They said he raped them that night. - Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community

Yakk · 06-30-2004, 12:54 PM

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They say he raped them that night. They say he did it with a cunning little doll, fashioned in their image and imbued with the power to make them do whatever he desired. They say that by manipulating the doll he forced them to have sex with him, and with each other, and to do horrible, brutal things to their own bodies. And though I wasn't there that night, I think I can assure you that what they say is true, because it all happened right in the living room -- right there amid the well-stocked bookcases and the sofas and the fireplace -- of a house I came later to think of as my second home.
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Where does speech end and action begin?

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[...]
For whatever else these thoughts were telling me, I have come to hear in them an announcement of the final stages of our decades-long passage into the Information Age, a paradigm shift that the classic liberal firewall between word and deed (itself a product of an earlier paradigm shift commonly known as the Enlightenment) is not likely to survive intact. After all, anyone the least bit familiar with the workings of the new era's definitive technology, the computer, knows that it operates on a principle impracticably difficult to distinguish from the pre-Enlightenment principle of the magic word: the commands you type into a computer are a kind of speech that doesn't so much communicate as make things happen, directly and ineluctably, the same way pulling a trigger does. They are incantations, in other words, and anyone at all attuned to the technosocial megatrends of the moment -- from the growing dependence of economies on the global flow of intensely fetishized words and numbers to the burgeoning ability of bioengineers to speak the spells written in the four-letter text of DNA -- knows that the logic of the incantation is rapidly permeating the fabric of our lives.
[...]

(more in article)

The article is long, but worth the read.

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[...]
"Mostly voodoo dolls are amusing," wrote exu on the evening after Bungle's rampage, posting a public statement to the widely read in-MOO mailing list called *social-issues, a forum for debate on matters of import to the entire populace. "And mostly I tend to think that restrictive measures around here cause more trouble than they prevent. But I also think that Mr. Bungle was being a vicious, vile fuckhead, and I...want his sorry ass scattered from #17 to the Cinder Pile. I'm not calling for policies, trials, or better jails. I'm not sure what I'm calling for. Virtual castration, if I could manage it. Mostly, [this type of thing] doesn't happen here. Mostly, perhaps I thought it wouldn't happen to me. Mostly, I trust people to conduct themselves with some veneer of civility. Mostly, I want his ass."

Months later, the woman in Seattle would confide to me that as she wrote those words posttraumatic tears were streaming down her face -- a real-life fact that should suffice to prove that the words' emotional content was no mere fiction. The precise tenor of that content, however, its mingling of murderous rage and eyeball-rolling annoyance, was a curious amalgam that neither the RL nor the VR facts alone can quite account for. Where virtual reality and its conventions would have us believe that exu and Moondreamer were brutally raped in their own living room, here was the victim exu scolding Mr. Bungle for a breach of "civility." Where real life, on the other hand, insists the incident was only an episode in a free-form version of Dungeons and Dragons, confined to the realm of the symbolic and at no point threatening any player's life, limb, or material well-being, here now was the player exu issuing aggrieved and heartfelt calls for Mr. Bungle's dismemberment. Ludicrously excessive by RL's lights, woefully understated by VR's, the tone of exu's response made sense only in the buzzing, dissonant gap between them.
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fernweh · 06-30-2004, 02:10 PM

Good article, but something worth noting is that this was first published in the Village Voice over ten years ago... I think that part of the shock that this caused was due to the fact that the internet was a relatively new medium back then and nobody had thought of this before. Nowadays, whenever it happens in a MUD or MOO or anything, it's just seen as the equivalent of someone shouting out obsenities or insults; someone being an a-hole, but not really hurting anything.

Apropos, there's a MMORPG coming out soon where rape is a feature of the game just like stealing and killing are parts of most RPGs. It's currently in beta, in case anyone's curious, and the site is here (nsfw)http://www.sociolotron.com

MSD · 06-30-2004, 09:18 PM

fernweh, I fixed your link

SinisterMotives · 07-01-2004, 07:42 PM

Fascinating reading. As both a programmer and a student of metaphysics, I've often drawn the analogy between computer programs and magical incantations myself. There may be something to the author's assertion that the distinction between word and action - and even that between thought and action - is completely arbitrary. The New Testament writers seemed to be hinting at something along those lines: for example, when they equate committing adultery in one's heart with committing adultery in fact; or when the first chapter of the Gospel of John states that the Word (i.e., Christ) is both the Creator in physical form and the medium through which physical reality was created.

Publius · 07-05-2004, 04:59 PM

Hehe I see that someone went and pulled up this old article again. Well I wasn’t there when it all happened either, but I did hear about it and I have been to the seen of the crime as I was part of this community for awhile. The place was/is LambdaMOO and it is still around. If you never experienced a MOO before drop by sometime and check it out, but be nice because they don’t take kindly to visitors with attitudes.

http://www.lambdamoo.info/

SinisterMotives · 07-05-2004, 06:45 PM

It's amazing that it's still around. You'd think text-based MUDs would be defunct now that 3D graphical communities like Active Worlds have been around for several years.

06-30-2004, 02:10 PM	#2 (permalink)
fernweh Crazy Location: San Francisco	Good article, but something worth noting is that this was first published in the Village Voice over ten years ago... I think that part of the shock that this caused was due to the fact that the internet was a relatively new medium back then and nobody had thought of this before. Nowadays, whenever it happens in a MUD or MOO or anything, it's just seen as the equivalent of someone shouting out obsenities or insults; someone being an a-hole, but not really hurting anything. Apropos, there's a MMORPG coming out soon where rape is a feature of the game just like stealing and killing are parts of most RPGs. It's currently in beta, in case anyone's curious, and the site is here (nsfw)http://www.sociolotron.com __________________ f-e-r-n-w-e-h is actually a gross misspelling of the name "gregory" Last edited by MSD; 06-30-2004 at 09:18 PM..

06-30-2004, 09:18 PM	#3 (permalink)
MSD The sky calls to us ... Super Moderator Location: CT	fernweh, I fixed your link

07-01-2004, 07:42 PM	#4 (permalink)
SinisterMotives Junkie	Fascinating reading. As both a programmer and a student of metaphysics, I've often drawn the analogy between computer programs and magical incantations myself. There may be something to the author's assertion that the distinction between word and action - and even that between thought and action - is completely arbitrary. The New Testament writers seemed to be hinting at something along those lines: for example, when they equate committing adultery in one's heart with committing adultery in fact; or when the first chapter of the Gospel of John states that the Word (i.e., Christ) is both the Creator in physical form and the medium through which physical reality was created.

07-05-2004, 04:59 PM	#5 (permalink)
Publius Crazy Location: Never Never Land	Hehe I see that someone went and pulled up this old article again. Well I wasn’t there when it all happened either, but I did hear about it and I have been to the seen of the crime as I was part of this community for awhile. The place was/is LambdaMOO and it is still around. If you never experienced a MOO before drop by sometime and check it out, but be nice because they don’t take kindly to visitors with attitudes. http://www.lambdamoo.info/

07-05-2004, 06:45 PM	#6 (permalink)
SinisterMotives Junkie	It's amazing that it's still around. You'd think text-based MUDs would be defunct now that 3D graphical communities like Active Worlds have been around for several years.