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fantasy world where the strange and unusual are commonplace” (2002). For hackers, the
unrestricted exchange of information on the Internet is the way to achieve this
utopian/dystopian paradigm. Programmers in general often self-identify as computer
geeks or science fiction buff (Every, 1999; Goodwins, 2002), and so fittingly their
cultural references often relate to these fields. Metaphors taken from the world of science
fiction and literature, such as monsters, wizardry and wormholes, are part of the basic
programming vocabulary. The Hacker Jargon file, for example, contains terms such as
“Elvish” (an elegant artificial language, from the Tolkien trilogy), “Dragon” (a secondary
functional program), “jump off into never-never land” (crashing a program by mistake,
from Barrie’s Peter Pan) and “Troll-O-Meter” (a measure of troublemaking in a
newsgroup) (Hacker's Jargon File, 2001).
For programmers then, creating an Easter egg is perhaps like creating a
passageway to a hidden world, much like a micro Narnia or MiddleEarth, within the
confines of the program. Many Easter eggs use mythological imagery or other science
fiction related references in playful and ironic ways. The identification with science
fiction concepts such as parallel universes or secret passageways allows the programmers
to express individual pleasure and creativity within their programming work. It is fitting
then, that these “wormholes” or “passageways” are also the mechanism which links the
producers of the Easter eggs with the consumers, both literally and figuratively. The fans
of the phenomenon, which organize in online communities or websites such as
eeggs.com, delight in discovering the eggs and the secret commands which reveal them,
and also share the cultural capital of the programmers’ literary references and playful
imagination. As Taylor says:
Convention