How Much Can You Handle?

It was interesting to read the article by Julian Dibbell about the LambdaMOO situation with Mr. Bungel/Dr. Jest and how people reacted to this virtual reality. In this case, it was a bit of an extreme and a little disturbing to read, but opened my eyes to how people can engulf themselves into a scenario that may not be physically real. Because the occurrence happened online, it still affected the users mentally in such a way that they had to do something about it. I can’t even imagine if I would have been able to handle that situation very well, just because I don’t understand why a person really has to do anything so terrible in the first place.

But to take this reading and apply to it to something outside of the MOO, such as video games that takes place in a virtual world, there is a different expectation involved in response to the “actions” made in each session. Killing a person, you would think, would be equivalent to the rape involved in the MOO, but why doesn’t anyone from the game protest like they did in there? Somehow we can separate this in our minds, but does that mean we don’t see killing a person really that big of a deal?

I suppose it just shows you how sensitive we are to particular actions, whether it be in VR or RL. We just need to remember that just because we are hidden behind these anonymous identities on the computer every time we get online, doesn’t mean that there isn’t someone out there who will test the waters to see how they can “abuse” people for whatever the reason may be for them to do it.