Julian Dibbell: My Tiny Life and Play Money
Scrutinising Spike's stat logs, my elderly review of Julian Dibbell's book My Tiny Life has been getting a lot of visits recently. I'm still not sure why, but it prompted me to go and find out what Mr Dibbell is been up to since the publication of his 1999 book, which described his online life in the virtual community of LambdaMOO.
Lambda was one of the first online universes (MUDs, or Multi User Dungeon/Dimension), running since 1994 before the Internet as we know it arrived. Dibbell's book stemmed from his original essay, "A Rape In Cyberspace", where virtual violence occurs within the community and its repercussions spill over into real life. (Read my review for more). LambdaMOO still exists today, open for anyone to log in.
My Tiny Life is a prescient book, not simply because of its description of the specifics of one of the first virtual communities, but because it presaged the rapid expansion that these virtual environments would undergo with the growth of the Net. Now MMPORGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games) let hundreds of users be online at the same time, navigating through a virtual world and interacting with one another. It's Dungeons and Dragons gone digital, basically. The popularity of these games has become phenomenal, spawning a huge industry with millions of dollars involved. Here in Asia, the internet cafes are stuffed full of teenagers and tweenies relentlessly gaming. The Thai government recently introduced legislation to limit schoolkids' use of internet cafes for gaming, which is fairly indicative of its popularity. And for some, it's become all-encompassing In Shanghai, a Chinese gamer recently stabbed his friend to death after an argument over who should possess a virtual sword in the online world. In India, there are digital sweatshops where hackers build up the virtual wealth and possessions of characters in online games, which are then sold on Ebay for real cash.
I'm not about to launch into a "ban this sick filth" rant here, because to be honest, I find this stuff fascinating. There's plenty of arguments going round about the pros and cons of gaming, online or not - Steven Johnson's Everything Bad Is Good For You has got a lot of column inches recently by advocating the positive side of kids getting fat pushing buttons.
What I'm more interested in is the fusing of the online and real worlds, where the online world significantly impacts on real life - "meatspace", as William Gibson put it. Julian Dibbell's next book, which he's due to finish writing by August 2005, is called Play Money. It details his own adventures in the MMORPGs and how he made more real money through the virtual world than he ever did as a professional journalist and writer. Dibbell's whole online odyssey for Play Money is chronicled in his blog, which provides a blow by blow account of his adventures. That blog concluded in April 2004, but Dibbell has been posting on the book's progress and the related articles he's been writing on his News page. I'm not sure I can hack cutting back through all his blog entries retrospectively, but I'm greatly looking forward to the distilled version in Play Money.
More on My Tiny Life:
Spike | Google | Amazon UK | Amazon US | Wikipedia
‘It’s Dungeons and Dragons gone digital,..’
Bring back dice that’s what I say. There’s nothing like a good role of a dice plus a strength bounus just to watch that Ogre go down in the dust with the feeling of steel in his gut.