by David S. Bennahum
The MEME Book Club: An excerpt from My Tiny Life, by Julian Dibbell.
In a new step for MEME, I am introducing the MEME Book Club. The MBC will feature, from time to time, excerpts from new books-- good books related to cyberspace and its impact on our culture. The first issue of the MBC is an excerpt from Julian Dibbell's new book:
(Owl Books, January 1999; USD$ 14.95) Some of you may recognize Julian's name from his terrific, and influential, story he wrote in December 1993 for the Village Voice, titled "A Rape in Cyberspace," which has become a classic of cybernetic reportage. That story, which detailed a "virtual rape" on LambdaMOO (a text-based virtual community, reachable at telnet://lambda.moo.mud.org 8888) led, five years later, to My Tiny Life.
Written with a style reminiscent of the 19th century travelogue, yet interspersed with hyper-modern "real-life" scenes in "MOO style," My Tiny Life recreates the texture and richness of living in a virtual world that's entirely text based. Set in LambdaMOO, a social space that predates the arrival of Netscape and the explosion of the Web, My Tiny Life blurs the edge between real-life and VR. Along the way, the reader faces all sorts of fascinating questions-- How human conflict remakes itself in cyberspace. How virtual worlds struggle to develop a form of society. How words and actions sometimes collapse, creating concepts like "virtual rape," changing the nature of sexuality and desire in a text-only universe.
With those themes in mind, I am inviting MEME readers to comment on the excerpts below. I will collect your responses and send them back out to the list at future date, in one installment. Without further delay, here is My Tiny Life, with permission from Julian Dibbell, exclusively for MEME.
From Chapter 2 of My Tiny Life 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 LambdaMOO 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 it 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 epic 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 MOO-space 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 (or a serviceable representative thereof) 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 that gods dwelt in 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 map games (to coin a term
distinguishing these board games from those like
Scrabble, for instance, that 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, the map 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 map-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 fluff 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 map 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 perhaps too with the later
development of the arguably cartographic East Asian game
of Go -- the map 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 map
games of a significantly woolier design 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 (and still clinging
tenaciously to their sizable niche market to this day):
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 Tolkienesque 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 attributes, skills, and possessions
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 often lasted years. Such elaborately structured open-endedness brought
map-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 Players' 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 map 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
unwieldy 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 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 recreating the dynamics of any real-world
process it was possible to imagine. Like the map 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 English-speaking 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: 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 of course 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. And 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 log-ins 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 U.S., 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
MUD-space; 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 MUDing crowd 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 MUDers, 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, MUDers 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 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
more or less 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 TinyMUDers 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 startup by the humiliatingly cutesy name
of Apple carried it into the endzone), his
employer-sanctioned interest in MUDs more than
whisperingly 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 schmooze about, well,
MUDs mostly. So that by the summer afternoon of 1994 on which I
showed up at LambdaMOO to wrestle with the curious case
of the dislocated television set, the world I happened to
be coming home to was but a single and not especially
singular 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 hardcore 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 habituÈs
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?
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MEME is published by David S. Bennahum. Duplication for non-commerical
use is permitted. Contact me if you have questions. Direct comments, bugs and so on to
me at davidsol@panix.com.In this issue of MEME:
MY TINY LIFE: CRIME AND PASSION IN A VIRTUAL WORLD
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 pin-point
lights that flicker on and off. The boxes
are computers, 25 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 3000 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 to feel 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, "Well 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-disc 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 19th 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.
A Genealogy of Virtual Worlds
You can order MY TINY LIFE and read more information about Julian and the book by visiting http://www.levity.com/julian/mytinylife/index.html
