(c) 1993 by Julian Dibbell.

This article originally appeared in The Village Voice, December 21, 1993, pages

36 through 42.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

                 A Rape in Cyberspace

                      or

       How an Evil Clown, a Haitian Trickster Spirit, Two Wizards, and a

        Cast of Dozens Turned a Database Into a Society

                   By Julian Dibbell

They say he raped them that night.  They say he did it with a cunning little

doll, fashioned in their image and imbued with the power to make them do

whatever he desired.  They say that by manipulating the doll he forced them to

have sex with him, and with each other, and to do horrible, brutal things to

their own bodies.  And though I wasn't there that night, I think I can assure

you that what they say is true, because it all happened right in the living

room--right there amid the well-stocked bookcases and the sofas and the

fireplace--of a house I've come to think of as my second home.

Call me Dr. Bombay.  Some months ago--let's say about halfway between the first

time you heard the words _information_superhighway_ and the first time you

wished you never had--I found myself tripping with compulsive regularity down

the well-traveled information lane that leads to LambdaMOO, a very large and

very busy rustic chateau built entirely of words.  Nightly, I typed the

commands that called those words onto my computer screen, dropping me with what

seemed a warm electric thud inside the mansion's darkened coat closet, where I

checked my quotidian identity, stepped into the persona and appearance of a

minor character from a long-gone television sitcom, and stepped out into the

glaring chatter of the crowded living room.  Sometimes, when the mood struck

me, I emerged as a dolphin instead.

    I won't say why I chose to masquerade as Samantha Stevens's outlandish

cousin, or as the dolphin, or what exactly led to my mild but so-far incurable

addiction to the semifictional digital otherworlds known around the Internet as

multi-user dimensions, or MUDs.  This isn't my story, after all.  It's the

story of a man named Mr. Bungle, and of the ghostly sexual violence he

committed in the halls of LambdaMOO, and most importantly of the ways his

violence and his victims challenged the 1000 and more residents of that

surreal, magic-infested mansion to become, finally, the community so many of

them already believed they were.

    That I was myself one of those residents has little direct bearing on the

story's events.  I mention it only as a warning that my own perspective is

perhaps too steeped in the surreality and magic of the place to serve as an

entirely appropriate guide.  For the Bungle Affair raises questions that--here

on the brink of a future in which human life may find itself as tightly

enveloped in digital environments as it is today in the architectural

kind--demand a clear-eyed, sober, and unmystified consideration.  It asks us to

shut our ears momentarily to the techno-utopian ecstasies of West Coast

cyberhippies and look without illusion upon the present possibilities for

building, in the on-line spaces of this world, societies more decent and free

than those mapped onto dirt and concrete and capital.  It asks us to behold the

new bodies awaiting us in virtual space undazzled by their phantom powers, and

to get to the crucial work of sorting out the socially meaningful differences

between those bodies and our physical ones.  And most forthrightly it asks us

to wrap our late-modern ontologies, epistemologies, sexual ethics, and common

sense around the curious notion of rape by voodoo doll--and to try not to warp

them beyond recognition in the process.

    In short, the Bungle Affair dares me to explain it to you without resort to

dime-store mysticisms, and I fear I may have shape-shifted by the digital

moonlight one too many times to be quite up to the task.  But I will do what I

can, and can do no better I suppose than to lead with the facts.  For if

nothing else about Mr. Bungle's case is unambiguous, the facts at least are

crystal clear.

The facts begin (as they often do) with a time and a place.  The time was a

Monday night in March, and the place, as I've said, was the living room--which,

due to the inviting warmth of its decor, is so invariably packed with

chitchatters as to be roughly synonymous among LambdaMOOers with a party.  So

strong, indeed, is the sense of convivial common ground invested in the living

room that a cruel mind could hardly imagine a better place in which to stage a

violation of LambdaMOO's communal spirit.  And there was cruelty enough lurking

in the appearance Mr. Bungle presented to the virtual world--he was at the time

a fat, oleaginous, Bisquick-faced clown dressed in cum-stained harlequin garb

and girdled with a mistletoe-and-hemlock belt whose buckle bore the quaint

inscription ``KISS ME UNDER THIS, BITCH!'' But whether cruelty motivated his

choice of crime scene is not among the established facts of the case.  It is a

fact only that he did choose the living room.

    The remaining facts tell us a bit more about the inner world of Mr. Bungle,

though only perhaps that it couldn't have been a very comfortable place.  They

tell us that he commenced his assault entirely unprovoked, at or about 10

p.m. Pacific Standard Time.  That he began by using his voodoo doll to force

one of the room's occupants to sexually service him in a variety of more or

less conventional ways.  That this victim was legba, a Haitian trickster spirit

of indeterminate gender, brown-skinned and wearing an expensive pearl gray

suit, top hat, and dark glasses.  That legba heaped vicious imprecations on him

all the while and that he was soon ejected bodily from the room.  That he hid

himself away then in his private chambers somewhere on the mansion grounds and

continued the attacks without interruption, since the voodoo doll worked just

as well at a distance as in proximity.  That he turned his attentions now to

Starsinger, a rather pointedly nondescript female character, tall, stout, and

brown-haired, forcing her into unwanted liaisons with other individuals present

in the room, among them legba, Bakunin (the well-known radical), and Juniper

(the squirrel).  That his actions grew progressively violent.  That he made

legba eat his/her own pubic hair.  That he caused Starsinger to violate herself

with a piece of kitchen cutlery.  That his distant laughter echoed evilly in

the living room with every successive outrage.  That he could not be stopped

until at last someone summoned Zippy, a wise and trusted old-timer who brought

with him a gun of near wizardly powers, a gun that didn't kill but enveloped

its targets in a cage impermeable even to a voodoo doll's powers.  That Zippy

fired this gun at Mr. Bungle, thwarting the doll at last and silencing the

evil, distant laughter.

    These particulars, as I said, are unambiguous.  But they are far from

simple, for the simple reason that every set of facts in virtual reality (or

VR, as the locals abbreviate it) is shadowed by a second, complicating set: the

``real-life'' facts.  And while a certain tension invariably buzzes in the gap

between the hard, prosaic RL facts and their more fluid, dreamy VR

counterparts, the dissonance in the Bungle case is striking.  No hideous clowns

or trickster spirits appear in the RL version of the incident, no voodoo dolls

or wizard guns, indeed no rape at all as any RL court of law has yet defined

it.  The actors in the drama were university students for the most part, and

they sat rather undramatically before computer screens the entire time, their

only actions a spidery flitting of fingers across standard QWERTY keyboards.

No bodies touched.  Whatever physical interaction occurred consisted of a

mingling of electronic signals sent from sites spread out between New York City

and Sydney, Australia.  Those signals met in LambdaMOO, certainly, just as the

hideous clown and the living room party did, but what was LambdaMOO after all?

Not an enchanted mansion or anything of the sort--just a middlingly complex

database, maintained for experimental purposes inside a Xerox Corporation

research computer in Palo Alto and open to public access via the Internet.

    To be more precise about it, LambdaMOO was a MUD.  Or to be yet more

precise, it was a subspecies of MUD known as a MOO, which is short for ``MUD,

Object-Oriented.'' All of which means that it was a kind of database especially

designed to give users the vivid impression of moving through a physical space

that in reality exists only as descriptive data filed away on a hard drive.

When users dial into LambdaMOO, for instance, the program immediately presents

them with a brief textual description of one of the rooms of the database's

fictional mansion (the coat closet, say).  If the user wants to leave this

room, she can enter a command to move in a particular direction and the

database will replace the original description with a new one corresponding to

the room located in the direction she chose.  When the new description scrolls

across the user's screen it lists not only the fixed features of the room but

all its contents at that moment--including things (tools, toys, weapons) and

other users (each represented as a ``character'' over which he or she has sole

control).

    As far as the database program is concerned, all of these entities--rooms,

things, characters--are just different subprograms that the program allows to

interact according to rules very roughly mimicking the laws of the physical

world.  Characters may not leave a room in a given direction, for instance,

unless the room subprogram contains an ``exit'' at that compass point.  And if

a character ``says'' or ``does'' something (as directed by its user-owner),

then only the users whose characters are also located in that room will see the

output describing the statement or action.  Aside from such basic constraints,

however, LambdaMOOers are allowed a broad freedom to create--they can describe

their characters any way they like, they can make rooms of their own and

decorate them to taste, and they can build new objects almost at will.  The

combination of all this busy user activity with the hard physics of the

database can certainly induce a lucid illusion of presence--but when all is

said and done the only thing you _really_ see when you visit LambdaMOO is a

kind of slow-crawling script, lines of dialogue and stage direction creeping

steadily up your computer screen.

    Which is all just to say that, to the extent that Mr. Bungle's assault

happened in real life at all, it happened as a sort of Punch-and-Judy show, in

which the puppets and the scenery were made of nothing more substantial than

digital code and snippets of creative writing.  The puppeteer behind Bungle, as

it happened, was a young man logging in to the MOO from a New York University

computer.  He could have been Al Gore for all any of the others knew, however,

and he could have written Bungle's script that night any way he chose.  He

could have sent a command to print the message ``Mr. Bungle, smiling a saintly

smile, floats angelic near the ceiling of the living room, showering joy and

candy kisses down upon the heads of all below''--and everyone then receiving

output from the database's subprogram #17 (a/k/a the ``living room'') would

have seen that sentence on their screens.

    Instead, he entered sadistic fantasies into the ``voodoo doll,'' a

subprogram that served the not-exactly kosher purpose of attributing actions to

other characters that their users did not actually write.  And thus a woman in

Haverford, Pennsylvania, whose account on the 'MOO attached her to a character

she called Starsinger, was given the unasked-for opportunity to read the words

``As if against her will, Starsinger jabs a steak knife up her ass, causing

immense joy.  You hear Mr. Bungle laughing evilly in the distance.'' And thus

the woman in Seattle who had written herself the character called legba, with a

view perhaps to tasting in imagination a deity's freedom from the burdens of

the gendered flesh, got to read similarly constructed sentences in which legba,

messenger of the gods, lord of crossroads and communications, suffered a brand

of degradation all-too-customarily reserved for the embodied female.

``Mostly voodoo dolls are amusing,'' wrote legba on the evening after Bungle's

rampage, posting a public statement to the widely read in-MOO mailing list

called *social-issues, a forum for debate on matters of import to the entire

populace.  ``And mostly I tend to think that restrictive measures around here

cause more trouble than they prevent.  But I also think that Mr. Bungle was

being a vicious, vile fuckhead, and I...want his sorry ass scattered from #17

to the Cinder Pile.  I'm not calling for policies, trials, or better jails.

I'm not sure what I'm calling for.  Virtual castration, if I could manage it.

Mostly, [this type of thing] doesn't happen here.  Mostly, perhaps I thought it

wouldn't happen to me.  Mostly, I trust people to conduct themselves with some

veneer of civility.  Mostly, I want his ass.''

    Months later, the woman in Seattle would confide to me that as she wrote

those words posttraumatic tears were streaming down her face--a real-life fact

that should suffice to prove that the words' emotional content was no mere

playacting.  The precise tenor of that content, however, its mingling of

murderous rage and eyeball-rolling annoyance, was a curious amalgam that

neither the RL nor the VR facts alone can quite account for.  Where virtual

reality and its conventions would have us believe that legba and Starsinger

were brutally raped in their own living room, here was the victim legba

scolding Mr. Bungle for a breach of ``civility.'' Where real life, on the other

hand, insists the incident was only an episode in a free-form version of

Dungeons and Dragons, confined to the realm of the symbolic and at no point

threatening any player's life, limb, or material well-being, here now was the

player legba issuing aggrieved and heartfelt calls for Mr. Bungle's

dismemberment.  Ludicrously excessive by RL's lights, woefully understated by

VR's, the tone of legba's response made sense only in the buzzing, dissonant

gap between them.

    Which is to say it made the only kind of sense that _can_ be made of MUDly

phenomena.  For while the _facts_ attached to any event born of a MUD's

strange, ethereal universe may march in straight, tandem lines separated neatly

into the virtual and the real, its meaning lies always in that gap.  You learn

this axiom early in your life as a player, and it's of no small relevance to

the Bungle case that you usually learn it between the sheets, so to speak.

Netsex, tinysex, virtual sex--however you name it, in real-life reality it's

nothing more than a 900-line encounter stripped of even the vestigial

physicality of the voice.  And yet as any but the most inhibited of newbies can

tell you, it's possibly the headiest experience the very heady world of MUDs

has to offer.  Amid flurries of even the most cursorily described caresses,

sighs, and penetrations, the glands do engage, and often as throbbingly as they

would in a real-life assignation--sometimes even more so, given the combined

power of anonymity and textual suggestiveness to unshackle deep-seated

fantasies.  And if the virtual setting and the interplayer vibe are right, who

knows?  The heart may engage as well, stirring up passions as strong as many

that bind lovers who observe the formality of trysting in the flesh.

    To participate, therefore, in this disembodied enactment of life's most

body-centered activity is to risk the realization that when it comes to sex,

perhaps the body in question is not the physical one at all, but its psychic

double, the bodylike self-representation we carry around in our heads.  I know,

I know, you've read Foucault and your mind is not quite blown by the notion

that sex is never so much an exchange of fluids as as it is an exchange of

signs.  But trust your friend Dr. Bombay, it's one thing to grasp the notion

intellectually and quite another to feel it coursing through your veins amid

the virtual steam of hot netnookie.  And it's a whole other mind-blowing trip

altogether to encounter it thus as a college frosh, new to the net and still in

the grip of hormonal hurricanes and high-school sexual mythologies.  The shock

can easily reverberate throughout an entire young worldview.  Small wonder,

then, that a newbie's first taste of MUD sex is often also the first time she

or he surrenders wholly to the slippery terms of MUDish ontology, recognizing

in a full-bodied way that what happens inside a MUD-made world is neither

exactly real nor exactly make-believe, but profoundly, compellingly, and

emotionally meaningful.

    And small wonder indeed that the sexual nature of Mr. Bungle's crime

provoked such powerful feelings, and not just in legba (who, be it noted, was

in real life a theory-savvy doctoral candidate and a longtime MOOer, but just

as baffled and overwhelmed by the force of her own reaction, she later would

attest, as any panting undergrad might have been).  Even players who had never

experienced MUD rape (the vast majority of male-presenting characters, but not

as large a majority of the female-presenting as might be hoped) immediately

appreciated its gravity and were moved to condemnation of the perp.  legba's

missive to _*social-issues_ followed a strongly worded one from Zippy (``Well,

well,'' it began, ``no matter what else happens on Lambda, I can always be sure

that some jerk is going to reinforce my low opinion of humanity'') and was

itself followed by others from Moriah, Raccoon, Crawfish, and evangeline.

Starsinger also let her feelings (``pissed'') be known.  And even Jander, the

Clueless Samaritan who had responded to Bungle's cries for help and uncaged him

shortly after the incident, expressed his regret once apprised of Bungle's

deeds, which he allowed to be ``despicable.''

    A sense was brewing that something needed to be done--done soon and in

something like an organized fashion--about Mr. Bungle, in particular, and about

MUD rape, in general.  Regarding the general problem, evangeline, who

identified herself as a survivor of both virtual rape (``many times over'') and

real-life sexual assault, floated a cautious proposal for a MOO-wide powwow on

the subject of virtual sex offenses and what mechanisms if any might be put in

place to deal with their future occurrence.  As for the specific problem, the

answer no doubt seemed obvious to many.  But it wasn't until the evening of the

second day after the incident that legba, finally and rather solemnly, gave it

voice:

    ``I am requesting that Mr. Bungle be toaded for raping Starsinger and I.  I

have never done this before, and have thought about it for days.  He hurt us

both.''

    That was all.  Three simple sentences posted to _*social_.  Reading them,

an outsider might never guess that they were an application for a death

warrant.  Even an outsider familiar with other MUDs might not guess it, since

in many of them ``toading'' still refers to a command that, true to the

gameworlds' sword-and-sorcery origins, simply turns a player into a toad,

wiping the player's description and attributes and replacing them with those of

the slimy amphibian.  Bad luck for sure, but not quite as bad as what happens

when the same command is invoked in the MOOish strains of MUD: not only are the

description and attributes of the toaded player erased, but the account itself

goes too.  The annihilation of the character, thus, is total.

    And nothing less than total annihilation, it seemed, would do to settle

LambdaMOO's accounts with Mr. Bungle.  Within minutes of the posting of legba's

appeal, SamIAm, the Australian Deleuzean, who had witnessed much of the attack

from the back room of his suburban Sydney home, seconded the motion with a

brief message crisply entitled ``Toad the fukr.'' SamIAm's posting was seconded

almost as quickly by that of Bakunin, covictim of Mr. Bungle and well-known

radical, who in real life happened also to be married to the real-life legba.

And over the course of the next 24 hours as many as 50 players made it known,

on _*social_ and in a variety of other forms and forums, that they would be

pleased to see Mr. Bungle erased from the face of the MOO.  And with dissent so

far confined to a dozen or so antitoading hardliners, the numbers suggested

that the citizenry was indeed moving towards a resolve to have Bungle's virtual

head.

    There was one small but stubborn obstacle in the way of this resolve,

however, and that was a curious state of social affairs known in some quarters

of the MOO as the New Direction.  It was all very fine, you see, for the

LambdaMOO rabble to get it in their heads to liquidate one of their peers, but

when the time came to actually do the deed it would require the services of a

nobler class of character.  It would require a wizard.  Master-programmers of

the MOO, spelunkers of the database's deepest code-structures and custodians of

its day-to-day administrative trivia, wizards are also the only players

empowered to issue the toad command, a feature maintained on nearly all MUDs as

a quick-and-dirty means of social control.  But the wizards of LambdaMOO, after

years of adjudicating all manner of interplayer disputes with little to show

for it but their own weariness and the smoldering resentment of the general

populace, had decided they'd had enough of the social sphere.  And so, four

months before the Bungle incident, the archwizard Haakon (known in RL as Pavel

Curtis, Xerox researcher and LambdaMOO's principal architect) formalized this

decision in a document called ``LambdaMOO Takes a New Direction,'' which he

placed in the living room for all to see.  In it, Haakon announced that the

wizards from that day forth were pure technicians.  From then on, they would

make no decisions affecting the social life of the MOO, but only implement

whatever decisions the community as a whole directed them to.  From then on, it

was decreed, LambdaMOO would just have to grow up and solve its problems on its

own.

    Faced with the task of inventing its own self-governance from scratch, the

LambdaMOO population had so far done what any other loose, amorphous

agglomeration of individuals would have done: they'd let it slide.  But now the

task took on new urgency.  Since getting the wizards to toad Mr. Bungle (or to

toad the likes of him in the future) required a convincing case that the cry

for his head came from the community at large, then the community itself would

have to be defined; and if the community was to be convincingly defined, then

some form of social organization, no matter how rudimentary, would have to be

settled on.  And thus, as if against its will, the question of what to do about

Mr. Bungle began to shape itself into a sort of referendum on the political

future of the MOO.  Arguments broke out on _*social_ and elsewhere that had

only superficially to do with Bungle (since everyone agreed he was a cad) and

everything to do with where the participants stood on LambdaMOO's crazy-quilty

political map.  Parliamentarian legalist types argued that unfortunately Bungle

could not legitimately be toaded at all, since there were no explicit MOO rules

against rape, or against just about anything else--and the sooner such rules

were established, they added, and maybe even a full-blown judiciary system

complete with elected officials and prisons to enforce those rules, the better.

Others, with a royalist streak in them, seemed to feel that Bungle's

as-yet-unpunished outrage only proved this New Direction silliness had gone on

long enough, and that it was high time the wizardocracy returned to the

position of swift and decisive leadership their player class was born to.

    And then there were what I'll call the technolibertarians.  For them, MUD

rapists were of course assholes, but the presence of assholes on the system was

a technical inevitability, like noise on a phone line, and best dealt with not

through repressive social disciplinary mechanisms but through the timely

deployment of defensive software tools.  Some asshole blasting violent, graphic

language at you?  Don't whine to the authorities about it--hit the @gag command

and the asshole's statements will be blocked from your screen (and only yours).

It's simple, it's effective, and it censors no one.

    But the Bungle case was rather hard on such arguments.  For one thing, the

extremely public nature of the living room meant that gagging would spare the

victims only from witnessing their own violation, but not from having others

witness it.  You might want to argue that what those victims didn't directly

experience couldn't hurt them, but consider how that wisdom would sound to a

woman who'd been, say, fondled by strangers while passed out drunk and you have

a rough idea how it might go over with a crowd of hard-core MOOers.  Consider,

for another thing, that many of the biologically female participants in the

Bungle debate had been around long enough to grow lethally weary of the

gag-and-get-over-it school of virtual-rape counseling, with its fine line

between empowering victims and holding them responsible for their own

suffering, and its shrugging indifference to the window of pain between the

moment the rape-text starts flowing and the moment a gag shuts it off.  From

the outset it was clear that the technolibertarians were going to have to

tiptoe through this issue with care, and for the most part they did.

    Yet no position was trickier to maintain than that of the MOO's resident

anarchists.  Like the technolibbers, the anarchists didn't care much for

punishments or policies or power elites.  Like them, they hoped the MOO could

be a place where people interacted fulfillingly without the need for such

things.  But their high hopes were complicated, in general, by a somewhat less

thoroughgoing faith in technology (``Even if you can't tear down the master's

house with the master's tools''--read a slogan written into one anarchist

player's self-description--``it is a damned good place to start'').  And at

present they were additionally complicated by the fact that the most vocal

anarchists in the discussion were none other than legba, Bakunin, and SamIAm,

who wanted to see Mr. Bungle toaded as badly as anyone did.

    Needless to say, a pro death penalty platform is not an especially

comfortable one for an anarchist to sit on, so these particular anarchists were

now at great pains to sever the conceptual ties between toading and capital

punishment.  Toading, they insisted (almost convincingly), was much more

closely analogous to banishment; it was a kind of turning of the communal back

on the offending party, a collective action which, if carried out properly, was

entirely consistent with anarchist models of community.  And carrying it out

properly meant first and foremost building a consensus around it--a messy

process for which there were no easy technocratic substitutes.  It was going to

take plenty of good old-fashioned, jawbone-intensive grassroots organizing.

    So that when the time came, at 7 p.m. PST on the evening of the third day

after the occurrence in the living room, to gather in evangeline's room for her

proposed real-time open conclave, Bakunin and legba were among the first to

arrive.  But this was hardly to be an anarchist-dominated affair, for the room

was crowding rapidly with representatives of all the MOO's political stripes,

and even a few wizards.  Hagbard showed up, and Autumn and Quastro, Puff,

JoeFeedback, L-dopa and Bloaf, HerkieCosmo, Silver Rocket, Karl Porcupine,

Matchstick--the names piled up and the discussion gathered momentum under their

weight.  Arguments multiplied and mingled, players talked past and through each

other, the textual clutter of utterances and gestures filled up the screen like

thick cigar smoke.  Peaking in number at around 30, this was one of the largest

crowds that ever gathered in a single LambdaMOO chamber, and while evangeline

had given her place a description that made it ``infinite in expanse and fluid

in form,'' it now seemed anything but roomy.  You could almost feel the

claustrophobic air of the place, dank and overheated by virtual bodies,

pressing against your skin.

    I know you could because I too was there, making my lone and insignificant

appearance in this story.  Completely ignorant of any of the goings-on that had

led to the meeting, I wandered in purely to see what the crowd was about, and

though I observed the proceedings for a good while, I confess I found it hard

to grasp what was going on.  I was still the rankest of newbies then, my MOO

legs still too unsteady to make the leaps of faith, logic, and empathy required

to meet the spectacle on its own terms.  I was fascinated by the concept of

virtual rape, but I couldn't quite take it seriously.

    In this, though, I was in a small and mostly silent minority, for the

discussion that raged around me was of an almost unrelieved earnestness, bent

it seemed on examining every last aspect and implication of Mr. Bungle's crime.

There were the central questions, of course: thumbs up or down on Bungle's

virtual existence?  And if down, how then to insure that his toading was not

just some isolated lynching but a first step toward shaping LambdaMOO into a

legitimate community?  Surrounding these, however, a tangle of weighty side

issues proliferated.  What, some wondered, was the real-life legal status of

the offense?  Could Bungle's university administrators punish him for sexual

harassment?  Could he be prosecuted under California state laws against obscene

phone calls?  Little enthusiasm was shown for pursuing either of these lines of

action, which testifies both to the uniqueness of the crime and to the

nimbleness with which the discussants were negotiating its idiosyncracies.

Many were the casual references to Bungle's deed as simply ``rape,'' but these

in no way implied that the players had lost sight of all distinctions between

the virtual and physical versions, or that they believed Bungle should be dealt

with in the same way a real-life criminal would.  He had committed a MOO crime,

and his punishment, if any, would be meted out via the MOO.

    On the other hand, little patience was shown toward any attempts to

downplay the seriousness of what Mr. Bungle had done.  When the affable

HerkieCosmo proposed, more in the way of an hypothesis than an assertion, that

``perhaps it's better to release...violent tendencies in a virtual environment

rather than in real life,'' he was tut-tutted so swiftly and relentlessly that

he withdrew the hypothesis altogether, apologizing humbly as he did so.  Not

that the assembly was averse to putting matters into a more philosophical

perspective.  ``Where does the body end and the mind begin?'' young Quastro

asked, amid recurring attempts to fine-tune the differences between real and

virtual violence.  ``Is not the mind a part of the body?'' ``In MOO, the body

IS the mind,'' offered HerkieCosmo gamely, and not at all implausibly,

demonstrating the ease with which very knotty metaphysical conundrums come

undone in VR.  The not-so-aptly named Obvious seemed to agree, arriving after

deep consideration of the nature of Bungle's crime at the hardly novel yet now

somehow newly resonant conjecture ``all reality might consist of ideas, who

knows.''

    On these and other matters the anarchists, the libertarians, the legalists,

the wizardists--and the wizards--all had their thoughtful say.  But as the

evening wore on and the talk grew more heated and more heady, it seemed

increasingly clear that the vigorous intelligence being brought to bear on this

swarm of issues wasn't going to result in anything remotely like resolution.

The perspectives were just too varied, the meme-scape just too slippery.  Again

and again, arguments that looked at first to be heading in a decisive direction

ended up chasing their own tails; and slowly, depressingly, a dusty haze of

irrelevance gathered over the proceedings.

    It was almost a relief, therefore, when midway through the evening

Mr. Bungle himself, the living, breathing cause of all this talk, teleported

into the room.  Not that it was much of a surprise.  Oddly enough, in the three

days since his release from Zippy's cage, Bungle had returned more than once to

wander the public spaces of LambdaMOO, walking willingly into one of the

fiercest storms of ill will and invective ever to rain down on a player.  He'd

been taking it all with a curious and mostly silent passivity, and when

challenged face to virtual face by both legba and the genderless elder

statescharacter PatGently to defend himself on _*social_, he'd demurred,

mumbling something about Christ and expiation.  He was equally quiet now, and

his reception was still uniformly cool.  legba fixed an arctic stare on

him--``no hate, no anger, no interest at all.  Just...watching.''  Others were

more actively unfriendly.  ``Asshole,'' spat Karl Porcupine, ``creep.'' But the

harshest of the MOO's hostility toward him had already been vented, and the

attention he drew now was motivated more, it seemed, by the opportunity to

probe the rapist's mind, to find out what made it tick and if possible how to

get it to tick differently.  In short, they wanted to know why he'd done it.

So they asked him.

    And Mr. Bungle thought about it.  And as eddies of discussion and debate

continued to swirl around him, he thought about it some more.  And then he said

this:

    ``I engaged in a bit of a psychological device that is called

thought-polarization, the fact that this is not RL simply added to heighten the

affect of the device.  It was purely a sequence of events with no consequence

on my RL existence.''

    They might have known.  Stilted though its diction was, the gist of the

answer was simple, and something many in the room had probably already

surmised: Mr. Bungle was a psycho.  Not, perhaps, in real life--but then in

real life it's possible for reasonable people to assume, as Bungle clearly did,

that what transpires between word-costumed characters within the boundaries of

a make-believe world is, if not mere play, then at most some kind of emotional

laboratory experiment.  Inside the MOO, however, such thinking marked a person

as one of two basically subcompetent types.  The first was the newbie, in which

case the confusion was understandable, since there were few MOOers who had not,

upon their first visits as anonymous ``guest'' characters, mistaken the place

for a vast playpen in which they might act out their wildest fantasies without

fear of censure.  Only with time and the acquisition of a fixed character do

players tend to make the critical passage from anonymity to pseudonymity,

developing the concern for their character's reputation that marks the

attainment of virtual adulthood.  But while Mr. Bungle hadn't been around as

long as most MOOers, he'd been around long enough to leave his newbie status

behind, and his delusional statement therefore placed him among the second

type: the sociopath.

    And as there is but small percentage in arguing with a head case, the

room's attention gradually abandoned Mr. Bungle and returned to the discussions

that had previously occupied it.  But if the debate had been edging toward

ineffectuality before, Bungle's anticlimactic appearance had evidently robbed

it of any forward motion whatsoever.  What's more, from his lonely corner of

the room Mr. Bungle kept issuing periodic expressions of a prickly sort of

remorse, interlaced with sarcasm and belligerence, and though it was hard to

tell if he wasn't still just conducting his experiments, some people thought

his regret genuine enough that maybe he didn't deserve to be toaded after all.

Logically, of course, discussion of the principal issues at hand didn't require

unanimous belief that Bungle was an irredeemable bastard, but now that cracks

were showing in that unanimity, the last of the meeting's fervor seemed to be

draining out through them.

    People started drifting away.  Mr. Bungle left first, then others

followed--one by one, in twos and threes, hugging friends and waving goodnight.

By 9:45 only a handful remained, and the great debate had wound down into

casual conversation, the melancholy remains of another fruitless good idea.

The arguments had been well-honed, certainly, and perhaps might prove useful in

some as-yet-unclear long run.  But at this point what seemed clear was that

evangeline's meeting had died, at last, and without any practical results to

mark its passing.

    It was also at this point, most likely, that JoeFeedback reached his

decision.  JoeFeedback was a wizard, a taciturn sort of fellow who'd sat

brooding on the sidelines all evening.  He hadn't said a lot, but what he had

said indicated that he took the crime committed against legba and Starsinger

very seriously, and that he felt no particular compassion toward the character

who had committed it.  But on the other hand he had made it equally plain that

he took the elimination of a fellow player just as seriously, and moreover that

he had no desire to return to the days of wizardly fiat.  It must have been

difficult, therefore, to reconcile the conflicting impulses churning within him

at that moment.  In fact, it was probably impossible, for as much as he would

have liked to make himself an instrument of LambdaMOO's collective will, he

surely realized that under the present order of things he must in the final

analysis either act alone or not act at all.

    So JoeFeedback acted alone.

    He told the lingering few players in the room that he had to go, and then

he went.  It was a minute or two before ten.  He did it quietly and he did it

privately, but all anyone had to do to know he'd done it was to type the @who

command, which was normally what you typed if you wanted to know a player's

present location and the time he last logged in.  But if you had run a @who on

Mr. Bungle not too long after JoeFeedback left evangeline's room, the database

would have told you something different.

    ``Mr. Bungle,'' it would have said, ``is not the name of any player.''

     The date, as it happened, was April Fool's Day, and it would still be

April Fool's Day for another two hours.  But this was no joke: Mr. Bungle was

truly dead and truly gone.

They say that LambdaMOO has never been the same since Mr. Bungle's toading.

They say as well that nothing's really changed.  And though it skirts the

fuzziest of dream-logics to say that both these statements are true, the MOO is

just the sort of fuzzy, dreamlike place in which such contradictions thrive.

    Certainly whatever civil society now informs LambdaMOO owes its existence

to the Bungle Affair.  The archwizard Haakon made sure of that.  Away on

business for the duration of the episode, Haakon returned to find its wreckage

strewn across the tiny universe he'd set in motion.  The death of a player, the

trauma of several others, and the angst-ridden conscience of his colleague

JoeFeedback presented themselves to his concerned and astonished attention, and

he resolved to see if he couldn't learn some lesson from it all.  For the

better part of a day he brooded over the record of events and arguments left in

_*social_, then he sat pondering the chaotically evolving shape of his

creation, and at the day's end he descended once again into the social arena of

the MOO with another history-altering proclamation.

    It was probably his last, for what he now decreed was the final, missing

piece of the New Direction.  In a few days, Haakon announced, he would build

into the database a system of petitions and ballots whereby anyone could put to

popular vote any social scheme requiring wizardly powers for its

implementation, with the results of the vote to be binding on the wizards.  At

last and for good, the awkward gap between the will of the players and the

efficacy of the technicians would be closed.  And though some anarchists

grumbled about the irony of Haakon's dictatorially imposing universal suffrage

on an unconsulted populace, in general the citizens of LambdaMOO seemed to find

it hard to fault a system more purely democratic than any that could ever exist

in real life.  Eight months and a dozen ballot measures later, widespread

participation in the new regime has produced a small arsenal of mechanisms for

dealing with the types of violence that called the system into being.  MOO

residents now have access to a @boot command, for instance, with which to

summarily eject berserker ``guest'' characters.  And players can bring suit

against one another through an ad hoc arbitration system in which mutually

agreed-upon judges have at their disposition the full range of wizardly

punishments--up to and including the capital.

    Yet the continued dependence on death as the ultimate keeper of the peace

suggests that this new MOO order may not be built on the most solid of

foundations.  For if life on LambdaMOO began to acquire more coherence in the

wake of the toading, death retained all the fuzziness of pre-Bungle days.  This

truth was rather dramatically borne out, not too many days after Bungle

departed, by the arrival of a strange new character named Dr. Jest.  There was

a forceful eccentricity to the newcomer's manner, but the oddest thing about

his style was its striking yet unnameable familiarity.  And when he developed

the annoying habit of stuffing fellow players into a jar containing a tiny

simulacrum of a certain deceased rapist, the source of this familiarity became

obvious:

    Mr. Bungle had risen from the grave.

    In itself, Bungle's reincarnation as Dr. Jest was a remarkable turn of

events, but perhaps even more remarkable was the utter lack of amazement with

which the LambdaMOO public took note of it.  To be sure, many residents were

appalled by the brazenness of Bungle's return.  In fact, one of the first

petitions circulated under the new voting system was a request for Dr. Jest's

toading that almost immediately gathered 52 signatures (but has failed so far

to reach ballot status).  Yet few were unaware of the ease with which the toad

proscription could be circumvented--all the toadee had to do (all the ur-Bungle

at NYU presumably had done) was to go to the minor hassle of acquiring a new

Internet account, and LambdaMOO's character registration program would then

simply treat the known felon as an entirely new and innocent person.  Nor was

this ease generally understood to represent a failure of toading's social

disciplinary function.  On the contrary, it only underlined the truism

(repeated many times throughout the debate over Mr. Bungle's fate) that his

punishment, ultimately, had been no more or less symbolic than his crime.

    What _was_ surprising, however, was that Mr. Bungle/Dr. Jest seemed to have

taken the symbolism to heart.  Dark themes still obsessed him--the objects he

created gave off wafts of Nazi imagery and medical torture--but he no longer

radiated the aggressively antisocial vibes he had before.  He was a lot less

unpleasant to look at (the outrageously seedy clown description had been

replaced by that of a mildly creepy but actually rather natty young man, with

``blue eyes...suggestive of conspiracy, untamed eroticism and perhaps a sense

of understanding of the future''), and aside from the occasional jar-stuffing

incident, he was also a lot less dangerous to be around.  It was obvious he'd

undergone some sort of personal transformation in the days since I'd first

glimpsed him back in evangeline's crowded room--nothing radical maybe, but

powerful nonetheless, and resonant enough with my own experience, I felt, that

it might be more than professionally interesting to talk with him, and perhaps

compare notes.

    For I too was undergoing a transformation in the aftermath of that night in

evangeline's, and I'm still not entirely sure what to make of it.  As I pursued

my runaway fascination with the discussion I had heard there, as I pored over

the _*social_ debate and got to know legba and some of the other victims and

witnesses, I could feel my newbie consciousness falling away from me.  Where

before I'd found it hard to take virtual rape seriously, I now was finding it

difficult to remember how I could ever _not_ have taken it seriously.  I was

proud to have arrived at this perspective--it felt like an exotic sort of

achievement, and it definitely made my ongoing experience of the MOO a richer

one.

    But it was also having some unsettling effects on the way I looked at the

rest of the world.  Sometimes, for instance, it was hard for me to understand

why RL society classifies RL rape alongside crimes against person or property.

Since rape can occur without any physical pain or damage, I found myself

reasoning, then it must be classed as a crime against the mind--more intimately

and deeply hurtful, to be sure, than cross burnings, wolf whistles, and virtual

rape, but undeniably located on the same conceptual continuum.  I did not,

however, conclude as a result that rapists were protected in any fashion by the

First Amendment.  Quite the opposite, in fact: the more seriously I took the

notion of virtual rape, the less seriously I was able to take the notion of

freedom of speech, with its tidy division of the world into the symbolic and

the real.

    Let me assure you, though, that I am not presenting these thoughts as

arguments.  I offer them, rather, as a picture of the sort of mind-set that

deep immersion in a virtual world has inspired in me.  I offer them also,

therefore, as a kind of prophecy.  For whatever else these thoughts tell me, I

have come to believe that they announce the final stages of our decades-long

passage into the Information Age, a paradigm shift that the classic liberal

firewall between word and deed (itself a product of an earlier paradigm shift

commonly known as the Enlightenment) is not likely to survive intact.  After

all, anyone the least bit familiar with the workings of the new era's

definitive technology, the computer, knows that it operates on a principle

impracticably difficult to distinguish from the pre-Enlightenment principle of

the magic word: the commands you type into a computer are a kind of speech that

doesn't so much communicate as _make_things_happen_, directly and ineluctably,

the same way pulling a trigger does.  They are incantations, in other words,

and anyone at all attuned to the technosocial megatrends of the moment--from

the growing dependence of economies on the global flow of intensely fetishized

words and numbers to the burgeoning ability of bioengineers to speak the spells

written in the four-letter text of DNA--knows that the logic of the incantation

is rapidly permeating the fabric of our lives.

    And it's precisely this logic that provides the real magic in a place like

LambdaMOO--not the fictive trappings of voodoo and shapeshifting and wizardry,

but the conflation of speech and act that's inevitable in any computer-mediated

world, be it Lambda or the increasingly wired world at large.  This is

dangerous magic, to be sure, a potential threat--if misconstrued or

misapplied--to our always precarious freedoms of expression, and as someone who

lives by his words I do not take the threat lightly.  And yet, on the other

hand, I can no longer convince myself that our wishful insulation of language

from the realm of action has ever been anything but a valuable kludge, a

philosophically damaged stopgap against oppression that would just have to do

till something truer and more elegant came along.

    Am I wrong to think this truer, more elegant thing can be found on

LambdaMOO?  Perhaps, but I continue to seek it there, sensing its presence just

beneath the surface of every interaction.  I have even thought, as I said, that

discussing with Dr. Jest our shared experience of the workings of the MOO might

help me in my search.  But when that notion first occurred to me, I still felt

somewhat intimidated by his lingering criminal aura, and I hemmed and hawed a

good long time before finally resolving to drop him MOO-mail requesting an

interview.  By then it was too late.  For reasons known only to himself,

Dr. Jest had stopped logging in.  Maybe he'd grown bored with the MOO.  Maybe

the loneliness of ostracism had gotten to him.  Maybe a psycho whim had carried

him far away or maybe he'd quietly acquired a third character and started life

over with a cleaner slate.

    Wherever he'd gone, though, he left behind the room he'd created for

himself--a treehouse ``tastefully decorated'' with rare-book shelves, an

operating table, and a life-size William S.  Burroughs doll--and he left it

unlocked.  So I took to checking in there occasionally, and I still do from

time to time.  I head