Learn how one of the first virtual worlds ballooned into a real-life nightmare,

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  • With the increased attention being paid to us, the population of LambdaMOO grew at an alarming pace. This, in turn, put an ever-increasing amount of pressure on the wizards; we were spending more and more of our time just keeping the place running, dealing with inter-player disputes, and judging the things that players had built when they wanted permission to build even more. None of us were being paid to operate LambdaMOO, but it was taking an increasing toll; we started to create institutions and automated procedures to lighten the load.
  • I created a committee of long-time LambdaMOO players to take over the job of judging other player's work (according to a recently-announced quota on the amount of objects players can create). I named them after the kinds of groups I'd seen in various RL home-owner's associations: the Architecture Review Board (ARB). It was clear that this group would need some slightly privileged tools, so that they could make a sufficiently complete judgement of other players' work.
  • From the very beginning of the ARB, there were players suspicious of it. How was it formed? Who chose those particular people and why? How do they make their decisions? What is said in the Star Chamber? What can't we go in there? It wasn't (at least at first) that anyone knew of anything bad actually happening around the ARB; its very existence, and the way it was created, were enough to worry some players.
  • The third major burden on the wizards during this period was inter-player disputes. The wizards were the police, the judges, and the executioners; we had set ourselves up for this back when "help manners" was drafted, when we had claimed "Vengence is ours, sayeth the wizards." In retrospect, I think the last half of 1992 was almost entirely characterized for the wizards by our weariness and stress. Something had to give, and it was us.
  • On December 9, 1992, I posted a pivotal message to LambdaMOO's *Social-Issues mailing list; I titled it "On to the next stage...," but somehow history has indelibly tagged it "LambdaMOO Takes A New Direction," or "LTAND." In that message, I announced the abdication of the wizards from the "discipline/manners/arbitration business;" we would no longer be making what I glibly termed "social decisions."
  • LambdaMOO slowly became a rougher place after LTAND. It's hard to say how much LTAND accelerated a process that was already in place, but surely it didn't help to hold it back. The level of inter-player strife and harassment rose and rose, slowly but inexorably. The crisis point came about four months after LTAND, in the infamous rape in cyberspace case.

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