While my entry into SL-Gor is still on hold, after a terrific talk with Alice Robison last week, that hasn’t been a bad thing. The delay is giving me a vastly stronger grounding in theory and method, or in non-academic-speak, the glimmerings of a clue as to what I’m doing. It’s also occasioned some serious reflexivity: a hard look at what I bring to my research question (and that’ll be the topic for my next post).
I’ve just devoured Markham and Baym’s Internet Inquiry: Conversations About Method. While it sounds more like the academic equivalent of a root canal than something to be lost in as breakfast reading runs into the afternoon, Internet Inquiry is perhaps the best academic anthology I’ve ever read – and I only say “perhaps” because I’ve had several years of referring back to Oudshoorn and Pinch’s How Users Matter: The Co-Construction of Users and Technology.
From the introduction, in which the authors encourage us to ask
“what counts as an authentic self-representation? How are we conceptualizing the embodied persons we study? How are we framing our own embodied sensibilities? Do we approach what we are studying as traces left in public spaces or as embodied activities by people situated in rich offline contexts… how to interpret other people’s selves and how to represent ourselves to the people we study, especially when we may not be meeting them in person,”(pp.xviii-xix)
I knew I’d found an essential resource, not only for this conundrum of researching questions I consider legal/political in SL-Gor, but for my own development as a researcher. The chapters on privacy and sexuality in particular were directly applicable to this project.
Malin Sveningsson Elm’s essay on privacy neatly captures the problems I’ve had making sense of the IRB biomedically-based framework for evaluating privacy and consent in the context of a reclusive online community. While I think her description of a continuum of public and private is deeply flawed in its particulars (IMO, registration for “membership” when there is no prospect of that registration being rejected is not fundamentally a move to make a public space more private, but to collect marketable demographic data), the general framework and the rest of her discussion provides factors for evaluating privacy and consent issues that I will use regularly in my work.
Her conclusion, as well as the “response” essays focus on respect for the people being studied, a serious asking of the question, “what do they get out if it,” and a focus on ensuring “that our research subjects are not harmed, humiliated or offended,” (p.85) back up my course of carefully negotiating the terms of my participation in SL-Gor with both my PI and advisors, and the community members who’ve invited me, prior to my beginning work.
Lori Kendall’s essay on sexuality is the most revolutionary thing I’ve read in years, since my first foray into trying to understand online communities and the impact of new technologies on selfhood. She states, “I make the case for doing qualitative work with the whole body, and not cutting off certain types of experiences as irrelevant or inappropriate, even in situations, such as wholly online interactions, in which the body might seem relatively unimportant.” (p.101).
Of course, in studying Gor, the body is of fundamental importance, and it’s issues around embodiment and its political meaning that are both at the core of why I want to study Gor and why my entrance has been so problematic. Gor is about gender and its embodiment, as the iconic “kef,” or slave brand, attests. It is about the performance of hyper-masculinity and hyper-femininity (I’d say, “whatever the actual-world performance of the subject might be,” but that’s exactly one of the points in contention), and in no small part the sexual component of that performance.
Kendall’s essay gave me key insights into the eroticism of online attraction, a huge component of my life for more than a decade, both personally (my wife and I met online) and academically (I’m fascinated by the construction and performance of gender and sexual expression in online spaces).
Both responses enriched Kendall’s essay – Sunden’s in making the case for the embodied richness of online sexuality, and Campbell’s in providing strategies for research within sexual communities.
Baym’s concluding essay, on the nature of quality in qualitative research, is a guide I will refer back to regularly, despite my discomfort with the notion of “dialectic” as a framing mechanism – I’m with Markham in finding the “di-” aspect limiting and problematic.
All this leaves me seeing the beginnings of a negotiated solution that could produce a good research project in SL-Gor. I see multiple stages: the first, to meet my semester deadlines, may just involve a conversation with select persons, in which my identity as a male researcher is foregrounded, on questions of canon adaptation. A second may be to take up my host’s offer for slave training, again with the key participants aware of my identities, for insights into the appeal of the community and how initiation, training and meaning-making take place. A third is the most problematic one, of continuing my involvement(s) in a larger, more public Gorean community, either as kajira or free man or both.
Regardless of what may come of the second and third phases (my next blog post will address some concerns about the second, and I’ve already aired concerns about the third), the first seems like it should work to produce some solid answers to my research question.
“Canon” is one of the fundamental concepts of media fandom – the original work or works that one is a fan of. But canon isn’t just that stuff, that body of work, but as the term suggests, it’s in some way sacred, privileged. There are personal pleasures in a good new addition to a favorite body of work, but what’s the deal with the sacred dimension of canon?
That sacred status can be used to turn the personal pleasures of canon into a politics of legitimacy. For the individual engaging with a text, canon is literary, but in the context of a fan community of co-producers of new works, canon is political: contesting within a fan community the status of a work or performance is the stuff of power and status . Canon in fandom lies, then, at the intersection of play and politics, of literature and law.
I’ve found Linda Hutcheon’s A Theory of Adaptation a tremendously useful framework for evaluating the politics of canon, though her own focus is on the literary appreciation of adaptations to canon (and the concomitant academic politics, but that’s a different beast entirely).
But let’s start with the literary pleasures of canon. Over dinner the other night, a colleague enthusiastically described his experience playing Star Trek Online. He didn’t 
evaluate the game mechanics – which have gotten largely unfavorable reviews in the gaming blogs, but instead talked about the joy of immersion in the world of Star Trek, of visiting places familiar from stories he’s returned to his whole life, but this time as a participant rather than a spectator. Commanding a Federation starship, being spoken to by the famous voice of Starfleet computers – that was fun, regardless of the affordances and limitations of the game engine.
As Hutcheon observes, “what is often most significant for videogames is the adapted heterocosm, the spectacular world of digital animation that a player enters.” (p. 51) I think she’s wrong, deeply wrong, with respect to gamers approaching a transmedia game, but right insofar as she’s referring to fans of the original property who pick up the game seeking a transmedia experience.
Likewise, another colleague and guildmate of mine in World of Warcraft is reading Christie Golden’s novel, Arthas: Wrath of the Lich King. The joy for him was in recognizing familiar places in a new medium, and having those places enriched by canon lore, and learning more about iconic figures from the game.
These pleasures of new, transmedia, works slotting into canon are personal, matters of one’s own opinions and engagement with stories and characters across platforms. Of course, the transmedia experience is not always pleasant: adaptations or additions can feel like violations of canon. Everyone has a favorite book badly adapted into a movie or a movie into a game, or has seen a sequel that fails to capture the spirit of the original. But this appreciation of canon is personal, aesthetic, the stuff of humanities scholarship.
Right now I’m more interested in the other sort, the social use of canon as a tool of politics. Hutcheon describes a “morally loaded discourse” of discussion about adaptations of canon (p.7), quoting another researcher who found terms like “infidelity,” “betrayal,” “deformation,” “violation,” “desecration” used in evaluating new adaptations.
She states that such thinking is “based on the implied assumption that adapters aim simply to reproduce the adapted text,” arguing that, rather, “’to adapt’ means to adjust, to alter, to make suitable,” especially in a transmedia context, as “[w]ith each mode, different things get adapted in different ways.” (p.12). “Suitable,” of course, is in the eye of the beholder.
Hutcheon quotes Susan Stanford Friedman, who has applied the anthropological/political concept of “indigenization” to adaption, stating that the concept “implies agency: people pick and choose what they want to transplant to their own soil. Adapters of traveling stories exert power over what they adapt.” (p. 150). That power is utterly, fundamentally political. Indigenization is often applied in a religious context, of the creation of a “nativized church.” The immediate question in that context, as in the fannish one, is – is indigenization a revitalizing adaptation to local circumstances, or is it heresy?
In fanfiction, “canon” takes on some interesting nuances. Not that much fic strictly is close to canon, the sort of stories called “gen,” for general, that are typically “continuing adventures,” stories that could be an episode of the TV series, a sequel to the books or movies. Much fic explores non-canon romantic and sexual relationships – but there, attitudes towards canon still play a critical political role. A community will judge if a pairing is credible within the bounds of canon, and a fandom will typically split along “shipper” lines – Harry Potter fans into Harry/Hermione vs. Harry/Ginny, for example.
Slash – romantic/sexual fiction about gay relationships between characters that aren’t canon gay – is a staple of fic, yet even there, issues of canon split shipper communities into those who find the pairing canon-plausible and those who reject it. If you’re wearing “slash goggles,” interpreting emotional displays between male characters in a sexual context, well, certain pairings are “practically canon,” while others are too implausible to count.
In roleplay communities, canon is used to judge not a static work, like fanfiction, but an ongoing performance. There’s a shamefully un-studied world of virtual-world roleplay on LiveJournal, text-based worlds like the old MUDS and MOOs, but persistent, with roleplay permanently visible in public or semi-public threaded logs. There, it’s expected that each roleplayer will bring their own interpretation (often slashy) to the character – but within the bounds of canon plausibility, and “playing OOC,” or out of character, is a primary ground for social criticism, and to some degree, ostracizing, as people prefer to play with more plausibly canon versions of the characters.
In SL-Gor, canon takes on a more explicitly political dimension. What separates Gor from medieval roleplay on the one hand and BDSM roleplay on the other is the explicitly ideological dimension, the unforgiving male dominance, the abject nature of female slavery. “Canon vs. ‘Disney’” seems to be the fundamental political issue dividing Gorean communities, with one side arguing for the orthodoxy of “by the book,” and the other for a “nativized church” of a Gor closer to mainstream liberal culture.
Why is canon so important that it’s used as a justification even for clearly transgressive fic and roleplay? How can canon fidelity even exist as a meaningful concept when a novel or TV show is translated to text or 3D roleplay, or heteronormative narrative is slashed?
We must love our orthodoxies, even the implausible ones…
Part 1, The Closing of the Alt Frontier, set up a distinction between the systems of trust in frontier communities (like Second Life) and metropolitan ones (like globalized RL). Now we’re going to get into special cases, which for some reason are problematic for trust systems and flash points for conflict between them.
Gender
Let’s start with gender. Many separate gender from sex – the cultural performance of “man” or “woman” from the physical plumbing. There’s a broad range of combinations of sex and gender, of course. For those of us whose gender and sex aren’t in tight traditional alignment, there seem to be two very different approaches to expression, and to getting gender and sex in closer aligment.
There are two terrific books on the subject, both memoirs.
One, Jennifer Finney Boylan’s She’s Not There: A Life in Two Genders, describes the male-to-female sex change of someone whose gender performances, as male and later female, as I read them, were both fairly close to a center line: James was not highly masculine in presentation, Jennifer not highly feminine. The cover, left, catches some of the spirit of the book.
The other, Richard J. Novic’s Alice in Genderland: A Crossdresser Comes of Age, is the story of someone coming to express both highly gendered male and female sides – again well reflected in the book’s cover.
There are of course other differences and more nuances – I’m painting in broad strokes here to set up some general concepts.
So, many (hard numbers are about impossible to find) have found SL an opportunity for expressing a gender that they can’t, or can’t readily or safely, in RL. And again, there are (at least) two approaches to doing so. One is to use a body of the sex that feels more right or appropriate, and perform gender somewhere around the middle. Some of these people “pass,” and are “read” as women much of the time, some don’t. The other approach is to carefully perform gender to “pass.”
Lat time we said that systems of trust in frontier communities are based on personal reputation and consistency of dealing. By frontier values (and those of old SL, people who came in before later 2007), you are what you claim to be, unless your presentation is just not credible. And that applied to gender as much as to being a designer or architect or business consultant – if you did the job credibly, that’s what you were.
The values of the metropolis were explicitly rejected: a lot of SL’ers personal profiles, in the “First Life” tab say something like, “I leave my FL in FL – don’t ask, and I won’t tell.”
Gender was always a little different, and it’s perhaps gotten more so as the frontiersfolk have become outnumbered by people holding onto the values of the metropolis. In the metropolis, claiming to be something and doing the job is not enough, or even not that important: credentialing is.
In SL, credentialing for gender (typically for dating) can be done by insisting on voice chat in addition to text, or more subtly by demanding, or expecting, RL details to flesh out and substantiate in RL a gendered performance: talk of husbands, cramps, and such.
Is that deception? Someone bringing the values of the metropolis would say absolutely: false credentials were supplied to create an identity, and had real ones been supplied (that the person was a different gender RL) they’d be rejected for the, um, “job.” Someone from the frontier would say, “if it quacks like a duck, it’s a duck – and you’re never gonna see the RL bits anyway.” They might say, the use of RL information, accurate or not, just takes the problem of RL credentialing off the board, and allows for the SL performance to speak.
I don’t think there’s a “right,” but a clash of perspectives and needs. Personally, only personally, I’m not sympathetic to the RL demand, nor comfortable with the use of false information. But I don’t think I’ve got the answer at all.
Researcher
I’ve discovered that “social scientist” is as controversial an identity as “genderbender.” I’ve been hearing from a variety of sources that there’s a lot of hostility and fear towards social science researchers in SL. No small part of this seems to be due to stupid and/or unethical behavior by some researchers, but I think there’s more going on. I don’t pretend to have a good body of data or understanding of the phenomenon yet.
That is, aside from one personal incident. My profile says, “I live, work and study in SL. No, I’m not taking notes on you!” while my First Life tab identifies me as a graduate student of online communities. I did once have someone turn cold and then teleport away in the middle of what had been a good conversation, as she was convinced that I was “experimenting on” or “studying” her.
When I told that story in class last week, one of my students laughed and said that he’s gotten in the habit of never saying he’s a law student when he’s out in clubs. I remembered I didn’t either- I used to say I was in film school. People don’t like law students, and I didn’t look much like people’s expectations of one (my “law student performance” wasn’t convincing enough to “pass”!). For us, that was similar to the gendered case – it got a potential but irrelevant (to us) clash out of the way, so we could relate in the immediate environment (ok, in both cases, we all lied to get laid. Let’s be real!).
Transgendered Researchers of Gor!
My legal anthropology project in SL-Gor has been on hold for a couple weeks. One delay has been getting my application for IRB exemption approved by my supervising professor. Another has come from an email dialog with my Gorean host. I got a long email from him last week, describing the circumstances I’d be entering, and providing some background information. His situation had changed from the one that had been described to me, and I’ve gotten concerned about how I can answer my research questions in the new environment.
But what really brought me to a halt was his opinion that I conceal my identities as an RL male and as a researcher, due to profound prejudices against genderbenders and researchers among the SL-Gor community. He suggested that I might not learn anything, and face great hostility, were I to make those “metropolitan” identities known in the “frontier” community of SL-Gor.
I had to laugh, having defended the values of SL communities against the incursion of RL credentialing. Now the digital chickens have come home to roost.
I’ve got no good answers on this one, and neither do my faculty advisors: I’ve been referred to two authors of books on internet research ethics. I think I see the outlines of a solution, but I’m a long way from sure.
Coming soon: “Part 3 – If Code Is Law, Code Monkeys Are Rewriting Our Constitution!”
“The Closing of the Alt Frontier” is going to be a discussion of sex, lies, identity, social media and trust. But,the juicy bits are going to come at the end of a road, one that begins with one of the most famous speeches in the history of American History. I promise few of you will die of dysentery along the way, so, yeehaw, let’s ride!
SL, The Final Frontier
In 1893 a young scholar named Frederick Jackson Turner delivered a speech that historians of America have engaged with – approvingly, critically, mockingly, tiredly, repeatedly – ever since. Turner said,
“The peculiarity of American institutions is the fact that they have been compelled to adapt themselves to the changes of an expanding people – to the changes involved in crossing a continent, in winning a wilderness, and in developing at each are of this progress out of the primitive economic and political conditions of the frontier into the complexity of city life… Thus American development has exhibited not merely advance along a single line, but a return to primitive conditions on a continually advancing frontier line, and a new development for that area…. This perennial rebirth, this fluidity of American life, this expansion westward with its new opportunities, its continuous touch with the simplicity of primitive society, furnish the forces dominating the American character.”
There’s no more quintessential expression of that American character than Second Life, from its very name. It’s been a place to reinvent oneself, to find and manifest one’s true nature free of the constraints of life back in the metropolis, to start fresh – all the things that the communities of the Western frontier provided migrants of centuries past.
In 2008, Mitch Kapor, chairman of the board of Linden Lab, owners of Second Life, declared its frontier closed. He’s someone who knows a thing or two about the concept, having founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation back when the Internet was still an open frontier space.
Just as Turner’s declaration came long before the last traces of frontier life vanished from America (with the continuing exception of the Arizona state legislature), Kapor’s came before the closing of the frontier became an inescapable social reality. That time may be at hand now.
Trust Systems: The Frontier and the Metropolis
Here’s what we all learned in class the other day, myself as much as the students – there’s nothing like a discussion with 25 bright, engaged people from diverse backgrounds for honing ideas.
Trust issues are not tremendously complicated within communities, especially frontier communities. In them, trust is largely a product of personal behavior broadly known – of reputation from direct dealings. While it can be damaged by “identity theft” and other means, it’s not terribly complicated or controversial.
Trust systems in the metropolis – the big, sophisticated world that frontier pioneers have fled – are also fairly straightforward. They’re designed to achieve the same ends as the systems of the frontier: holding people accountable for their actions, determining if someone will do what they say they can do, ensuring consistency of outcomes in dealings. But instead of being reputation-based, they’re document-based. They use third parties, not personal experience.
In short, on the frontier, I am who I say I am. If you want to know whether I will do what I say I’m going to, ask the people around who I’ve dealt with. In the metropolis, I am who my identity card says I am, whatever I may think about the matter. If you want to know whether I’m going to do what I said I’ll do, look to my degrees, my certifications, my credit report. Personal reputation still matters at the margins, but personal contact is often used to verify the authenticity of documents, not to learn about the person.
Both systems work pretty well. Problems come when you try to establish trust across communities using these different systems, or communities holding different values.
This happens in SL all the time. However, it’s often treated as a special case, drawing on the academic concept of “the magic circle,” which is actually utterly irrelevant, I think. Clashes stem from the failure of negotiation of reputation and identity across two communities, RL and SL.
Many SL “Residents” consider the valid culture for reputation and identity to be SL itself, the frontier town. In frontier values, nobody cares whether you were prince or pauper in the Old Country, only how you act and what you do on the frontier.
Many, however, don’t, and want to use metropolitan tools for measuring reputation and identity: documents, certificates, credentials, the tools of a mass, not a frontier, culture.
Much of the social history of SL from 2005 to 2008 came from that conflict of reputational tools.
Next up: “Part 2 – Passing or Clashing?” and “Part 3 – if code is law, code monkeys are rewriting our constitution!”
I went to my first SL Bar Association meeting today. It was quite decent as meetings go, but something caught my interest more than the agenda. The meeting was held in text chat, and the group apparently has a norm of emoting “raises hand” and waiting to be called on by the chair rather than just typing out – though the norm wasn’t universally followed.
Now, your cognition might not have ground to a screeching halt at that, as mine did. But, consider the venue: a text-chat meeting in Second Life.
Some time ago, a professor of mine mentioned in class that a friend of hers had looked into SL as a teaching tool and dismissed it when she found out there wasn’t a default animation for students to raise their hands. I cracked up, belly laughing, snorting – and then realized not only was my professor not joking, she didn’t get the humor herself.
So it bears explaining.
Let’s look at hand-raising. It’s a technological solution to a cognitive problem, one that’s become a custom. The cognitive problem is, humans are pretty bad at finding meaning from more than one person speaking at a time. Voice and music, voice and much ambient noise, no problem – but multiple voices, we’re just not good with. So we adapted a technological kludge: a visual tool for ensuring only one voice gets heard at a time (and incidentally, assuring the accountability of the chooser to the chosen, but that’s a separate issue).
And hand-raising is a neat solution to that little cognitive flaw of ours. We’re raised with it, and it seems second nature. It becomes customary for situations in which multiple people would like to speak at once.
But of course, in a virtual environment where nobody is speaking, but conversing in open chat – it’s a solution to a problem nobody is having! We can process successive lines of text quite easily – it’s called “reading,” and people learn to do it about the same time they learn that “hand raising” kludge. No matter how many people are “speaking” at once, the client renders it all as a text -the letters aren’t all superimposed over each other, but come neatly formatted and tagged by sequential speaker.
This is one of the great strengths of the medium: with our ability to process multiple simultaneous written inputs, the conversational bandwidth is vastly higher than with speech. Add a text backchannel to a speaker, and you’ve got a beautifully rich event. And unless people are very new to the medium, or more than 40 people or so are actually text-chatting all at once, it’s really not hard to follow. It’s just reading.
So what’s with the “raises hand” thing? Custom. People don’t think about why they use technology the way they do once it becomes familiar. And when new technologies are introduced, they go through a period of being treated as just like old technologies. It takes a while for people to understand they’re different, and to discover new uses and customs for them. Thus, automobiles started off as “horseless carriages,” a new technology “just like” a familiar old one. Computer GUIs were “electronic desktops” complete with “file folders” and “trash cans,” just like the familiar physical office space. And virtual world meetings have “hand raising.”
Sometimes, though, the new technology’s affordances – the things it allows you do do that other technologies don’t – and the cultural expectations of old-tech users crash head on, with nary a horse to be found. 2008’s “Convergence of the Real and the Virtual,” the first academic conference held in World of Warcraft, epitomized that. Traditional academic speakers, used to deference to their credentials and their place at a physical podium, melted down when confronted by the virtual-meeting norm of backchannel open conversation and engagement with the speaker.
Whether from a traditionalist’s view or an early adopter’s view, it was the sort of trainwreck you can’t take your eyes from. By the third day, however, everyone seemed to have adapted their cultural expectations to the affordances of the technology, and finished with a smooth and enjoyable day.
What of the SLBA’s hand-raising then? It’s a cultural marker, to be sure: it says that the people aren’t, as James Paul Gee would put it, fluent in the “Discourse” of virtual worlds meetings. Now, the “horseless carriage” trope serves a purpose: it smooths the adoption path. By obscuring differences and affordances, it allows noobs the opportunity to get comfortable with the technology in their own time. While it’s not a leet discourse, “horesless carriage”-ing is a technology with its own affordances.
For a group bringing new people into the virtual space, making them feel comfortable, and then socializing them into the discourse, it’s a kindess. For an organization seeking to have impact as knowledgeable participants in the Discourse of virtual worlds professionals – well, as WoW’s trade chat would have it – “lol noob!”
“Fresh Off the Boat” – that’s the step before being a noob.
Today I designed and equipped the avatars I’ll be using for my research into governance in Second Life’s Gorean community. Pandit Idlemind is my Caste of Scribes scholar:
Temperance (“Tempe”) Madrigal is my kajira, or slavegirl:
The tighter crop on Tempe’s photo is to keep it worksafe. Tempe is wearing the camisk, the garment slaves are exhibited and sold in. It’s translucent and ends above the crotch, the better to show the merchandise. She’s also wearing the “kef” slave brand:
I spent the afternoon designing Pandit’s and Tempe’s bodies, and going around getting them the basics: skin, hair and animation overrider. I had the invaluable help of several friends, and it was a fun time. Once that was done, I logged on as Pandit to begin my study.
The first stop in SL was the Gor Hub, a very busy nexus of shops, real estate vendors, web links and information givers. I looked around, and collected a stack of notecards for later reading. Not having seen a vendor selling the tunic of the Caste of Scribes, I turned to Second Life’s online shopping site, XStreet SL – and promptly found what I was looking for. Instead of buying online, I went back to the store in SL. I got what I wanted, and picked up a camisk for Tempe, to replace the silks of a slave in a wealthy household, which she’d had on hand.
From there, I teleported to the infohub at Port Kar, the community I’ll likely get introductions to through my colleague. Unlike a number of SL Gorean communities, Port Kar maintains a very active and regularly updated website (I’ll be at the fashion show on Saturday).
On arrival, I saw a set of popups on my screen, giving me informational notecards, and asking me to choose my reason for visiting (much like an automated border inspection). I chose “observer,” for a non-Gorean who would not be roleplaying, and thus not subject to attack. I put on the identifying tag and looked around at the inevitable shops and picked up more of the inevitable notecards. The environment gave the impression of a canon community, as opposed to “Disney Gor:” much of the clothing was drawn from descriptions in the books, rather than generic fantasy.
From there, I teleported down to the city itself, arriving on the docks just outside the town walls. I took some photos, and logged off, to repeat the process with Tempe.
It was as Tempe that I noticed the signs on the portal into town:
That brought home the enormity of what I intend.
I plan to live in this world for three months, about half the time as Pandit, the other half as Tempe. She has the collar, camisk and brand, but that’s just the beginning of the process of breaking her to slavery, a process I will go through – by the book. I see it as a personal and professional challenge: but so may whoever ends up buying her. It will not be an easy or pleasant time. Roleplay or no, it will be me in there, going through that. I’ve got a good support network, of people who know Gor and SL – but this will be a challenge.
Next up, introductions to my contacts, and a further exploration of SL-Gor websites.
Alice Robison asked everyone in ENG654 – Social Media for a status report this week on our online-community research projects, so here’s Updates of Gor, such as they are.
The biggest development was getting the project appropriately scoped. Alice and I sat down early last week and came up with a division into an investigation of the SL Gorean RP use of web forums and social media for class, and a legal anthropology investigation of governance in SL-Gor for an independent study project (and, hopefully, a dissertation chapter down the line, but I’m nowhere near a firm enough dissertation proposal to know if that’ll be feasible). I still owe her – and the chair of the School of Human Evolution and Social Change – a one-page writeup of the project. I’ll probably do that directly after finishing this post.
She recommended a couple books on methodology: Charles Ess’s Digital Media Ethics, and Markham and Baym’s Internet Inquiry: Conversations About Method. As soon as I finish Lessig’s Remix, my lunchtime reading for the past week, I’ll start in on the Ess.
I discovered that the project seems to be exempt from IRB approval: as both observation of public behavior (Category 3), and data to be collected without RL identifiers (Category 4). I still have to apply for exemption, the form being, of course, almost identical to that for expedited review of *non*-exempt research. There’s no escape from forms. It seems that I can’t be my own Principal Investigator: that could prove troublesome, and I’ve asked for some clarification as to my options there.
My human subjects certification (which I’d obtained as a facilitator in a study run by my former employer, ASU’s Counseling & Consultation some years back) had expired, so I had to take the National Institutes of Health online training program again. It was actually sort of fun and interesting, and I did very well, quickly getting my Not Mad Scientist certificate:
In a pleasant bit of synchronicity, I discovered that a colleague has deep experience with Gorean RP in SL, and has offered up high-level contacts to provide me a seal of approval and introduction into the community. If it comes through, it’ll be an incredible boon: trying to break in cold as an outsider *and* a researcher could easily be an utter failure.
I’ve created an SL avatar to be my Caste of Scribes researcher, and repurposed one I had around into my kajira (slavegirl) researcher. The scribe has yet to log on for the first time: sometime in the next few days I’ll do up a shape for him, get a good skin, hair and animation overrider, and some generic-but-acceptable Gorean clothes to start in. My kajira needs an RP-appropriate skin and hair, but has a lot of basics in place.
I’m halfw
ay through Book 4 of the canon novels. I’m finding them surprisingly entertaining: John Norman is a *terrible* prose stylist, but does tell a ripping good adventure yarn. The treatment of women has been more silly than offensive: Norman’s social views so far are too absurd to get upset about: his social Darwinism is so patently illogical as to be entertaining. I still plan to read through the first 7 (of 27) novels as soon as possible, but no further, unless necessary.
I haven’t dived into the web communities yet, other than a read-through of the goreanrp.com site, a work in progress intended as a community site for SL-Gor, by the author of a very useful Amazon list of the Gor novels. Thanks to @AZAfterthought, I have a copy of the Bardzell & Odom ethnography of SL-Gor, which looks like it sets a good high mark for me to match with my work.
So the coming week holds: making contact with the SL-Gor community leaders via my colleague, getting my avatars up and running, reading the next couple of novels, startng the Ess book and Bardzell & Odom article, doing a writeup of my proposed research for my advisors, and starting to lurk on the online forums.
Last week in Alice Robison’s Social Media class, we read Jim Gee’s “Literacy, Discourse and Linguistics: Introduction,” in which he describes how one enters into a “secondary Discourse community,” a community other than the one in which one was raised. He uses the concept of “mushfake,” a prison term for the process of repurposing common materials to replace scarce or unavailable goods, as a descriptor of the process of becoming a member of a Discourse community. On consideration, I find the “mushfake” concept even less useful than I did on first read. To get at my critique, I’m going to outline three ways one enters Discourse communities, then test the “mushfake” concept against each of them.
1. Apprenticeship: By definition, nobody’s born into a secondary Discourse community. The rules and content of D/d discourse have to be learned, and the person accepted into the community in some status or other. How this works would seem to be a well-understood process, particularly outside the world of the excessively schooled (as school is used to undermine and supplant traditional processes of learning). Lave & Wenger’s Situated Learning provides solid examples and explication of the process.
Typically, it follows some or all of these stages: “sweeping up,” in which the aspirant performs menial labor unrelated to the core tasks of the occupation (from martial arts to tailoring to corporate law to community activism), but is afforded an opportunity to observe the (d)discourse – to learn communications styles and watch journeymen and masters work. Second is to assist a master – handing them materials, performing simple tasks, but essentially watching a master work. Next, or simultaneously, is training in simple tasks under a journeyman, then independent work as a journeyman, then mastery.
At each stage of the process the person *is* a member of the Discourse community – a cadet or trial member, ideally acting in a role-appropriate way. It’s not the job of the apprentice to sound and act like a master, it’s their job to sound and act like an apprentice.
2. Passing: Passing is the act of trying to seem like a member of a Discourse community for a circumscribed purpose, when one actually is not a member. Gee’s example of “a professor walks into a biker bar” is a case of passing: the professor is not trying to become a biker, or a biker bar regular, but to seem like one for a limited period of participant-observation.
Passing sometimes, but not always, involves a power or status differential. It is an attempt to temporarily take on the markers of a status other than that of one’s home Discourse: the professor in the bar, the mixed-race person trying to be taken as white, the gay as straight, the man as woman. Passing can be either high-to-low or low-to-high status: both cases have produced a great number of classic stories.
There is no period of training in passing; there is either success or failure, though the process can be iterative. Passing differs from apprenticeship in that, in the latter, the home Discourse community and the one of training are not inherently conflicting, while in the passing case they are. Passing is built on secrecy, if not deception, elements which undermine an effective apprenticeship.
3. Getting over: Getting over, it seems, is passing with intent to acquire something other than acceptance as a member of the Discourse community. One has to pass to get over, but not all who pass are seeking to get over. Grifters, con artists and seducers use the techniques of passing in order to get something extrinsic to community membership: wealth or sex.
So how does Gee’s concept of “mushfake,” what an earlier generation called “ersatz,” relate to these categories? Poorly, for the most part. “Mushfake” is the art of making do, of substituting plentiful materials in rough equivalency for scarce ones.
It has no bearing on the apprenticeship situation: there, materials (cognitive, discursive or physical) are abundant, and made available in a regulated manner appropriate to the person’s growth into mastery of the Discourse. Any sort of faking is inimical to the achievement of mastery in such a community, which requires an honest appreciation of the apprentice’s progress in order to produce a trained journeyman and skilled master.
Gee, writing from the “passing” context, rightly identifies an element of make-do and fakery. Passing involves misdirection to cover gaps in knowledge that a proper apprenticeship would have filled, which could be analogized to the repurposing of materials in “mushfake.” I didn’t see Gee as making that point explicitly: had he done so, and examined the role of misdirection in passing, his article would have gained greatly in subtlety, insight and utility.
It seems that in the case of getting over, the role of repurposing of discourse tools is less, and vastly more refined, than in the case of passing. Passing is a process akin to that of the stage magician: putting on a performance while manipulating attention away from acts which would break the illusion. Getting over takes the performer and audience into territory of greater skepticism, and requires something very like mastery of a Discourse without membership. Getting over has to stand up to direct scrutiny, where passing typically involves people just seeing what they expect to see.
Mushfake, as Gee describes it, is obviously fake: the old underwear repurposed into a hat. The performance of getting over has to be as masterful and convincing as the real thing, the art forger as skilled in technique and Discourse as the genuine master. There’s no room for obvious substitution.
In short, Gee’s mushfake concept seems to mis-describe the tool use of people entering Discourse communities, either legitimately as an apprentice or illegitimately as someone trying to pass or get over. It does suggest, however, that a subtle and sophisticated analysis of the use of misdirection (in the passing case) and alternative routes to mastery (in the getting over case) could usefully shed light on how Discourses are learned in less exotic circumstances.
Dear Student:
No, you’re not any one of my students in particular: this song isn’t about you. But you are a composite. You’ve asked me a set of questions about virtual worlds, ones that I haven’t been able to answer satisfactorily for either of us. I’m going to try again here, and see if a day’s reflection and consultation can make a difference.
You’ve made some observations and asked some questions that I think sum up as, you’re not readily connecting with the space and don’t see why you should learn it. I think what underlies your (very legitimate) questions is, you’re in the Trough of Noobery, and it sucks to be there.
I said in the first class that there are three reasons for studying governance of virtual worlds: as a model, a small-scale online reproduction of larger and more complex offline phenomena; as a convenient nexus of offline political, economic, legal and cultural forces, all interesting in their own right; and as a potential source for innovations that might transform offline institutions.
Let’s talk about the model. What I’m having you do is model an experience many of you will have in your professional lives, not least of all those of you who want to practice law: entering into a new field, leaning what it’s about and what’s important, earning respect among the people in that field, and being able to make meaning within it.
We all do this throughout our lives, from starting at a new school or job, moving to a new town, picking up a craft or hobby. Those things are either inevitable or freely chosen: your parents got relocated, and you were dragged along, or you decided you really want to spend your evenings learning luge, or Thai cooking. In both cases, theory and methodology really don’t help: you’re either fine, or stuck, without them. Desperation or desire will propel you out of the Trough of Noobery sooner or later.
But the professional case, the one we’re modeling in this class, is an intermediate: somewhere between compulsion and desire, tools come in handy for navigating your way down the the road to Leetville.
So far, you’ve read insiders’ views and outsiders’ views, academic articles, works of in-depth journalism, newspaper articles and blogs. You’ve gotten a bit of political science, anthropology, economics and law. These intellectual tools, we think, are good and useful, but mostly for people who’re already out of the Trough of Noobery and rolling down the road to Leetville. You’re not there yet, and telling the political scientists and economists to get out and push isn’t getting you the momentum to get out of the Trough.
You have to do that.
You have to be a noob, and you have to keep going through that till you reach comfort and fluency on the road to Leetville.
We haven’t stressed this enough in class, in part because we’re really not sure how to approach it (and pretty sure, from keeping up with the field, that nobody’s really sure), but what we want you to be able to do by the end of the semester is to be able to make meaning convincingly and coherently, at a graduate-appropriate level, in a game world and a social world.
That’s why we’re suggesting alternatives to the traditional seminar paper: we’re confident you know how to make meaning in school. You’ve had a lot of practice at that. What we want you to do is enter into a new field, figure it out, and “read” (understand what people are saying, and what they mean by it) and “write” (create something that people in the space consider meaningful and useful) in it.
Much of legal practice is built around this skill set. A client comes to you with a problem. You need to understand what it is they do well enough to understand the problem in their terms. Then you have to sort through your knowledge of the law, figure out what applies and what doesn’t, and then (ideally) translate that in terms that the client can understand, so they know what the law expects of them. Then, you have to explain the situation, to a judge (who doesn’t know anything about the client’s business or situation), a jury (who doesn’t know anything about either the law or the client’s situation), or a potential investor (who understands finance, but not the law or the client).
That’s some very sophisticated “reading” and “writing” across a range of very different, mutually ignorant, communities.
That’s the skill set we’re hoping to train you in, in this class. We’re not here to get you to develop a hobby, or to share our hobbies. We don’t much care if you like either world we’re using, or if you like virtual worlds at all, at this point. We do care that we do a good job teaching you, and you do a good job learning, how to enter into a technologically-bounded space and become literate within it.
So what can you do to get past noob-hood and come out literate?
My PhD program faces the same sets of issues: how to take a bunch of lazy noobs and get them making meaning in their academic field. One of the things they’ve done is to create a mandatory 1-credit course, in which we have to attend an on-campus academic talk every week, like it or not. It sucks, and I whine, but it works.
We’re not going to mandate time inworld, or that you attend one event a week. We didn’t establish those ground rules, and we’re not going to change the rules in mid-game. But if you want to do well, if you want to achieve literacy, try this:
This week:
- Go to one of the freebie stores on the notecard we gave you. Get some clothes and change into them.
- Go to one of the events on the weekly recommendations. No, go to two, one academic/professional and one social, like a live music event.
- Talk to strangers until you’ve found someone you’d like to add to your friends list.
That’s the advice for SL. The advice for WoW is much the same: level to 15 or so, and join a pickup group to fight (not get run though, fight), Ragefire Chasm. Or click the PvP button and join a battleground. Or join a pickup group to quest for a couple hours. Buy and sell a green item in the Auction House. Raise your professions and at least one of cooking, fishing or first aid to equal your defense level.
Do that, and you’ll be out of the Trough of Noobery and well on your way to Leetville – and to success in the class.
I’m starting the semester in another class of Alice Robison’s: English 654, Social Media. One of our core assignments is a digital literacies project that will see us actively engaged with the discourse of an online community – one that’s completely new to us. Subject to approval, and negotiation of research protocols (and isn’t *this* going to make for an interesting IRB application!), I’m going to do participant-observer work in Second Life’s Gorean community (or, in the internet vernacular, I’m going to be a kajira FOR SCIENCE!).
Discussing my research interests in virtual worlds governance with a friend recently, she suggested that I spend some time exploring SL Gor. It’s perhaps the largest network of themed communities in SL, apparently (though I haven’t found any reliable and current statistics yet) larger than the well-known steampunk nation of Caledon (another potential research site), yet operates largely in isolation from SL’s media and elites. In 2007, Goreans were something like vampires are today – a public nuisance, spilling their roleplay over into conventional spaces. This seems to have subsided dramatically, with Goreans largely staying in their own vast realms, and thus dropping off the public radar.
Gor is an ideal topic for a social media study: it’s got the canon of original novels, whose interpretation and application are hotly debated across a multitude of internet forums. There are lifestylers, who try to recreate the customs of the novels full-time in their lives; roleplayers, who delimit their involvement to particular times and places; orthodox and reform movements; machinima, parodies, blogs, and much more.
Remarkably little has been done in academia with respect to SL-Gor, and there’s definitely room in the field for a good paper, especially one treating SL-Gor as an object of legal-anthropological study.
I’m about halfway through the first (of 27) of John Norman’s novels of Gor, Tarnsman of Gor (I’m hoping to get by reading only the first seven, after which non-devotees seem to agree the author descended into abysmally-written rants, and much greater hostility to women) I’ve done a preliminary survey of forums and blogs, looked at some machinima, read some parody fic, and begun to think about methodology.
Tentatively, I’m thinking of a two-pronged approach: one, to go in as an itinerant member of the caste of scribes, roleplaying as a student of laws and customs across the cities of SL-Gor; and two, as a kajira, or slavegirl. I don’t know how Gorean RP breaks down between the roleplay of living in a barbarian-fantasy world, and how much of it is BDSM wrapped in an ideology deeply hostile to women. I think both perspectives, of scholar and slave, will be necessary to really understand SL-Gor.
I hope to learn how the Gorean cities of SL govern themselves; how they debate and dispute the application of canon and negotiate the boundaries between casual play, RP and lifestyle; how they handle the boundaries between Gor and non-Gor within SL; how they handle the boundaries among Gorean sexuality, knowledgeable BDSM and sex tourism; how identity is created and negotiated; to what extent SL-Gor is a transmedia experience or is limited to face to face RP in an SL Gorean sim; and hopefully many questions I can’t imagine yet.
I’m calling what I want to do legal anthropology, as I see it grounded in questions about what people actually do in creating communities and setting rules and customs for who and what they are, and how they deal with others, within those communities. Lawrence Rosen has written extensively on the legal anthropology of North African communities, with a focus on the interplay of Islam, culture and law. I think something very similar can be done with SL-Gor, and that it will provide some real insights into the politics of gender relations in offline society as well as into microcommunity governance in online spaces.
This will be an immensely controversial project. Gor has many impassioned antagonists, and based on what little I’ve known, I’ve long been one of them. I suspect that anything which might be construed as sympathetic, or anything other than full excoriation, will bring down immense internet wrath on me from the Left. Likewise, I suspect that anything other than blind praise will engender accusations of bad faith from my Gorean hosts. It won’t be a dull semester.
Next up: creating my avatars and RP backstories, making contacts in SL-Gor and getting started; and really figuring out what my participant-observer work will look like. And reading more novels.
Some Resources So Far:
Sheraka The Scribe’s Gor-SL blog
Avatars in Wonderland: What is this Gor? (an interview with Sheraka the Scribe, with some fascinating comments)
New World Notes: Second Life of Gor – Nearly 50k Gorean Roleplayers in SL?