Lambda-what?

By Matthew Gillis

I’m assuming that most of you have never heard of LambdaMoo, and I don’t think you’ll ever hear of it again after this. LambdaMoo is described as a “text-based virtual community.” For those of you who are still confused (just as I was), imagine creating a character and his or her virtual world in The Sims and then having all of your creative work converted into text format and pasted into a chat room. Welcome to LambdaMoo.

From the minute I logged into LambdaMoo, I immediately rejected the idea of a virtual community in which you could not see but only read. After spending several minutes trying to understand the site’s new lingo, I then struggled to navigate through the imaginative hallways of this virtual world, all of which only exist in writing. It felt like I was trying to find my way while being blindfolded.

In Program or be programmed: Ten commands for a digital age, Douglas Rushkoff says, “The bias of our interactions in digital media shifts back toward the nonfiction on which we all depend to make sense of our world…” (112). I not only struggled with the technical aspects of LambdaMoo, but I also had a hard time making sense of a virtual reality in which there was little connection (especially visually) to what I experience in daily life. Could I not make sense of a world crafted out of nonfictional text?

Despite my initial struggles, I finally got a hang of the site enough to have a conversation with a veteran user named Kephalos. He said that he had begun using LambdaMoo at the height of its popularity when he was an undergraduate student about 18 years ago. Kephalos explained to me the dynamics of the site and how it was now a ghost town where mostly dedicated users revisited to mingle with old friends they had met through the virtual community. It still amazes me that social networking sites and even text-based virtual reality sites like LambdaMoo have the power to create and sustain relationships. Rushkoff explains, “…The invention of technology gives us the ability to program: to create self-sustaining information systems, or virtual life” (144). Technology is another platform where one has the ability to build and foster friendships.

 

But the number one thing that surprised me about the site is the way my initial impression of it changed. After unintentionally spending close to an hour conversing with various users on LambdaMoo, I began to understand its draw. LambdaMoo functions through the use of one’s imagination. Interacting in the virtual community is like reading a book that you have the ability to write yourself. If I can make sense of a world crafted out of nonfictional text in books, I could sure understand a “novel” that I draft up on my own using LambdaMoo.

However, my conversation with Kephalos taught me the true function of sites like LambdaMoo: it is a way to keep people connected. “If living in the digital age teaches us anything, it is that we are all in this together. Perhaps more so than ever” (Rushkoff 150).