Interfaces act as a bridge between technologies and their users. The designers of these technologies establish orders of operations and aesthetic frames for their programs to be used. The frame or the interface, therefore, is central to the users experience as it sets the possibilities and limitations that he is subject to when using the technology. Second Life is a popular online video game that, based on its interface, establishes interesting relationships between technology and user as well as freedom and control within the game. Julian Dibbel’s essay, A Rape in Cyberspace depicts a series of events that take place inside within an interface or online community, very similar to that of Second Life. Dibbel’s work makes evident the inverse relationship between limitations and freedom by exploring the inconsistencies associated with personal representation within a virtual-reality interface.
Second Life is a virtual world, accessed via the Internet, where users can customize a personal avatar to interact with the Second Life community. Users can complete a number of tasks including but not limited to: the building and trading of property, conversing with other users, customizing the appearance of their personal avatar, and traveling through the Second Life “grid”. The nature of such an interface automatically establishes a dynamic relationship between the freedom and control of the user. To some extent, the program is meant for exploration and freedom but at the same time, this exploring can only occur within the walls of the program. That is, a users experience, while unique and customizable, is a product of what the game’s designers planned for the user. For example, while users can chat with one another, and say whatever is on their mind, they can only communicate because the program was designed with chatting as a usable feature.
Because the program’s users interact with the Second Life community under the identity of their avatars, the line between real and virtual life is somewhat blurred. While users can only act within the constraints of their real life imaginations, their motivations and agendas in the virtual world are not necessarily parallel with their motivations in the real world. Dibbel describes a series of events within the community of LamdaMOO, a similar interface to Second Life, in which one of the characters known as Mr. Bungle commits a series of sexual and violent acts. The “Bungle affair” serves as a prime example of the relationship between real life and virtual reality and the freedoms and controls associated with this relationship. He says,
“every set of facts in virtual reality (or VR, as the locals abbreviate it) is shadowed by a second, complicating set: the “real-life” facts. And while a certain tension invariably buzzes in the gap between the hard, prosaic RL facts and their more fluid, dreamy VR counterparts, the dissonance in the Bungle case is striking”
The fact that VR users can act in ways that they would not be willing act in RL establishes freedom of action that Second Life users have access to. Within the controls associated with the programmed community of Second Life, users have the freedom to do what they please, without being subject to the controls associated with RL. That is, if the user who controlled Mr. Bungle actually sexually abused the user that controlled on of his LamdbaMOO victims, he would be arrested and put in jail. Freedom then, is directly related to the controls of a given society. VR presents an alternate series of controls and results in an alternate series of freedoms.
We’ve established that freedom is a direct result of control and this is true in both VR and RL. What complicates this relationship, however, is when individuals posses different personal controls within the established controls of reality, virtual or real. Dibbel uses Mr. Bungle as an example of such inconsistent, self imposed controls,
“to the extent that Mr. Bungle’s assault happened in real life at all, it happened as sort of a Punch-and-Judy show, in which the puppets and scenery were made of nothing more substantial than digital code and snippets of creative writing. The puppeteer behind Bungle that night, as it happened, was a young man logging in to the MOO from a New York University computer. He could have been Mother Teresa for all any of the others know, however, and he could have written
Bungle’s script that night any way he chose.”
Regardless of the RL character and personality of Mr. Bungle’s user, he decided to take advantage of the comparative lack of repercussions (or controls) associated with flagrant avatar behavior in LamdaMOO. As Dibbel noted, Mr. Bungle’s actions in the VR were in no way congruent to his user’s beliefs and morals in reality. Conversely, the victims of Bungle’s actions were appalled and disturbed and that was made clear in post-incident, real life interviews that were conducted by Dibbel. The fact that to the victims, a moral code of virtual conduct, that was related to their sense of real-life morality was breached, and that was disturbing. This shows clear inconsistencies in the way in which Bungle and his victims view the relationship between RL and VR.
The existence of extreme inconsistencies in the way in which people approach a program like Second Life is evidence of the freedoms associated with vicariously living through an interface that is alternate to reality. The repercussions associated with inappropriate behavior in a virtual world are not real. That is, at any point you can log out and never return to the Second Life world. In contrast to that are the repercussions associated with unlawfulness and inappropriate behavior in reality. In reality, your actions are linked to your identity: your social security number, bank account, family members, etc. so if you act in ways that are inconsistent with the expectations and rules for people in real-life society, you are punished and you cannot reset or log out of your identity. Second Life uses anonymity as a cornerstone to freedom; with it you can act as you please, without repercussion.
