anthropology » Aporia

10 Big Pieces: Nardi, My Life as a Night Elf Priest, part 1

Sep 012010

Bonnie Nardi‘s new book, My Life as a Night Elf Priest: An Anthropological Account of World of Warcraft, is online anthropological – and indeed academic in general – writing at its finest. It is clear, readable, and insightful, deploying theory in a sophisticated way while remaining highly accessible to a general audience. It’s an outstanding work that deserves wide use in the classroom.

However, along with Nardi’s exceptional contributions, in cross-cultural fieldwork as well as in the clarity of her writing, her theoretical framework is problematic in many ways, and outright contradicted in her strong observational concluding chapters. Another contradiction running through the book is between her use of John Dewey‘s democratic theory of aesthetic experience (from Art as Experience, 1934) and an ivory-tower condescension towards popular, amateur creative expression, along with a glib dismissiveness of cultural forms outside her areas of interest or expertise.

This post will deal with the book’s many strengths, the next one with a criticism of its flaws.

Nardi states in her prologue that “I believe World of Warcraft is an exemplar of a new means of forming and sustaining human relationships and collaborations through digital technology.” In describing her research methodology, while stating that “there was not a great deal of difference between my work on World of Warcraft and my previous work,” she adds that one difference was “that the research inclined toward the participant end of participant-observation,” as a “full participant in game activities,” citing Pearce (2009)’s term “participant-engagement.”

That’s a clear and valuable statement of the distinction between “RL” fieldwork in situations where the anthropologist is immediately and inevitably tagged as an outsider, and those, particularly online, in which something like full participation in the community is possible. Such a position, of course, calls for a different epistemology, problematizing the reflexivity required of an “engaged” reporter as well as the tensions between participation in the subject community and the community of academic research.

Nardi seems to have found the liminal space of participant-engagement much less troublesome than I do, but skilfully weaves the subjective through her work.

She makes an unusual and evocative argument early on: that WoW is “a refuge – an ‘escape,’ as players say – from modernity,” which manifests in the appeal of the medieval and “human scale” of architecture and activities, and in a focus on “character development,” in which the “toon” serves as a proxy for Victorian notions of self-improvement through deliberate activity.

One thinks of the “Vickies,” the neo-Victorians from Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age, who used nanotechnology to enable a culture thoroughly rejecting modernist, mass-culture values in favor of an advanced steampunk aesthetic – and foresees another post in the Mixy Things series. It’s unfortunate that Nardi didn’t further develop this theme in a more overt way.

While much of Nardi’s discussion of aesthetics is problematic, she does take a good swipe at both Jesper Juul and the narratologists by noting that

“Metrics and competition suggesting sportsmanlike activity tell half the story, but instead of the literal uniformity of sporting uniforms and the plainness and predictability of, say, basketball courts or soccer fields, video games conjure striking visual worlds remarkable in their vivid realizations of unique imagined universes,” and “[w]hile agreeing that video games bring forth imagined worlds, my data suggest that these worlds are less a fiction in which players fill in gaps and more a powerful visual experience like viewing a striking landscape – the world is fully realized, and one need only gaze at it.” That visual surface “did double duty: players could gaze appreciatively at their surroundings, but, simultaneously, the world’s visual features invited players to participatory activity.”

She argues that the success of WoW and MMOs in general is the linking of the performative role of the player to the designer-created visuals, that performance alone, as in text-based and tabletop games, is not enough to draw and sustain a mass audience. Yet, performance is real: “[p]articipation in virtual worlds is not simulation but performance.” Contra Baudrillard, she argues that “[p]ostmodern theory asserted the delusional quality of mass-produced images, but even as those images were proliferating, new means of authentic expressive performance, embedded in vivid visual spaces, were emerging as forms of mass culture.”

The final third of her book, “Cultural Logics of World of Warcraft,” is where Nardi really shines. Her fieldwork here is very strong, her reportage largely unwarped by excessive devotion to theory over observation (and as I’ll argue next time, refutes over and over again one of her key theoretical arguments from the somewhat dicey middle section).

She addresses addiction, theorycrafting and mods, gender and play in China each in their own chapter. While all are models of anthropological technique and description, her chapter on gender is truly extraordinary. Academics tend to see what they want to see, and tend to interpret the reactions of others as if all were liberal academics – resulting in such astonishing statements as Corneliussen (2008)’s description of WoW as “a playground for feminism.” Nardi clearly describes the “boys’ tree house” atmosphere of American WoW servers, the constant homophobic teasing, men actually choosing female avatars so they wouldn’t have to look at a male avatar, and the creation of a somewhat exclusionary space through boyish, masculinist discourse practices.

Her chapter on Chinese gamers (not gold farmers, but the huge audience of regular WoW players in China) is fascinating overall, and particularly for its contrast with the construction of masculinity in China versus the US: cross-gender playing is much more rare because the homophobic teasing is shaming, rather than more or less good-natured as in the US, and the huge dominance of PvP play marginalizes women to a much greater degree than the US PvE norm. Fascinating stuff, and Nardi notes many opportunities for very valuable future study.

(Parenthetically, in discussing these chapters with technosage, she asked about gendered MMO play in Japan, and I was startled to realize I haven’t read a single thing about Japanese MMO culture, or, even more surprisingly, Korean. I wonder if the incipient release of Final Fantasy XIV will create an opportunity to fill that gap. And, if anybody knows any work in that field, please let me know!)

Next up: problems of agency raised by Nardi’s use of activity theory, and tensions between her use of Dewey and her own fairly evident cultural elitism – which support her use of activity theory and a heavy weighting of the role of technological artifacts over that of users and their culture, which reads like technological determinism without the macro-historical arguments.

Powerpoint Champion of Gor!

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Jun 142010

My presentation (available for download here) at Games+Learning+Society 6.0, on ethical and methodological challenges of research in Gorean roleplay communities in Second Life, went well and accomplished what I was hoping for – the beginnings of a discussion of some issues that really seem to be more complex and nuanced than generally acknowledged.

The presentation covered most of the territory of a paper I wrote for Alice Daer last semester, and currently in alpha revisions for publication. It wasn’t what the abstract, written at the very beginning of last semester, promised: the results of an ethnographic study of how canon is used politically in Gorean disputes and training.

That project still hasn’t started: I’ve got a new principal investigator, and over the next few weeks I’ll hopefully be working with Elisabeth Hayes to craft a new application for IRB exemption, go through that process, and finally, six months after I expected to start, get out into the field and get to work.

However, I’m hugely glad for the delay, as it gave me a chance to explore a set of ethical and methodological issues that I thought really needed and deserved more attention.

I’d been exploring them on my own, though, and when I walked into the room to deliver my presentation and saw Constance Steinkuehler, Rebecca Black, and Thomas Malaby in the room, I was really hoping I hadn’t missed something disgustingly obvious! I definitely had nightmare flashes of one of them saying, “oh, you didn’t read the classic text in the field that solved this problem ten years ago?”

Given that, when Constance sat me down and talked with me very intensely afterwards – gods, what a relief! She had brilliant, brilliant advice, and the reassurance that I’d spotted a real problem and was more or less on the right track in addressing it was terrific news.

Over the next two days, quite a number of people came up to me and engaged me on the issues I’d raised. While not everyone agreed with the approach I proposed for my own work, I got to see that I’ve come across a somewhat extreme case of a very common problem in participant-observer fieldwork, and that the very extremity of my example can shed good constructive light on issues common to many of us.

One of the things I took from people’s comments was that there’s a tendency of academics to look for their lost keys under the streetlamp, rather than in the alley where they dropped them. It’s easier to research good behavior, communities of conventional values, groups who’re open and friendly to the research process and community, and that that creates an academic map of the world that simply overlooks “here there be dragons” territory.

The advice I got was to go ahead and explore anonymously, in addition to my open, disclosed, transparent research efforts – but not to use the fruits of that exploration in work for academic publication.

In other words, while I can know what lies past the fuzzy edges of the mapped territory, I really should only report back on the places to which roads go. I’m not entirely convinced that that’s a good answer for the pursuit of understanding, though I do agree that it’s the best choice for balancing the norms and expectations of ethical human subjects research, the values and integrity of the people and communities being studied, and the desire for a comprehensive, synthetic understanding of the world.

It’s a shame it’s not reasonably or ethically possible to have parallel careers, one as “academic alt,” one as “journalist alt.” For all my snark at the foolishness of academia, it really is where I belong and want to work, so I will have to constrain what I report about what I do to fit within academic norms.

That said, I do think I’m doing something broadly valuable in challenging the community on methodological and ethical issues around studying online communities. We’re growing past the 1990s absolute privileging of RL in studying online behavior, and the idealistic, unrealistic and often wrong assumptions of early research driven by psychological paradigms. We’re also seeing a necessary pushback against disembodied scientism, and an embrace of subjectivity, reflexivity, and a willingness to take seriously and study digital embodiment, performance, and sexuality.

I’m reading more and more work from the past half decade, much of it in fan studies, who have been pushing for an inclusion of the emotive, physical, sexual in online cultural studies. I’m glad to be following in their footsteps, and I hope that once I get past this initial phase of research design, I can start doing some good fieldwork to add to what’s been done.

Identity at the Participant/Observer Crossroads

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May 292010

Anthropological fieldwork sits – uncomfortably sometimes – at the intersection of the intimate and the social. I’m largely glad of it: that crossroads is a fascinating place, marked with signs blinding and obscure, and populated by all manner of strange and wonderful characters. Including me – and it’s the construction of “me” as participant and observer I want to noodle around with a bit today.

For about two and a half years, Second Life was problematic for me: I was intoxicated by its revolutionary potential, and saw it as a natural successor to places I’d studied and worked in before, but I couldn’t quite get it. I came to SL in April 2007, after reading a Wired account of a Yuri’s Night party held live at NASA’s Ames Research Center and in SL. I’d worked with the founders of Yuri’s Night, and had friends and mentors at Ames. While I’d left that community, it still held a powerful draw for me, and this mixed-media event was irresistible. I rolled an av, and came in.

And I went to meetings and to talks. My av looked a lot like me, with a Matrix-influenced wardrobe. I didn’t socialize at all, didn’t make personal connections, and gods know I didn’t have fun. I didn’t stay, either. I left after a while, and then repeated the process: I’d get to thinking about the potential of SL, I’d come in and treat it as a university campus, and I wouldn’t stay. I tried rolling a few different avatars, and that didn’t do it either.

Late in 2008 I had a conversation about that experience with a friend who’s an old SL hand. She told me to start over, and create an avatar without preconceptions, unbound to recreations of my physical self (or the me-with-ankle-length-dreads I had been using – hey, a bald guy can dream, right?). I created a version of the female self I’d seen in my mind’s eye all my life – and that worked. Well, subject to a year of angsting over whether I could present like that for work and teaching – but I eventually decided to, without any visible ill effects.

Late last year, comfortable in my avatar self at long last, I felt ready and able to join a community as a resident, to make that transition to the other side of the screen, and live the experience of SL as a place and not a tool. And I’ve found another set of complications.

My initial vision of my identity in SL was as RL – me: scholar, educator, social media and events manager. I was largely, unconsciously, identity-transparent. I was working in a new space, and treated identity issues the same as starting a new office job: while my presentation would be negotiable (what do I put on my desk? who do I talk about my geeky interests to? what do I use for desktop wallpaper?), they weren’t in any sense fundamental. I was coming in with my life experience, my professional history, all those tags of identity, along with me. I never really thought about it much.

I knew there was a debate, sometimes quite intense and arcane, over the nature of identity, disclosure, and selfhood online. It was out there, but it didn’t have any personal referents: the people around me were NASA managers, professors, grad students – all people like myself, just working in a different space.

Around that time Tom Boellstorff’s book, Coming of Age in Second Life, came out. He’s got a chapter on methodology where he talks about his decision not to use research alts, and to have full disclosure of his RL identity in his SL profile. That sort of disclosure was very different from the SL norm at the time (and probably still is), but he made a strong case for it as a researcher subject to university Internal Review Boards, which hold social science research to the same standards as surgery and drug testing, with a strong standard of full disclosure, the result of generations of unethical research practices.

So, when I decided to come back to SL as a full fledged researcher, my initial plan was to use my Kaseido Quandry avatar for research, but to really experience life in SL on its own terms, on an (initially identical) alt without RL disclosure. I made friends on that alt, but found that the people I became close to, I introduced to Kas as well: I was on Kas for events a good bit mid-days, and making that connection helped me stay in touch. Then I got busier and busier, and used my alt less and less.

Some of that was, as I’d always known and shied away from, fieldwork takes time: the norm is that you live in your community, full time. I still find that unimaginable, but I’m trying. So, I was on as Kas more. But there was another thing: Kas was me.

My alt had it easier: same appearance, same personality, just not the burden of ZOMG LAW PROFESSOR PHD STUDENT – and disclosed RL male. This wasn’t an act of dishonesty: “don’t ask, don’t tell” about RL is a very common norm in SL. Only the naive and the new think that the RL person looks like the SL avatar, be it in gender or general hottitude. Absent not actually lying about RL, many people see no issue with non-disclosure. Lying to fully pass as the gender one presents is a complex issue: I’ve never done it, though.

But while my alt was having a fine social time, I felt it was at the price of a loss of too much of my identity: “don’t ask, don’t tell,” just as it does in the military, for me repressed too much of my selfhood to be tolerable or to feel real.

In law school, I’d had a similar social problem: with a pink wedge of hair and combat boots, I didn’t fit most people’s expectations of a top-5 school law student – yet nobody believed me in clubs when I said that’s what I was. I took to telling people when I went out that I was in film school: it was easier to believe, and it didn’t drive people off. But I never met anybody that way that I became really close to.

I wanted the acceptance of being able to carry my work signifiers with me when I went out. I’ve gotten it: at the Olive Bistro, The Savoy Jazz Club, Parky’s Pub, The Breeze at The Frank Lloyd Wright Museum, I’ve found hangouts where I’m welcomed as a regular, where I can bitch about school, and it’s good. Well, aside from always dancing solo, which is starting to suck.

My alt, with that standard “don’t ask, don’t tell” disclaimer about RL in her profile, gets lots of romantic attention, and never has to dance alone. Kas, openly gender-queer and lately really neurotic about it, doesn’t get much at all, and doesn’t know what to do with what she does. Tired of being a neutered figure, I’ve tweaked my shape a little bit to be hotter – and then flailed when it’s had the desired effect. But that’s not really an anthropological problem, except in passing (pun intended).

It’s not unrelated to something that is a critical anthropological issue, though. In the CDS, the community where I’m living, participating in local government and doing research, the local norms are very – call it immersionist, or pseudonymous, or magic-circle: people don’t disclose a lot of RL information. Some don’t disclose any at all. Most give hometown, maybe profession, some impression of gender, age, marital status – but not all of those, and not all of the people, by any means. Full-disclosure Kas is an anomaly, and an increasingly uncomfortable one.

It feels disrespectful to friend the avatars of the CDS with my RL Facebook account, to violate the frontier norms of “you’re only as good as what you do here” with references to my RL work and experience. It feels like cheating, some strange form of cheating in which I get less for having done so than if I’d played by the rules.

It’s too late to create a set of pseudonymous tools for Kas: that horse is out of the barn. What I have done is edited my SL profile: gone is the first-panel statement that I’m studying in SL, replaced by a pitch for the CDS. My RL tab has gone from the hint “any Kaseido on the internets is likely me” to the blatant “Want full RL? Google Kaseido” to a referral to a Picks statement that I’m a researcher, and will provide full RL on myself and my work on request. It feels more respectful to the norms of the communities I travel in, while still meeting the stringent ethical standards of my profession, which are terribly important to me.

And I think I just need to chill and say yes when strangers ask me to dance

I don’t know what to do with all this, other than to start writing academic articles that critique powerfully the internet researcher norm of constant full RL disclosure, to argue for participation as involving respecting and following the identity norms of the culture of residence.

Democracy is a Bad Metaphor

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Mar 202010

For about a month I’ve been participant-observing in Second Life’s Confederation of Democratic Simulators (CDS), a political community that’s recently merged with Al-Andalus (AA), where I’ve bought a home. This is the first time I’ve blogged about my experiences there, which is probably a mistake. I haven’t wanted to publicly record my impressions till I’d gotten out of “the trough of noobery:” I wanted to understand the issues, personalities and politics better before my opinions and perceptions cast me, willy-nilly, into alliances and enmities.

A recent post on the CDS forums described the community as a model of “representative democracy,” in contrast to what the author called “adhocracy,” or what I’d describe as “management,” rather than governance. There also seems to be something of a split, which doesn’t cleanly track the CDS vs. Al Andalus, Europeans vs. Americans, but close, between deliberation and collaboration, a tremendously useful concept from Beth Simone Noveck’s Wiki Government.

The CDS seems to place a primary value on deliberation, on the airing of all opinions, on discussion, as an end, a social good, in itself. The other view sees collaboration, working to produce an outcome through action, as the greater good.

I’m a hardcore collaborator, and the CDS Representative Assembly meetings have challenged my patience. Issues which I feel could have been resolved in five minutes take hours of discussion to generate no action items. Of course, that’s not the necessary goal: there’s a lot to be said for the feeling that everyone’s had their say.

My days as a lurker ended yesterday in a special meeting to develop a definition of citizenship for the merged AA/CDS polity. I’ll set aside the logistical issues, though they were numerous, and manifested, I believe, the general spirit of preferring discussion over action (consensus model: let’s all wait 20 minutes in case a key member shows up. collaboration model: time has value, let’s get down to work).

The issue on the table was, who can vote in CDS legislative elections? The problem was, the CDS is a model of a territorial nation state. The answer for the state is “born or naturalized human persons within the territorial boundaries,” subject to certain exceptions, and with a description of the naturalization process attached. The exceptions and the process may be contestable, may be fair or unfair by certain lights, but the definition itself is simple and easy to understand.

Applying this definition as a metaphor to a community in Second Life reveals complications.

Let’s start with “within the territorial boundaries.” Few in RL are so global, travel so much, that they don’t have a “permanent abode” in a meaningful sense. Most all the world’s billions spend most all their time in an identifiable location in a nation-state.

Not so in SL. I “live” in Al Andalus, but I spend very little of my time in SL there. That’s not the case for some, but it’s certainly not true that our time in SL is necessarily confined to one region, at all.

So, then, what makes a resident? The standard definition is real estate ownership, but that raises serious issues of disenfranchisement for people who contribute services to a community rather than own property. A marketing manager, an event host, gods help us a politician, may contribute more value than someone renting a token postage-stamp parcel. Similarly, someone may buy a plot just to have a vote, but remain uninvolved in the life of the community.

“Person” is an even greater complication. SL allows the free creation of “alts,” other avatars. Tying an avatar to an identifiable human without consent is a violation of SL’s terms of service. One can spy, or ask nicely, but there’s really no way to ensure accuracy of “one human person, one vote.”

Further, the theoretical justification of “one human person, one vote,” in SL is far from clear. Another post on the CDS forums observes that the vote has been tied to property ownership because in the CDS the sanction for violating rules is seizure of property.

This makes “one human person, one vote” start to look unjust. In RL, the ultimate sanction is seizure of the person, not their property. We all have only one body to jail out here, so tying the vote to the thing at risk from the state makes sense. If the CDS sanction is seizure of property, those with more property are at greater risk, and it’s not clear at all they receive a commensurably greater benefit.

Another question comes from the purposes of the political entity. The RL state “provides for the common welfare and defense,” taking personal assets through taxation and providing common services in return. The SL “state” is fundamentally a real estate cooperative, a lessee of land from Linden Lab, and beholden to them for rents. Services may be provided, but the foundation is the obligation to “pay tier” to Linden Lab. Given that, larger lessees are more at risk from overall default than smaller ones; they have more to lose if tier is not paid in full, the collective defaults, and Linden Lab reclaims the property.

So, yesterday’s meeting struggled to adapt the nation-state citizenship model to SL conditions, twisting itself in knots attempting ever more complicated contortions to force their SL situation into a Treaty of Westphalia model.

I suggested that, the best model for an SL real estate cooperative is an RL real estate cooperative. This produced a rare moment of unity: all present were horrified at my undemocratic, rapacious American capitalist, wealth-privileging notion.

It still seems to be the only solution that is clear, parsimonious, and meets the practical goals of the environment.

Treat the land-owning entity as a corporation. You can buy shares, each share holding one vote. The share price is pegged to the going rate for the smallest practicable residential parcel, 512 square meters. You can buy a share by buying a parcel, or buy a share at the same price without a parcel. If you want to get fancy, you can provide a salary to workers, pegged to share price (say, one share per hundred hours of logged community service, or somesuch). Publish the share registry publicly.

This eliminates the alt problem entirely: it doesn’t matter at all what RL person controls what avatars: shares are held in avatar name and voted by the avatar, and if one person wants to divide them up across avatars, it’s irrelevant.

It recognizes that persons with more to lose from asset seizure deserve more control to prevent such seizure, either by the CDS judicial system or by LL foreclosure. It enfranchises people who for whatever reason don’t want to own and maintain property.

And it’s very easy and transparent to administer.

It’s also at least a partial solution to vote-packing fears: while gaming the system is still possible, at least the state profits from the attempt, through share sales, providing either insurance against insufficient rental funds, or an operating budget for events.

It’s a non-starter, of course, because it does shatter the strained metaphor of the CDS as a territorial nation. The problem is, there is no workable, just, transparent and parsimonious solution that does keep the metaphor intact.

Online communities are not territorial nation-states. Some of us regard that as a very good thing, some wish they were. But all the wishing, all the contortions, all the speechifying, don’t change the physics. By keeping the metaphor, the CDS is forced into increasingly complex epicycles to try to maintain a model that fits the fundamental metaphor while still managing some sort of justice and administrability.

Which, I think, is realized: the meeting ended where it began, all parties happily talked out, nothing changed, and no strong directions for eventual action. Deliberation took place, the primary goal was achieved, and the CDS is content.

Ilinx of Gor

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Mar 182010

More than halfway through the semester, yet to have entered SL Gor for my planned term paper, three questions seem most pressing:

am I doing this project?
if so, why am I doing it? and
why haven’t I done it already?

My honest answers aren’t mundane (a stalled IRB application, a community contact who’s moved around more than I can keep track of), or related to my grade in ENG 654, but are both deeply personal and at the heart of methodological quandaries around participant-observer research in online communities involved in sensitive issues.

I’ve been deeply influenced by Lori Kendall’s essay in Internet Inquiry: Conversations about Method, Markham and Baym, eds., “How Do Issues of Gender and Sexuality Influence the Structures and Processes of Qualitative Internet Research?” (a title only Jim Gee could love!)

Kendall makes “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 social interactions, in which the body might seem relatively unimportant.” (p. 101) She quotes Kleinman and Copp (1993) to the effect that “Fieldwork analyses reflect our identities, ideologies and political views. Yet we often omit them from our published accounts because we want to present ourselves as social scientists: objective and neutral observers.” (p.102) She goes on to say that “[e]ven in nonsexual situations and nosexual relationships, sexual aspects of identity influence interactions at the most basic and minute level.”

I think it’s impossible to come to the study of Gor without a tremendous mount of identity-related and ideological baggage. The participant observer in Gor must, of necessity, confront their own core values around politics, gender identity and gender relations, at least to the degree that any Western anthropologist must confront their own issues of racism and colonialism in studying “tribal” peoples.

Any attempt to elide or deny the researcher’s perspective, identity and biases seems deeply unscientific: there is no “outside” position for a researcher to take in studying this culture. The study of Gor has to be the study of oneself engaged with Gor. As dualisms, antinomies and paradoxes seem central to the Gorean canon, so too it seems that the self that engages with Gor cannot honestly be unitary, unreflexively ideological, constant and coherent.

Entering Gor seems to involve opening the doors of perception, behind which are only mirrors – twisted perhaps, but reflecting in uncomfortable and unpredictable ways perhaps previously unseen, unrecognized or denied aspects of one’s “self” and those of others.

So that’s the abstract answer to my three questions (insert obligatory Monty Python flashback here).

The concrete answers are, yes, I’m doing it. The project itself may run much longer than the semester, if I get some traction in an SL Gorean community, but there will be a coherent, well researched, and likely really interesting paper to turn into Alice Robison on time.

Why am I doing it? Oh, there are all the plausible reasons: SL Gor is one of the largest online communities in the world, and largely unstudied; Gor’s politics of canon can reflect on the role of fundamentalisms and religious interpretation in physical communities; it’s a good attention-grabbing topic for a grad student looking to make a mark. And, a topic for a later post, I think there’s something absolutely essential in online communities built around Dominance/submission, Gorean or otherwise, for our understanding of ourselves and our offline culture.

The last point leads into the real reason: the chain and the collar, of Gor or otherwise, take me to a point beyond reason, beyond comprehension, and I need to go there, to know what lies beyond the point where my rationality seems to have no traction.

There’s the strange literary aphasia that Norman’s novels produce in me: I expected to be shocked, horrified, disgusted, coming as I do from a deep and visceral, as well as fairly well-read intellectual, feminism. I’m mostly not, though I have had those moments of horror. I read the sequences that justify female slavery, and my mind skitters off them like a beetle on a lake’s surface tension. It’s like reading mathematical notation: there aren’t even points of engagement that lead to comprehension, as there might be in reading a foreign language and looking for common root words. It’s a disturbing phenomenon, and I need to know what my own barrier to understanding is, and how to cross it.

And, I read the slave submission passages with a feeling reminiscent of what Roger Caillois calls ilinx, in referring to a category of games “based on the pursuit of vertigo and which consist of an attempt to momentarily destroy the stability of perception and inflict a kind of voluptuous panic upon an otherwise lucid mind. In all cases, it is a question of surrendering to a kind of spasm, seizure, or shock which destroys reality with sovereign brusqueness.”

That ilinx, that very real and not at all intellectual sense of disorientation, came over me last night reading Nomads of Gor. The protagonist, Tarl Cabot, once of Earth, now utterly gone native on Gor, brings new arrival Elizabeth to accept, to feel, her enslavement as a liberation of her true nature. And I find, reading it, I can’t place myself. Slaver/enslaved, aceeptant/rejectionist, male/female, immersed/critical – I seem to try to occupy all points at once, and any residual sense of an atomistic self just shatters.

As a kid, I was terribly phobic of carousels: I couldn’t even look at them. I have to think it was because I’m very prone to motion sickness. Now, I find them beautiful: attractive works of art laced with melancholy for childhood experiences I didn’t have. I appreciate them, and they move me – but I don’t ride them.

So that’s why I am where I am with this project. Ilinx is both centrifugal and centripedal in its effects: I’m both drawn in and spun out, and being more chicken than not, I’ve stayed over on the intellectual sidelines rather than risk the dizziness (the original title of this post was “Great Big Chicken of Gor,” but I suspect I’ll have greater need of that title later on!).

Halfway through the semester, my original plan seems like a better idea than ever: go into SL Gor in character as a male member of the Caste of Scribes, with identifiers in my profile as a researcher, and ask a lot of mostly intellectual questions about the politics of canon interpretation, and base a moderately conventional paper on that.

And, face my fear of ilinx, confront all the terrifying dualisms in my response to Gor, and experience slave training (or citizenship education, or ideological indoctrination, or whatever lens you want to view it through) in a canon household, and see if I can’t break that surface tension, find some point of equilibrium between repulsion and attraction, and understand what’s beyond the point where my ratiocinating mind stops when confronted with the coffle.

Why am I going to join an SL Gorean community?

It holds a fundamental mystery, and I have to know it, intellectually or otherwise. It’s a blind spot in my field of perception, an itch I can’t scratch, and I have got to come to deal with it.

Oh, and make a mark on the academic field: I may be dizzy, but I’m still vain!

Research Ethicist of Gor, another sequel

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Mar 062010

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.

Part 2 – Passing or Clashing?

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Feb 192010

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!”

Not-Mad Scientist of Gor

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Feb 072010

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 halfway 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.

Legal Anthropologist of Gor!

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Jan 242010

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:

SecondLife Gor forum

Gor-SL forum

Sheraka The Scribe’s Gor-SL blog

Thoughtful Kajira’s Weblog

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?

Gay, Bejeweled, Nazi Bikers of Gor

Houseplants of Gor

YouTube: Submission – SL Gor