement a couple years ago, setting out for
Rochester, New York, to found an Internet software business
with some other MUDders he knew, and once he got there, he
also ended up in a serious RL relationship with a woman he
had previously known only as Aurea
on LambdaMOO. Two years down the
road, both ventures appear to be going swimmingly. His company
isn't the next Netscape or anything, but it's landed some
respectable gigs, including a contract to run the official
_Sally Jessy Raphael_ chat room; Finn and Aurea remain happily
involved. His days as an online Casanova and all-around
firebrand are pretty well over, but if he misses them much he
doesn't show it. He still MOOs daily, but he mostly just sits
idling in Lambda House's smoking room while he goes about his
business at work. "I've still got friends on Lambda, and it's
still fun," he says. "But it's not as much of a stage where
you can play out your political ambitions and real arguments.
It's no longer really a metaphor for real life. It's just not
as passionate, I suppose."
For the mighty morphing gender-bender
Niacin, as well, the passion seems to have gone out of MOOing
long ago. At the time I left, he had acquired a stable of
approximately fifteen spare characters, with several morphs
per spare, and his "social intrigues," he now reports, "were
Byzantine in their complexity." Inevitably perhaps, he drew
closer to the other great morpher in our circle, S*, and it
wasn't long before the two were involved in a serious virtual
relationship. Their affair lasted about a year and a half, and
when it ended, Niacin writes, "I realized that with her I'd
taken the VR love thang about as far as I ever could; I just
couldn't picture putting that much energy into any phase of VR
life again." Niacin had in the meantime also finally ended his
long-rocky relationship with the woman he lived with IRL, a
relationship that, "bad as it was (or rather because it was so
bad), had heightened the intensity of my MOOing." He'd left
his lousy secretarial job as well, his RL in general was
gradually getting happier, and the happier it got the less he
felt like spending time in virtual reality. "In retrospect,"
he says, "it's evident to me just how much the misery of my
real life (and not my intellectual curiosity, or my
gender-role issues, or whatever) was the thing that made VR
seem so dazzling back inna the day.
"Then there was also the fact that VR
had started to seem tacky," he adds. "By '96 it seemed like
every yutz in the world was on the Internet, 'living the
fantasy.' Whatever elitist pioneer spirit had seemed to me to
permeate Lambda back in '91 or '92 was completely gone. I
missed that, and Interzone was marginal compensation at
best."
And so he just stopped going,
basically. He let his spares die out, reaped one by one as he
let them lie, and he now logs on to Lambda once a month, at
most, to check his MOO-mail. It's enough for him. "I'm
teaching prep-school English and living in Austin with a woman
I really like," he tells me. "My life is pretty simple now. I
feel like I've grown up a lot."
As it happens, S* seems to feel about
the same. Her life is going well, or so she told me in an
e-mail a few weeks ago, though she didn't tell me much in the
way of details. I didn't ask. I mainly wanted to know about
her relationship to VR, and she confirmed what my @who queries
had already told me over the last year or so: "I don't go
there much any more." She also gave me some reasons why she
doesn't, as best she could figure them out: "Perhaps it's
because my life there was largely about drama, & I find
myself less & less attracted to drama these days. Also
perhaps because I am increasingly cynical about the power of
words to change much of anything. . . . Mostly, though, it's
just that I'm doing other things these days, & they're
more interesting to me than VR."
I took her word for it. We hadn't
spoken in years, except to exchange a few brief, somewhat
formal e-mail messages concerning what I might or might not
end up quoting from our time together in my book. And not
surprisingly, I guess, her sessions on the MOO somehow had
never coincided with my occasional visits over the years.
She's been a phantom for me, like the others -- Horton, Finn,
Niacin, and the rest: Sebastiano, Elsa, Minnie, enaJ, dunkirk.
. .They have gone on living lives invisible to me, moving on,
growing up, while I have sat surrounded with the ghosts they
left behind on my hard drive and sometimes watched for traces
of their living selves in the vapor trails of the @who
command.
As for exu, I haven't seen even that
much of her in over a year. The cold, hard, technical truth,
you see, is that the player object #50981, formerly known as
exu, is no more: the acrimony of MOOish politics finally got
to be too much for her, and she committed MOOicide in July of
1996. As Lambda funeral customs dictate, the player's name and
recycled object number were passed on to friends. Doome got
the number, and I am told he made a charming little memorial
puppet out of the new object it defined. As for the name, it
went to a MOOer who loved her more than he had ever thought he
could love a name on a computer screen: "exu" is now among the
several aliases attached to player object #53475, also known
as Faaa, and also known as Samantha, and also, mainly, known
as Dr. Bombay. I wear the alias with pride and in the fond
hope that, someday, the woman who created and destroyed exu
will decide the time has come to revive the character and
reclaim the name.
But I doubt she will. The woman in
question is getting along just fine without her old identity,
if I'm in any position to judge, and I think I am. For she
alone, of all the people I encountered on LambdaMOO, has
remained a living presence for me ever since, and pver the
course of many e-mail messages and the odd phone call I have
kept up, from afar, with the rich unfolding of her real and
virtual existences. I have followed with amusement, with
anxiety, sometimes with sympathetic sadness, and often with
pride the adventures and vicissitudes of her personal life,
which I have seen her manage with the same openhearted but
self-preserving aplomb I had always admired in her virtual
dealings. I can't tell you the best parts, but what I can say
is that she's led a full life in the years since I knew her as
exu: she set to work again in earnest on her dissertation; she
started teaching undergrads and going to conferences to
present her papers; she bought a motorcycle and took it on
thousand-mile road trips.
And through it all she MOOed, and she
is MOOing still. The late, untimely passing of exu certainly
didn't stop her -- she had a little-known second character on
Lambda waiting in reserve, and she has kept it very much
alive. I won't reveal the character's name, not even under
cover of a pseudo-pseudonym, because the former exu's MOO life
is a lot quieter now and I believe she'd like to keep it that
way. She has cut back somewhat on the frequency of her visits
to LambdaMOO, and on their length, and she has nothing to do
with public affairs there if she can help it. "I spend most of
my time on Interzone," she says, "with a similarly weary group
of oldtimers. ... We read each other's writing. We play, we
listen to each other's rants, or we spend hours at a time not
saying anything at all. the way you can with old friends."
Weary though she may be, however, she
doesn't regret her involvement in the political debates that
ultimately exhausted her. "I'm way beyond sick of theorizing
about cyberspace," she says, "and have become completely
anti-utopian about VR, but all in all the experience has been
good for me. It's made me a much better writer . . .
encouraged me to go out and get myself published. It's also
given me a social presence IRL in a way I never used to think
I had. After all the practice I got taking stands, making
points, influencing audiences who were sometimes incredibly
hostile, grad student seminars, for instance, came to seem
comparatively amazingly easy places to formulate and express
arguments."
I know: I said once that to look for RL
benefits from MOOing was to miss the point entirely. But now I
must confess that nonetheless it gratifies me to my soul to
learn how tangibly my good friend's life on LambdaMOO has come
to help her prosper elsewhere. I'm not sure why. Perhaps it's
because, in spite of myself, I can't help wishing I too had a
ready answer when people ask me what real good, other than a
book deal, ever came of my own months wandering the halls of
LambdaMOO. And perhaps, also, it's because the only remotely
serviceable reply I can ever think of is to point to this
enduring friendship, and to the friend it's given me, who was
exu when I knew her first but who need never be exu again as
far as my affections are concerned. Her well-being will always
gratify me, I imagine, no matter how she arrives at it, and
her place in my heart remains assured no matter what name I
know her by.
One last confession, though: I still
miss exu, sometimes.
I really do.
And LambdaMOO? I miss it also, in an
abstract and uncertain sort of way. The problem, really, is
that it's hard for me to know exactly what it is I'm missing
anymore. On this point I'm afraid my informal survey of
surviving users has been inconclusive. The common thread of
postlapsarian disenchantment that runs in varying degrees
through all their responses -- from HortonWho's darkling
meditations on the tragic shape of history through the sober,
morning-after cool of Niacin and S* to the sated shrug of Finn
and the mellow exhaustion of exu -- could indicate a number of
different things, not all of them especially informative about
the current state of LambdaMOO. It could simply mean, for
instance, that there is a natural limit to the length of
virtual lives, and that my virtual-world-weary friends have
all reached or anyway are rapidly approaching it. It could
also mean that the initial charm of cyberspace, not just for
this handful of MOOers but for society in general, is
dissipating swiftly as its novelty dissolves into the status
quo. Or it could mean, finally, just what on its surface it
appears to mean: that LambdaMOO just isn't what it used to be.
That the age of golden ages there is over, and that my former
virtual abode is now in a state of terminal cultural
decline.
I wouldn't bet on that one, though.
Difficult as it may be for me to figure out exactly what is
going on with LambdaMOO these days, I think it's safe to say
the place is not in any imminent danger of fading away. Lambda
is still one of the most populous and complex MUDs around, and
the world of MUDs itself, though dwarfed now by the
fast-expanding universe of the Web, is bigger and more diverse
than it ever was. VR as MUDs define it -- text-based,
slow-moving, socially intricate -- will probably never have
the same mass appeal as 3-D, Technicolor virtual realities
like Doom and Quake and similarly immersive networked games,
and it will surely never become the seamlessly distributed,
universal network interface that Pavel Curtis once dreamed of
transforming it into. But these days even Curtis recognizes
that the defining virtue of MUDs lies elsewhere -- that their
appeal has nothing to do with high-tech spectacle or practical
utility, and everything to do with the unique pleasures of
"textual repartee and prose-based reality," as he puts it --
with language cherished for its own sake. Delivering those
pleasures is what MUDs do best as a medium, Curtis believes,
and he's convinced that for the purposes of what they do best,
MUDs will never be replaced.
"In the same way that books haven't
gotten any better technologically for hundreds of years, MUDs
are already perfect," he insists. "I don't think they will
die, and I don't think they will get hugely more popular.
Doom, Quake, they'll always have more attraction to a mass
audience. But to the intellectual, or just the one who
appreciates language -- the reader -- I think there's going to
be a strong attraction to MUDs sort of forever. And there's
something really charming about that. What could you do to
improve on it? Nothing. You're already there."
As for his own attempts at Xerox PARC
to "improve" the MOOish interface, to turn it into a Net-wide
tool for "serious" collaborative enterprise, Curtis put that
all behind him long ago. True to the rumors, he left Xerox
several months back, cofounding a software company called
Placeware, whose high-bandwidth, multimedia collaborative
networking products have little to do with the wordy, quirky
architecture of MUDs. But there was never any question of
abandoning LambdaMOO. The server came with him to Placeware's
offices in Mountain View, where it still resides, officially
the property of Stanford University, but otherwise entirely in
the care and possession of the man who brought the MOO into
existence seven years ago.
"I'm still the archwizard," Curtis
informs me. "And I'm still the one with his finger on the
power button."
But aside from drily noting this
perennially momentous fact -- the great hard-wired conundrum
of Lambda's democratic experiment and still the ultimate
source, I can only assume, of all that is both interesting and
maddening about MOOish politics -- Pavel Curtis makes no great
claims to any responsibility for what goes on within the world
whose fate his index finger controls. Nor could he, in good
conscience. By all reports, including his own, the archwizard
Haakon spends almost as little time in LambdaMOO these days as
I do. For that matter, he has had nearly nothing to do with
MOOish governance in the five years since he introduced the
petition system; and in the seven years since he laid down the
basic floor plan of Lambda House, he has had even less to do
with the shaping of MOOish architecture. The MOO was his
creation once, but that was very long ago: it's his no
more.
And he is therefore no more qualified
to tell me what's become of LambdaMOO, I think, than any of
the others in my hardly scientific sample. Which leaves me
finally with no other choice, if I would really know the state
of affairs in the place that I once thought of as my second
home, than to go back and make it my home again, if only for a
little while -- to expose myself once more to the currents of
its history, the seductions of its geography, and the wit,
invention, fear, lust, anger, warmth, and banality of its
citizens.
I think I'll pass. Once was enough, God
knows. Besides, I'd probably feel obliged to write another
book about it all, and frankly, you've already heard about as
much of LambdaMOO's saga as you need to hear from me. If you
really want to find out how the rest of the story goes, well,
it's still out there-- somewhere vaguely to the west of me,
somewhere between reality and imagination, somewhere that I
would say is more or less where all the stories of the world
have ever been told. And didn't Haakon say the MOO is for
readers? What then, dear reader, are you waiting for?
*****************************************
(You finish reading.)
You are seated in an ergonomically
designed office chair. On the desk before you : a computer, a
printer, a telephone, a clutter. On the computer: a screen. On
the screen: a square of light, and floating in it lines of
words you've seen before: "PLEASE NOTE: LambdaMOO is a new
kind of society, where thousands of people voluntarily come
together from all over the world. . . ."
You lay down the sheaf of pages.
You rest your hands on the desk before
you.
You stretch your fingers out to touch
the computer's keyboard.
You type a word. The word is
"connect."
Acknowledgments
This book owes its life above all to
the many lives that make up LambdaMOO. By the time my sojourn
there was done, at least ten thousand players had passed
through the place, some leaving visible traces on its
surfaces, some leaving only memories, but all contributing in
one way or another to the remarkable collective work of
culture and imagination they inhabited (and in many cases
continue to inhabit). They are writers all, and I feel
slightly awkward getting paid to write about the world that
they have written into being for the sheer love, fun, and hell
of it. I would gladly acknowledge my debt to each and every
one of them by name if I had the space, but since I don't,
I'll limit my thanks to the pseudonyms of those who helped me
most directly with this project.
BriarWood, Kerrit, Margaret, Minnie,
Miseria, Moondreamer, Ople, Rhay, Sebastiano, stingaree,
Wooga, and all the oldtimers at aCleanWellLightedMOO granted
me extensive interviews, some on-line, most face-to-face.
Haakon, enaJ, Kropotkin, glynn, and TomTraceback gave me more
than interviews; their generosity with their time, resources,
and attention was heartening. Niacin, Horton-Who, S*, Elsa,
and Finn allowed me to print far more about their personal
lives than I had any right to expect. And exu gave me all of
the above and the MOO itself: she taught me how to see it. Any
other MOOers who came to my aid and whom I have failed to
mention should know that the failure was not intentional. In
any case, you know who you are, all of you, and much better
than I ever could.
My debts to people outside the MOO, of
course, are also numerous. The work of Elizabeth Reid
introduced me to MUDs and made my first forays into MUD-dish
VR less baffling than they might have been. Other writers who
have oriented me along the way include Howard Rheingold (whose
book The Virtual Community supplied me with much of the
early history of networks and MUDding recounted in chapter
two), Richard Bartle (MUD pioneer and likewise an invaluable
MUD historian), Lynn Cherny (sharp-eyed analyst of MOO
politics and culture), Kathaleen Amende (chronicler of the
Schmoo Wars), and Shannon McRae (ethnographer of MOOish sex
and gender).
Lisa Kennedy, at The Village Voice, saw a feature
article in the Mr. Bungle story when I was still only thinking
of it as a curious anecdote, and Jeff Salamon, another
keen-eyed Voice editor, helped
inestimably to make the article happen and to give it shape.
Mark Kelley, my agent, gave me the kindly kick in the ass
without which I would never have turned the article into a
book proposal. Ben Ratliff, Jonathan Landreth, and Elise
Proulx, my editors at Henry Holt, oversaw the transformation
from book proposal to book with exemplary trustworthiness and
savvy.
Erik Davis, Joe Levy, Kit Reed, Jeff
Salamon (again), and Sherry Turkle each took the time to read
the manuscript and offer feedback, all of which was thoughtful
and some of which was crucial. To the students of Beth
Loffreda at Rutgers University, of Tom Keenan and Tom Levine
at Princeton and Johns Hopkins, of Robert Christgau and of
Stacy Horn at New York University, and of Josh Quittner at
Columbia, who responded both challengingly and
enthusiastically to readings of some of the chapters, and to
the many readers of "A Rape in Cyberspace" who have e-mailed
me criticisms and appreciations over the years, I am also
grateful.
Assistance with the beastly job itself,
the writing of the thing, came from a number of quarters. When
the work was at its loneliest and most maddening, the Writer's
Room was an oasis of camaraderie and calm. When inspiration
flagged, the prose of Herman Melville, Salman Rushdie, and
Cormac McCarthy (to say nothing of the grande lattes of the
Starbucks Corporation) supplied it in abundance. And very
often, as she has always been, my mother, Jane Dibbell, was on
hand with moral and material support.
But if anyone put as much effort into
bringing these pages to the light of day as I did, it was
Jessica Chalmers. I said it before and I will say it now,
again: this book is hers
[1]Pronounced approximately eh-SHOO.
[2]TinyMUD's
prefix appears also to have been the source of the “tiny” sometimes used in the
local terminology of social MUDs, LambdaMOO included. Aspnes says he
picked the prefix because of the relatively small number of code lines in his
program, but as I suggested earlier, I suspect its subsequent
spread into common usage had more to do with the sense of miniaturization
endemic to a world that exists “inside” a small computer somewhere
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