This last weekend I logged on Ventrilo for the first time since August. Last night, then, I spent several bittersweet hours reminiscing about World of Warcraft with both real life friends and people who I know only as their WoW avatars. In recounting our fondest memories of the game, we never discussed boss strategies, PvP victories, or anything related to the actual game itself. Instead, all of our memories revolved around the people who played the game and the community they formed. We discussed guild politics and our relationships with people we have no way of ever contacting again. And we were thankful we no longer felt the urge to enter Azeroth every day, junkies hungry for our next fix, but were also deeply saddened by the fact that the game had changed, and in changing, forced us from it forever. It’s interesting how this game allowed us – people from wildly different backgrounds and places of origin – to build collective memories that we could share and laugh over just as easily as if they had really happened.

Of course, they did really happen. Not here in the flesh and blood world of reality or in the bits and bytes of a server farm in Irvine, California, but in the space between, where the real world and the virtual one met in our imaginations. Here, we built an honest-to-God community on the backbone of a game that wasn’t nearly as complex as it ensured us it was. There were haves and have-nots, celebrities famous and infamous, and a real sense of history on the Dark Iron server. Yes, for us, everything that happened there between orcs and elves was no less real than the bathroom breaks we took between raid bosses.

Perhaps you can understand, then, why the book My Tiny Life by Julian Dibbell is so close to my heart. Released in 1999, the book recounts Dibbell’s virtual life spent in LambdaMOO – think a MUD without those distracting game bits – as he lived through the MOO’s transformation from simple distraction to genuine community in late 1993 and early 1994. Back then, the Internet was frighteningly new territory still being mapped out by its most enterprising pioneers. Despite the medium’s infancy and rough edges, however, Dibbell found in LambdaMOO the very essence of the online experience, and wrote with such clarity, poise, and an honest sense of curiosity about topics we take for granted today – gender issues in a genderless world, the power of text in a world forged entirely from it, the differences between community and society – that anyone with even a passing interest in virtual worlds owes it to themselves to read this book.

Thankfully, you can do so entirely free of charge. Just last month, Dibbell released the book as a free PDF. And while spending hours hunched over a computer screen reading the book’s 300+ pages is far from comfortable, it just feels right. The book deserves to exist in the murky waters between real world object and its virtual representation. At its core, My Tiny Life explores the distinction between real and virtual spaces. Events in real life are written in the style of LambdaMOO’s scrolling text while the happenings of virtual reality are recorded in traditional prose, and as the book progresses, Dibbell’s real and virtual lives continue to overlap, becoming increasingly inseparable.

The book opens with the virtual rape of exu, a longtime player who would eventually rise to be one of LambdaMOO’s most influential political figures. In the aftermath of this violent act against her, the community of LambdaMOO rallies against her attacker, and in doing so places the destiny of the MOO firmly in their hands. Mr. Bungle, the cum-stained clown that publicly raped exu is toaded – the MOO equivalent of execution – and his death marks the beginning of LambdaMOO’s evolution from virtual playground to virtual reality. Dibbell becomes good friends with exu and a handful of other MOOers, spending upwards of twenty-five hours a week logged in LambdaMOO in the name of “research,” but mostly because he wants to. Exu confides in Dibbell that her virtual rape caused her to shed real world tears, and Dibbell comes to realize that LambdaMOO is just as real as his New York apartment.

Throughout the book, Dibbell provides his insight on the issues facing the digital age, waxing philosophical on virtual sex, economics, and politics. Feeling he’s at a watershed moment in history – virtual or otherwise – Dibbell sets about leaving his mark on this virtual space, even if it may not survive to see the next millennium. He begins construction on the Garden of Forking Paths, a virtually physical representation of the I Ching, an ancient Chinese book of wisdom and fate. He goes to great lengths to decipher LambdaMOO’s tangled history, tracing the existence of virtual worlds back to the first maps and board games and detailing the events of LambdaMOO’s Schmoo War, but also places the MOO and the sort of text-based online spaces it represents in the context of history itself. As one former player describes it to him, the MOOers of the early ‘90s were not unlike the first explorers of the New World, blazing the trails that the journalists and documenters like Dibbell would later follow.

Throughout My Tiny Life, Dibbell provides valuable commentary on lives both virtual and real, and the struggle in leading one of each. His insight hits particularly close to home, but he writes with such clarity that even someone unaware of exactly what the Internet is – as many readers undoubtedly were at the time of the book’s first publishing – will understand the complex issues at stake in building a virtual world out of thin air. This is a book that should be required reading for anyone using the Internet today. Though many of its questions have been asked many times over since its publishing, I’ve never found better answers than the ones Dibbell provides.

LambdaMOO is still online and operational, though not nearly as many people call it home today as in 1993. Connecting to the MOO is as simple as opening TELNET and inputting the address. No new laws have been proposed since 2005, and during my time online this morning I could only find a couple of AFK users, though admittedly, the interface is too archaic for my GUI-indoctrinated mind to fully grasp. Stepping foot in the virtual living room of LambdaMOO described at so many points throughout the book for myself, I could almost sense the power the place must have held over a decade ago, as college students and corporate researchers found themselves face-to-face with a fully-realized virtual world. I’m reminded of the first time I stepped foot into Azeroth, an orc green in skin and sensibility, unaware of the real power a virtual place could hold over me and forty or so of my closest friends.

I played some Star Fox Adventures today. About five hours worth, to be exact. I hadn’t played the game since the weekend I bought it and subsequently played through it, back in 2002. The game is still graphically very impressive and proof positive that the last console generation ended too early. Anyway, I wanted to write about Star Fox Adventures being indicative of Nintendo 64-era Rareware as a whole and a symbol for the relationship between Nintendo and the British developer. I had also planned to categorize the various widgets and wingdings players collect along the way. I still can, I guess.

As you can imagine, the game wasn’t holding my attention. I would play for a while, take a break to take a shower or look up Japanese Beast Wars Neo characters on Wikipedia, and then play a little more. I’d just pause the game and leave it running, never bothering to turn the GameCube off or actually save my progress. Imagine my surprise when I returned from one such diversion to find that the game had returned to the title screen. With no explanation in sight, I’ll just take this as a sign from the almighty.

Star Fox Adventures isn’t a good game. I’ve collected enough pukpuk eggs, bafomdads, and blue grubtubs to last a lifetime. Actually, now that I’m thinking about all the mean things I could say about this (five-year-old) game (that nobody would care about), I might just go ahead and write my Star Fox Adventures update anyway. This update basically would have served as an excuse to post the following picture regardless of whether or not my game ate itself.

Never one to wallow long in defeat, I quickly moved on to equally productive activities:

My fingernail on my right ring finger had a little discoloration stemming from a recent finger wounding. I just clipped my fingernail, removing the discolored bit.

It all just clumps together and rolls up.

Live the Katamari life. It is a game.

She came in from the outer edge tired and full of pain (though she did have that one good day back in 2004). None of us could look her in the eye for fear of losing ourselves or increasing our insurance premiums. She had come here to drown us with her sorrow and wouldn’t clean up our kitchen after she used it.

I figured my immune system could use the workout.

Hello, and welcome to 2007.

We cool, we slow down. Things aren’t quite the way they used to be. We don’t understand the young people anymore (though, really, when did we ever?). The hairline recedes and the waistline expands. We outlive our friends.

In these, our twilight years.

Filthy secret: I love Safeway sushi.

Have a page of cats.

Oddly enough, I visit this site several times per day. It’s my homepage, you see. Generally as soon as I fire up ye olde browser I will immediately click off to go find something I actually want to read, but the momentary imprint of the DORK Club header is enough to ensure that I don’t forget it exists. That, and I’m far too lazy to change my homepage to something else.. even if I wanted to.

I’ve been reading the same Piyonugget updates for most of a year, now. Sometimes I clean out the spam bots from the forums.

Wedge55 is absent.

(at the bottom I used to have links)