Dramatic Interactors - Computers as Theatre - page 116

Pavel's Reluctant Polity: LambdaMOO
In 1991 at Xerox PARC, a researcher named Pavel Curtis invented LambdaMOO as
an experiment in technology that ended up being a grand experiment in govern-
ment. I interviewed him in 2013, at least ten years after he ceased to be active in the
LambdaMOO community. Pavel was primarily interested in implementing a MUD us-
ing object-oriented programming. His goal was to create a community around the
resources of LambdaMOO to play with the tech:
To a large degree, I was in it for the technology. I thought it was just cool to have
this language and this ability to make things—intelligent or interesting artifacts
that people could play with, and it was just this great playground, and I was just
assuming that everybody would be happy to be there.
As the community began to form up, Pavel was surprised that he was getting
demands for a “statement of manners.” Implicit rules of conduct were being upheld
by the “Wizards”—Pavel and several of the early players who had sys-admin powers
that mere mortals lacked and who actually had physical possession of the server.
Pavel fi gured that reasonable people might interpret the implicit rules differently, so
it probably made sense to write them down. These were rules like “be polite,” “don't
try to take revenge on a person,” “respect other players' sensibilities,” and “don't
hog the server” (Curtis 1992). Says Pavel in 2013,
“some rules just came down to 'don't be an ass-
hole.'” In the early years, enforcement for severe
or repeat offenders was a process called “Toad-
ing”—literally turning off a player's account and
leaving a Toad with the player's name on it in
the world as an object; but that wasn't effec-
tive enough to protect the experience of what I
would call sincere play ers.
There were people who were invested in LambaMOO who were just being
mean to other people. I kept fi nding people coming to me and asking me to
judge what was going on, and I tried to judge with as much wisdom as I could,
but it wasn't something I wanted to do and it didn't make me feel powerful or
gratifi ed in any way. I think that's one reason why LambdaMOO was successful.
The majority of MUDs were being run by college sophomores who were getting