Julian Dibbell: My Tiny Life

Filed under: Book Reviews, Chris Mitchell   

Chris Mitchell

With the popularity of the World Wide Web these days, it’s easy to forget that the Internet has other tricks up its telephone wires. MUDs (Multi User Dimension) and MOOs (Multi user dimension, Object Orientated) are burgeoning virtual reality communities tucked away in the backwaters of cyberspace. My Tiny Life is Village Voice writer Julian Dibbell’s personal account of the time he spent within one of the largest of those communities, LambdaMOO.

Originally set up as an experiment at Xerox’s PARC Center, LambdaMOO provides a virtual space through a completely text-based interface. (You can visit LambdaMOO by typing its Telnet address into your Web browser - telnet://lambda.moo.mud.org:8888/). Users are presented with a description of their surroundings, with options to move around, pick up objects and so on. They can also talk to other users in the same area and build their own virtual scenery. The nearest real-world analogy would be that it’s similar to watching a play script being written.

Dibbell begins his story back in 1994, at a moment of crisis for LambdaMOO: the virtual rape of one character by another. By sending obscenities not only to his victim but to everyone logged on to the MOO at that time, the virtual rapist caused a furore within the virtual community.

The fact that a few lines of text can spark such trouble indicates how the tiny life of VR can have ramifications on users in real life. Dibbell uses the questions thrown up by this unwelcome intrusion into LambdaMOO’s supposed anarchist utopia as a way of exploring the complexities of virtual life, both good and bad.

Interspersing chapters about his on-line life with real life vignettes concerning the trouble his use of LambdaMOO began to cause with his girlfriend, Dibbell illustrates how the boundaries between the two worlds rarely stay intact. His explanations of LambdaMOO’s complex society, with its voting systems, protocols and power struggles show how much of real life crosses over into the virtual realm.

It becomes apparent from Dibbell’s book that the crude, text-based virtual reality of LambdaMOO is more potent than the graphical worlds of videogames because it plugs directly into the user’s imagination, rather than simply presenting a pre-defined universe, and it relies on the input of other human beings to function properly.

As such, My Tiny Life gives a convincing account of why mere words on a computer screen take on much greater power, “both devastating and illuminating”, within a world built solely from text. While entering virtual reality might seem like escapism, My Tiny Life indicates that VR is an extension of real life rather than parallel to it, with its inhabitants being as brilliant and banal as they are in reality.

Posted on January 1st, 1999.

• Julian Dibbell: My Tiny Life
• Mark Slouka: War Of The Worlds: The Assault On Reality
• N. Katherine Hayles: How We Became Posthuman: Virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature and informatics
• Richard Powers – Plowing The Dark
• William Gibson: All Tomorrow’s Parties