My Tiny Life: Crime and Passion in a Virtual World

This is a very well-written book that was perhaps a little ahead of its time in its insightful depictions of life online. ( )

Life on MOOs. I couldn't read past the first chapter - the writing is so florid and hysterical. Plus, while I've been in an online community for years, I have a low tolerance for the creating-worlds-with-words stuff. I can barely stand it when someone posts "welcome to this conference; may I offer you a cookie?" or something cutesy like that.
Anyway, more than I cared to know about this particular subject. My loss. ( )

Aleks Krotoski, broadcaster, journalist, and academic specialising in technology and interactivity, has chosen to discuss Julian Dibbell’s My Tiny Life: Crime and Passion in a Virtual World on FiveBooks as one of the top five on her subject - Virtual Living, saying that:




"...The first chapter is his first-person perspective of how an online text-based community called LambdaMOO created what’s described as a ‘consensual hallucination’. LambdaMOO was a very early online community, just after the web started, populated initially by idealists who thought: right, we’ll reject what we have offline and create this utopian society online. It documents how this idealistic society moved from being this utopian ideal into an environment in which people decided that they needed regulations, they needed rules, they needed very fixed community structures..."


The full interview is available here: http://five-books.com/interviews/aleks-krotoski ( )

This book drifts between incredibly interesting moments and long drawn out stories for which I could not find the purpose at first. As the book wound to a close, I realized that these excessive stories were what made this book real to me. By being open and telling all of the story, he provides a way for me to connect to his experience. All the superfluous pieces added to his insights on what lambdaMOO meant to him, much in the same way the superfluous pieces have added to my experiences in other virtual worlds.
My Tiny Life is not simply a history of lambdaMOO, but it is a memoir of his time in this world. Though often romanticized, his insights still ring true. ( )

Julian Dibbell always impresses by making a very thoughtful study into an engaging piece of literature. I enjoy reading the books as much as I value them for pushing the boundaries of how we think about virtual and game worlds.

In My Tiny Life, Dibbell studies the world of LambdaMOO. Digital culture and arts scholars will already be familiar with this book already — it was a common reading-list member when I was in college. I read this for a second time after reading Dibbell’s latest, Play Money. This time through was much more casual, and I appreciated it for being a compelling story more than I had in school. ( )