Why the ribbon? Well, on the Web, no campaign can be considered complete if it lacks a ribbon icon for easy Web page festoonment. Blue ribbons, green ribbons, black ribbons -- there's even a Web page Ribbon-O-Matic service that will allow would-be campaigners to design their own new ribbon on the spot.

But the Quake community's adoption of the color green was laced with a wacky dose of irony. Quake is a shoot-em-up computer game devoted to extreme violence -- so much so that it has even spawned its own slang word, "gibbing," to describe the act of blowing up an opponent so that body parts fly in every direction. But the Green Ribbon Campaign already existed before the Quake community joined in: It was the brainchild of Zondervan, a Christian publishing house whose authors include, among others, former Vice President Dan Quayle.

Zondervan's promotional literature for the campaign warns that on the Internet, the principle of free speech is "being used and used irresponsibly as a smoke screen to communicate in a vulgar, profane, violent and insulting manner." But in Quake, isn't profane violence a way of life? How in the world did a community that specializes in gibbing and fragging each other come to endorse a Christian-sponsored campaign preaching responsibility and self-restraint?

One answer might be that Quake players are using the campaign to help them draw the line between entertainment and real life -- to make useful distinctions between violence contained within the pixels of a game and violence directed at real people. But even more intriguingly, if reports are true that the Quake community is toning down its adolescent act, the Quake Green Ribbon Campaign suggests that there may actually be some substance to the very idea of an online "community" -- even one so loosely defined as the set of "all people who play multiplayer Quake online." Posting a ribbon icon may be an absurdly easy gesture to make, but it is a dose of activism, nonetheless.