Tute presentation: A Rape in Cyberspace (from week 10)

"...I'm not sure what I'm calling for. Virtual castration, if I could manage it..."

Months later, the woman in Seattle would confide to me that as she wrote those words posttraumatic tears were streaming down her face - a real-life fact that should suffice to prove that the words' emotional content was no mere playacting ... Where real life ... insists the incident was only an episode in a free-form version of Dungeons and Dragons, confined to the realm of the symbolic and at no point threatening any player's life, limb, or material well-being, here now was the player legba issuing aggreived and heartfelt calls for Mr. Bungle's dismemberment. Ludicrously excessive by R(eal) L(ife)'s lights, woefully understated by V(irtual) R(eality)'s, the tone of legba's response made sense only in the buzzing, dissonant gap between them.

An article about magic, more or less. It describes events that occured in LambdaMOO, an online text-based virtual world. A player called Mr. Bungle violated others, and eventually paid the price.. appropriate punishment handed down (death), he was indeed transformed. Another issue explored: the intimate connection between body and mind. Net sex can be physiologically similar to real sex; feelings expressed or experienced in cyberspace are still feelings.

The article suggests that, in a sense, virtual reality is just as 'real' as physical reality...

All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream -- Edgar Allan Poe