My Tiny Life

By Julian Dibbell,

Book cover of My Tiny Life: Crime and Passion in a Virtual World

Book description

This is the true story of a journey into LambdaMOO, a virtual Eden, where race, gender and identity were infinitely malleable and whose visitors thought they had escaped from all usual cultural limits. Until a brutal rape and ideological warfare between high and low castes brought the virtual and real…

Shepherd is reader supported. When you buy books, we may earn an affiliate commission.

Why read it?

1 author picked My Tiny Life as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Julian wrote “A Rape in Cyberspace,” a widely-discussed Village Voice article about transgression in LambdaMOO, a very early virtual world (known as a MUD, for multi-user dimension) depicted completely in text.

Expanding this story into a deeper exploration of its fascinating user community, My Tiny Life was incredibly influential to me as a very young writer—convincing me that online games and virtual worlds offered endless stories and insights into the human condition.

His book remains crucial to understanding virtual worlds. Indeed, as I write in my own book, a senior developer at Meta desperately tried to get colleagues to read…

Want books like My Tiny Life?

Our community of 11,000+ authors has personally recommended 100 books like My Tiny Life.

Browse books like My Tiny Life

5 book lists we think you will like!

Interested in virtual reality, rape, and presidential biography?

Virtual Reality 54 books
Rape 76 books