created 2025-03-23, & modified, =this.modified
Why I’m reading
This was written in 1997 so all of these “new frontiers” of virtual spaces are obsolete. How have online relationships changed? In a sense, virtual sex seems the furthest possible away from sex, but in another sense…?
I’m unsure if it will be good but as a lark, why not?
Introduction
We who live there—cyber citizens—live in the virtual reality (VR) world. We participate in real life (RL), too, of course. But our First World exists in the computer.
Cyber life is real. It’s a place in your mind where you’re joined to the minds of others.
Parasociality, and illusory interaction:
According to Sullivan, “personality is the relatively enduring pattern of recurrent interpersonal situations which characterize a human life” … It should be noted that an “interpersonal situation,” as Sullivan uses the term, requires the participation of only one “real” person, in that any other “persons” in any particular instance may be wholly illusory—that is, products of the real per¬ son’s imaginations or fantasies… Strictly speaking, then, personality is nothing more (or less) than the patterned regularities that may be observed in an individual’s relations with other persons, who may be real in the sense of actually being present, real but absent and hence “personified,” or illusory.
Hot Chat
VR is as real as RL.
Thought
RL is being used, which to me feels dated. I think IRL is the dominant description. I wonder why?
The first online chat service for the public
In 1980 Compuserve had a CB radio simulator. CB channels, in those days, generally held ten to thirty people (now they go over one hundred).
CompuServe CB quickly became the largest single product on CompuServe despite virtually no marketing. The first online wedding occurred on CompuServe CB, and worldwide fans organized events to meet in the “real world” people they had met in CB.
Hot Chat
But CI$’s menu maze freaked me out, as I was also being deluged with private Hello!s and had no idea how to respond. There must have been a gang of men waiting for a female name to log into HSX.
Author falls into a cyber romance with user (IRL married) named “Fire.”
At first, I found hot chat a nifty novelty but soon grew bored. The verbal format repeated itself like a trashy novel.
Many interviewees reported an escalation in the number of phone calls and email or time spent online chatting, as the attraction between the online lovers grew.
Echo - Local BBS
On echo you’d write a comment on an item at 1PM and log out. Someone might answer two hours later, and you’d find responses when you logged in the next day.
Thought
This feedback loop is more like physical mail.
On Echo, we spent hours a night yo-ing each other or speaking directly in chat.
Cleo: getting ready to leave actually, gottogo. Yo ya later
Yo-ing
Yo-ing? Proto-DM?
Now it’s all “DM” use? What else? IM. PM. Whisper or PST. Text. Buzz. Pen.
IM - tied to the 90s, with AIM/MSN PM - fallen out of favor to DM, but similar overlap. Maybe more app-agnostic, but app-specific? like DM pertains directly to mobile phone use, and PM maybe with computer use. Whisper - possibly specific to games? Text - Mobile Buzz - Dated, phone. Pen - Letter.
Parentheses signaled private messages.
(private message from Brent): here he is again(send Brent) groan
Being avant-garde New York, some abbreviations used elsewhere, like LOL for Laughing Out Loud and ROFL for Rolling On Floor Laughing, were considered bad form on Echo. Symbols like )”, representing a smiling face, and (”, a frowning one, were also rejected as revealing an imagination too poor to express oneself properly.
The Net/ MOO-Sex
MOO was a step-up as they offered emote capabilities to portray an action.
MOO sex is more interactive than hot chat. It’s rich with imagery, involving more brain and less genitals. You can take off clothes, lie on furniture, and your actions reflect and adjust to that of your partner’s. It’s also less orgasm-oriented, though it is ultra-sensuous. The great masters of MOO sex, the ones who’ve been at it a long * time, don’t have pauses in their dialogue. The long pauses in hot chat indicate someone’s hands are busy elsewhere.
In MUD systems, players can not only select gender but can choose to appear as a plural of creatures (“colony: i.e. ChupChups leaves the room, closing the door behind them)
Object creation
MOOers can create a “child” of a “generic” object. The defining quality of a MOO is that a “child” object shares the programs that exist on the generic “parent” object. One of the most popular generic MOO objects is the “clothing.” You create a child of this object and name it what you want—a hat, a sweatsuit, a garter belt. After you describe it—a sombrero with an Aztec pattern around the brim, or black lace crotchless undies—you can set its “coverage” message, which designates the part, or parts, of the body it covers: head, neck, chest, groin, legs, or feet.
Programming in Sprawl
First, we need some way to tell if the toy has been wound up. We’ll create a property called “wound” on the toy.
@property toy.wound 0@verb toy:wind this
@program toy:wind
this, wound = this.wound + 2;
player:tell(“You wind up the”, this.name,
player.location:announce(player.name,
“winds up the ” , this.name,
@program duck:continue_msg
times = {“once”, “twice”,
“thrice”} [random(3) ];
return “swivels its neck and quacks ” + times
| u >5.
' • ?
Cleo Odzer
It’s here that I do a little research on this Author Cleo Odzer. A strange journey and early end.
Using this programming language she creates a brothel. It creates this monotonous, but popular environment.
Pine-Guest orders Nok the Prostitute. Pine-Guest pays Nok the Prostitute. Nok the Prostitute drops to her knees and exposes Pine-Guest’s genitals. Nok the Pros¬ titute licks Pine-Guest’s genitals and swirls her tongue round and round. Nok the Prostitute licks Pine-Guest’s genitals and swirls her tongue vigorously. Nok the Pros¬ titute licks Pine-Guest’s genitals and swirls her tongue softly. Nok the Prostitute smiles with satisfaction as Pine-Guest comes.
This gives her control of situation
And since I could control what went on in my bar, I was no longer a passive observer. Sometimes I’d get an obnoxious guest who wanted cyber sex with me, not just with my robots, so I made attack programs to deal with people who annoyed me. I could make them virtually bleed, I could eject them from the bar, give them hiccups, make them sneeze and fart
We had MOO sex in his pond and snuggled afterward on a lily pad.
Keeping a mental model of the interaction
It could be distracting if your partner suddenly had you facing up when you envisioned down, or was in back of you when you’d just gestured to the front. MOO actions required an imagination adept at maintaining the vision of who was where in relation to whom, the location of all the legs and arms, and all the changes in position. Jarring, mismatched dialogue ruined the mood. A leg in the air when you pictured it on the ground broke the scenario, reminding you that your hands were on a room-temperature keyboard and not a hot-blooded man.
Sex at the Palace
The Palace uses a text-to-speech program so that users can hear what people type as well as see it in a cartoon speech balloon on the screen.
Only members can wear personal avatars. Guests are restricted to round green faces, but they can activate the noises, and seem particularly fond of the farts.
Thought
The Palace still operates. Some notes:
Each room in a palace is represented by a large image that serves as a backdrop for users. By clicking on certain areas in a room called “doors”, users can travel either to different rooms in the same palace, another palace server, or an address leading to a different service, such as websites and email.
The Palace has an avatar system that allows users to combine small, partially transparent images
The Palace’s popularity peaked around 1999–2000, when nu metal band Korn had their own palace chat room that fans could download from their official website
Author is asked to become a Palace Wizard.
According to cyberspace hierarchy, a “wizard” is someone who has special powers and who performs certain duties. Gods have the highest powers and are usually the owners or creators of the space. System operators (sys ops) reign over one area or perhaps a board.
As a wizard on the Palace, I can gag, kill, and site-ban.
People change avatars frequently in Palace, resulting in rapid changes in attraction rel:Love between shapeshifters
The main Palace has four bedrooms that can be locked. For a romantic setting, it’s possible to dim the lights in the room, making the background go dark but still visible.
Mismatches in Expression
Thought
This section is actually great. The act of intimacy becomes a bit of an artistic/engineering problem. It just seems so alien and unlike intimacy.
Author carries on an intimate relationship in this new virtual space but is unable to express herself as usual.
You’re right. I need to add a bed. So, how do we do this? I asked, a Palace virgin. I don’t know.
The standard Palace avatar is a forty-four-by-forty-four-pixel box, but members can combine boxes to make larger ones. His nude was nine boxes big, while mine was only one.
I changed into the most erotic photo I had—a woman facing down, eyes closed, sucking on a penis that was halfway in her mouth. But I felt like a failure. Our positions didn’t match. His nine boxes represented a man standing up with an erection pointing to the left, and I was a one-box little face aiming down over a penis. Totally mismatched.
When I moved my icon on top of his, he noted, Now it looks like four people in an orgy.
I moved the butt photo up against his erection photo and it almost looked like it fit, but now what? There was no way to make actions, you could only talk. I’m so hot for you, I said, I want you in me. By this time, though, he seemed to have given up on our project and asked. ”How do you like my ocean? I’m going to draw another room with a beach.”
She stops a love interest because of “his” typographic errors, “Within minutes, I stopped seeing Storm Shadow as a sexy hunk and started picturing him as an idiot, uneducated, disheveled, lazy, and so lacking in concern for others that he didn’t care if he confused them with sentences that needed to be deciphered by a professional cryptographer.”
CUseedick
A black-and-white computer video camera costs ninety-nine dollars.
When you’re face-to-face with someone on video, though, it’s harder to disengage. In my second week of CUseeme-ing, I did it twice. The encounters just weren’t exciting. Worse, they were downright tedious.
I saw him smile. A kaleidoscope effect on my screen indicated fast motion, and my heart skipped a beat…
Stereotyped Traits
To be convincing as a female (where insiders know that half the women are really men) I giggle and blush and avoid being too aggressive. On the other hand, when I log on as a male, I don’t giggle and I’m demanding, suggestive, and bold. As a male, I can more easily touch my body parts and those of other people and speak in cruder language. I’m allowed to be more openly sexual.
Addiction/Obsession/Love
I checked to see when Mars had last logged on, how long he’d been on, and if he’d added a female name to his “pals” list.
There is MOO wedding, “The occasional “arrival message” such as GroodJDragon flies in on a toaster added MOO ambience.”
Alas, the couple broke up within six months of matrimony. Stormwatch changed his name and FractaLMuse refused to discuss what had happened. They never again met in person.
NOTE
@toading is a kickban, or termination of the character’s access to the game. It is called such historically in reference to wizards turning people into toads, and has been in various TinyMUCKs and MUDs since the early 90s.
Fantasy/Illusion/VR-RL Clash
One day, I found out that my closest MOO friend, Galactica, with whom I’d engaged in hours of girl talk, was in reality a male. Galactica had made it clear that to meet in RL, I wouldn’t be dealing with her but with the “core personality,” the guy, David.
… men are often surprised at how they are treated when they log on as a female character.