Learn how one of the first virtual worlds ballooned into a real-life nightmare,

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  • It was late in September 1990 when I found the "alpha test MOO" running on a machine named "belch" in Berkeley. Stephen (aka Ghondahrl aka ghond) had set up this site so that he and others could test out his creation as it was being written and refined. It wasn't perfect, of course (what language is?), but he seemed to have made many fewer of the mistakes made by most language-design amateurs. I wrote few simple MOO programs of my own, trying to recreate in MOO some of my favorite puzzles from Zork, and decided after a few days that it would be fun to work with Stephen on the future evolution of his language.
  • By the end of October, I had added a number of new features, fixed a number of bugs, and gotten hungry to try out my new version of the program on others. For my earlier MUD visits, I had used the name "Lambda" for myself; it was a major keyword in the Scheme programming language that I had been working in for so long and so it naturally sprang to mind when first I was prompted for a character name. I now decided to use "LambdaMOO" as the name for my revision of Stephen's MOO server, since it was "Lambda's MOO".
  • I remember, in particular, one evening's conversation early in my tenure there; I chatted for quite some time with three other folks and it became clear after a while that two of them, named Gemba and Gary_Severn, must know each other outside of this electronic context. I was shocked to discover that Gemba and Gary were actually connected from the Australian National University and that the third other person was sitting at a terminal in Israel! It was only then that the geographic scope of MUD participation began to dawn on me.
  • During the earliest days of LambdaMOO, through the beginning of 1991, everything was fascinating every day. The technical work was fascinating as Gary, Gemba, and I tried to build the core libraries of MOO programming. The collaborative feel of it was fascinating as we worked closely together from our separate offices thousands of miles apart. The creativity was fascinating as I laid out the core geography of the LambdaMOO mansion (based on the layout of my real-life house). But most fascinating of all was what was happening all around and through me: a community was forming inside this computer program, a community with hundreds of people, all learning about LambdaMOO by word of mouth and coming to see what it was about.
  • Of course, not everyone was so nice or so constructive, though it took quite a while before this became clear. I think it was at least a few months into LambdaMOO's existence before the "Penn State a**holes" came calling. Two connections arrived nearly simultaneously, both from computers at Penn State University, and the log showed the player names these two new users had chosen for themselves: vulgar terms for parts of the female anatomy, words I wouldn't have repeated to my mother. By the time I joined them in the "Living Room," they were both typing "F*** YOU" over and over again, to the annoyance of all present. Later that day, in a black mood, I wrote the first version of the LambdaMOO "@toad" command, for permanently destroying a user's character and all of its possessions. Some of the shine was off the apple, never to return.


Next page: LambdaMOO Faces the World, and Vice Versa

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