Dibbell’s “A Rape in Cyberspace”

First off, this might be one of the most interesting (yet disgusting) articles I have read in my academic career. Dibbell’s retelling of a cyber-rape in a small and thriving online community, MOO, is a haunting and philosophical roller coaster. I believe in today’s online society, one would easily view the issues with this “cyber-rape”. In Overwatch (and many other popular AAA titles), there is a report system where you can tell the developers what another player has done. Were they using racial slurs or being sexist? There’s an option for that. Game sabotage? There’s an option for that. Any other sort of harassment? You can file a report for that, too.

Dibbell’s story follows the journey of exu (a Haitian woman in RL) and Mr. Bungle. In MOO, Bungle created a new executable that would take away another characters control, and was using it to “rape” them for his enjoyment. He viewed this executable as form of a “voodoo doll”. In the wake of this, a small group of people stood up against him. The issue: there was no system in place to get rid of him even if the community overwhelming agreed. You had to go through a Wizard. After much debate, one wizard took matters into his own hands and turned Bungle into a toad (deleting the character and turning them into a toad in the game). Days later, people started to notice a new characters familiarity. Mr. Bungle created a new character.

This article brings about a lot of questions. In the earlier days, I would say these particular events got us to where we are today when it comes to players having tools to report others. On the other hand, we have a philosophical debate. How bad do you punish someone for things like this? If you get rid of them, are there things in place to make it harder for them to get back in (ie, new character)? Seeing developers like Blizzard ban cheaters and horrendous harassers through IP bans is one step, but are there even more things we can do to stop this?