In occasional catastrophes, whole days or weeks of programming may be destroyed. Unless one keeps text copies of everything one has built, and all the coding used to build them, it may be impossible to reconstruct a damaged virtual environment. Perhaps an even worse drama occurs when the programmer who created the template you used for all your building decides to leave the MOO forever. Thus, the very body of the places you make is often subject to the whims of others. Where writers are limited by their determination to prioritise text, Goldsworthy is limited by his insistence on using only materials at hand in order to create his work.
Process is vital to the act of making.
Thus, he will spend as long as it takes to gather leaves of exactly the hue he needs, then even more hours stitching them together with stalks. He does not use glue, or staples, or thread to bind and connect his materials, but daisy-chains them with thorns and stems, moistens them together with water, or sticks them with spittle. In order to form the shapes he requires he offers them up to the elements, allowing them to be patterned by the flow of a stream or the direction of the wind. The result has many features of a natural formation but still retains that tone of deliberately-constructed unreality which is the trademark of Goldsworthy's work. As a writer working in virtuality, I can build a similar dysreality.