Virtual v. Real: One world

Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2007/06/15/magazine/20070617_AVATAR_SLIDESHOW_11.html

Virtual realities, for many, are alternatives to the everyday "boringness" of life. They are a scape from the real world and what we do not like about it, our worries, commitments, own and other's wickedness...

Interaction is free of the attachments of the physical body, you can be whoever you want, do whatever you want, be wherever you want--morality an inherent, tacit, albeit unsupervised structure in which users find their way through these "law-less," "government-less" worlds by instinct and their own pre-assumed real life standards and rules of conduct.

Inside these multi-user dimensions (MUDs), users are able--or believe they are--to interact not only without the constraints of social standards and stereotypes, but also without the usual wariness and distrust of others. So when a case of virtual rape occurs, the initial shock of having something that seems confined to the real world happen in your virtual reality becomes an urge to establish rules to govern the same freedom that may have caught your attention in the first place.

Dr. Bombay's rape narrative in LambdaMOO, besides being at times gruesome and scary, touches on several points. First, the possible and understandable physicality of virtual worlds where, even if only through words, users are still more than able to experiment desires, needs, pain and a myriad of emotions--both good and bad.

The narrator of the story characterizes what happens in virtual worlds as "true," and indeed, as I mentioned in my post on avatars, one's real self gets so enmeshed into our virtual living that what happens in one world irremediably affects the other. The narrator describes this phenomenon when he says that "what happens inside a MUD-made world is neither exactly real nor exactly make-believe, but nonetheless profoundly, compellingly, and emotionally true." Our reactions to events in one world are extrapolated and mimicked in similar situations in the other world.

Second, the situation that the virtual rape produced was so unprecedented yet so in need of a solution that users, despite the freedom inherent in virtual worlds and the initial desire to distance from the real world, ended up demanding resolutions logical in the real world, recognizing the ultimate need to create governing standards and platforms that regulate conduct inside their virtual world. The outcry for punishing Bungle, the perpetrator, was such that users began, in a sense, merging the real world with its virtual counterpart, withering boundaries and compressing degrees of separation.

What happened in LambdaMOO, the way it played out and was resolved are more evidence that, no matter how much different we believe (and want) virtual worlds to be, as they are irremediable run and used by humans, they end up being not a second life, an alternative self in a different world, but just an extension of users and their own lives. It is precisely those who, seeking a escape from real life, brought reality to the virtual world.