After reading this piece, what stood out for me the most was the reality of the “virtual reality” that the participants of LambdaMOO had created. Let me explain. It seems like the “virtual reality” should be an escape, where the constraints and problems of the world we live in today wouldn’t apply. Yet the character Legba cried real “posttraumatic tears” after she was virtually raped. Even though the woman playing the character Legba was in no way physically threatened or hurt, she was still emotionally distraught. The “virtual” experience affected her in the real world.
One her experience, Julian Dibbell wrote, “perhaps the body in question is not the physical one at all, but its psychic double, the bodylike self-representation we carry around in our heads.” Thus I believe Dibbell is suggesting that what was really violated was Legba’s internal representation of herself. That was what she had projected onto her online character, that that representation had been violated with her online character.
Dibbell further writes that “what happens in a MUD-made world is neither exactly real nor exactly make-believe, but profoundly, compellingly, and emotionally meaningful.” Thus I believe he means that the reality of the symbolic “virtual” experience might be in the emotions it can cause. This emotional connection could be what links the online experience and the everyday world we live in, as it could be what made Legaba’s experience real to her.
Much of our emotional reality seems to be symbolically represented anyway. Dibbell writes that “sex is never so much an exchange of fluids as it is an exchange of signs.” To me, he questions whether the physical act of sex or the emotional connotations that those physical acts signify make sex enjoyable. So sex might be an exchange of symbols, just as any interaction online is also an exchange of symbols.
To me, this emotional connection is shown in how Legaba’s online world is different from a video game. Although both involve virtual worlds, in a video game one can kill or sexually experiment with all of the virtual characters he or she wants, without any consequences. But in the MUD scenario, real people can actually become emotionally hurt. Even though a player might initially not be able to tell the difference between a virtual reality full of well-programmed computers and one full of real people, the emotional component of our online representations I think allows us to connect with other human “characters,” and it also makes us responsible for how we treat those other characters. The world may be on a computer, but it can still be meaningful emotionally. In the online representation we just have to convey emotions through symbolic words and cultural phrases instead of physical emotional expressions and gestures, as we would in everyday communication.