Week 12 E-learning post

"Think on some of the experience you had in-world and consider the reading by Dibbell, "A Rape in Cyberspace". Contribute to the discussion about the social lives and communities that form in virtual worlds, and how they have their own standards and norms of acceptable behaviour. What do you think of the LambdaMOO community's decision to kill the character of Mr. Bungle?"


I found second life really interesting, particularly in that I started almost immediately to think of the virtual space as real. I did things like get excited about the water slide park, and felt really inapproproate turning up to a bar wearing a bikini.I think that when you enter a virtual world like second life, if you don't know the social conventions of that world you try to stick mostly to those in real life (I did anyway).I found the concept of LambdaMOO difficult to grasp, and because of this I can't help but think the people willing to put the time and effort into participating in it would be fairly emotionally invested with that world. Even if this isn't the case, the Mr Bungle character was being offensive both in world and in real life, and because of this some form of punishment was called for. A real life punishment would definately be over the top, but something was required to give those that cared a sense of justice.While you could argue 'killing' Mr Bungle was a bit pointless, as a new account was easily created, it served a purpose in that it made the LambdaMOO community happy (for the most part), and acted as a form of censorship against offensive behaviour.