Will it work this time? Can we achieve peace on LambdaMOO and a tolerable job for the wizards? It's best not to set one's sights too high for a place like LambdaMOO. Trapped in a fundamentally untenable economic and political situation, perhaps it is enough to maintain, to keep the place together for another year or two or three, until it stops providing something that its thousands of regular users can't get anywhere else, or until something better comes along.
What would "something better" look like? On the top of my personal list is a vastly more equitable distribution of both power and economics. If these online "virtual" communities are to have the same robustness as the more physically oriented ones, they must become pliant and mutable under the same forces that cause RL communities to grow and change. It must be possible for incompatible sub-communities to separate and grow apart, thereby relieving the kinds of stresses that constantly tear at LambdaMOO. It must be possible for individuals to completely control their own creations, without the specter of an all-powerful wizard looming in the background, distorting all natural social interactions.
When these things happen, when online communities can form and break apart as fluidly and naturally as do face-to-face ones, something dramatic will be taking place in the history of the human race. If you look closely at the Internet today, you can begin to see it happening already, in newsgroups and in the World Wide Web. It's still not here in the area of more synchronous interactions, but I know for a fact that it's coming; I'm working hard for it every day. We have only to hold on, to keep dreaming the dream; more than at any other time in human history, dreaming is nearly enough to make it happen.
Pavel Curtis is the founder of LambdaMOO, still home to more than 150 virtual communities and 8,000 members. Curtis is also the founder of the Web-conferencing company PlaceWare.