Geek life
Kit Reed
En: http://storyfirst.web.wesleyan.edu/screed00.html

Yesterday my friends the philosopher, the social semiotician and I met for coffee. We were in the kitchen, mulling the continuity of community, when a passing guest ogled me. This stranger in our house was an escaped love slave, with perfumed hair and hands bound by silken scarves. I guess he was looking for a little excitement and he thought we were all panting hard. We thought it was funny.
Grinning at the possibilities, we called him back. The proposition we put to this love slave-in-waiting was not the one he expected. We presented him with a laundry list of chores. Hume needs somebody to chase dust and subdue clutter at his place. Merce's ironing is piling up. I say my yard's a mess and by the way, does he do windows. It's a Have Broom, Must Travel situation, because Hume and Merce and I live in Canada, the UK and the United States respectively. Our clueless guest couldn't hear what we were saying about him behind his back or guess how hard we were laughing.
Maybe you had to be there.
If you and I were together in space, at this point I'd type :) to let you know I am smiling irl: in real life, sitting at my keyboard where you can speak to me, but don't see me.
In deep? Oh yes I am in deep.
In the company of other nutcakes and thinkers, students and scientists, geeks and writers, shutins, sexual predators and emotional cripples, I live at, let's call it ElseMOO.mud.org 8888. That's multiple-object oriented multiple-user domain to you. I've lived in this virtual community for two years. Designed by users, this intricate, text-based environment attracts some six thousand players from all over the world.
With its detailed geography and its social and political systems, the text-based ElseMOO is light-years beyond any "chat" room. Players don't zoom through computer generated landscapes, nor do they put on avatars like bouncing tokens in a video game.
Established residents in a world made out of words, we are what we type. Ours is a various, self-selected society. If we regulars have anything in common it's that we're highly verbal computer literates comfortable in a programmer's world, and we're maybe just a little frivolous. Frivolity? It's like the port number, 8888; if you have to ask, there's no explaining.
I can explain why I'm here. Most writers need solitude to work. For novelists, fiction develops out of trial and error, born of desperation compounded by boredom. Incipient agoraphobes, we stalk the perimeters, repel all boarders. Work goes well or badly but at quitting time we look up and-- surprise. We're alone. It can be daunting. If there's a treehouse out there where novelists sit around at the end of the day commiserating over cups of dialog, it's not for me. Instead I open up the box and see who's there. As a regular, OK, an addict, I usually find somebody I know.
No, I don't do virtual Whatever, although there are plenty who do. For me ElseMOO is the cosmic water cooler, a place to hang out and snap off one-liners. A closet intellectual, I swap ideas with friends who do something completely different-- paint, code for a living, do bone marrow transplants, stand for public office.
Unlike the commercial chat room or the IRC (International Relay Chat program), where anonymous lonelyhearts and wafflers are transients in nebulous spaces, ElseMOO is its own small town. When make friends, find a place and settle down. In this six-year-old community, players are defined by their histories in the society as surely as the residents of William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County.
Yoknapatawpha County, it isn't. But maybe it is. If Faulkner's territory, is metaphorical, so is this. Lives unfold. Loves are lost, friends found and enemies made. Faulkner's work anatomized a central part of American life. In its own way, ElseMOO is a beginning anatomy of the global village.
Unlike Faulkner, we players write only our own lines, and that's a large part of the appeal for me. In the long-running soap opera or endless novel the community is typing, psychopathologies surface. Descriptions and dialog, drama and action scroll up my screen without any effort from me. What a rush for a writer!
There is the equally liberating knowledge that we are judged by what we say. Space releases the shy, the physically handicapped, the geographically impaired. The large and the unwieldy can be skinny and quick. Free of preconceptions, I cut to the chase.
What's inside your head?
A mathematician tells me he likes the MOO because he can edit what he says before he hits Return and it reaches my screen. I like it because it's the one place where I don't have to edit. Some players spend hours confecting online personas, but I do not think they are writers. One speaks only in slang; another spends hours crafting speeches designed to enrage players of every persuasion. For me, life's too short; I do that kind of thing for a living.
Yet I move with pleasure through our text-based mansion and formal gardens, woods, crypts and caverns. The key word here is text. Watching lives unscroll, I am struck by the tremendous associative power of text. If I type:
                    DARK WOODS,
the picture you draw in your head will be richer and more resonant than any forest I could show you. The words are compounded by all the memories and associations you bring to them.
Where else would a writer play, but in a world made out of words?
Most of my programmer friends work at home. Like me, they log on for company. Technocrats, they don't program much here. On ElseMOO, they spend their energies on politics and gossip and eloquent, impassioned posts to the MOO's many mailing lists. Because I write for a living, I read, but seldom post.
I tinker with my generic following dog, thank you. I'm thinking about re-coding him as a Victorian settee that will go clattering after any player foolish enough to sit down on it.
I am struck by the similarities between what programmers do irl. and what I do. We're all pushing ideas around on a screen. If, historically, the universal systems of logic are language and mathematics, I think computer programming, with its propositions and arguments and its power to organize and express thought, has emerged in this decade as the third. Try a sequence. Wrong? Try again. Again, until you solve it. Code is constructed of arguments. Solutions come out of trial and error. And intuition. In a maddeningly frustrating absoolutist way, coding offers and demands precision.
Just like writing. Through a progression of arguments, trial and error, the writer organizes and expresses thought. Figuring out what she has to say while she is finding the right way to say it.
But --and this is the real draw for closet geeks like me-- unlike writing, programming offers the possibility of fixed endings. Exact solutions. What could be more elegant, or more seductive?
Fiction is by nature accident prone; even the best novelists watch their works change as they develop. The act follows the intention but may not necessarily fulfill it. Measured against what we thought we were doing, even our best works are failures.
Who wouldn't rather live in a world of exact solutions? If I ever quit I will go there, move in and set up housekeeping. Right now I keep my programming minimal. On ElseMOO I do just enough to get around, customizing the work of generic designers. I have a virtual dog. I've taught him to tapdance. In my virtual room the phone brings only good news; outside, the sun rises and sets and (yes, frivolous) messengers bring prizes with charming regularity.
Programming, I am not in the least tempted by hypertext. Fixed on the similarities between programming and what I do, I am arrested by the difference. For me there's no place in fiction for narrative flow charts with alternate reader choices leading to multiple possible endings. Like my friends the programmers, who spend their work lives finding solutions in what one calls a "closed, rational field," I chase after in absolute solutions in an uncertain, open one. Working, I believe in narrative inevitability, at least until a book is finished. Then, troubled by the shadow that falls inevitably between the intention and the act, I know it's time to try again. Why else would I keep writing?

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