reviewed by J. Hartman

About half of this book consists of discussions of philosophy, politics, and sociology in a virtual community. The author's descriptions are telling and incisive, but his conclusions on these topics are unsurprising and may seem a little naive to anyone who's spent much time online. The social dynamics that he describes with occasional breathless surprise are mimicked (in various ways and to various degrees) on most mailing lists, newsgroups, and MUDs, and presumably in chat rooms and anywhere else that people communicate online.

However, the other half of this book, intermixed with the above, is a fascinating and personal exploration of sex, gender, and identity in an online community. It goes into more detail, and does so more insightfully, than any other such analysis I've seen. Most discussions of online gender identity are content to note that online personas are not necessarily who they appear to be; some go on to warn against getting emotionally involved with anyone online, or to give ridiculous lists of questions to ask to determine a potential online lover's RL (real life) gender. Dibbell bypasses all such issues by simply describing real people, their personas, and their interactions online; the truth about these personas and interactions is far more complex and interesting than the simplistic goals usually assigned to virtual cross-dressers.

Dibbell's writing has something of an academic slant, and he expects readers to be able to keep up. He mentions lit-crit theory early on ("you've read Foucault and [you can accept] the notion that sex is never so much an exchange of fluids as it is an exchange of signs"), and a little later notes that the virtual world is one "in which the social construction of reality [isn't] a matter merely of academic dogma but of basic physics." But he rarely goes overboard in such comments. He does wax rhapsodic at times: "...[I felt the MOO was] a creative form more radically democratic than any I was familiar with, and more meaningfully participatory than any critic of the alienating modern gap between artist and spectator could ever hope for." But for the most part I like his writing style a great deal.

The book opens with a revised version of an article Dibbell wrote for The Village Voice about an event that took place in LambdaMOO. For the uninitiated: LambdaMOO is a MOO, which is a particular kind of MUD. A MUD is a computer program that allows people to interact (via typed text) online in real time, by presenting textual descriptions of (imaginary) locations, objects, and people. You connect to a MUD via the Internet; the MUD presents you with a description of a room and the people and objects in that room; you describe the character/persona that represents you in this virtual world, and then you can interact with the other characters that represent other RL people who are connected to the MUD. Clear as mud? The book provides a more detailed explanation, including a summary of the history of MUDs and many examples of MUD interaction. (For those who've played in combat MUDs and/or roleplaying MUDs, note that LambdaMOO isn't like those -- the characters aren't necessarily identical to the people playing those characters, but the MOO is used as a social venue, like an elaborate chat room, rather than for adventures or interactive storytelling.)

The incident that sparked the Village Voice article involved one of the characters -- known as Mr. Bungle -- using a trick to make it appear that other characters were performing various sexual acts (some of them quite unpleasant) with him and with themselves. Within the context of the MOO's "reality" this act was nothing short of rape; but of course in an RL context it was nothing of the sort, merely words on a screen. The tension between these two contexts provides a theme that Dibbell returns to again and again throughout the book: the idea that the MOO exists at a level of reality somewhere between the entirely real solid world we live in, and the entirely imaginary fictional world of books or movies. The characters who people the MOO are not entirely fictional, but neither are they entirely real.

The cover copy suggests, inaccurately, that the "Bungle Affair" is the central focus of the book. Although echoes of the situation reverberate through the rest of the book, the real importance of that Village Voice article is that it led Dibbell to want to write a book about the MOO, which in turn led him to attempt to join the society he wanted to write about.

Unfortunately, where Dibbell's anthropological and journalistic approach shows through, his philosophical conclusions are largely uninteresting to anyone who's spent much time online. He wants to see this virtual place become a semi-utopian community; he discovers that building community, much less building a new society from the ground up, isn't as easy as it seems. Ho hum, say us jaded longtime Netjunkies. And he has an unfortunate tendency to imbue the events he describes with Epic Importance, to lose sight of the fact that they are, after all, interactions among a few people in a nonexistent world. But in so doing, he captures the tone of many online interactions perfectly; a sense of perspective is often the thing most lacking in online communities.

At any rate, Dibbell's journalistic objectivity fades when he's faced with the idea of sex in the virtual world. His discussions and experiences with this topic are complicated and enriched by his ongoing efforts outside the MOO to build and strengthen a RL relationship; chapters of "VR" (describing his online experiences) alternate with short chapters of "RL" (mostly describing discussions and problems with his SO, Jessica -- which are written in the form of MOO transcripts even though they take place in the real world).

He approaches the most interesting topic in the book by discussing the relationship between language and virtual reality: "Language, narrative, ritual -- all of these are engines for the creation of virtual realities..., for [they] allow two or more minds to occupy the same imaginary space." In his usage, "virtual reality" refers to the text-only world of the MOO. That term more commonly refers to visual worlds displayed with 3D graphics, but from Dibbell's point of view, the text on the screen provides at least as convincing an illusion of a real space as any graphical portrayal could convey.

From the idea of language constructing a virtual space, it's not such a big step to note that "...when it comes to sex, perhaps the body in question is not the physical one at all, but ... the bodylike self-representation we carry around in our heads -- and ... whether we present that body to another as a meat puppet or a word puppet is not nearly as significant as one might have thought." Dibbell meets many of the other citizens of LambdaMOO, and befriends several of them. He begins to observe how characters react to the fact that it's impossible to accurately determine a player's RL gender: "[S]elf-appointed gender police [were] just a deviation from a far more nuanced norm, in which players generally took for granted the marked fluidity of gender in VR, yet at the same time also tended to take at face value the virtual gender of whomever they were interacting with."

And there are many more genders available to MOO characters than there are in RL. A character can choose to present as male, female, hermaphrodite, neuter, plural, or "Spivak" (using the pronouns "e" and "em"), among others. About one of the players, a friend of Dibbell's whose usual character is a South American spirit named exu, Dibbell notes that "...exu's hermaphrodism ... shorted out the binary circuitry with which [other] players' minds processed gender, rendering the very notion blessedly, if temporarily, inapplicable. ... [exu commented,] 'People treated me as a me rather than as a gendered being.'"

Meanwhile, another of Dibbell's friends, a character known as Niacin, embarks on a series of fascinatingly ambiguous online sexual adventures. Niacin's player is, in RL, a heterosexual male; while playing a female character named Furie, he engages in an online liaison with another female-presenting character -- who, Niacin knows, might well also be played by a RL male, and who turns out to know that Furie is played by a RL male. Niacin discovers that he has a talent for presenting female character descriptions (his clothing descriptions are so spot-on that at least one male-presenting character says such descriptions "couldn't possibly be the work of a man"). He begins to seduce male-presenting characters whom he believes to be male in RL -- and yet, in RL he identifies neither as homosexual nor as transsexual.

Dibbell later describes another RL male, Finn, who presents as male and engages in netsex almost constantly while online. Finn's partners are invariably female-presenting, though fairly often they tell him during or after sex that they're males in RL. Finn is slightly disappointed at such revelations, but not terribly distressed: "...the point was not so much what sort of body sat at the other end of the connection -- it was rather, so far as Finn was concerned, what sort of text that body was capable of putting on your screen." Finn notes that netsex is "a 'writing exercise' that demanded a high degree of improvisatory precision"; Dibbell later comments, "In VR, it's the best writers who get laid." In fact, in his early days online, Finn concluded that "there were a lot of MOOers out there who could use some help with the subtle art of pulling off a virtually convincing roll in the hay." So he created a new character type, which had built-in commands for taking its clothing off and appearing nude...

Eventually, Dibbell delves deeper into the world of netsex, alienating Jessica and finding himself drawn to -- but I won't spoil his adventures and conclusions. Read the book to find out what he does and doesn't do, and why, and with whom.