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Virtual Worlds: Why and Who Cares?

Aug 032010

My dear friend Charlanna Beresford just issued a challenge I’ve got to take up. I suspect I’m going to have to answer her questions in academic/employment contexts a lot, so it’ll be good to get a start on a potted answer. She asked:

Here’s my questions to you, dear readers, is it possible to describe the value of a virtual world to the uninitiated? Does Second Life have a broader purpose that appeals to the masses? Or does it simply resonate with a smaller niche of society? Can you describe why Second Life matters to the broader population in just a couple of sentences? Anyone up for the challenge?

Here’s my “why”‘s, and then a “so what:”

Hunger for Community. There’s a reason why the user demography of SL skews to 35-55. We’re the most isolated group, by and large, in our physical lives. The 18-21 set has college, 22-30ish has bars, clubs, basketball/softball tournaments and suchlike. Older folks have active retirement communities. Us, though? Many of us go from solitude in our cars to isolation in our cubicles to equal isolation in our suburban nuclear-family homes. Between work, family, kids, the infrastructure of office and suburbia, we don’t have the time, energy or access to the kind of socializing that’s so deeply human.
True Bodies. Not unrelated, those of us who’re middle-aged tend towards a substantial disconnect between our physical selves and our internal self-conceptions. For me, the physiological changes I went through between 44 and 47 were as drastic as, and *much* more disorienting to my sense of self than, puberty (middle aged male gender dysphoria is clearly related, but nobody seems to know how or why). I’m now the “middle aged overweight guy” of stereotype, but that’s not who I see in my mental mirror. A huge part of the appeal of virtual worlds is to gain/regain a fit between our internal and external appearances.
Prosumerism. OK, it’s an ugly word, but an important point. SL is one among many manifestations of something deeply revolutionary: an end to the half-century aberration in human history in which most all of us were passive consumers of, rather than generators of, creativity. It’s deeply telling that mainstream RL content creators – music labels, fashion designers, corporate retail in general – failed spectacularly in SL. Given a choice, we prefer our own work, our handicrafts, our arts, our celebrities, to the ones prepackaged for us. SL, along with MMO game worlds, are TV killers. They turn us back into active creators of our entertainment world, as we’re supposed to be.

Can they be a mass phenomenon? Certainly virtual worlds with more structure (game worlds) already are.

But non-game worlds are at core a niche phenomenon, yes. Despite the rise of the fan creator, the prosumer, we’ve grown up in a world of structured entertainment. We’re used to sitting passively, riding the rails, showing up for our soccer playdates and dance lessons. Very very few of us grew up with unstructured play. Few of us also approach life without structure.

In explaining SL to people, I usually say it’s a midsized city with a really active cultural life, a Portland or San Francisco, just digital. But… most people who move from their homes to cities like that do it as part of a structured path: admission to a school, being hired into a job. Only a small percentage of us up and move to the big city cold, just for the challenge and opportunity. Those likely to in RL, they’ll take to SL just fine. The majority who’d feel sheer terror at the prospect of moving to a new city without a structure in place, they’ll stick to gameworlds.

Nongame virtual worlds, then, could use some sort of structured onramp – being assigned for school or work, going in to some sort of development or leveling trajectory – or they will only appeal to the tiny niche of the deeply adventurous.

But, that onramp has to be real and personally meaningful. It can’t be inauthentic or lacking in integrity, in the literal sense of the term.

That’s where I think Hamlet Au’s plumping for an achievement system for SL is misguided: especially in virtual spaces, people have a nose for the phony, the half-assed, the tacked-on. Something like career tracks or a talent tree might be integrated into SL in a genuine way. Reputation or achievement systems, I think, can only reek of the bogus, of the desperate attempt to copy game mechanics without a deep understanding or integration of them.

OK, that’s an aswer to some of the “whys.” Here’s a crack at the “so what?”

Virtual worlds prepare us for a coming utopia. Without going all transhumanist, it is entirely likely that RL over the next generation is going to look a lot more like SL for a lot of the world’s population. After all, the amount of body modification and ideal-looking physiques in Scottsdale, AZ, the cosmetic surgery capital of the world, isn’t that different from SL!

We’re also going to need to learn how to get along in communities of voluntary association, not the towns we were born into and stuck in. We’re going to need to learn how to work and play with people from wildly different cultures. We’re going to learn to manipulate and customize our RL environments, rather than to inherit the old or take the factory mass-product. We’re going to have to learn how to deal with a mixed economy – not capitalist and socialist, but market and gift. We’re going to have to re-learn how to be creators, producers, citizens, and no longer mere consumers.

The RL world of SL is coming. We early adapters are creating the culture today that may be everybody’s tomorrow.

Why? We need, viscerally need, community and self-expression.

Who cares? Today SL, tomorrow the world.

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.

The Postmodern Mirror

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Mar 232010

A colleague of mine, Gretchen Gano, did a wonderful talk today: “Megamachine in the Megalopolis: a living picture of Lewis Mumford‘s technological city.” Using the motif of the tableau vivant, a Victorian amusement in which people would stage re-enactments of famous paintings, she used a set of artifacts held by volunteers: a mirror, a clock, a vase and a lamp, to engage us with Mumford’s ideas of the city.

There were many rich echoes of my own work on virtual communities in Mumford’s writings in the era of high modernism. The simple one is that some of us live in places both virtual and actual, both the “Invisible City” of omnipresent civilization and the city as container, of things drawn in from all around to be held together.

But a more interesting reflection, I think, I found in Gretchen’s floor-length mirror. An accompanying handout quoted Mumford’s The City In History:

If the outward world was changed by glass, the inner world was likewise modified. Glass had a profound effect upon the development of the personality: indeed, it helped alter the very concept of the self…

If the image one sees in the mirror is abstract, it is not ideal or mythical: the more accurate the physical instrument, the more sufficient the light on it… show(s) the effects of age, disease, disappointment, frustration, slyness, covetousness, weakness – these come out as clearly as health and joy and confidence.

And that was the experience of modernism: the social creation of an atomistic self as that which one sees in the mirror, and through the process of seeing in the mirror, particularly the mirror of psychoanalysis, which, needing selves to study, created them in the act of turning mirrors upon them.

Now we can go beyond mirrors, not in a simple return to the ideal or mythical, but to the intentional, to the mirrored self as the product of agency, both personal and social.

I threw a party last night, one which Mumford might have celebrated as the product of city as container of civilization: I had some 40 people over from all walks of life, to dance to a DJ’d set of Arabic club music, to chat, to meet, to display our fashion, style and wit in my beautiful well-appointed home.

And yet. We had people from at least five time zones, three countries, all in the same space at the same time! Surely that is the Invisible City! But no, it was no mere importation of culture produced elsewhere and consumed locally, as Mumford described, but a moment in a truly global, temporally united, space of civilization.

And yet. We were not – or, not only - tired meatbags of unitary egos. We wore our true names, our inner selves, our identities composed from software tools, fashion design, observed or flouted conventions of age, gender, species – truly the cyborgs of Harraway’s ironic vision.

We are all these things at once: realist and impressionist, united and dispersed, recognizable by any civilized ancient and something almost indescribably new.

I have a dear friend who loves to answer binary questions with “Yes.”

Are we any one of these things, or are we their opposite?

I’m happy to answer, along with Galatea, “Yes.”

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!”

Part 1 - The Closing of the Alt Frontier

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Feb 192010

“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!”

Raising Your Hand on the Horseless Carriage

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Feb 132010

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!”

Privilege & Courage 2: Digitally Transgendered

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Dec 022009

Yesterday I started a short series of posts by introducing two approaches to identity, privacy and social media. One holds that affiliating with an institution obligates a person to only display the institution’s values in crafting their online idenitity. The other doesn’t think the paycheck or affiliation buys conformity outside the job.

I’ve long supported the second, and I said I’ve lived by that. That’s true as far as it’s gone, but I don’t think it’s gone far enough. I’ve got some measure of privilege and social capital, and it’s time to start spending it.

After a year of flailing, long conversations with friends, the reading of books academic and popular, and screwing my own courage to the sticking place, it’s time for me, as a friend once said in a really good criticism of me, “to get some skin in the game.”

Hi, I’m Kas, and I’m digitally transgendered.

What does that mean? Given a choice, I present online as a woman – and as one very particular look, that’s what I see in the mirror of my mind’s eye. I don’t *hate* wearing a male avatar in RL, but I’d sure like the choice, and I don’t get to have it. So in digital spaces, I’m usually a woman, under something like the name Kaseido Quandry, and something like this look.
It suits me, deeply, and after a year of trying, liking it too much, backlashing and then tiptoeing back again, I’m ready to be out and open about it.

A lot of you know me as Kas. I’m Kas in my guild in WoW. I’m Kas in my work with World2Worlds Inc., a virtual worlds service provider. More of my friends call me Kas than don’t these days.

I’ve done a couple presentations in class where I’ve shown my Kas identity without comment: one on Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, which was full of screenshots of Kas-me. Another on Fallen Earth, same thing. And you know, it’s cool. But it’s time to go beyond “don’t ask, don’t tell.”

I’m going to be chairing a conference in January live in Second Life and in the Great Hall at the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law at ASU, and teaching a semester-long course on virtual worlds with a Second Life component. And I’ve been agonizing over whether to present as girl-Kas or boy-Kas, a look I’ve trotted out a few times during my backlashes (and boy-Kas has always had an odd feel of roleplay about him, in a way girl-Kas doesn’t. That tells me something).

My decision solidified when a friend who identifies as goth told me,

The (delightful) Lady of the Manners makes plain acknowledgement of the fact goths choose to look spooky and weird. While they may not do it for attention, they will get attention and so they can expect many questions. To deny yourself the chance to dress up in the first place, thus avoiding such questioning, is kind of sad. The alternative is to be the sort of person who stands up for themselves, embraces the less-than-ordinary and certainly remains memorable. When you consider the sort of people you’re going to be teaching, many of whom may play female Sin’dorei or even live their secret second life as the opposite gender, not only are you likely to get a sympathetic crowd but maybe one who’ll feel they can open up to you more!

Hell, if it raises so many questions you could even turn it round into an impromptu seminar. Discuss the issue.

I’d been unsure if I wanted to be identified professionally as “gender boy,” concerned that the course message of “law and governance of virtual worlds” would be hijacked by “teacher’s a tranny!” And of course, generally chicken

But you know, it’s who I am. There’s a *ton* of us in SL, many in high profile corporate jobs. And while ASU is in a very conservative community, well, they can just read my social media policy

Tomorrow, part 3: thinking about the personal today and the political yesterday has synthesized into a research agenda for me, I think.

Immense thanks and gratitude to my three dear friends who’re pioneering the way. I can’t dream of paying you back for your help and support, so I’m going to try to pay it forward.

Fallen Earth: Field Notes 1

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Oct 282009

I’ve decided to acknowledge that my cyclical frustration with social virtual worlds is in a deep trough, and choose something other than Blue Mars for field observations for EDT 691, Research in Virtual Worlds. I’ve taken on the post-apocalyptic MMO, Fallen Earth.

fallenearth_logo

Sunday morning I read several blog posts in succession that gave the game glowing reviews, leading me to think that it was different enough from World of Warcraft to be intriguing, yet similar enough that some of my experience and skills would transfer. I’m sick to death of Tolkienesque fantasy worlds, and I’ve been actively looking for an MMO in another genre, but have been put off by bad reviews of Champions Online, and found my trial of City of Heroes aesthetically unappealing.

I decided to download the game from Steam rather than ordering disks from Amazon (or, gods forbid, going outside to a store!). I started the download around 10 am, stopped it in the evening to play WoW, and restarted it before bed. The download didn’t complete until early Monday morning, as my computer had gone into hibernation during the process. Then, on setup, it required a patch almost the size of the initial download. I set it to run while I went off to class, and came home to a (supposedly) complete and ready to play game around 9 pm.

Character creation is a huge part of the game experience for me, and will immediately make or break my gameplay. Avatars in Fallen Earth draw on an artistic style similar to that of Dragon Age Origins, sort of “realistically ugly” for the setting. As with that game, bodies aren’t customizable at all, except Fallen Earth allows a choice of height (one forum poster suggested pulling the slider to the lowest setting, to make yourself a smaller target!).

fallenearth4 The body types aren’t egregious, but they aren’t great. The male is of fairly average build, the female sort of anorexic, with a hip-to-waist ratio I’ve never seen on an actual human woman, but seems the inevitable default in games. T fallenearth3 he skin tones are okay, with palettes intended to be “white,” “Asian” and “Black,” and all conventional human tones. Per usual, the Black tones are more “Florida golfer” than “African,” but the Asian ones are quite nice.

There’s a really good, broad range of tattoos and piercings available, which also seems to be a common feature currently.

fe_kas1 I was able to recreate my cross-world “Kaseido Quandry” avatar pretty well, while my “older, badass version of my atomic self” rendering came off looking more like mental patient/hospital orderly

The game starts with a sandbox tutorial, with access to full game chat channels, including a default Help channel that’s become general chat despite the GMs’ constant efforts to limit the forum though calls to take general chat elsewhere.

Unfortunately, the very first quest in the tutorial revealed a flaw running throughout Fallen Earth: it drops key files like whoa.

Quests are indicated by a gold rotating biohazard symbol over the questgiver. In the tutorial, you rez in some sort of personal chamber or cell, and can see the symbol over a computer terminal in the next room. The quest is given by voice and text: it’s a woman elsewhere in the facility who says that she’s going to help you escape. She commands you to go to the next terminal and “activate the LifeNet” before proceeding.

There was no next terminal. Across the way was a bank of computers symmetrical to the questgiving one, except for an open space in the middle where the actual quest terminal would be.

So, I looked all over the room, and ran out in the hall, to find a door that wouldn’t open until the LifeNet was active.

I was too embarrassed to ask for help: I thought that failing the “report to” starting quest was the ultimate in noob stupidity. I relogged to see if that might make a difference, but no. I then went to the forums and searched for “LifeNet,” and found that the missing terminal was a bug that could be fixed by running “Perform Complete File Check” from the login screen.

And, sure enough, it found another 3000 files to download. I logged back in to find symmetrical terminals, activated the LifeNet, and was good to go.

fallenearth2

It's Our Story: Character & Narrative in Alter Ego, Blue Mars and Dragon Age Origins

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Oct 172009

I’m not sure how I found Alter Ego, but I spent a few really engrossed hours with it last night. It’s a browser based (also available in Android and iPhone apps) text game, a decision tree covering life choices from birth to death. It’s charming, warm, very immersive, and really delightful. And it provides an interesting perspective on narrative and gameplay, character creation and immersion.

Alter Ego

Alter Ego looks like an iPhone screen, with a branching tree of attractive icons representing family, love, finances, work, health, and so on. Clicking on each icon generates a situation with a choice, that may in turn branch from one to four times. A separate box keeps track of character stats: trustworthiness, happiness, confidence; cash and debt; and a few other things.

And that’s pretty much it. You make choices, choices shape your character, your character shapes the arc of your life. Then you die.

My projective identity (no character names) felt real. I felt her frustrations, her triumphs, her losses – and her death after a healthy old age brought a melancholy completeness: I/she/we didn’t have quite the life I/she/we wanted, but it was rich and full, and very much complete at the end of her days.

It was cathartic, and in a way quite profound. Despite a major rewrite of childhood, her middle age nonetheless looked very much like mine: we’d converged around our core *character* – whether measured by stats or expressed in our choices. That realization gave me an “aha” moment in a way that twenty grand of therapy couldn’t – I lived it and saw it, right there on the screen.

Experiencing it through my projective identity made it real in a way that other means of learning really couldn’: that “alter ego,” that life re-roll, became my story, as much as my own life is (interestingly, WoW Insider ran a column today on “Real Life Character Re-Customization,” addressing something very similar)

A powerful, moving psychological/narrative experience had emerged from some icons and a long list of questions.

Character and Immersion: It Ain’t Graphics

Yesterday saw a bunch of gee-whiz tweets and retweets from the official Blue Mars channels, including a short video of Blue Mars running in panorama on three widescreen monitors.

BLUEMARS_top1_r1_c1 I didn’t tweet my response, because I wanted to consider it (I’ve been in a “knee-jerk negativity about virtual worlds” phase, and didn’t want to just “bah, humbug” without some thought). My immediate response was, so what? It’s pretty scenery, and I couldn’t care less. Give me people, give me a UI with effective tools for communication and expression (through text, images and building). What matters is the human world, not pretty reflections off the waves.

I was right. Alter Ego, with no more pretty than some well-designed graphic icons, deeply engaged me for the better part of an evening. Blue Mars, despite my needing to cover the world for a class, hasn’t pulled me back in weeks.

Why?

Realism and immersion aren’t generated by graphics engines, they’re generated by people, real or fictive. This is hardly news to old-time MUDders (I’m not one, but I’ve talked to them extensively), but continues to escape software engineers and too many game designers.

Dragon Age Origins

Another example: I played this week with the Dragon Age Origins character generator.

dragon-age As Tobold observed, it’s not a character generator, it’s a face generator. As such, it’s really quite good (except, why is it, in game after game, you can make an avvie with nice African features but not African *hair*?).

But, using a D&D-like system, your characters are almost entirely pre-rolled, there’s no way to create a character bio, no real choice of starting talents. And you can’t modify the avvie bodies at all: not only that, the bodies across races and factions are identical aside from height (at least among the humans and elves) – so a human rogue and an elf warrior look pretty much identical below the (choose your length) neck.

So how is it a character generator?

Simple, if you think like a software engineer: it’s all about the visuals, the surface, the code that generates graphics.

Dragon Age Origins encourages you to upload your characters to a social network (an interesting take on the “alone together” phenomenon of people not really playing MMO’s socially – so Dragon Age Origins is the natural next step beyond being able to solo to level cap in WoW: it’s a solo game where you can show off your achievements socially without having to actually play with other people).

But what do you upload? Some largely pre-set stats and a profile icon.

Why not backstory? Why not the output of a little “character generator” like Alter Ego, that indicated how the character might likely behave: are they dishonest, sexually assertive, likely to try talking their way out of a fight first but brutal in finishing it, uninterested in wealth but drawn to power? How much more interesting that would be than the width of my avvie’s nose and the extra point I put in DEX?

It’s *Our* Story

This week I’ve been reading First Person: New Media as Story, Performance and Game, an anthology covering the ludology/narratology dispute in games studies. Ultra-short version? Academic wank and turf wars. Ultra-short re-roll? “Tastes Great!/Less Filling!” Short version? Ludology stressed games-as-rule-sets, holding in its extreme view that there’s no possible room for narrative or story in games. Narratology basically wanted to read games as just like movies, with player-actors. Yes, that’s unfair, pejorative, and grossly oversimplifying. If you want the full deal, read the book.

What struck me was that both factions were arguing over the head of the player, as it were. Both seemed to be grounded in an auteur model, just arguing over what was being authored, a rule set or a text.

But what all these examples I’ve mentioned here have in common is player authorship of emergent narrative. I wrote a life in Alter Ego, not the very skilled authors of the questions and decision tree. I created, however tentatively, three characters for Dragon Age, not Biosoft. If anything interesting happens in Blue Mars, it won’t be due to the CryEngine, but due to the people.

Here’s another interesting example: there was a consensus the other day that story is irrelevant in boss fights in WoW. I think they’re only half right. I’d say, Blizzard’s story is irrelevant in boss fights, because we’re too busy enacting the events that will figure into our narratives, our guild’s tale of the time we took on the boss. And note – the bloggers weren’t saying that Blizzard’s story is irrelevant - not at all – but that it’s best gotten from media that do a better job of delivering authored stories: novels, manga or comics. Let each medium do what it does best.

Good designers give us good tools, an engaging setting, and let us get on with living, and then telling, our own stories. Bad designers (and a lot of academics) still think it’s their story.

It’s our story, all of it.

Dreaming in KOTOR

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Oct 162009

After a class presentation on Monday where I argued that Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic is unethical in the way it creates ethical dilemmas for our player character/projective identity, then limits the player’s responses in ways sometimes deeply frustrating, the game and I clicked at such a deep level that I’ve been dreaming in character extensively every night since.

What changed? I think I’ve achieved some measure of literacy with the adventure-game format, and the game progressed to a phase where it was getting everything right. The basic structure has your adventuring party traveling between planets. The first two have to be taken in fixed order, then you’re free to take the next four in any sequence, leading into a fixed endgame. Since the middle worlds can be taken in any order, they have to be at roughly the same level – so the first one the player encounters will be very hard, the last fairly easy.

manaan5 The first world I went to completely stymied me on the boss fight, so I re-rolled. By the time I got back there (at the 10 hour rather than 17 hour mark), it was tough but straightforward. The next two worlds I went to were absolutely delightful: story and gameplay integrated smoothly, the visuals were terrific, the challenges just in that “flow” zone of pleasantly frustrating.

One of KOTOR’s interesting mechanics has been the conversation/quest interplay with the NPCs in your party. Each has a backstory (including the hilariously bloodthirsty droid, HK-47). The more you converse with them, the more, obviously, they reveal about themselves – but the conversations also unlock side quests involving their pasts. It’s an interesting solution to the problem of creating strong characters in games.

Some of the character-development quest/conversation arcs work better than others, and in general they’re pretty heavy-handed. Carth’s quest for his son, lost in a war zone as a baby and rumored to be in the Sith Academy, was standard melodramatic fare, but Bastila’s search for her father’s journal and choice whether to keep it or offer it to her hated mother, and the Mandalorian mercenary Canderous’s slow reveal of why he’s come along both felt rich and engaging.

The game’s built around a powerful plot arc involving a quest for the source of the Sith lords’ power and a means to bring them down – and I’m hugely glad I was unspoiled for the plot developments. Last night had me screaming “OMFG!” at a major plot turn, much as I’d seen something being foreshadowed all along.

I think re-rolling was the key element in the depth of my engagement with the game: the choices I made at the game-mechanics level for customizing my player character and party members paid off in much better gameplay, and playing as my constant digital-worlds alter ego, Kaseido Quandry, rather than a generic character, made the ethical choices and plot developments much more personally resonant than if I were playing with a character who wasn’t so strongly my projective identity.

I’m on our last world before the finale now. I’m a little concerned that I’m low-level: I passed up a few side quests, and a lot of the money-making side opportunities, so I’m not in uber-leet gear.

I was just too greedy for the story….

Older Entries

Virtual Worlds: Why and Who Cares?

Identity at the Participant/Observer Crossroads

The Postmodern Mirror

Part 2 – Passing or Clashing?

Part 1 - The Closing of the Alt Frontier

Raising Your Hand on the Horseless Carriage

Fallen Earth: Field Notes 1

It's Our Story: Character & Narrative in Alter Ego, Blue Mars and Dragon Age Origins

Dreaming in KOTOR

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