Julian Dibbell is an American author and technology journalist

Journalist

A journalist collects and distributes news and other information. A journalist's work is referred to as journalism.A reporter is a type of journalist who researchs, writes, and reports on information to be presented in mass media, including print media , electronic media , and digital media A...

 with a particular interest in social systems within online communities. His 1993 article "A Rape in Cyberspace

A Rape in Cyberspace

"A Rape in Cyberspace, or How an Evil Clown, a Haitian Trickster Spirit, Two Wizards, and a Cast of Dozens Turned a Database into a Society" is an article written by freelance journalist Julian Dibbell and first published in The Village Voice in 1993...

" detailed attempts of LambdaMOO

LambdaMOO

LambdaMOO is an online community of the variety called a MOO. It is the oldest MOO today.LambdaMOO was founded in late 1990 or early 1991 by Pavel Curtis at Xerox PARC. Now hosted in the state of Washington, it is operated and administered entirely on a volunteer basis...

, an online community, to quantify and deal with lawbreaking in its midst. The article was later included in Dibbell's book, My Tiny Life: Crime and Passion in a Virtual World. Additionally, Dibbell has chronicled the evolution of online worlds for Wired

Wired (magazine)

Wired is a full-color monthly American magazine and on-line periodical, published since January 1993, that reports on how new and developing technology affects culture, the economy, and politics...

Magazine, and has written about his attempt to make a living playing MMORPG

MMORPG

Massively multiplayer online role-playing game is a genre of role-playing video games in which a very large number of players interact with one another within a virtual game world....

s in the book Play Money: or, How I Quit My Day Job and Made Millions Trading Virtual Loot. Dibbell is also a founder of the academic gaming research blog Terra Nova

Terra Nova (blog)

Terra Nova is a collaborative blog for academics and professionals in game studies. It focuses primarily on the study of virtual worlds.Started in 2003 by Edward Castronova, Julian Dibbell, Dan Hunter, and Greg Lastowka, Terra Nova initially focused heavily on research and questions surrounding...

.

Dibbell was born in New York City

New York City

New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...

. He grew up in Claremont, California

Claremont, California

Claremont is a small affluent college town in eastern Los Angeles County, California, United States, about east of downtown Los Angeles at the base of the San Gabriel Mountains. The population as of the 2010 census is 34,926. Claremont is known for its seven higher-education institutions, its...

, and currently resides in Chicago, Illinois, attending the University of Chicago Law School

University of Chicago Law School

The University of Chicago Law School was founded in 1902 as the graduate school of law at the University of Chicago and is among the most prestigious and selective law schools in the world. The U.S. News & World Report currently ranks it fifth among U.S...

.

Works

• Dibbell, Julian. My Tiny Life: crime and passion in a virtual world. Owl Books, 1999. ISBN 0805036261
• Dibbell, Julian. Play Money: or, How I Quit My Day Job and Made Millions Trading Virtual Loot. Basic Books, 2006. ISBN 0465015352

External links

• Official site
• The Life of the Chinese Gold Farmer - By Julian Dibbell, published in the New York Times on June 17, 2007.