Confessions of a Recovered MOOer

Jesus, this whole article about the LambdaMOO virtual rape by Julian Dibbell is SO my psychological life in the wasteland of the mid-90s, I can't even handle it. Just revisiting this tale of LambdaMOO (I was not a direct part of Lambda but heavily involved in a neighboring MOO called DU) makes my lip curl. The article is written in the sort of flowery, indulgent style that makes for a perfect VR player (I am no stranger to this literary clumsiness, as will be demonstrated by the end of this post) and is hard to read... in fact, I doubt that anyone who isn't acquainted with the world he's describing will get very far. But it has taken me back to a different time in my head, when my virtual life was rich and self-created out of pure imagination and dreamy immaturity... and honestly, I'm half tempted to see if I can find my way back to the virtual landscape I so carefully built... I don't even know if it's still there. I deserted it long ago.

And I'm not sure why, or what flipped the switch. I had a whole world created. You entered it via a door in the English building, where gradually the floor beneath your feet turned into grass and sand. Head down a lane and you passed a Maritime farmhouse, complete with talking robot (programmed by yours truly) who, for all intents and purposes, looked and talked like Anne of Green Gables and who could make conversation with you about prim bullshit like roses and stars. You could explore the farmhouse—other characters from the Anne books were in the kitchen having traditional turn-of-the-century tea, and you could read an old fashioned cookbook with actual recipes that I'd researched and plugged in. (Sounds crazy, right? Oh, this is the tip of the iceberg). Exiting the farmhouse, you entered the garden, where poetic quotations were carved into themed stone benches and information about different types of flowers abounded—you could swing on the garden gate.

From the garden, you headed towards the shore cliffs, a crossroads of sorts that I created but where friends had joined in the insanity. Through some pine trees was the cottage of L.F. (a friend from an online reading group)—she build her own mini-environment within my larger world. Further through the woods was the gateway to a little house shared by A. and A., who went to the same college in RL and were also in our reading group. I forget what you could do in A. and A.'s house—they were heavily into Little House on the Prairie, so the Anne of Green Gables theme became less relevant if you went too far into the woods (I didn't do that very often). Back on the cliffs, for the secretly cynical, I'd programmed in a suicide verb... in case you wanted to throw yourself off, which people occasionally did (their death was described, then they miraculously came back to life, etc.). This was not an advertised feature of the shore cliffs, yet people discovered it all the time... says something about who was roaming (and building) these virtual landscapes.

From the shore cliffs, you could head down to the shore itself, which was my official stomping ground. On the virtual beach, I'd built myself a three-story lighthouse. The first floor was full of various sailing accoutrements and vaguely personal items—I had a (robot) dog called Chowder and several (robot) cats. Head up some stairs and you hit the lighthouse watchroom, where you could pull levers and turn cranks and learn all about how lighthouses work (seriously). Head to the top of the lighthouse and you reached the lookout, dedicated to weather lore education and the intricacies of the Fresnel lens.

Oh and that's not even the worst of it. I'd programmed all sort of atmosphere into these environments—you could sit on the shore and watch the fishing fleet come in, get soaked by a sudden squall, watch clouds shift and change... Chowder the dog had a whole script he'd act out if someone entered the main room of the lighthouse, whoring for attention just like a real dog would do... This was a complete, almost masturbatorily imaginative environment, charted to the last detail and researched more thoroughly than any paper I've ever written for school.

And I must reiterate that I was not alone in this insanity. Another friend from the reading group lived down the shore on a stretch of my beach (which means I owned that virtual real estate but had given her permission to build and program within it). In her beach shanty there was a "magic spyglass" that allowed us to spy on each other and teleport between locations (all programmed by one of the wizards). In addition to my personal world, I created other environments. I built a pirate ship in the Music building that taught the complete history of Gilbert & Sullivan's operettas. I constructed a multi-roomed House of Origins where you could touch things like forks and toilets and learn how, when and why they'd been invented (the histories of each are actually quite interesting)—one room was the lair of two robots, one an Egyptian princess, the other a Victorian lady, who could recite between them the entire history of cosmetics. And I had a small office of my own in another part of the English building, where I went to "work" when I wasn't in the lighthouse...

I was a fully functioning part of this world for at least two years (it's a little hazy now, actually). I was good at it—no, I'll be honest, I was great at it. I thrived in text-based virtual reality. I know, bizarre. And looking back at it all now (the Dibbell article was featured by Kottke today), I realize how absolutely miserable I must have been to retreat so thoroughly into a escapist universe of my own creation.

WHAT THE FUCK??

Ten years later, it is hard to really connect with that previous me. I don't have the same relationship with the internet, and my real life is much healthier. But reading the Dibbell article brought back some of the old feelings, and he makes some very true points about that legendary Lambda virtual rape—anyone who doubts that virtual reality can't be as impacting as RL has clearly never experienced that type of culture (Dibbell calls it "magic", and though I'm sneering at the whole thing now, my feelings of connection to the virtual world were sincere and emotional enough that I know exactly what he means)...

My questions now involve the changing times—I can't help but wonder if the whole phenomenon of MUDS and MOOS is something that is specifically a byproduct of the new relationship society was developing with the internet during the early and mid-90s. When I was a MOOer, I was one of the only people I knew online—Al Gore maintains that 1994 was the "year of the internet" but I started as a freshman in college in 1993, when an email address was a strange new novelty. There was no sense of "netiquette" or proper appreciation for risk—people naively gave out personal info all over the place. The internet was a young world, and I was a young person swimming through it. I'd be interested in studies about how our relationship with technology has changed, does change, is changing as we the culture become more tech... whether responses to virtual environments (ex. modern IM is a virtual environment) are uniform at certain ages, regardless of the fact that general cultural tech-savvy increases every year.

Perhaps I'm not as far removed from my old self as I'd like to think—even now, I'm looking into getting an MFA in Creative Environments (arguably connected). It's actually kind of a wake up call to be jolted back to my MOOing days and realize that what appealed to me about that then is possibly still relevant in my creative professional life... wow. Fighting through the Dibbell article doesn't make me wish for those years back, however. I'm glad to be a recovered MOOholic, and I think I'll let the ruins of my virtual world decay unvisited. On to the next technological addiction (er... blogging, anyone??).