LambdaMOO

One of the oldest and most famous still-running MUDs on the Internet, LambdaMOO went online in late 1990. MUDs (multi-user dungeon) and MOOs (MUD, object oriented) are computer programs that allow multiple users to connect from remote locations and to both interact with the program and communicate with each other. Once connected to a MUD, participants must log on as a “character” on that MUD. They then type text to the program and receive responses from the program and from other users.

Pavel Curtis, who in 1990 was a programmer at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), used a heavily revised version of the original MOO code developed earlier that year by Stephen White to create the LambdaMOO environment. (The program itself is also called LambdaMOO, and many other MOOs use some version of this program.) The opening of LambdaMOO was announced in early 1991 on the Usenet newsgroup rec.games.muds, and LambdaMOO quickly became extremely popular. It currently runs on a computer located at Stanford University, sponsored by the Web conferencing company PlaceWare.

LambdaMOO was initially maintained and operated by its “wizards,” a group that included founder Pavel Curtis. In a 1993 post to an internal LambdaMOO bulletin board entitled “LambdaMOO Takes a New Direction,” Curtis, citing time constraints as well as philosophical considerations, turned over such functions as dispute resolution and aesthetic planning to the growing LambdaMOO community, reserving only technical programming functions for the wizards.

Since the wizards' abdication, a variety of social events on LambdaMOO have influenced the direction of participants' self-government strategies. One of the most infamous of these events, known as “the Bungle Affair,” occurred in 1993, and involved one participant's use of MOO programming capabilities to sexually harass other players via the “virtual rapes” of their characters. In the aftermath of this disturbing incident, LambdaMOO participants developed several formal ways for dealing with conflicts and disputes, including a petition system, dispute arbitration, and an “Architectural Review Board.”

Petitions may be put forth by any member of the community, and all participants are encouraged to vote on open petitions; reminders appear on users' screens when they log on. Wizards implement any program changes necessary to effect approved petitions. Petitions have addressed virtually every aspect of LambdaMOO life, including such issues as the content of official LambdaMOO texts, the operation of the petition process itself, technical strategies for dealing with disruptive participants, and rules for creating new characters. Dispute arbitrators intervene in interpersonal conflicts, and impose sanctions against offending participants. The Architectural Review Board makes decisions about additions to the LambdaMOO database, in an attempt to ensure the continued integrity of the whole and to protect the database from malfunctions. The exact procedures for each of these three systems have evolved over time, and remain sources of conflict and controversy.

When detailed descriptions of social life on LambdaMOO appeared in a Wired magazine article in 1994, LambdaMOO experienced a tremendous surge of new participants. Many of these newcomers were new not only to LambdaMOO but also to MUDs in general, and often disrupted the activities of long-term LambdaMOO participants through their lack of knowledge and failure to adhere to community social norms. In addition, the sudden increase in population taxed the program itself, resulting in increased lag (the gap in time between input of a command and the program's processing of that command, primarily experienced by participants as awkward pauses) as well as higher incidences of the program crashing, or going offline due to program errors. Numerous petitions have attempted to address the difficulties caused by LambdaMOO population growth, and several have resulted in changes in the ways that characters are created and deleted.

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