Virtual Worlds: Why and Who Cares?

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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:”

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.

Posted by Kaseido at 3:09 pm Tagged with: , , , , ,

Mixy Things 3: Stargate's SG-1 as Amodern Guerrillas

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Jul 302010

I used to find it embarrassing, and a bit difficult to explain, that my all-time favorite fandom is Stargate SG-1.  It’s an action show without a shred of intellectual cachet, but from the moment I was forced – forced! – to watch it, it’s been the one media property I can go back to again and again, the fandom whose fic I’m most drawn to.

As Henry Jenkins describes it in Textual Poachers, quoting Bourdieu, “The most intolerable thing for those who regard themselves as the possessors of legitimate culture is the sacrilegious reuniting of tastes which taste dictates shall be separated.” Jenkins argues that fan culture is mixiness, applying the analytical tools of the literary academy to popular works, taking seriously that which should not be regarded as serious, “perversely misappl[ying]” “high culture” tools to “low culture” work.

The same distinctions too often get made within fandom, so that I could see idea-driven science fiction like Star Trek or Battlestar Galactica as a legitimate object of fandom while raising an eyebrow at the action-adventure SG-1 (though, ok, I loved Xena like a mad thing, and that show was my gateway to online fandom and devoted fic reading).

Part of SG-1‘s appeal was that Daniel Jackson is the fictional character I identify with most (along with Captain Sisko, as I described last time, with Tim Drake and Bren Cameron as runners-up, and there’s probably far too much insight into my psyche!). But I think the core is that the eponymous team of SG-1 is a mixy insurgency within a modernist framework.

Parenthetically, this is also an explanation for why SG-1 ran for ten seasons and Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles only lasted a season and a  half: SG-1 was able to appeal to a modernist audience while presenting, or enabling, a fannish subversive amodern reading; while SCC, once it hit its stride, was so resolutely amodern that it alienated an audience that might tune in to see modernist humans laying the smackdown on evil robots.

I recently watched the SG-1 pilot again, in a week where Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern and Jenkins’ Textual Poachers were marinating in my brain. It amazed me how quickly and clearly that episode sketched out the series themes, creating some truly remarkable characters within the action-adventure context.

Jack O’Neill is a cold warrior, an old-school snake-eater. His superiors order him to nuke a village in order to prevent any prospect of an alien invasion – and he flat-out refuses. Instead, he evaluates the situation personally, and is captured trying to free two villager hostages. He engineers an escape, and then does something truly remarkable: he invites his captor to join him! That’s my true-love fannish moment, akin to (hmm….) two symbolic haircuts, one in SCC and one in DS9, where the main characters embrace a mixy destiny in the face of modernist-separatist expectations.

The episode ends with O’Neill requesting the alien, Teal’c, be assigned to his team. In a subsequent episode, O’Neill defends Teal’c, with an extraordinary mix of biting sarcasm and unabashed idealism, from interrogation and dissection by the military. The team coalesces as a very mixy thing: O’Neill, a quintessentially high-modern warrior with an amodern soul, Teal’c, himself a synthesis of human and animal, human and alien; Carter, the science chick, the crack-shot geek; and Daniel, the anthropologist who starts by seeing all cultures, including his own, as equal blends of familiar and alien and who becomes combat archaeologist, ruthless diplomat, a blur of alive, dead and transcendant.

The team spends nearly as much time in conflict with their military-political leadership, which is struggling to keep everything neatly in its modernist boxes, denying there are aliens, denying they’re involved in a galactic war, denying the creative freedom that would enable effective use of captured technologies, as they do fighting the modernist Goa’uld, carefully keeping separate slaves and masters, material and spiritual.  Carter’s father, a hardcore by-the-book general, becomes a hybrid and a mediator, part Goa’uld and part human. Daniel erases the binary of death repeatedly. The team laughs in the face of notions of linear time so essential to modernism, as it blurs the modernist distinctions between sacred and profane, temporal and transcendent.

And yet, it continues to do so within the modernist framework of the US military and political establishment, never calling for revolution (Daniel’s journey through and around secrecy and authority is a mixy mess all its own) but rarely obedient, guided by a moral compass that becomes the product of a synthesis of Jack’s black-ops sneakiness, Daniel’s militant compassion, Carter’s technological optimism and Teal’c's ruthless serenity.  Interestingly, I never really liked Carter, who’s pretty much an unreconstructed modernist, despite the mixiness of being woman/soldier/scientist.

Jenkins quotes Umberto Eco, that “in order to transform a work into a cult object one must be able to break, dislocate, unhinge it so that one can remember only parts of it, irrespective of their original relationship with the whole.”  This is where SG-1 succeeds as a fannish object (along with the pre-2009 Star Treks) and Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles and, I think, Battlestar Galactica fail: the latter are two hermetic, too complete and integrated in their execution.

So, I can read SG-1 as the mutual redemption of three very broken people (O’Neill, Teal’c and Daniel), as a mixy insurgency, while others can read it as Jack/Daniel or Jack/Teal’c slash, as a triumph of personal integrity over institutional corruption – or as some really kickass explosions and cool military hardware (P90s! Air Force intergalactic battle cruisers!). Most of those readings don’t preclude the others -that’s what the mixiness of fandom is about.

Jenkins claims that the female fan blurs the boundary (not a border but la frontera, Patricia Nelson Limerick’s mixy space beyond the limits of modernism) “between fiction and experience, since their metatextual inferences relied upon personal experience as a means of expanding upon the information provided and since character identification became a means of self-analysis.”

This was in Textual Poachers, one of the first full-length academic studies of fandom, a very long time ago. What was gendered then is now more nearly universal, in part because “male fandom” has become an insignificantly small part of fandom even as fandom iteslf has mainstreamed: we all read for metatextual inferences now, and few are the remaining starship-measurers and stat-counters.

We are all fans now, and all turn to fandom for that metatextual bridge, that mixiness between the received text and personal significance, between our own critical interpretation and an “authorized” view ever more frequently the product of fans-turned-producers, who enable and encourage textual deconstruction, remixing and slash. We can’t see the modernist text through our slash goggles, and neither do the best producers anymore.

Jenkins also describes fandom as a mixy utopia, a community (a real, physical as well as mediated community, not an abstraction) profoundly apart from the modernist world, one run on the gift economy of fan production, “one defined by its refusal of mundane values and practices, its celebration of deeply held emotions and passionately embraced pleasures…. a space within which fans may articulate their specific concerns about sexuality, gender, racism, colonialism, militarism and forced conformity.” Fandom is “a poached culture, a nomadic culture… a patchwork culture, an impure culture.”

It’s my culture, from my production of Star Trek novelizations at age seven, to my recent rereading of synecdochic’s marvelous uber-mixy SG-1 fic this month. It’s a culture born, as Jenkins describes, out of a radical, if circumscribed, rejection of modernity.

It is utopian, and fan culture presents a genuine alternative to modernist political systems and ideologies. As SG-1 fought with wit and weapons against modernist political systems human and alien, so the fan creates an alternative political/cultural/technological space apart from the anti-mixiness of corporate copyright, of the cash economy, of institutions which lose truth and justice in procedural conformance, of a politics determined to pit us against them, to maintain purities which never were.

SG-1 is (in one reading, not in any way privileged above others) a parable of fandom, a radically synthetic Haraway-cyborg insurgency within the rotten system of modernism. The mixy, our SG-1, our fandom,  is subversive without being revolutionary, alternative without being oppositional, better, not triumphalist.

Jenkins claims this mixy space for fandom, James Paul Gee for learning, me for emergent political technoscience. La frontera, the land of kokopelli, of trickster gods and cyborgs, is the space of all those things and others, of the queer, the syncretic, the mashup, the remix. It has no border guards but it has its defenders and their heroes, Jack O’Neill, Daniel Jackson and John Connor among them.

Future Mixy Things: the Greco-Egyptian alternative to Augustus, the Byzantine Empire in “decline,” and hopefully some guest posts from technosage on Navajo and Japanese anime alternatives to modernism.

Posted by Kaseido at 6:58 pm Tagged with: , ,

Mixy Things 2: Terminator's John Connor as Amodern Hero

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Jul 302010

This month I’ve been growing a life back, one I’d not fully realized I’d lost during two years of grad school coursework. Part of that’s entailed catching up on two years of television, and feeling the fannish impulse for about the first time in that period. One of the things on the “must-watch” list my friends have given me was Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. Along with Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern, it not just re-activated my core fannishness, it provided a metaphor for understanding the politics of technology.

Latour argues that modernism abhors hybrids, while simultaneously creating circumstances in which they proliferate. Modernism wants clear lines between human and animal, human and machine, nature and culture, culture and technology – yet the world modernism built is one in which those things in fact mix, blend and synthesize shamelessly.

The Terminator (1984) began the franchise as straight-up modernist horror, an updating of the Frankenstein myth. In the first movie, an artificial intelligence (mixy! unkosher! repulsive!) created a cyborg (meat and machine! uncanny!) to kill off the greatest threat to its dominance: the unborn child (natural!) of a sweet, helpless waitress (normative gender role!) and a devoted soldier (ditto!). Modernism produced its own hybrid monsters, but modernism’s category-separation allowed the natural, the human, to triumph over the machine.

Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) shredded the simple modernism of the original, and stands as an amodern classic, but one harkening back to some very traditional themes. T2, in a theme repeated strongly in Sarah Connor Chronicles, is, among other things, The Velveteen Rabbit (as unlikely a Rabbit as the Governator made!). I’m not going to expand on that observation here, but if anybody’s interested, I can do a post on that.

This time out the hybrid is the hero, defending young John against the pure machine, the sleek liquid-metal T-1000. Sarah is no longer the simpering waitress but a hybrid herself: rigidly logical and diagnosed insane, mother and commando, often colder and more distant than the machine Terminator protecting her son.

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (2008-9) not only adds to the mixiness, but puts the amodern philosophy of embracing hybrids at the core of the mythos. Why is John Connor the savior of post-apocalyptic humanity? Because he alone rejects the modernism of the machines and the parallel anti-modernism of the Resistance. John embraces (literally, in one very steamy scene towards the end of the series) the hybrid, recognizing mixiness as humanity’s deliverance.

Latour argues that anti-modernism is simply modernism with its polarity reversed – good for bad – while accepting all of modernism’s premises. Where modernism sees the triumph of the machine over human, the abstract over the concrete, the Apollonian over the Dionysian, as an unquestionable good, the anti-modern agrees that all those things have happened, but regards the prospect with horror, and attempts to “turn back the clock” of linear time to a point before modernism’s apparent triumph.

This is Sarah Connor’s enterprise, literally to turn back the clock to enable a future without the triumph of modernism, where the threat to humanity from the machine never was. But Latour (along with John Connor, I argue) asks, “Where does the threat come from? From those who seek to reduce [the human] to an essence and who – by scorning things, objects, machines and the social, by cutting off all delegations and senders – make humanism a fragile and precious thing at risk of being overwhelmed by Nature, Society or God.”

One of the major plot threads of SCC‘s second season involves an opposition to John Connor from the humanist right. Driven to treason by Connor’s consorting with Terminators – as ship captains, bodyguards, and his own sole trusted companion, they conspire to rid him of his weakness for hybridization once and for all.

As Connor comes of age, he does so not as a figurehead for his anti-modernist mother and the anti-mixy Right, but as a cyborg feminist, able to love and trust women both human and cyborg, building a network in opposition to his mother’s isolationism, inclusive where she is divisive, forward-looking to the world after the apocalypse rather than backward to an idyllic world of purely human actors gone, if it ever existed, before his own temporally-displaced origins.

A Fannish Response to Mixiness

SCC doesn’t really get rolling thematically till its second season. I think there’s a particular moment where my response went from “this is an entertaining enough diversion” to fandom: when John cuts his emo hair, signifying a move from Sarah’s over-hyped baggage into badass mixy proto-messiah. Till then, both in T2 and SCC‘s first season, John had been a thing molded by his mother, and there was really no seeing the future leader in the person Sarah was raising. It’s when John rejects Sarah’s upbringing decisively that his own network-based leadership emerges, when he takes the side of his own team of humans and machines over that of his mother and uncle, that we see a hero emerge.

It got me to realize I’ve always loved mixy heroes, stories of the struggle of the mixy against the kosher. From the age of six I was a Spock fan, but my favorite Trek was Deep Space Nine, a radically amodern aspect of that universe, one standing in opposition, in no small way, to Trek’s quintessential modernism. DS9 argued that religion, politics and technology were not separate things, not past, present and future, but all one, all at once. The Wormhole was an artifact at once natural, technological and religious, the Prophets both advanced aliens and holy spirits.

DS9‘s Captain Sisko stood at the center of countless hybridizations – himself rationalist and religious leader, soldier and father, commander of the very human and the entirely alien. His enemies were often dear friends, his dear friends sometimes enemies; his mentor, who he called “Old Man,” a beautiful woman half his age; his first officer an angry terrorist in the uniform of authority. Sisko’s wife was killed by Trek’s Terminators, the Borg, but his own journey could only begin when he let go of loss and rage, the loss and rage in which Sarah Connor is ever stuck. Gods, I loved that show!

So SCC stands as an argument against 1980s modernism, against dualism, against modernism and its opponents alike. It’s as good a parable for our time, one in which state modernism and religious anti-modernism are locked in a destructive cycle, one increasingly absurd, increasingly dangerous, as the rest of us, the children of the network, the cyborg feminists, the treyf mixy people, just want to get on with our fecund creative syntheses.

Next up: Stargate SG-1 as guerrilla amodernism.

Posted by Kaseido at 2:51 pm Tagged with: , ,

10 Big Pieces: Women and Gaming

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May 242010

I’ve got a number of entries to catch up on in my “10 Big Pieces” series of key works at the intersection of games, governance, new media and education, but I’m going to start with the newest: Women and Gaming: The Sims and 21st Century Learning was released just last week. Co-authored by James Paul Gee and Elisabeth R. Hayes, it represents an important step forward for Gee’s work, and is a quick must-read for anyone interested in education, technology and social change.

For years, Gee has been a primary and lucid advocate for fundamental changes in education, to encompass the kind of process- and skills-based learning embodied in video games. His critique of the failures of schooling is clear and incisive; his advocacy of the learning model embodied in games effective.

But previously, Gee’s vision of games and gaming was drawn from that of the boy (of whatever age), seated at a console, playing with friends present in person or online. Gee understands the role of class in American society better than almost any contemporary social scientist and is really pretty good on race, but has failed to understand gender and sexuality in gaming, education and culture.

This collaboration with Hayes (who is on my dissertation commitee) marks a giant step forward in Gee’s thinking. Foregoing action and strategy for the world of The Sims, Gee enters Henry Jenkins territory through the work of Hayes and her students, looking at women across a broad range of ages learning demanding skills and producing valued and respected content in fan communities.

The case studies – an older shut-in woman become a multimillion-download content creator, a young teen fanfic writer inspired by the Twilight books, a professional woman whose life in The Sims and Second Life devastates the old academic concept of the “magic circle,” a German woman using The Sims as a platform for a simulation game about poverty in America – are gracefully woven into a narrative of learning reform.

Gee and Hayes argue that a certain kind of community with very specific features – a “passionate affinity group” – can generate enormously effective learning and personal growth by channeling impulses to learn particular things for particular ends. From mythology to Photoshop to machinima, they provide a learning environment that allows people to transform themselves from consumers to producers, to achieve expertise and recognition.

I think they’re on shaky ground with this concept. Leading a long list of elements of the “ideal” passionate affinity group is “A common passion-fueled endeavor – not race, class, gender or disability – is primary.”  Gee and Hayes add

These latter variables are backgrounded, though they can be used (or not) strategically by individuals if and when they choose to use them for their own purposes. This feature is particularly enabled and enhanced in virtual passionate affinity groups (Internet communities) because people can enter these spaces with an identity or name of their own choosing. They can make up any name they like and give any information (fictional or not) about themselves they wish. This identity need not, and usually does not, foreground the person’s race, gender, age, disability or social class. (p. 107)

Gee is neither stupid nor inexperienced, so one has to interpret this passage as some mixture of willful ignorance and prescription over description. Such a passage, typical of 1990s academic writing about internet communities, simply does not reflect reality. Internet identities, as a dozen years of scholarship have shown, tend to be closely tied to offline identity. When they are not, they tend to involve either passing as higher status (e.g., “whitewashing” identity – Gee commits the privileged fallacy of reading “white, straight, middle class” markers as “no markers”) or digitally transgendered men. What they almost never do is fail to foreground some claim of race, gender, age, disability or social class.

Gee and Hayes write about The Sims fan communities which profoundly put the lie to this claim of external status-blindness: they are highly gendered, setting forth and enforcing by social pressure a very particular view of gendered behavior. They are also profoundly heteronormative. True, race and class are elided, but those factors are extraneous to cultural identity as a The Sims fan. Gender and sexuality are not, any more than they are not in male-gendered spaces like World of Warcraft forums or first person shooter fandoms. Gee makes much of how nobody cares that one of his exemplars is Asian-American: that’s not a factor of the focus on learning in the community, but that “mixed race” status is unremarkable in young contemporary America, while particular expressions of race, gender and sexuality remain highly remarkable and remarked upon, even in gaming and learning communities.

The implication also that a community focusing on support for people from particular circumstances: gay gamers, inner-city gamers, disabled gamers – are somehow inferior environments for support, learning and growth than those of some race-blind liberal ideal, is deeply offensive and unscientific, an ideological assertion unsupported by contact with reality.

Gee and Hayes contrast the communities that meet their definition of “passionate affinity groups” with a “leet” community, a “school of hard knocks.” Their brief sketch of such a community in within a fandom seen by “leet” male gamers as irredeemably feminine and “carebear”-y is a major contribution, and one that deserved to be expanded upon.

They consider this community an inferior learning environment, while noting that several people they studied were members of both the “hard” and “soft” communities, adjusting their behavior to each. This suggests that there may not be one ideal style of a learning community, hardly a radical insight. Some people learn best from drill sergeants, tough teachers, demanding sensei, and some learn best from nurturant peers. A vital ecosystem of learning offers both, along with communities tailored to distinct cultural backgrounds, to enable anyone wanting to learn to find a niche best suited to them.

Failure to see this point may be a flaw of the social science case study approach: it focuses on organisms rather than ecosystems, on individuals in small communities rather than on “communities of communities” and issues of choice and migration among them. In fact, the ecosystem of fandom around The Sims (or any other large fandom) may be a practical example of Robert Nozick’s libertarian ideal of small, diverse communities with low barriers to entry and exit, each an experiment in governance. Such an ecosystem approach need not lose sight of the individual, or of Clifford Geertz’s exhortation to thick description, but acknowledgment of the system level would not only more accurately depict reality, but would serve as a further critique of the one-organism ecosystem of schooling.

Gee and Hayes also acknowledge, but might have expanded on, the not-unrelated tensions between nerfing and challenge. Making more user-friendly tools, they note, enables more people to participate, but if the tools are too easy, there is no impetus to find a community to help in learning and training. While the deep learning and mastery the authors describe is an important development of participatory culture, the opposite strain, of automatic reward, runs deep, especially among a cadre of children raised on praise without accomplishment.

Games and gaming communities can veer towards either end: towards a demand for more and easier rewards, or towards calls for deeper challenge. World of Warcraft is torn between these two, and many argue that Blizzard has chosen empty rewards for participation over a need for real mastery. At the same time, EVE Online is so demanding and unforgiving as to limit its appeal to an audience a tiny fraction of WoW’s size. A healthy ecosystem, of course, has niches for both, and for a wide range of variations. Again, a systems-level focus might have enriched the authors’ discussion of this tension.

Despite these small shortcomings, Women and Gaming is an excellent, accessible book which should be read by everyone interested in educational reform (especially the STEM-education cadre), and by traditional masculine gamers who don’t “get” feminine game spaces and cultures.

Posted by Kaseido at 1:21 pm Tagged with: , , , , , ,

A Political Theory of Roleplay

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Mar 292010

We need a political theory of roleplay.

I’m using “roleplay” as a term from fandom to mean the structured, bounded, amateur performance of a character or type from a particular canon, or textual source (Harry Potter, or Battlestar Galactica, or Gor), in a social context. Roleplay isn’t acting, in that it’s unscripted and not performed for an audience, but part of a community of participation. It’s not doing a job (being, say, a doctor or firefighter), in that it’s bounded off behind a “magic circle” from ordinary life. It could be described as “fantasy play,” but that just begs questions as to the definitions of “fantasy” and “play,” which aren’t necessary in this context.

Roleplay can be live action (LARP), as in Civil War re-enactments, online text-based (LiveJournal communities) or online three-dimensional (SL-Gor). Roleplay is distinct from cosplay (costume play) in being fundamentally social and interactive, rather than presentational.

So what does roleplay have to do with politics, and why should there be a theory of this sort of social, fannish performance?

I’m going to perform some sleight-of-hand, and include constitutions as a fannish text, and argue that three categories of political activity are actually the same sort of roleplay as pretending to be a Hogwarts student – and more so than dressing up as a Klingon to work security at a fan convention.

A theory of roleplay could: clarify mechanisms for providing children with experiential learning about representative democracy; elaborate the nature of similar functions for adults in the governance of “third space” communities; and provide a taxonomy of communities ranging from those engaged in completely self-referential processes to those with greatest efficacy outside their boundaries.

All three situations have a significant overlap, I think, yet lie on an axis from function to dysfunction: lack of external consequence may be a virtue in children’s training, an appropriate level of engagement for a bowling league or gaming guild, and a terrible flaw in a territorial legislature.

Here’s a definition as a working hypothesis: political processes are “roleplay” when they primarily (a) provide an experience of identity, of being a participant, and (b) engage in reflexive work  (I’ll explain what I mean here in a moment – that’s a terrible term but the best I have right now). By contrast, political processes are not roleplay when they primarily (a) provide an experience of practice, and (b) engage in externally-focused work.

For a prototypical roleplay community, let’s look at the officer corps of a group roleplaying a ship’s company in the Battlestar Galactica canon. Their authority is bounded by the roleplay environment: the captain’s word may be absolute law on the ship, but they can’t tell you what groceries to buy or where to get your car insurance. The experience is one of being an officer on the ship, rather than, say ensuring that enough maintenance gets done on your Vipers to maintain adequate flight-worthiness rates.

Note that this in-character, or IC, experience, is distinct from out of character, or OOC, management of the game space. The two form a useful contrast: OOC management typically called moderating, or “modding,” which may be done by a different group from the IC leadership, focuses on management of the play space: recruitment, admissions, training, fundraising, moderating for language or other content rules. The experience of modding is one primarily of doing rather than being, of action rather than identity.

Let’s take a look at the three types of roleplay I laid out earlier. For American public school children of my generation, our first exposure to politics was often through the election of classroom officers. The offices didn’t involve much work; the point was to roleplay the republican process of campaigning, voting, and acknowledging the leadership of representatives. The purpose was to practice being a voter, a class president, rather than to accomplish particular tasks.

The ritual of classroom elections does provide solid participatory learning. However, for the exceptionally astute or cynical, it does also convey the message that elections are primarily empty popularity contests, and more about being chosen than accomplishing anything once chosen.

The second category, adult political activity in “third spaces,” involves a lot of overlap with the childhood-learning context. Alexis de Toqueville described a post-revolutionary America mad over voluntary associations, local debates and elections for leadership roles in organizations. People of a half-century or so ago had an ongoing civic education in union locals, parent-teacher associations, bowling leagues, and suchlike. Today that experience is more likely to come in a raid guild – orcs with clubs, rather than Elks’ Clubs – but the principles are entirely the same.

In these groups, unlike the “class president” context, while process and popularity play a role, active management of resources and outcomes is expected. Different groups have different blends of identity and productivity, of title and responsibility.

In the third case, organizations set up to perform social goods – legislatures or corporate boards – may descend into a form of dysfunction in which process and popularity trump productivity and purpose.  “Within the Beltway” is the term for the Washington, DC equivalent of the “magic circle,” an event horizon of self-referentiality disconnected from accomplishing legislative aims or producing social goods.

A theory of roleplay would provide guidelines for an optimal blend of being and doing, of identity and performativity, of self-referentiality and external efficacy, across environments ranging from the educational to the playful to the local to the global.

It could provide a diagnostic suite for dysfunctional organizations, to identify when members of political institutions start acting like middle school hall monitors; and by the same token, when guild leaders begin to take on more attributes of effective management than their corporate counterparts.

With the mainstreaming of fandom, with “third space” political experience coming more from game environments and less from meetings run by Robert’s Rules of Order, with electoral politics taking on more elements of the fantastical with every headline, a political theory of roleplay could do much to inform our understanding of our world, improve our institutions, and more effectively train a next generation of political participants.

Posted by Kaseido at 2:45 pm Tagged with: ,

Literature Review of Gor

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Mar 212010

In ENG 654: Social Media, Alice Robison has assigned us the task of creating a hybrid annotated bibliography/literature review of approximately 10 works as a midterm project in our study of an online community. Here’s the introduction and list of works I’ve chosen. I’m not sure the analysis of the works themselves will be of any particular interest, but the list of references may be. So, here’s the skeleton of the thing.

This review will focus on sources providing a theoretical construct for studying the use of “canon,” or original authorial texts, for political ends in Gorean roleplay (RP) in Second Life (SL)(referred to as SL-Gor). The resulting construct is composed of two primary elements, methodological and analytical tools. With Law, J. (2004) I hold that, as research methods create the realities being studied, methodology and analysis cannot be neatly separated. The works chosen largely reflect this perspective, preventing a clear delineation between process and product.

SL is a persistent social virtual world, essentially an infrastructural tablua rasa enabling individual and collective creation of objects and communities. (Boellstorff 2008) While far from the most common use of the world, SL enables the creation of roleplay communities through the building of three-dimensional virtual environments recreating the settings of fictional works.  One of the largest such communities is built around the novels of John Norman, set on a “Counter-Earth,” called Gor, of city-states modeled after various cultures of the classical world, and marked by a uniform caste system, chattel slavery and the complete subjugation of women to men. (Norman 1966)

As with the city-states of Gor, SL Gorean RP communities are autonomous, tending to regard outsiders and members of other communities as potentially hostile.  One of the primary issues, if not the primary issue, separating these communities appears to be the interpretation of canon with respect to the treatment of women. “By the book” Gor holds that subjugation is absolute and unconditional, within the cultural institutions described in Norman’s novels. What they refer to as “Disney” Gor adapts the novels to allow for a broader range and interpretation of roles for women.

This dispute involves: literary interpretation, through the selective use of quotes from the novels to bolster positions; ideology, both with respect to the value of textual orthodoxy and to the proper role and nature of women in general; notions of citizenship, in who can and cannot be a legitimate member of a particular community; positional goods, in claims of higher status by the most rigidly orthodox communities and of members within those communities; and economic questions, as the RP communities are also businesses responsible for collecting funds to pay for the rental of their regions from the corporate owners of SL.

The study of SL-Gor presents a number of obstacles, which may account for its under-representation in the academic literature examining SL. The values of Gor are arguably diametrically opposed to those of Western academia: separatism versus openness; caste system versus egalitarianism; sexism versus feminism.  The author has been advised that some Goreans perceive researchers as hostile and biased.  Additionally, reflexivity seems an essential prerequisite for the study of SL-Gor: it seems inescapable that one’s own perspectives will be strongly determinant of what one sees, and what meaning one attaches to it, within SL-Gor. Reflexivity is a problematic and contested concept in ethnography (Law 2004): the sort of personal disclosure called for by Kendall (2009), which would seem essential to an honest and scientific ethnography of SL-Gor, is still far from the norm within academia.

The works chosen thus grapple with questions of reflexivity, ethical engagement with research subjects in online communities, the social construction of gender in technological domains, fan appropriation and interpretation of canon texts, and theories of gender-driven transmedia adaptation of texts. Works excluded, while useful, are those specifically focusing on methodological tools, such as discourse analysis, ethnographies in which there is not a sharp ideological or gendered distinction between researcher and subject, and studies of transmedia production in which relations to canon do not bear significant political ramifications.

  1. Bardzell, S. and Odom, W. (2008) “The experience of embodied space in virtual worlds: an ethnography of a Second Life community.” Space and Culture, 11; 239-259. doi: 10.1177/1206331208319148
  2. Boellstorff, T. (2008). Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
  3. Butler, J. (1990). Gender Trouble. New York: Routledge.
  4. Haraway, D. (1991). ”A cyborg manifesto.” In Haraway, D. (1991), Cyborgs, Simians and WOmen: The Reinvention of Nature (pp. 149-181). New York: Routledge.
  5. Hutcheon, L. (2006). A Theory of Adaptation. New York: Routledge.
  6. Jenkins, H. (2006). “Star Trek rerun, reread, rewritten: fan writing as textual poaching.” In Jenkins, H. (2006), Fans, Bloggers and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture. New York: New York University Press.
  7. Kendall, L. (2009). “How do issues of gender and sexuality influence the structures and processes of qualitative internet research?” In Markham, A. and Baym, N. (Eds.), Internet Inquiry: Conversations About Method (pp. 99-118).Thousand Oaks: SAGE.
  8. Kendall, L. (2002). Hanging Out in the Virtual Pub: Masculinities and Relationships Online. Berkeley: University of California Press.
  9. Law, J. (2004). After Method: Mess In Social Science Research. New York: Routledge.
  10. Norman, J. (1966-7). Tarnsman of Gor. New York: E-Reads.
  11. Springer, C. (1999). “The pleasure of the interface.” In Wolmark, J. (1999), Cybersexualities: A Reader on Feminist Theory, Cyborgs and Cyberspace (pp. 34-54). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
  12. Stone, A. (1996). The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age. Cambridge, The MIT Press.
Posted by Kaseido at 2:19 pm Tagged with: , , , , ,

The Pleasures and Politics of Canon

1 Response »
Feb 242010

“Canon” is one of the fundamental concepts of media fandom – the original work or works that one is a fan of. But canon isn’t just that stuff, that body of work, but as the term suggests, it’s in some way sacred, privileged. There are personal pleasures in a good new addition to a favorite body of work, but what’s the deal with the sacred dimension of canon?

That sacred status can be used to turn the personal pleasures of canon into a politics of legitimacy. For the individual engaging with a text, canon is literary, but in the context of a fan community of co-producers of new works, canon is political: contesting within a fan community the status of a work or performance is the stuff of power and status . Canon in fandom lies, then, at the intersection of play and politics, of literature and law.

I’ve found Linda Hutcheon’s A Theory of Adaptation a tremendously useful framework for evaluating the politics of canon, though her own focus is on the literary appreciation of adaptations to canon (and the concomitant academic politics, but that’s a different beast entirely).

But let’s start with the literary pleasures of canon. Over dinner the other night, a colleague enthusiastically described his experience playing Star Trek Online. He didn’t evaluate the game mechanics – which have gotten largely unfavorable reviews in the gaming blogs, but instead talked about the joy of immersion in the world of Star Trek, of visiting places familiar from stories he’s returned to his whole life, but this time as a participant rather than a spectator. Commanding a Federation starship, being spoken to by the famous voice of Starfleet computers – that was fun, regardless of the affordances and limitations of the game engine.

As Hutcheon observes, “what is often most significant for videogames is the adapted heterocosm, the spectacular world of digital animation that a player enters.” (p. 51) I think she’s wrong, deeply wrong, with respect to gamers approaching a transmedia game, but right insofar as she’s referring to fans of the original property who pick up the game seeking a transmedia experience.

Likewise, another colleague and guildmate of mine in World of Warcraft is reading Christie Golden’s novel, Arthas: Wrath of the Lich King. The joy for him was in recognizing familiar places in a new medium, and having those places enriched by canon lore, and learning more about iconic figures from the game.

These pleasures of new, transmedia, works slotting into canon are personal, matters of one’s own opinions and engagement with stories and characters across platforms. Of course, the transmedia experience is not always pleasant: adaptations or additions can feel like violations of canon. Everyone has a favorite book badly adapted into a movie or a movie into a game, or has seen a sequel that fails to capture the spirit of the original. But this appreciation of canon is personal, aesthetic, the stuff of humanities scholarship.

Right now I’m more interested in the other sort, the social use of canon as a tool of politics. Hutcheon describes a “morally loaded discourse” of discussion about adaptations of canon (p.7), quoting another researcher who found terms like “infidelity,” “betrayal,” “deformation,” “violation,” “desecration” used in evaluating new adaptations.

She states that such thinking is “based on the implied assumption that adapters aim simply to reproduce the adapted text,” arguing that, rather, “’to adapt’ means to adjust, to alter, to make suitable,” especially in a transmedia context, as “[w]ith each mode, different things get adapted in different ways.” (p.12). “Suitable,” of course, is in the eye of the beholder.

Hutcheon quotes Susan Stanford Friedman, who has applied the anthropological/political concept of “indigenization” to adaption, stating that the concept “implies agency: people pick and choose what they want to transplant to their own soil. Adapters of traveling stories exert power over what they adapt.” (p. 150). That power is utterly, fundamentally political. Indigenization is often applied in a religious context, of the creation of a “nativized church.” The immediate question in that context, as in the fannish one, is – is indigenization a revitalizing adaptation to local circumstances, or is it heresy?

In fanfiction, “canon” takes on some interesting nuances. Not that much fic strictly is close to canon, the sort of stories called “gen,” for general, that are typically “continuing adventures,” stories that could be an episode of the TV series, a sequel to the books or movies. Much fic explores non-canon romantic and sexual relationships – but there, attitudes towards canon still play a critical political role. A community will judge if a pairing is credible within the bounds of canon, and a fandom will typically split along “shipper” lines – Harry Potter fans into Harry/Hermione vs. Harry/Ginny, for example.

Slash – romantic/sexual fiction about gay relationships between characters that aren’t canon gay – is a staple of fic, yet even there, issues of canon split shipper communities into those who find the pairing canon-plausible and those who reject it. If you’re wearing “slash goggles,” interpreting emotional displays between male characters in a sexual context, well, certain pairings are “practically canon,” while others are too implausible to count.

In roleplay communities, canon is used to judge not a static work, like fanfiction, but an ongoing performance. There’s a shamefully un-studied world of virtual-world roleplay on LiveJournal, text-based worlds like the old MUDS and MOOs, but persistent, with roleplay permanently visible in public or semi-public threaded logs. There, it’s expected that each roleplayer will bring their own interpretation (often slashy) to the character – but within the bounds of canon plausibility, and “playing OOC,” or out of character, is a primary ground for social criticism, and to some degree, ostracizing, as people prefer to play with more plausibly canon versions of the characters.

In SL-Gor, canon takes on a more explicitly political dimension. What separates Gor from medieval roleplay on the one hand and BDSM roleplay on the other is the explicitly ideological dimension, the unforgiving male dominance, the abject nature of female slavery. “Canon vs. ‘Disney’” seems to be the fundamental political issue dividing Gorean communities, with one side arguing for the orthodoxy of “by the book,” and the other for a “nativized church” of a Gor closer to mainstream liberal culture.

Why is canon so important that it’s used as a justification even for clearly transgressive fic and roleplay? How can canon fidelity even exist as a meaningful concept when a novel or TV show is translated to text or 3D roleplay, or heteronormative narrative is slashed?

We must love our orthodoxies, even the implausible ones…

Posted by Kaseido at 1:13 pm Tagged with: , , , , , ,
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