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My Tiny Life: Crime and Passion in a Virtual World
Being a true account of the infamous Mr. Bungle and of the author's journey, in consequence thereof, to the heart of a half-real world called LambdaMoo. From In Cold Blood to Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, readers have been gripped by the novelistic rering of eccentric communities torn apart by violent crime. Julian Dibbell's reporting of the "Mr. Bungle" rape case first appeared as the cover story in The Village Voice. Since that time it has become a cause célèbre, cited as a landmark case in numerous books and articles and a source of less discussion on the Internet. That's because the scene of the crime was a "Multi-User Domain," an electronic "salon" where Internet junkies have created their own interactive fantasy realm. In a "place" where race, ger, and identity are infinitely malleable, the addictive denizens had thought they'd escaped all traditional cultural and moral limits. Yet Mr. Bungle's primal transgression challenged all their illusions, confronting even this electronic utopia with the same issues of order and social norms that humanity has faced since the Stone Age. When this fantasy imbroglio threatens Dibbell's actual marriage, we see how the virtual world at once mirrors and mocks real life.
352 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1999
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Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews
July 30, 2007
Back when this book was first released, I would have rated it a bit higher. You see, I had a certain interest in the book because I was there for all of the events therein - only a bit player, but I know which of the entirely-changed aliases is me. It all seemed so important then, but with the passage of time it now seems pretty inconsequential.
This was the spiritual parent of Second Life. No graphics, sure, but it was the same animal. All the promises and pitfalls already happened fifteen years ago.
The book itself is interesting if you're curious about the study of online socialisation. For me, it's all a little too close.
This was the spiritual parent of Second Life. No graphics, sure, but it was the same animal. All the promises and pitfalls already happened fifteen years ago.
The book itself is interesting if you're curious about the study of online socialisation. For me, it's all a little too close.
January 16, 2011
A shame this book sat around unread for years. It's simply the best thing written on virtual sex and politics, and possibly the best thing *to* be written - which doesn't bode well for my doctoral thesis!
August 17, 2021
This is a very interesting book. There's a lot you can say about it -- pretentious, sure, overwrought, yeah, and there's purple prose on virtually every line. I don't think anyone can argue against these points. However, with that said, My Tiny Life is still a fascinating look into a period of online history that, in 2021, one might as well consider an extinct culture. While billed as a memoir, this book is practically an anthropological account, too.
While I was introduced to a section of this book in college (the chapter concerning Mr Bungle), I had been active within MUDs, MOOs, and MUSHes since I was an actual child. Gifted with a 56k modem and a love of both writing and performing, I found myself immersed in so many virtual worlds over the years, and Dibbell's text captures some of the feelings I had in my times there -- some of those feelings were startlingly powerful. To borrow a line from an article I've long since lost track of: it was like having memories of things that never happened to me.
My Tiny Life is a series of achronological vignettes telling an account of Dibbell's life within LambdaMOO, one of the first major online worlds. Essentially, the book is a virtual memoir and it touches on a lot of topics concerning nascent cybersocieties -- what is law-keeping in a virtual world, what is geography in a digital realm, what is identity where you can be whatever and whoever you want, do you fall for someone's avatar or the player behind it, and so on. These questions may seem pretentious or silly or unnecessary, but it's difficult to describe just how much the Internet has changed since the time Dibbell describes it unless you were there to see it.
Personally, I find Dibbell's purple prose an interesting approach at attempting to capture the fantastical, emotional intensity that could enrapture you like some magical spell if you found the right people in the right world. You could have the most incredible chemistry with people on the other side of the world who existed as nothing but lines on a screen! The term 'consensual hallucination' is very, very apt.
Now, whether that prose works or not, well, that depends on the reader in question. I can certainly understand the people who find it unbearable. I also enjoy Dibbell's depiction of the 'outside world' as if it were a MOO itself and I think that was a very effective way of demonstrating what a MOO was like without attempting to depict the MOO itself like that.
I've known some of the people who were featured within this book or were present as events unfolded. Some have said that Dibbell's account is not entirely accurate, but I don't think the novel ever purports to be. And given that the entire experience of MUDs and MUSHes is rooted in subjective experience, is that such a bad thing?
This book is practically a cultural artifact, documenting a time and place that no longer exists. Sure, LambdaMOO still exists -- but so does the Parthenon, but only an idiot would insist that the temple functions today as it did in antiquity.
The Internet changes fast, and the increasing prevalence and penetration of the Internet into every facet of our society killed worlds like LambdaMOO. It seems oxymoronic, but it's true. While these virtual worlds -- MOOs, MUSHes, and MUDs -- remain online, they are nothing like they used to be. Temples without their gods and without their worshippers.
To that end, I think Dibbell's book is a solid text that attempts to document and preserve that brief period in time where this type of bizarre, curious, wonderful Internet society flourished. If Dibbell's account was something academic, it would fail. But in order to enjoy and understand this text, you need to be willing to be carried away by his insistence that these virtual worlds were so awe-inspiring and transcendental.
Because in a way, they were.
While I was introduced to a section of this book in college (the chapter concerning Mr Bungle), I had been active within MUDs, MOOs, and MUSHes since I was an actual child. Gifted with a 56k modem and a love of both writing and performing, I found myself immersed in so many virtual worlds over the years, and Dibbell's text captures some of the feelings I had in my times there -- some of those feelings were startlingly powerful. To borrow a line from an article I've long since lost track of: it was like having memories of things that never happened to me.
My Tiny Life is a series of achronological vignettes telling an account of Dibbell's life within LambdaMOO, one of the first major online worlds. Essentially, the book is a virtual memoir and it touches on a lot of topics concerning nascent cybersocieties -- what is law-keeping in a virtual world, what is geography in a digital realm, what is identity where you can be whatever and whoever you want, do you fall for someone's avatar or the player behind it, and so on. These questions may seem pretentious or silly or unnecessary, but it's difficult to describe just how much the Internet has changed since the time Dibbell describes it unless you were there to see it.
Personally, I find Dibbell's purple prose an interesting approach at attempting to capture the fantastical, emotional intensity that could enrapture you like some magical spell if you found the right people in the right world. You could have the most incredible chemistry with people on the other side of the world who existed as nothing but lines on a screen! The term 'consensual hallucination' is very, very apt.
Now, whether that prose works or not, well, that depends on the reader in question. I can certainly understand the people who find it unbearable. I also enjoy Dibbell's depiction of the 'outside world' as if it were a MOO itself and I think that was a very effective way of demonstrating what a MOO was like without attempting to depict the MOO itself like that.
I've known some of the people who were featured within this book or were present as events unfolded. Some have said that Dibbell's account is not entirely accurate, but I don't think the novel ever purports to be. And given that the entire experience of MUDs and MUSHes is rooted in subjective experience, is that such a bad thing?
This book is practically a cultural artifact, documenting a time and place that no longer exists. Sure, LambdaMOO still exists -- but so does the Parthenon, but only an idiot would insist that the temple functions today as it did in antiquity.
The Internet changes fast, and the increasing prevalence and penetration of the Internet into every facet of our society killed worlds like LambdaMOO. It seems oxymoronic, but it's true. While these virtual worlds -- MOOs, MUSHes, and MUDs -- remain online, they are nothing like they used to be. Temples without their gods and without their worshippers.
To that end, I think Dibbell's book is a solid text that attempts to document and preserve that brief period in time where this type of bizarre, curious, wonderful Internet society flourished. If Dibbell's account was something academic, it would fail. But in order to enjoy and understand this text, you need to be willing to be carried away by his insistence that these virtual worlds were so awe-inspiring and transcendental.
Because in a way, they were.
January 22, 2008
One sentence summary: MUDs are pretty fucked up, man.
Definitely don't regret reading this one. Quite interesting and thought-provoking as a whole, but the writing is patchy. Mainly it suffers from the same problem actual MUD/MOO writing does: it's a party, and every goddamned florid adjective is invited.
Also the whole business seems just a touch corny, overwrought. I spent a decent amount of time MOOing in high school, and it just didn't seem so — I don't know — important as it's described here. Maybe that marks me as not being emotionally involved in texts as some people are. Maybe I just never got involved in all the gender play and tinysex and MOO politics that was apparently so rampant. Dunno.
Definitely don't regret reading this one. Quite interesting and thought-provoking as a whole, but the writing is patchy. Mainly it suffers from the same problem actual MUD/MOO writing does: it's a party, and every goddamned florid adjective is invited.
Also the whole business seems just a touch corny, overwrought. I spent a decent amount of time MOOing in high school, and it just didn't seem so — I don't know — important as it's described here. Maybe that marks me as not being emotionally involved in texts as some people are. Maybe I just never got involved in all the gender play and tinysex and MOO politics that was apparently so rampant. Dunno.
September 11, 2008
Life on MOOs. I couldn't read past the first chapter - the writing is so florid and hysterical. Plus, while I've been in an online community for years, I have a low tolerance for the creating-worlds-with-words stuff. I can barely stand it when someone posts "welcome to this conference; may I offer you a cookie?" or something cutesy like that.
Anyway, more than I cared to know about this particular subject. My loss.
Anyway, more than I cared to know about this particular subject. My loss.
December 24, 2008
I did quite a bit of MUSHing back in the day, although not on any of the servers described in this book. After reading it, I went and checked some of them out... most are still up and running, and I even ran into some of the people from the book. Unfortunately, I just don't have the kind of time and temperament for this sort of thing anymore. But I remember it fondly.
July 26, 2007
This place really exists.
Take it from someone who, like Julian Dibbell, has spent too many hours to count there.
Even if his book is (according to oldtimers) not entirely accurate- it's still a good read, and an interesting history of online relationships, communities, etc.
Take it from someone who, like Julian Dibbell, has spent too many hours to count there.
Even if his book is (according to oldtimers) not entirely accurate- it's still a good read, and an interesting history of online relationships, communities, etc.
July 8, 2022
The content was so fascinating, and Dibbell has a great sense of structure--I love the way he can make anecdotes reveal themselves in layers, peeling back one complication and the next until we can see the whole truth. Ultimately, though, although the content saw me through to the end, I can't pretend to enjoy Dibbell's prose. He implements the occasional inspired turn-of-phrase, but mostly it's overly florid, trying hard almost to the point of self-consciousness. I wonder if he thinks he needs all these flourishes to make his reader take his topic seriously. I don't think that's true now--although perhaps it was when this first came out, I wouldn't know, I was 2--and it did take me out of what was otherwise an exceptionally interesting reading experience.
3.5/5
3.5/5
December 21, 2013
I expected that if this book was any good, it would trigger within me some combination of nostalgia and melancholy that--according to the Internet--is best described by the Welsh word "hiraeth." I expected this because this was the sensation that I experienced in my own time on LambdaMOO (among other such sites), and I expected that if this book was any good, it would evoke those memories in a highly specific way.
I did not, I should note, expect it to be any good.
To my surprise, however, it is good--at least reasonably so--and it did not evoke this feeling. Perhaps that's because it so thoroughly documents the author's own struggle with that same sensation, during his time in the half-world that was a textual virtual reality before there were better options. And while there are a lot of criticisms to be leveled over the veracity of the information presented here--for instance, the author's 3 months of study rates him as nothing more than a tourist, and it has been noted in the intervening years that the pivotal event of his original Village Voice article was nothing more than a hoax organized, at least in part, by the supposed victim, with whom he claims to be close friends ...
Well, whatever. Julian Dibbell's understanding of the subject matter might not be the best, is all I'm saying. Nevertheless, he weaves a decent story, and manages to capture my nostalgia without inflicting it upon me, for which I am, surprisingly, grateful.
I'd recommend this book to anyone who was there, whether they wind up liking it or not, for the simple reason that they were there--they should know what history has recorded. I don't know if I can, in good conscience, recommend it to anyone else.
I did not, I should note, expect it to be any good.
To my surprise, however, it is good--at least reasonably so--and it did not evoke this feeling. Perhaps that's because it so thoroughly documents the author's own struggle with that same sensation, during his time in the half-world that was a textual virtual reality before there were better options. And while there are a lot of criticisms to be leveled over the veracity of the information presented here--for instance, the author's 3 months of study rates him as nothing more than a tourist, and it has been noted in the intervening years that the pivotal event of his original Village Voice article was nothing more than a hoax organized, at least in part, by the supposed victim, with whom he claims to be close friends ...
Well, whatever. Julian Dibbell's understanding of the subject matter might not be the best, is all I'm saying. Nevertheless, he weaves a decent story, and manages to capture my nostalgia without inflicting it upon me, for which I am, surprisingly, grateful.
I'd recommend this book to anyone who was there, whether they wind up liking it or not, for the simple reason that they were there--they should know what history has recorded. I don't know if I can, in good conscience, recommend it to anyone else.
March 18, 2010
Aleks Krotoski, broadcaster, journalist, and academic specialising in technology and interactivity, has chosen to discuss Julian Dibbell’s
My Tiny Life: Crime and Passion in a Virtual World
on FiveBooks as one of the top five on her subject - Virtual Living, saying that:
"...The first chapter is his first-person perspective of how an online text-based community called LambdaMOO created what’s described as a ‘consensual hallucination’. LambdaMOO was a very early online community, just after the web started, populated initially by idealists who thought: right, we’ll reject what we have offline and create this utopian society online. It documents how this idealistic society moved from being this utopian ideal into an environment in which people decided that they needed regulations, they needed rules, they needed very fixed community structures.
The full interview is available here: http://five-books.com/interviews/aleks-krotoski
"...The first chapter is his first-person perspective of how an online text-based community called LambdaMOO created what’s described as a ‘consensual hallucination’. LambdaMOO was a very early online community, just after the web started, populated initially by idealists who thought: right, we’ll reject what we have offline and create this utopian society online. It documents how this idealistic society moved from being this utopian ideal into an environment in which people decided that they needed regulations, they needed rules, they needed very fixed community structures.
The full interview is available here: http://five-books.com/interviews/aleks-krotoski
July 20, 2017
An inside look at LambdaMOO, an early 90s online community. Fascinating in terms of the detail, and particularly how closely the issues that beset LambdaMOO map onto today's online experience: male hostility and verbal violence towards women in online discourse; the fluidity of gender and sexuality when anyone can be who they choose; pronoun choice for non-binary individuals; and the inflation of virtual currencies (including an accidental but entirely accurate prediction of the economics of FIFA Ultimate Team).
Where the book fails is in the prose, which is florid and flabby. The author acknowledges the influence of Cormac McCarthy in the afterword - a different Cormac, surely, since the writer of No Country For Old Men could not inspire these meandering, nails-on-a-blackboard sentences. Through the prose comes the insipid character of the author, who presents himself as pretentious, repressed and desperate for others to acknowledge his intelligence. Also from the prose comes the pace, or rather lack of it. The book is a slog.
If you can accommodate yourself to the writing and to the author's presentation (I'd grown almost fond of him by the end) there is plenty of detail to engage with about a forgotten world that bears a striking resemblance to our own.
Where the book fails is in the prose, which is florid and flabby. The author acknowledges the influence of Cormac McCarthy in the afterword - a different Cormac, surely, since the writer of No Country For Old Men could not inspire these meandering, nails-on-a-blackboard sentences. Through the prose comes the insipid character of the author, who presents himself as pretentious, repressed and desperate for others to acknowledge his intelligence. Also from the prose comes the pace, or rather lack of it. The book is a slog.
If you can accommodate yourself to the writing and to the author's presentation (I'd grown almost fond of him by the end) there is plenty of detail to engage with about a forgotten world that bears a striking resemblance to our own.
January 25, 2010
This was an interesting read. While I missed out on MUDs...I became quite involved with the first MMORPGS (Asheron's Call, Everquest)back in the late 90s. This book was a bit of a trip down memory lane. Indeed, many of the social, political, and sexual elements of the book were (and I imagine are) manifested on MMORPGS today. This book would have been a fascinating read back when it was first published. As it stands, it is an interesting glimpse into the early "net" before it became mainstream.
February 1, 2008
While the writing style leaves much to be desired, this is a wonderfully noble effort to capture the magic of lambdaMOO.
December 22, 2008
An interesting book. Sort of a cautionary tale about getting too involved with one's work and the virtual world. Mirrors some of my experiences with early text-based role-playing.
July 4, 2010
A fascinating insight into something that at the time seemed extraordinarily odd and barely worth talking about - the geekiest end of virtual worlds and gaming.
April 16, 2012
I liked it but it was also a bit creepy.
February 6, 2023
Back to the age of text-based virtual reality, Dibbell writes an extraordinary chronicle.
March 15, 2025
I don't know how this book, came to be on my TBR, but it was an interesting glimpse into this phenomenon, via the author's several-month immersion into the community known as LambdaMOO.
My first taste of the internet was in the mid-'90s, approximately. America Online discs would periodically appear in the mail and we did try it out, once or twice. My brother, however, found cheaper, local dial-up for us, and we used Trumpet Winsock to connect (thank you, many times over, to Peter Tattam, the wizard who developed that. Sorry to read that you got pretty much no compensation for it).
Anyway, this seems to have been the right time for MUDs and MOOs and all that embryonic virtual reality, but I was in high school, my brother in upper elementary, and I think it just wasn't our age group. (The author mentions that these environs were popular for college students, and most of the other personalities in this book also appear to skew older, so maybe we didn't know because no one told us).
Sure, I've heard about them, these nascent virtual communities where people met and created and even fell in love, all through the medium of text (and maybe some ASCII art, which is also based in words and letters . . .) I played a little Zork back in the day, the text-based adventure game.
But I wasn't there to experience this. I don't know how this book, My Tiny Life: Crime and Passion in a Virtual World, came to be on my TBR, but it was an interesting glimpse into this phenomenon, via the author's several-month immersion into the community known as LambdaMOO.
More on my Substack.
My first taste of the internet was in the mid-'90s, approximately. America Online discs would periodically appear in the mail and we did try it out, once or twice. My brother, however, found cheaper, local dial-up for us, and we used Trumpet Winsock to connect (thank you, many times over, to Peter Tattam, the wizard who developed that. Sorry to read that you got pretty much no compensation for it).
Anyway, this seems to have been the right time for MUDs and MOOs and all that embryonic virtual reality, but I was in high school, my brother in upper elementary, and I think it just wasn't our age group. (The author mentions that these environs were popular for college students, and most of the other personalities in this book also appear to skew older, so maybe we didn't know because no one told us).
Sure, I've heard about them, these nascent virtual communities where people met and created and even fell in love, all through the medium of text (and maybe some ASCII art, which is also based in words and letters . . .) I played a little Zork back in the day, the text-based adventure game.
But I wasn't there to experience this. I don't know how this book, My Tiny Life: Crime and Passion in a Virtual World, came to be on my TBR, but it was an interesting glimpse into this phenomenon, via the author's several-month immersion into the community known as LambdaMOO.
More on my Substack.
January 4, 2008
Book club selection
March 21, 2015
Oh, and you thought MapleDrama was new.
:D
DL version at www.lulu.com/content/1070691
:D
DL version at www.lulu.com/content/1070691
December 23, 2008
Couldn't get past 10 pages. A virtual character using a virtual voodoo doll to virtually rape another virtual character...is it really that serious???
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
January 25, 2009
not exactly what i expected it to be, but has an interesting insight into the early addictions to the virtual world...
May 22, 2024
awful good fun.
Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews