A Rape in Cyberspace

I kind wish we would have read this before our baptism by fire into LambdaMoo. I think it would have helped me develop a more concrete context from which to understand the whole MOO phenomena. Now after rading the article, I think I can appreciate it a little more. People really get into this stuff---it means something to them. Though in reality the occurrences of the MOO may be nothing more than the scroll of individual fantasy across a monitor, the interactions of of those individual fantasies seem to have very real consequences. In the case of this article, a few people felt so abused by Mr. Bungle it resulted in his eventual VR banishment. Death by toading, as humorous as it sounds and seems to be to me, is apparently its serious business. Mr. Bungle might have been a fantasy, but "he" was some one's fantasy; the object of some one's creative will. The product of some one's mind Mr. Bungle was effectively squashed, erased, expelled from existence...dead. Big deal right, he just reincarnated himself into a new character and re-assumed his place in VR of LambdaMOO. So, for me at least, the whole point of this and any other analogous example, is that symbolism means something. Take the assault and following execution to be prime examples of this consequentialism. It matters because symbolism, as its discussed here, exists in the realm between VR and RL. This gray area intrudes upon both the VR and RL linking them and seperating them in the same instance ("conflation of speech and act in a computer mediated world").

All in all, the melodrama of Mr. Bungles leads me to believe that as revolting symbolic speech can be, we can't forget its ephemeral quality. On the same note, we also must be attentive of how close VR and RL get and insure that gray area remains an uneasy barrier between the two worlds. When VR and RL collide individuals often find themselves in big trouble.