TatooineMOO

I found A Rape in Cyberspace to be downright intriguing. I don’t know how many people were regulars on LambdaMOO at the time of the incident, but it seems like most of them were either in the very room or attended the meeting afterwards. To me, it is remarkable that so many people, likely holding real jobs and obligations, were able to come together in such an organized fashion in this text-based world. When I visited, things didn’t seem much at all like I thought they would when I was reading.
I went through the tutorial first, and then, having pushed a secret button in the linen closet, fell down a chute into the living room. There was no one in the house. I expected people to be hanging out in and around the living room at the very least. I did an @who and got a list of 99 people all hanging out each in what seemed to be his own room.
When I decided to explore, I found that there were more places than I cared to bother with. Not only that, but the dense room descriptions stealthily embedded with the cardinal directions I would need to get around made travel stilted and in one case, seemingly impossible. I went into the kitchen, and I couldn’t figure out how to get back, so I tried the patio. Eventually, I found myself in front of a Buddha in a Japanese garden many rooms south of the house. I ran another @who, couldn’t figure out how to teleport, and eventually joined a random character in “La Cantina de los [a phrase that changed regularly],” the room I deemed the most populous. The description mentioned something about a hint of evil, and I definitely got that vibe. One person I looked at turned out to be some sort of disgusting bird creature. Nobody was talking for quite some time, but eventually the bird and the character I had used to join the room began drooling over the idea of a Reuben sandwich. I waited a while longer, but nothing happened, even when I prompted them, so I left the MOO.
The image of a strangely happy and social community that Dibbell created was shattered. I now know LambdaMOO only for its dark and lonely cantina (I felt like Luke at the Mos Eisley Cantina) and confusingly mapped, empty house. Oh, and the pronoun referring to the bird creature was “we.”