"Months later, the woman in Seattle would confide to me that as she wrote those words posttraumatic tears were streaming down her face - a real-life fact that should suffice to prove that the words' emotional content was no mere playacting. The precise tenor of that content, however, its mingling of murderous rage and eyeball-rolling annoyance, was a curious amalgam that neither the RL nor the VR facts alone can quite account for. Where virtual reality and its conventions would have us believe that legba and Starsinger were brutally raped in their own living room, here was the victim legba scolding Mr. Bungle for a breach of 'civility.' Where real life, on the other hand, insists the incident was only an episode in a free-form version of Dungeons and Dragons, confined to the realm of the symbolic and at no point threatening any player's life, limb, or material well-being, here now was the player legba issuing aggrieved and heartfelt calls for Mr. Bungle's dismemberment. Ludicrously excessive by RL's lights, woefully understated by VR's, the tone of legba's response made sense only in the buzzing, dissonant gap between them."

- Julian Dibbell, "A Rape in Cyberspace"

This passage revolves around the discussion between virtual personalities in Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs), and the affects they can have on our real life personas. In his online essay "A rape in cyberspace" (1993), Dibbel is trying to clarify the connections between real and virtual personas, and is also trying to rectify the misconceptions people have about the connections between reality and these online personas.

This is a significant discussion because in the ever-changing world of narratives, we must question what is deemed to be a narrative. Are these fantasy worlds’ actual narratives, or are they simply the over-active imagination of unsociable people, who take this too seriously. The answer is that it lies somewhere in between both opinions; yes, there are narrative aspects of MUDs, but where do the narrative aspects stop and a connection to a real person begin. This is the issue this piece brings up, and in the broader context of digital culture is very important.

When readers analyse these MUDs, they must step back and see it as a bigger picture. Are the players in the piece merely going through the motions like characters in a book? And as such if something happens to their 'online' persona, do we deem that it does not affect them physically or mentally in real-life? Or is it in fact because these players are creating these characters, that the things that happen to them is so much more important. That there is an emotional bond between the real and virtual personalities that is not a product of an over-active imagination. In fact, this character is a facet of a person, and as such if this character is hurt or betrayed it directly affects the player in real-life. Realising these differences and getting people to question their beliefs on what can actually constitute the physical 'us' is a key part of digital narrative.