Archive | 2.03 - Mar 1994 | features

Johnny Manhattan Meets the Furry Muckers

Why playing MUDs is becoming the addiction of the '90s.

By Josh Quittner

In come into LambdaMOO through the closet.

The closet is the port of entry, the Ellis Island for all immigrants to this virtual world. It's a dark, cramped space and I keep bumping into coats, boots, and the bodies of sleeping, huddled masses. I can see a metal doorknob in front of me. (Of course, I can't really "see" anything, not in the conventional sense. I merely read the text that spools across my computer screen.) How do I get out of here? With some puttering, I finally figure out the Open sesame:

I type open door. Text marches up my screen, telling me I'm in the Living Room: It is very bright, open and airy here with large plate glass windows looking southward over the pool to the gardens 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....

And there are people here, with names like Milk, Stranger, Exdore, and Laxative. They're talking, horsing around, smirking at each other, waving. Milk's juggling two live cats and a chainsaw.

It gets kind of confusing and I wander north, outside of the house, and somehow end up in a large field in which three spaceships sit. How can you not enter a spaceship? I do, fire up the engines, and learn how to navigate. I land on the moon, where I find other people have already started a colony, a MOO within a MOO on the virtual moon....

I'm here because I've heard that strange and wonderful things are happening out where the Internet ends. It's not just on LambdaMOO, one of the biggest and most versatile of the MOOs, (or object oriented MUDs), but on the hundreds of MUDs, Mucks, Mushes, and M-whatevers that are propagating on the Net like jackrabbit warrens. There's a virtual place for everyone. If you don't like to hang out in a "chat house," you can live in a world of vampires on Elysium, or be a cartoon character on ToonMUD or be a sleek, post-pubescent otter on FurryMuck, where you can have Netsex with a fish.

You can live in some of these places, in the sense that you can spend most of your waking hours there, in a computer-simulated space. A lot of people do. They're moving in and setting up camp. They're making friends and enemies, pooling their intelligence, creating their own environments, forming cliques, writing manifestos. They're building what Howard Rheingold wrote a whole book about: virtual communities. And within those communities they're creating new culture, new ways for people to communicate.

That's what's happening at LambdaMOO, a 3-year-old MOO set up by Pavel Curtis at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (see WIRED 2.02, page 90). Curtis, a programming language designer and implementer, put the MOO together as an experiment; it has turned into a real community.

I want to put down virtual roots here. To do that, first I need to create myself. Creating things, building your own home and filling it with objects that work, is a big part of what makes Lambda-MOO (all MOOs, in fact) such a draw. To build, you have to have a character. I create one named Johnny Manhattan (it's a name I borrowed from the first microstory I wrote: "Johnny Manhattan sat at the bar, out of work, underfed, full of jazz." I liked that sentence so much when I wrote it fifteen years ago that I saw no need to go further.) Then I carefully typed the following words: @describe me as tall and thin, pale as string cheese, wearing a neighborhood hat. Now when anyone types look at Johnny Manhattan that description - tall and thin, pale as string cheese, wearing a neighborhood hat - will be returned. The "@" told the computer I was talking to it directly. A lot of commands are preceded by @. If I want to know who's logged in, for instance, I type @who. I set Johnny's gender to male (on LambdaMOO, you can be male, female, or neuter). I type @gender me is male. So now that I'm a fully described, gendered character, I am ready to interact. I want to see things, go places, meet people. I don't want to have Netsex with otters.

On my first day, just outside the living room in the Entrance Hall, I meet a Bay Area MOOer named Jongleur, "a wiry fellow in orange and black motley who carries a sack with juggling balls and a diabolo slung over his back." He's with someone by the name of ChristJ. Jongleur explains that his juggling balls really work: If you type a certain sequence of keystrokes at a certain cadence, you see text descriptions of balls being juggled. But better than that, Jongleur knows magic. (I know this may seem a bit silly, but put a piece of paper over all but the next line and tease it down, line by line, to get the proper effect of text scrolling across your screen. Go ahead, just do it.)

Jongleur says, "Want to see an example of programming, Johnny?" Johnny Manhattan says "Yes." Jongleur says, "OK, silence and watchup." Jongleur recites the incantation and invokes the snow storm. A chill wind begins to whip around the towers and walkways... * * * * * * ** * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *** * * * ** * ** ***** * * * * **** * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *** * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * Sparrows were feeding in a freezing drizzle * * * * * * * * * * * * * ** ** * * * * * * * ** *** * * * **** ** * ** ** * ** * ** * * * * That while you watched turned into pieces of snow * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * ** * ** * * * * * * * * * *Riding a gradient invisible * * * * * * * * * * * *** * ** ******* **** * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * From silver aslant to random, white, and slow * * * * * * * * * * ** * * ** * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * There came a moment that you couldn't tell. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * ** * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * And then they clearly flew instead of fell * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * / ChristJ says, "Major cool. Nice."

I am blown away. I actually "wow" out loud, alarming my pod mate (I am at work.) This is way major cool, the cumulative experience better than the simple poetry at its core. As the lines filter up from the bottom of the screen, it feels like being caught in a snow storm. My mind fills in what the asterisks and the poem suggest. It is like hearing the howling wind in a radio play.

Looking back over the text now, it's odd how dead it looks. That's because, I think, part of the excitement of MOOing, just like life itself, comes from waiting to see what will happen next.

It's not the shock of recognition, it's the shock of communication. The organic sensation that you're connected to people evaporates from the printed page.

I am a convert now. Before, I was curious about how the MOO experience differed from BBS life, which seemed pretty interesting when it first emerged. I began to see that this was much more immediate, engaging. I'm a lurker on places like the Well; I like to read but almost never post. I can't lurk here, because I have an almost physical presence in a place that itself has dimension, color, size, and scope.

I want to belong to this community and learn cool spells. I want to be a virtual yenta.

I had heard vague tales about a "MOO rape" that occurred on Lambda. I knew that a New York University student who used the name Mr_Bungle was the perpetrator. Using something known as a voodoo doll, he had figured out a way to make it appear as if two well-known MOOers, Legba and Starsinger, were performing explicit sexual acts in a public place (other MOOers were there at the time). The real people behind the characters of Legba and Starsinger were helpless and horrified as Mr_Bungle played out his fantasies. I didn't know much more about it than that - except that Pavel Curtis had described the incident as one of the most important in Lambda's short history.

One day, I type whereis legba. Seconds later, I see legba (#26603) is at the Crossroads (#33560). I type page legba and tell her I'm a reporter and ask her about the Bungle Affair.

She replies from the Crossroads, What interests you about that incident in particular? It was a long time ago, early spring as I remember.

The Crossroads is her home, a barn she @described, in part, as smelling of "sweet, organic decay, mostly hay and old leather.... On the creaky wooden floor is painted a large white circle quartered by a cross. Within the circle are offerings: a bottle of rum with a yellow label featuring a bright green parrot, a black cigar that smolders slowly, ribs, skulls, and vertebrae from any number of small mammals, various shiny gears and wires, motherboards flashing with mazy circuitry..." Voodoo stuff. Legba is the name of a Haitian voodoo god who can change form and gender.

I tell Legba that I'm interested in the details of Mr_Bungle, but also in how women are faring in this virtual world.

Sociologically that's difficult, as people may not be the gender that they present here, she replies. In fact, legba has multiple characters on LambdaMOO that use different genders and races. At the moment, she is massive and magnificent as an antique schooner, wearing a muumuu bright with flowers of a variety and color not often found together in nature. Her hair floats in a frowsy black halo around her face. She has a deep, rich laugh and very small feet which are usually wedged into pink mules.

"I like subverting people's ideas about gender and race. During the Bungle incident, in fact, I was not female but a hermaphrodite," she says. "It was not specifically an attack on a female MOOer. He used a voodoo doll to assault me and another player from another room."

"Voodoo dolls are objects that you can use to emote an action from another room, specifically an action performed upon another player, as if you had made a voodoo doll of them," she explains.

I should say here that "emoting" is a standard way of demonstrating action on MOOs. If I type emote sprouts a propeller and flies into the cosmos, everyone in my room sees Johnny Manhattan sprouts a propeller and flies into the cosmos.

Mr_Bungle had created a voodoo doll named Legba and one named Starsinger. To the uninformed by-standers, these puppets seemed to be the real characters. He could then use "emote" to get them to do his bidding.

So that was the extent of Mr_ Bungle's harassment?

"Hmmm," she replies. "There is, I would say, a qualitative difference between harassment and the sustained violence of this particular attack."

I still don't get it and Legba tries once more: "He would shape the voodoo doll to look like me or like Starsinger and command it to transmit an action into the room we were in, which would be announced to the whole room. Example: 'As if against her will, Starsinger sucks Tab's juicy cock,' or something to that effect. Unfortunately, I don't remember the real graphic fun."

The affair caused a crisis in the young community: How should Mr_Bungle be punished? Some role-playing gamers from other MUDs said he should be "toaded," the ultimate recourse on many sword-play-and-magic MUDs, where an offensive character is described as a hideous thing and pilloried in a public place. Others suggested Mr_Bungle should be "recycled," that is, the character destroyed. And still others suggested the student's real e-mail address, and hence his identity, be divulged. With no way of polling the 1,500 regular MOOers, how could consensus be reached?

In the end, a Lambda wizard (wizards are the most powerful programmers there and help administrate the place) unilaterally decided to give Legba and Starsinger the kid's real e-mail address in case they wanted to complain to his systems administrator. They didn't. Instead, Legba, a political activist in virtual life, used the incident to illustrate a fundamental failing within LambdaMOO: The community had no way to make its needs known. That is, until Curtis, something of a social engineer in addition to everything else, instituted an elaborate balloting system, involving petitions and votes, so the public could have a voice.

But by then the citizens of LambdaMOO had tasted power and liked it. The incident brought class tension to the surface. In ascending order, there are players, then programmers, then wizards, and finally, Curtis (Lambda himself). Each group has a different degree of power; the wizards, for instance, can do anything from resolving disputes to firing other players over the MOO in an air cannon. Wizards aren't elected; they're designated by Curtis. And that's caused some strife, Legba says. Currently circulating is a ballot that would make a body known as the "architectural review board" a kind of representative government.

"Basically, we demanded (and got) a form of democracy," Legba says. "In effect though, the wizzes and their friends are still running the place."

Kind of the Gertrude Stein of LambdaMOO, Legba, as it turns out, knows everyone. In real life, she's a graduate student at a university in Washington state and is married to another MOOer who uses the name Bakunin (his @description reads, "A cognac-sipping anarchist wearing a torn T-shirt that says, 'I went to the First International with Marx and all I got was this lousy bullet scar'").

Legba is my first virtual friend. One afternoon she summoned me to "Club Dred."

Its description:

This nightclub appears to be the new in spot. Like all nightclubs, it is dimly lit, and very loud. Music and noise from all the conversation around is frankly deafening. But you might manage to find a more quiet corner to gather and talk, if you can find a way through the crowd! Immediately after walking in, you notice the coat check to the right, and the girl behind the counter. Beyond, the club appears to be just the right size, not too big to seem impersonal, and not too cramped either. There is a long, crowded bar along the left wall, extending and turning the corner to continue along the back wall.... Above the bar is a balcony where the DJ booth is, and where the special guests can lounge. There is a spiral staircase in the back corner. There is a narrow staircase leading down behind the coat-check counter. A dimly lit hallway leads to the west."

This nine-room place, complete with restrooms where you can actually go to throw up (major cool!), automaton waitresses, DJs, and drunks, is the creation of Dred - in real life an electrical engineer from Maryland. It took him nearly eighteen months to write and code.

I find Dred, the pony-tailed Sick ("a sick thing" with a digital clock that tells the time pasted in the middle of his forehead), and Legba (who today is a male character, Derrida). I get to their table just as Booga does:

Dred says, "Booga!!" Derrida says, "BOOGA!" Sick *HUGS* Booga! Dred *HUGS* Booga! Booga says, "Dred!!" Booga *HUGS* Sick! Booga *HUGS* Dred! Booga hands Derrida a rose, which he places between his teeth. Then Booga leads Derrida through a rhythmic tango, stepping across the floor and ending with Booga holding Derrida in a low dip. Booga bites Derrida where the neck reaches the shoulder. Lakitu was about to say "BOOGA!" but doesn't want to be like everyone else.

Sick, it should be noted, is a clever young hacker who wrote the code for the first voodoo doll. A 19-year-old who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, out-of-work, underfed Sick is the "parent" of a powerful class of MOO characters known as Sick's Sick Player Class. "Parent" is a term from the object-oriented programming language that LambdaMOO uses. Sick wrote from scratch the code for a player that has various powers; anyone who wants to be in that class can join it by copying his code. Sick's Sick players can instantly "morph," like Legba/Derrida, into any one of an endless stable of other characters they've created.

There are other classes of players here as well. There are the Schmoos, for instance, about 550 of them. Schmoos can remove their clothes; they write three @descriptions of themselves: fully dressed, dressed in underwear, and nude. Say you were with Mr_Schmoo, who is @described as "wearing a bowler hat and a gabardine suit." You could type: undress Mr_Schmoo and you'd see "You naughty thing! Mr_ Schmoo is wearing red pinstriped boxer shorts and a tank top. He trembles expectantly...." You could also type: strip Mr_Schmoo to see him in his virtual birthday suit, but let's not. This is a useful evolution for the teasing virtual foreplay that leads to Netsex. The fact that a character has three automatic descriptions of himself at the ready makes Netsex seem more like the real thing, I'm told. It gets around one of the main problems with Netsex, namely, typing fast enough.

A less racy example of a player class with automatic descriptions is Dred's Dredful Player Class (related to Sick's class). These players can change size, automatically invoking a description when they do: "Draakon bursts out of his clothes, expanding and growing until he is huge!" This class automatically tailors verbs, as well as descriptions, to the characters. For instance, Draakon doesn't say things, he roars or thunders them, depending on his size at the time.

All of these permutations allow MOOers to customize their characters, to personalize them and give them unique voices. I read a paper somewhere that compared computer bulletin boards to jazz. On a BBS, someone starts a thread, or a topic, and other people add to it, riff off it, playing with the theme. In my opinion, if computer bulletin boards are jazz, they are a particularly simple form where everyone plays the nose flute. On a MOO, you have your own instrument, your own voice, and a unique way of communicating. People play with and off each other like a Miles Davis quartet. That's what I'm thinking when I whisper to Sick, "tell me about voodoo dolls."

Sick says, "Okay, torture demo for the reporter. Volunteers?" Dred volunteers Sick. Sick reshapes the voodoo doll to look like Dred. Dred grins evilly, and chuckles from the shadows. Sick kicks the voodoo doll resembling Dred in the head. Dred looks as if someone just kicked him in the head. He screams in pain. Dred points his Needle Gun at Sick. Dred waves his Needle Gun around. Sick forces the voodoo doll resembling Dred to hug the reporter. As if against his will, Dred hugs the reporter. Dred pulls the trigger on his Needle Gun. The Needle Gun snicks, and a puff of highly compressed air hurtles a small, shining needle at Sick! Sick seems unaffected by the shining needle, even though the steel projectile has pierced him. Dred awws. Dred says, "Sick! The head!" Dred gives Sick's head a healthy kick. Sick's head screams, "AIEEE-EEEEEEEEEEEEEE!" as it flies across the room and slams into Derrida. Derrida hee hees! Was hoping Sick would do the head thing. Derrida laughs low in his throat. Chango is here. The waitress comes up to the table, "Can I get anyone anything from the bar?" she says as she puts down a few cocktail napkins....

I love how the waitress comes up to the table, as if this is a bunch of rowdy high school kids setting fire to the ashtray at a Pizza Hut. The stream of conversation and consciousness flows on for more than an hour and never stops being entertaining. I spent five hours on the MOO that day, and could have stayed longer. My eyes were bloodshot by the time I went to bed.

"Do you have any idea how difficult this is going to be to write?" I ask Dred. He nods. "Pretty damn difficult."

"What we are doing here is creating our own environment," says Sick. "Virtual reality is the wave of the future, but we are experiencing it now, in an object-oriented text format, where our imaginations take control."

"Do you think multimedia VR will be more or less compelling than this?" I ask.

"In some ways, less," says Sick. "It's easier to make things happen with text, because you simply have to type what you want to 'happen.' You can make up your own images, and it's different for everyone. There are no defined pictures to force you to share the same virtual images as everyone else."

Or, as Pavel Curtis told me earlier, "Crude prose about a tree works, crude pictures don't."

You want to see interesting stuff, visit Quinn, someone says.

"You really ought to meet Quinn," Legba/Derrida/Chango says.

I find Quinn in his home, "Quinn's Suckle Bar." A LambdaMOO regular, Quinn's interest in MOO life quickly overtook his interest in academic life.

"I don't think it really caused me to drop out. I would MOO until the last possible moment, and then rush to class, but I'm a marginal genius so I can get away with that," he says.

He did drop out, though, and now describes himself as a "virtual hobo, hopping links wherever I can find them" to the Internet. In other words, he hangs around a college campus, borrowing logins from Net-disinterested people. He says he spends "maybe 10 or 12" hours a day on LambdaMOO. Connections permitting.

A 22-year-old West Virginian, Quinn designed the Schmoo class, has written code for a huge number of places in the role-playing game section of the MOO, and is as legendary for his bawdiness as he is for his programming prowess. The Suckle Bar's description reads: A singles bar where all the eligible bachelor(ettes)s line up behind a plank with holes specially cut for their nipples. Little babies and calves and piglets are brought in and they suckle the nipples. Everyone seems to have a good time and nobody gets hurt.

Quinn likes to tweak people. A bad boy, he can't help himself. When you page Quinn, an automatic response is generated asking you if you'd like to be on his disgusting-response list. Type yes, and every time you page him you get a randomly selected ribald greeting, such as: "Look, they're beating Maurice Chevalier in the corner with a hoe! ...He likes it." Quinn's built a ton of stuff here. A casino with a working one-armed bandit, a fantasy castle, millions of "puppets" that respond to you with clever rejoinders. Quinn, who knew only Basic when he found LambaMOO, is turning his MOO-programming talents to two commercial ventures, one of which will be an "adult MOO."

"Sex is the real virtual lure," he says. "I'm working with some really liberated folk."

Now, I know that Netsex is a Big Deal, not only here, but on other MUDs. Take FurryMuck, for instance, "the first anthropomorphic MUD." It makes LambdaMOO look like the Young Republicans. People describe themselves as furry cuddly animals; more times than not, they have furry cuddly animal sex. FurryMuckers like to write long, loving, animal-sexy descriptions of themselves:

Jynx smiles shyly and waves as he notices you looking his way. He is a Salusian male looking between the ages of 17 and 18. He has big clear blue eyes and is covered with a shining light brown fur.... [Alendia] is a very attractive squirreloid in her later teens. Her soft red fur clings damply to her body and a few droplets of water trickle from her cutely upturned pink nose. Her long red hair hangs silkenly down her back and a few damp strands fall in front of her large gentle eyes. She is completely nude before you. The fur of her inner thighs is orange and damp, becoming thinner and steamy near the uppermost edge. Her waist is very narrow and her body curves up towards her firm breasts, making a nearly perfect hour-glass shape...

FurryMuckers like to jump into the Truth-or-Dare Hot Tub, where they feel each other's tails and stuff. When I first stumbled into FurryMuck (I was a fish named BigTuna; Wolfoids tried to eat me), I figured it was a very wry college-kid joke thing. It's not. It's quite serious. The place is at least as big and well-defined as LambdaMOO, with an apartment complex where 190 people live (if you want housing here, there's a waiting list) many bucolic parks and lakes, a taxi system, and underground caverns. Lots of squirreloids. It has a huge following, with hundreds of players who occasionally meet in real life for conferences in places like Philadelphia.... It also goes a long way to explaining the Usenet group, alt.sex.bestiality.

Isn't virtual sex kind of empty? I ask Quinn, who is a proponent of good, old-fashioned humanoid Netsex.

"Not at all!" he replies. "It's a leap above phone sex. It's like interactive erotica. Of course, not everyone is that good."

Of course.

But, it's not physical sex, either. It's virtual, I point out.

"How do you mean?" Quinn asks. "We share orgasms. That's physical. I suppose it's as real as two people on a bed, facing each other, masturbating as they recite Anais Nin."

Quinn said he has a real-life girlfriend in addition to his virtual assignations.

"Some people think that if you have Netsex here you can't 'get it' IRL, [in real life]" he typed, adding that while that's true for some people, "others are here because they don't wanna waste their talents IRL. I'm of the latter category. I don't like modern social rites."

For Quinn, there's more here than just Netsex. He loves to build things; to create places and fill them with bizarre and funny objects. He tells me that he used to read a lot; now he MOOs.

"This is such an immediate fix to your readers," he says. I understand what he's talking about. I'm reading a fine book now, Suttree, by Cormac McCarthy, very atmospheric and moody, and I can't stop thinking, great book, but it would be a better MOO.

This medium could be what experimental writers Robert Coover, Michael Joyce, and the rest of the literary hypertext crowd are looking for. What marvelous ways will "real" writers use MOOs?

Not long after meeting Quinn, I visit yduJ (that's Judy backwards, rhymes with fudge). She's one of the wizards. A professional programmer, educated at Stanford University, she lived with Curtis for three years and was one of the first people to set virtual foot inside Lambda when it opened in November 1990. We talked in yduJ's Refuge, where she sat "cat on lap, Coke in hand, and little dish of M&Ms off to the side."

"Uh, hang on, I'm being paged by Avenger - he's going to get the FCC to pull the plug on Lambda if I don't do something," she says, briefly attending to the call. "Some idiot posted a defamatory message...and Avenger was threatening to have the MOO shut down as a result. Unlikely to happen."

She pasted Avenger's query up and it spooled across my screen:

"I am not bluffing. I LOVE MOO BUT NO ONE HAS THE RIGHT TO DEFAME OTHERS. They can say all they want but not put someone else's name on it."

yduJ sighs, signalling her disgust with the whole administrative thing. I tell her I heard she's getting sick of this place.

"Well, it's confusing, because I'm also addicted," she says. "yduJ can't stay away."

Me neither. It's becoming an obsession. It's all I can do to stay below the 30-hour-a-month limit on my Internet account. Weirder still, my virtual life has been bleeding over into my real life. It has been suffusing my dreams. When I wake in the middle of the night, MOO words, MOO commands race through my head, all of them beginning with @. It reminds me of college when I played too much chess. Cross the street cattycorner and I was moving like a bishop. Walk down the hall and I was a rook...

"I was really addicted a year ago," yduj says. "By that I mean I put my MOO life ahead of almost everything else - social life, job, etc. The people at my job were nuts, they still thought I did a fine job and still gave me raises. But I felt like shit about myself."

It got out of hand she says, improving only when she quit her job and got another that required her physical presence at work. Now, she figures she MOOs maybe two hours a day.

She spends her time between Lambda and JaysHouseMOO, a place set up recently by some of the other founding programmers at Lambda who have quit the place for a more serious, civil MOO.

"I go there because the people are more polite," yduJ explains. "It's a fascist environment - you suck up to the wizards or you're out of there. We do @toad for cause, but rarely. We don't give you anything, no progbit [the programmer's bit, the authorization needed to build more interesting stuff than the rank and file MOOer], no quota. We don't have any cool player classes and we won't let anyone make them."

JaysHouseMOO, she says, is only for serious programmers, people who are interested in pushing MOOcode to its limits. They're attempting to tie some of the resources of the Internet into the MOO itself, allowing, for instance, people to do archie searches for software without ever leaving the MOO. A dictionary is in the library, allowing MOOers to look up words - invisibly conducting the search from a dictionary server elsewhere on the Net.

"We also have a MOO-based hypertext thing that we're working on so you can wander around in gopherspace pretty easily," she says. "Fascism is quite the nice system when you're one of the fascists. :-)" she says.

Weeks have gone by and I find myself unable to stop MOOing. The problem is there's always a new MOO to check out. Curtis has put the core code of LambdaMOO up on a PARC computer for all the world to grab, and all the world is grabbing it. The MOOs themselves are evolving, becoming easier to use, with neat-o features that improve upon the groundbreaking work that Curtis et al have done here at Lambda. On Metaverse, for instance, a subscription-based MOO run by Steve Jackson Games of Austin, Texas, players have a small compass in the corner of their screens, telling them where they are. Metaverse could be the first planned community in cyberspace, with roads neatly laid out and awaiting development.

Where is all this heading? I have no idea. Some people say that MOOs are the perfect model for the Infobahn, or whatever it's being called this week, making the whole mess of navigating on and between networks invisible, hidden in MOO's clothing. Maybe. In any event, I doubt these things will go away. With each new MOO, a new community begins and new cultures emerge to socialize a place where anything is possible. The Big Surprise of the Information Age is what people use their computers for: to communicate.

Sidebar
I've spoken to Pavel Curtis on the phone, but I wanted to experience God in his own environment. One day, I visited him in Lambda's Den:

"Lambda's...refuge from the hustle and bustle of life in the MOO, [his] sanctum sanctorum. This is the place he comes to get work done without constantly being interrupted, as happens in the Living Room, for example. There is a fancy-looking computer console on the desk by the windows to the south and several other tools of the wizardly trade...scattered about."

Here's an edited buffer from of our conversation:

Johnny Manhattan says, "I think I've been on here for like four hours today. I'm having Lambda dreams."

Lambda smiles and nods. "Getting addicted, eh?"

Johnny Manhattan says, "I understand it, though I'm not the addictive type."

Johnny Manhattan thinks about when he smoked cigarettes. Hand-rolled Drums. Ah so delicious....

Lambda says, "You *understand* it?! Quick, what's the story?" Johnny Manhattan says "It's because here, everything is permitted. If not permitted, at least possible. And that's all your fault. :-)"

Lambda cocks his head to one side. "Hmm... Socially, or pseudo-physically?" Johnny Manhattan says, "Because it's the programming language that makes even techno-illiterates like me able to build stuff."

Lambda says, "So it's the technical capabilities that attract you?"

Johnny Manhattan says, "Not the technology, but what it lets me do. It's this funny chemistry between technology and verbal people. As Legba said, 'We exist in a world of pure communication, where looks don't matter and only the best writers get laid.'"

Lambda laughs out loud at legba's quote. "Wonderful!" Lambda has never had the pleasure of spending any time with Legba.

Johnny Manhattan asks, "So, seriously, do you think there might be a too-addictive problem here?"

Lambda says, "There are many questions hidden in that one question... Fundamentally, I consider this question, like all questions of addiction, a matter of self-control."

Johnny Manhattan says, "True."

Lambda says, "If you are fundamentally not in control of your own choices, then you have a problem, to my mind."

Johnny Manhattan says, "Yes. But I think many people will be wholly unprepared for this. It's almost analogous to LSD."

Lambda says, "It is clear to me that MUDs are sufficiently attractive that many people get themselves in self-control trouble with them. They are certainly addictive to an amazing number of people."

Lambda says, "The second fragment of the question, though, is what ethical obligation that lays on me, as a researcher into this technology. I believe that this technology is going to get more and more widely available regardless of what I do with it. I therefore think it's useless, futile, and unwise for me to try to keep that from happening. Trying to keep any technology in a box is a fundamentally unstable situation; it only takes one isolated failure to let it loose and fail utterly."

Johnny Manhattan says, "Agreed. So is there any ethical obligation? I mean, imagine discovering tobacco."

Lambda says, "Yes, I firmly believe that there is an ethical obligation."

Johnny Manhattan asks, "So should MOOing carry a warning from the Lambda general?"

Lambda says, "I am a person who understands the technology and both its potential benefits and dangers. It is incumbent on me, as a worker in this subfield, to do what I can to find and publicize both the good uses and warnings of the risks."

Lambda says, "My job is to try to make it *possible* for people to use the technology wisely and safely."

Lambda says, "We then fall back, of necessity, on the normal mechanisms of society (police, OSHA, etc.) to enforce compliance with those recommendations. Another important enforcement mechanism is the individual, who must have easy access to information that explains both the technical capabilities of the system and the risks."

Johnny Manhattan says, "Sure. But you know this stuff and you're so far out on the edge ahead of the curve, should you be noting the risks?"

Lambda says, "Yes, I think so. Definitely. That's why I put a lot of effort into encouraging social scientists to study MUDs and their users."