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

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  • By the beginning of February 1991, I finally felt ready to make a public announcement of the existence of LambdaMOO; we had a small but thriving community, enough structure in the virtual world to give newcomers a starting point, a reference manual worth reading, and enough online "help" texts to answer most questions we thought a new user would ask. We got a fairly satisfying response, with lots of new users coming by to see what we'd been up to. We stopped being impressed when there were ten users online at the same time and started more often seeing numbers like 25 and 30. I thought we were huge beyond belief.
  • With an increase in population and popularity, though, also came an increase in problems; we had built up a set of tacit rules for gracious living on LambdaMOO and had never really noticed ourselves doing so. These newcomers didn't know our rules, didn't know our style, and didn't know the lessons we'd learned over the course of four months of birthing.
  • A player approached me one day to complain about how several of his objects had been moved about by other players without his permission; he asked me to find a way to let all the new players know what was considered acceptable and unacceptable behavior on LambdaMOO. The idea seemed pretty daunting to me, but he had a good point, so I wandered all over the MOO asking old-timers for examples of unwritten rules that ought to get writ. After a few days, I wrote the first draft of the "help manners" text that for a long time was the only written "law" that LambdaMOO had.
  • The "Case of the Lookalike Puppet." One character and another had had a falling out and one of them had, afterwards, created a MOO "puppet" with the same name and description as the other player. A puppet is a MOO object that acts much like a player (saying things, performing actions, etc.) but that is actually owned by and under the control of some other player. The player who was being imitated in this fashion was most upset that there was this doppelganger of them wandering the halls of LambdaMOO. They wanted the puppet renamed at the least, and preferably outright destroyed.
  • I agonized over the situation, I had long talks with both players, I took the problem home to my wife and argued both sides of it with her for hours, it seemed. I eventually worked out some sort of compromise (I forget the details now), but the case got me to thinking. What was going on here? What was happening to me? This was certainly not the kind of thing I had been used to doing as a programming language researcher. I was a hacker and not a judge, wasn't I?
  • In January of 1992, I had a memorable conversation with my lab manager. He suggested that after I'd fulfilled my commitments to the SchemeXerox project that I should consider going into "this MUD stuff" full time! It was clear to Mark, and becoming clear to me, that the work I was doing had a good chance of being important and, more significantly, it looked like there weren't any other computer scientists working in this area.
  • On the morning of April 1, 1992, when I first got to work, I checked out the transcript of my perpetual connection to LambdaMOO. Amid the usual paged questions and the like, there was a cryptic little message about how a major fire had just swept through the house. Curious, I began wandering around the core of LambdaHouse; it was marvelous. Clearly, some of my staff of wizards had been very busy preparing for this wonderful April Fool's Day hack.
  • At some point in my wanderings, a worried player paged me to say that it really, truly wasn't his fault, but he seemed suddenly to be a wizard! I didn't believe it, of course, but I checked it out just the same and discovered to my shock that it was true; when I inspected his player object, it clearly had the "wizard" bit on! He pointed to the latest article in the LambdaMOO newspaper; that article, written by my wizards, described the fire and said that, in order to hasten the repairs, all players had been made into wizards so that they could help out. I was utterly aghast.


Next page: Things Fall Apart; the Center Cannot Hold

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