gender » Aporia

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

Sep 012010

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We Can Do Better

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Jun 022010

I chose the Confederation of Democratic Simulators as a research site, as a community to live and work in, and to be a legislator in, because I don’t understand it.

The government of the CDS isn’t exactly a community management organization, and it isn’t exactly a roleplay site – though to me it’s historically been much more of the latter than the former. It’s a utopian experiment without the experimental spirit, or much of the utopian impulse. It’s been a closed, isolated, stagnant community – yet it voted to merge with one of Second Life’s most dynamic, experimental, utopian regions. It’s home to some of the nicest people I’ve met, and to some truly epic douchebags.

It’s a study in contradictions.

It’s not the only one. You can’t examine politics, culture and law online without becoming enmeshed in baffling antinomies which are both mirror and bellwether for the wider world.

Part One: Observer

One question in particular has risen to the top for me, not only, or even primarily, in studying the CDS, but in online political behavior more broadly: why are people who are clearly terrified of change here? I don’t understand wanting to turn back the historical clock, but I especially don’t understand using the most advanced technology to try to do so.

I don’t understand a group of people who defined themselves as engaged in “an experiment in democratic governance online,” and recreated some of the most undemocratic institutions of a bureaucratic nation-state, and slapped them onto the structures of a particular virtual world, with particular needs and affordances, without seriously engaging with the fit between goals and tools.

I don’t understand the naked viciousness when faced by the prospect of actually doing something beyond playing at factional politics in a church-like meeting room, the existential horror in the face of an agenda of concrete actions proposed by a strong professional woman – and I believe both those factors, actual work and a strong woman, to have provoked yesterday’s vileness in equal measure.

I’m studying Gorean communities for a similar set of reasons, and the behavior I saw yesterday from the minority faction in the new Representative Assembly is what I would have expected and understood more in a Gorean meeting hall. Though, Gorean roleplayers seem to be a practical bunch, with a firm eye on where roleplay ends and management begins, a notion lost to more than a few in the CDS.

What unites these genuinely disparate cases, I believe, is a rejection of one fundamental notion: we can do better. The Gorean would say, human nature is what it is, slavery is an essential part of the human condition, as is the inferiority and subjugation of women. The Enlightenment and modernity was largely a mistake, unnatural and irrelevant. Some in the CDS old guard would recoil in horror, standing fast by the UN Declaration of Human Rights, which is incorporated into the CDS constitution – and then in the next breath say that the structures of the 18^th or 19^th century European nation-state are the last word in management and governance, and apply everywhere without adaptation or exception, just as the Goreans do about their canon of novels.

There are a number of other issues to be explored here. A big one is my hypothesis that essentially no one is interested in democracy, if taken to mean active participation in community management by essentially all members of the community. The CDS bills itself as “SL’s only democratic self governing community” – while inaccurate in a number of ways, the statement is largely true. Why, in a space of millions of people over half a dozen years, who have created everything the mind can conceive? Why only one community?

“Democracy” and “Government” are not fun games. Virtually no one chooses to play them. A tiny handful do – a very tiny handful. Most people in most circumstances will, and do, gladly pay to not play that game, and hire other people – corporate managers, elected officials, community liaisons – to play it for them.

What people seem to want online is to be left the hell alone to play the game they want to play, while knowing that there are fair rules in place to deal with problems and conflicts, and while happily paying a team of people to provide, or enhance, their fun. This is not so different in the external world, at least in America.

Another issue is the powerful, visceral appeal of reaction, of rejection of modernity, equality. For more than a generation, commenters have looked worriedly at the popularity first of Tolkieneque fantasy, then of games based on Tolkien’s medieval tropes. We spend our entertainment dollars on and in worlds of masters and servants, castes and kings, the building and destruction of empires – and not on games of “Democracy,” “Government,” “Human Rights.” Some of the most popular products in Second Life enable restraint, subjugation, submission. We seem to want simple worlds where our place is clear, with simple lines of strong authority over us. The Goreans are right in saying that the urge to bend the knee is wide, and deep. It’s an unknown, illicit craving deep inside many, that finds expression in the worlds of our imagination. That’s a territory I want to map, where the deepest parts of our psyche become utterly politicized.

Taken together, if what we build in the spaces where we are most free is prisons of the past, chains of our deepest urges, then perhaps the Enlightenment experiment is a niche product, destined to gather dust on the gaming shelves. I don’t like this answer. I firmly believe, We can do better. But we cannot if we delude ourselves into thinking our games are more popular than they are. We have to examine, define and acknowledge our natures, then make those games of freedom that appeal. That’s the challenge of the progressive activist in the current age.

My grim hypotheses may or may not be supported by further evidence and study. But it’s a damn important question to be asking.

Part Two: Participant

I said above that what people seem to want online is to be left the hell alone to play the game they want to play, while knowing that there are fair rules in place to deal with problems and conflicts, and while happily paying a team of people to provide, or enhance, their fun.

Whether that’s understood or accepted is one of the fracture lines between the two voting blocs in the new Representative Assembly. One faction doesn’t really care how many people play “Politics,” but charges a subscription fee to non-players to subsidize their play. The other doesn’t really care to play “Politics,” but wants to use those subscription fees to provide a really first-rate space for the fun of the people paying.

And by “fun,” I don’t mean just the social mixers and dance parties that drive the old guard into apoplectic fits. Fun in Al Andalus, and for some in the CDS, is putting on an academic conference. Or hosting a book club, or contests for writers. Or experimenting with consensus decisionmaking. Or participating in a discussion series on religion and philosophy. Or designing and building new towns. Fun takes a lot of forms – but that “Politics” game isn’t one of them for most people.

We differ in opinions, values and goals. The group wanting to enable fun has a one-vote majority in the RA. “Experiments in democratic self governance” include losing elections, right? Then why the rabid, vicious assault by reactionary forces?

Why?

We can do better is more powerful a force than any explosive. It shames the contented, horrifies the backward-looking, terrifies the lazy. We can do better invalidates the very existence of the mediocre, the incompetent, the reactionary. It goes beyond the give and take of votes and elections, the disagreements of the politically active. It is a slap to the face, and it is being taken as such.

Unfortunately, We can do better implies a question at least as uncomfortable for the progressives as the reactionaries. As the old joke had it, “Whaddaya mean ‘we,’ white boy?” The naysayers have acted as if there is no “we,” while talking from both sides of their mouths on the matter. They have opposed the merger with the progressive elements of Al Andalus, they have viciously attacked our leaders, pointedly failed to publicize or support our events. They act as if there is no “we.” We have claimed there is a “we,” that the CDS and Al Andalus can be one progressive community.

Yet as we announce, We can do better, we look around, and have to ask ourselves, “with these clowns tied around our necks?” The six reactionary votes in the current RA are not the CDS. The handful of nasty old men, on and off the RA, are not the community. And yet, what if we took a good sharp knife to the rope tying the liars, fools and nutcases to our necks?

We’re spending hours every week, every day, countering Big Lie allegations, pushing back against stall tactics, losing energy, momentum and faith to the sharp-toothed ankle-biters.

We can do better, indeed….

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.

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.

Ilinx of Gor

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Mar 182010

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

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

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

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

Kendall makes “the case for doing qualitative work with the whole body, and not cutting off certain types of experiences as irrelevant or inappropriate, even in situations, such as wholly online social interactions, in which the body might seem relatively unimportant.” (p. 101) She quotes Kleinman and Copp (1993) to the effect that “Fieldwork analyses reflect our identities, ideologies and political views. Yet we often omit them from our published accounts because we want to present ourselves as social scientists: objective and neutral observers.” (p.102) She goes on to say that “[e]ven in nonsexual situations and nosexual relationships, sexual aspects of identity influence interactions at the most basic and minute level.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why am I going to join an SL Gorean community?

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

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

Research Ethicist of Gor, another sequel

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Mar 062010

While my entry into SL-Gor is still on hold, after a terrific talk with Alice Robison last week, that hasn’t been a bad thing. The delay is giving me a vastly stronger grounding in theory and method, or in non-academic-speak, the glimmerings of a clue as to what I’m doing. It’s also occasioned some serious reflexivity: a hard look at what I bring to my research question (and that’ll be the topic for my next post).

I’ve just devoured Markham and Baym’s Internet Inquiry: Conversations About Method. While it sounds more like the academic equivalent of a root canal than something to be lost in as breakfast reading runs into the afternoon, Internet Inquiry is perhaps the best academic anthology I’ve ever read – and I only say “perhaps” because I’ve had several years of referring back to Oudshoorn and Pinch’s How Users Matter: The Co-Construction of Users and Technology.

From the introduction, in which the authors encourage us to ask

“what counts as an authentic self-representation? How are we conceptualizing the embodied persons we study? How are we framing our own embodied sensibilities? Do we approach what we are studying as traces left in public spaces or as embodied activities by people situated in rich offline contexts… how to interpret other people’s selves and how to represent ourselves to the people we study, especially when we may not be meeting them in person,”(pp.xviii-xix)

I knew I’d found an essential resource, not only for this conundrum of researching questions I consider legal/political in SL-Gor, but for my own development as a researcher. The chapters on privacy and sexuality in particular were directly applicable to this project.

Malin Sveningsson Elm’s essay on privacy neatly captures the problems I’ve had making sense of the IRB biomedically-based framework for evaluating privacy and consent in the context of a reclusive online community. While I think her description of a continuum of public and private is deeply flawed in its particulars (IMO, registration for “membership” when there is no prospect of that registration being rejected is not fundamentally a move to make a public space more private, but to collect marketable demographic data), the general framework and the rest of her discussion provides factors for evaluating privacy and consent issues that I will use regularly in my work.

Her conclusion, as well as the “response” essays focus on respect for the people being studied, a serious asking of the question, “what do they get out if it,” and a focus on ensuring “that our research subjects are not harmed, humiliated or offended,” (p.85) back up my course of carefully negotiating the terms of my participation in SL-Gor with both my PI and advisors, and the community members who’ve invited me, prior to my beginning work.

Lori Kendall’s essay on sexuality is the most revolutionary thing I’ve read in years, since my first foray into trying to understand online communities and the impact of new technologies on selfhood. She states, “I make the case for doing qualitative work with the whole body, and not cutting off certain types of experiences as irrelevant or inappropriate, even in situations, such as wholly online interactions, in which the body might seem relatively unimportant.” (p.101).

Of course, in studying Gor, the body is of fundamental importance, and it’s issues around embodiment and its political meaning that are both at the core of why I want to study Gor and why my entrance has been so problematic. Gor is about gender and its embodiment, as the iconic “kef,” or slave brand, attests. It is about the performance of hyper-masculinity and hyper-femininity (I’d say, “whatever the actual-world performance of the subject might be,” but that’s exactly one of the points in contention), and in no small part the sexual component of that performance.

Kendall’s essay gave me key insights into the eroticism of online attraction, a huge component of my life for more than a decade, both personally (my wife and I met online) and academically (I’m fascinated by the construction and performance of gender and sexual expression in online spaces).

Both responses enriched Kendall’s essay – Sunden’s in making the case for the embodied richness of online sexuality, and Campbell’s in providing strategies for research within sexual communities.

Baym’s concluding essay, on the nature of quality in qualitative research, is a guide I will refer back to regularly, despite my discomfort with the notion of “dialectic” as a framing mechanism – I’m with Markham in finding the “di-” aspect limiting and problematic.

All this leaves me seeing the beginnings of a negotiated solution that could produce a good research project in SL-Gor. I see multiple stages: the first, to meet my semester deadlines, may just involve a conversation with select persons, in which my identity as a male researcher is foregrounded, on questions of canon adaptation. A second may be to take up my host’s offer for slave training, again with the key participants aware of my identities, for insights into the appeal of the community and how initiation, training and meaning-making take place. A third is the most problematic one, of continuing my involvement(s) in a larger, more public Gorean community, either as kajira or free man or both.

Regardless of what may come of the second and third phases (my next blog post will address some concerns about the second, and I’ve already aired concerns about the third), the first seems like it should work to produce some solid answers to my research question.

Part 2 – Passing or Clashing?

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Feb 192010

Part 1, The Closing of the Alt Frontier, set up a distinction between the systems of trust in frontier communities (like Second Life) and metropolitan ones (like globalized RL). Now we’re going to get into special cases, which for some reason are problematic for trust systems and flash points for conflict between them.

Gender

Let’s start with gender. Many separate gender from sex – the cultural performance of “man” or “woman” from the physical plumbing. There’s a broad range of combinations of sex and gender, of course. For those of us whose gender and sex aren’t in tight traditional alignment, there seem to be two very different approaches to expression, and to getting gender and sex in closer aligment.

There are two terrific books on the subject, both memoirs.

One, Jennifer Finney Boylan’s She’s Not There: A Life in Two Genders, describes the male-to-female sex change of someone whose gender performances, as male and later female, as I read them, were both fairly close to a center line: James was not highly masculine in presentation, Jennifer not highly feminine. The cover, left, catches some of the spirit of the book.

The other, Richard J. Novic’s Alice in Genderland: A Crossdresser Comes of Age, is the story of someone coming to express both highly gendered male and female sides – again well reflected in the book’s cover.

There are of course other differences and more nuances – I’m painting in broad strokes here to set up some general concepts.

So, many (hard numbers are about impossible to find) have found SL an opportunity for expressing a gender that they can’t, or can’t readily or safely, in RL. And again, there are (at least) two approaches to doing so. One is to use a body of the sex that feels more right or appropriate, and perform gender somewhere around the middle. Some of these people “pass,” and are “read” as women much of the time, some don’t. The other approach is to carefully perform gender to “pass.”

Lat time we said that systems of trust in frontier communities are based on personal reputation and consistency of dealing. By frontier values (and those of old SL, people who came in before later 2007), you are what you claim to be, unless your presentation is just not credible. And that applied to gender as much as to being a designer or architect or business consultant – if you did the job credibly, that’s what you were.

The values of the metropolis were explicitly rejected: a lot of SL’ers personal profiles, in the “First Life” tab say something like, “I leave my FL in FL – don’t ask, and I won’t tell.”

Gender was always a little different, and it’s perhaps gotten more so as the frontiersfolk have become outnumbered by people holding onto the values of the metropolis. In the metropolis, claiming to be something and doing the job is not enough, or even not that important: credentialing is.

In SL, credentialing for gender (typically for dating) can be done by insisting on voice chat in addition to text, or more subtly by demanding, or expecting, RL details to flesh out and substantiate in RL a gendered performance: talk of husbands, cramps, and such.

Is that deception? Someone bringing the values of the metropolis would say absolutely: false credentials were supplied to create an identity, and had real ones been supplied (that the person was a different gender RL) they’d be rejected for the, um, “job.” Someone from the frontier would say, “if it quacks like a duck, it’s a duck – and you’re never gonna see the RL bits anyway.” They might say, the use of RL information, accurate or not, just takes the problem of RL credentialing off the board, and allows for the SL performance to speak.

I don’t think there’s a “right,” but a clash of perspectives and needs. Personally, only personally, I’m not sympathetic to the RL demand, nor comfortable with the use of false information. But I don’t think I’ve got the answer at all.

Researcher

I’ve discovered that “social scientist” is as controversial an identity as “genderbender.” I’ve been hearing from a variety of sources that there’s a lot of hostility and fear towards social science researchers in SL. No small part of this seems to be due to stupid and/or unethical behavior by some researchers, but I think there’s more going on. I don’t pretend to have a good body of data or understanding of the phenomenon yet.

That is, aside from one personal incident. My profile says, “I live, work and study in SL. No, I’m not taking notes on you!” while my First Life tab identifies me as a graduate student of online communities. I did once have someone turn cold and then teleport away in the middle of what had been a good conversation, as she was convinced that I was “experimenting on” or “studying” her.

When I told that story in class last week, one of my students laughed and said that he’s gotten in the habit of never saying he’s a law student when he’s out in clubs. I remembered I didn’t either- I used to say I was in film school. People don’t like law students, and I didn’t look much like people’s expectations of one (my “law student performance” wasn’t convincing enough to “pass”!). For us, that was similar to the gendered case – it got a potential but irrelevant (to us) clash out of the way, so we could relate in the immediate environment (ok, in both cases, we all lied to get laid. Let’s be real!).

Transgendered Researchers of Gor!

My legal anthropology project in SL-Gor has been on hold for a couple weeks. One delay has been getting my application for IRB exemption approved by my supervising professor. Another has come from an email dialog with my Gorean host. I got a long email from him last week, describing the circumstances I’d be entering, and providing some background information. His situation had changed from the one that had been described to me, and I’ve gotten concerned about how I can answer my research questions in the new environment.

But what really brought me to a halt was his opinion that I conceal my identities as an RL male and as a researcher, due to profound prejudices against genderbenders and researchers among the SL-Gor community. He suggested that I might not learn anything, and face great hostility, were I to make those “metropolitan” identities known in the “frontier” community of SL-Gor.

I had to laugh, having defended the values of SL communities against the incursion of RL credentialing. Now the digital chickens have come home to roost.

I’ve got no good answers on this one, and neither do my faculty advisors: I’ve been referred to two authors of books on internet research ethics. I think I see the outlines of a solution, but I’m a long way from sure.

Coming soon: “Part 3 – If Code Is Law, Code Monkeys Are Rewriting Our Constitution!”

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.

Julian Dibbell's Play Money: Games Being Played

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Nov 142009

For EDT 691, Research In Virtual Worlds, I’ve been asked to do a writeup for discussion of Parts 5-8 of Julian Dibbell’s Play Money: Or, How I Quit My Day Job and Mad Millions Trading Virtual Loot:

Game designer Sid Meier famously defined games as “a series of interesting choices.” With that definition in mind, Dibbell identifies in Parts 5-8 of Play Money a number of games, some of which he plays and some of which he observes being played around him. Let’s take a look at those games and the “interesting choices” involved:

1. The Economy Game. This is of course the game that Play Money is ostensibly about: a meta-game of economics that players created around the actual game of Ultima Online. As Dibbell gets deeper and deeper into his personal economic game (since it has a clearly defined goal and end state, it’s much more of a “game” for traditional theorists than the MMO that enables it, ironically), he comes to discover that there isn’t one economic game, but a number of very different ones.

These games can be ranked in order of abstraction, or degrees of distance from the core game of UO. Dibbell begins by acting as a merchant within the context of the fictional UO world: running a mall, buying low and selling high. The story of Play Money through the middle of the narrative is one of Dibbell’s increasing abstraction from the game, until he finds himself fully occupied in currency speculation and looking down upon the people still engaged in the concrete game that first attracted him.

Questions: What are the similarities and differences between the rules, values and goals of the various economic games played around UO and those played around “RL”? What draws (some) people to find pleasure, or compulsion, in ever more abstract activities, and what are the implications of that phenomenon for games studies, and games in education?

2. Cops and Robbers: One of the most lol-worthy moments of an entertaining book was Dibbell’s narration of Rich Thurman’s scheme to hook his botnet up to the A.L.I.C.E chatbot, to confound corporate investigators. Yet Dibbell defines his victory condition as a legitimate, negotiated and accepted settlement with the cops, reporting his income to the IRS. Dibbell is fascinated by, drawn to, and eventually joins, the robbers: the “series of interesting choices” in his gameplay generates a consistent arc towards the Robbers – yet he retains an end state of being accepted by the Cops.

Questions: is Cops & Robbers a particularly American game? Do we love and yearn to be the outlaw more than other cultures? Yet our legendary outlaws, like Dibbell, yearn for legitimacy – even if they have to buy it. What are the implications of this ambivalence for faction design in games? For the creation and regulation of communities, digital and physical?

3. The Turing Test: The Turing Test is much more interesting than a programming challenge involving natural-language generation. It’s a means for thinking about the social role of virtuality, and about the nature of the human.

200px-Drstrangelove1sheet- Turing described his test towards the end of an era when the Machine was the epitome of the Human: Taylorism in the workplace sought to transform the human into an automaton; military culture had, in the aftermath of World War I, transformed from glorifying the passionate individual into the mass army, the pilot as the extension of the bomber, and would soon reach its apotheosis in a hyper-rationality which transcended into pure nonsense, as depicted in Dr. Strangelove.

Yet, Turing’s test was intended to help create a machine to take on just those characteristics that humanity sought to shed: personal warmth, psychological insight, and sociability. Like Cops and Robbers, The Turing Test derives its play appeal from antinomies.

The Turing Test, though, was initially a game playing off a fundamental antinomy, and in that form may be one of the most widely played games on the internet: that between male and female.

Dibbell, like many people, finds a deep issue raised by the internet to be that of authenticity, an issue at the heart of The Turing Test. He ultimately concludes, “it’s a waste of precious time and creativity to wonder whether the model is the same, on some deep, ontological level as what it simulates. The question, rather, is whether it’s the same in every way that matters for the purposes at hand.”

Questions: Now we’ve reached the question at the core of virtual and games studies. Is the model the same for the purposes at hand? If not, is it better, worse, or another set of playful antinomies? What can the model teach us that is obscured by the original? Is there, ultimately online, any reason to privilege the original at all, or is it simply Life 1.0, a buggy beta to be patched, upgraded, and eventually replaced whole?

Guest Post: Pirate-ette?

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Sep 252009

I’ve invited my classmate, Julie Ashley, to guest-blog today. She posted this to our class forum, and I enjoyed it so much that I wanted to be able to publicize it to my vast readership (Hi, you two!).

Comment and tell Julie she needs to write more – I’m trying to pull her into the blogoverse!

So, I mentioned in class that I was trying to mod my player character in Pirates! so I could swashbuckle as a woman. Honestly, I was picturing a cross-dressing pirate wench who could fence in a cuirass just like any guy (with only the hint of somewhat flattened breasts). She’d have some other just-under-the-radar pirate chicks on her crew, and they’d keep the male pirate crew around for combined extra muscle, companionship, and stud stable. Maybe after a long day of dancing in drag with governors’ daughters, terrorizing and plundering trade ships, escorting new governors to Caribbean islands, and digging up buried treasure, my pirate would take off her armor and just be a girl with the other crossdressing chicks on her girl.

In a game with a single avatar option — a blue-eyed pirate guy with brown hair in a ponytail — I felt like I was crossdressing already. An important minigame consists of wooing and dancing with governors’ daughters, who in turn provide you with rescue quests, handy gifts, and treasure maps of lost Incan/Aztec/Mayan cities. Further, one category on your game “status” scorecard consists of points earned for courting, rescuing, and marrying a daughter. So unless the game added the option of plain, attractive, and beautiful governors’ sons rather than governors’ daughters (and then let each player order her or his own gender choice from a sort of in-game menu), I would be forced to crossdress anyhow if my avatar was female.

If the broken links can be believed, several female pirate mods USED to be available. Now just a single mod seems to be. The mod did make me a female pirate — clearly by grafting a “beautiful” governor’s daughter or barmaid’s head and buxom torso onto the male pirate’s lower body. At certain angles and points in the action, you just can’t miss my she-pirate’s package. Never fails to amuse. One other weird glitch: if your player character has acquired the special brace of pistols, these do not appear in the she-pirate’s hands. Instead, she swoops her hands out of the holsters to reveal….curled fingers, which, miraculously manage to shoot a bullet into her opponent’s right shoulder. Fingers like that could come in handy!

Further, the female pirate only shows up when I play the fencing mini-game. Since she’s got very low and burgeoning cleavage, this seems an inopportune time to whip off the boy-costume. (Never mind that her face suddenly changes into a totally different and female face during those fencing scenes too.) At all other times, I’m still the guy pirate and I sort of need a shave. I tell my game-self that the she-pirate is crazy brilliant to reveal her true assets at just the physically-vulnerable moment of battle: she’s not just risking a cutlass slash to that milky white animated skin; she’s actually using that cleavage to confound and distract her male opponents. (Would you really stab a girl, enemy captain? Haven’t seen anything like this since you left port, have you, poor sucker?)

I would love to be a rakishly sensitive crossdresser when I woo the governor’s daughters, but in those and all of my non-fencing moments, I’m still the same-old humdrum male pirate. Not nearly the mod of my swashbuckling dreams. Makes me wish I knew how to mod it myself. I can’t believe no one’s done it right yet! Undoubtably, this is how most modders start….

But I still want to play more than I want to muck around with mods and cheats. Just moved up to the third and middle difficulty level. Made me a fresh pirate named him/her Orlando in honor of V. Woolf’s gender-bender. I’m trying a new strategy this time, sacking lots more cities and pursuing quests earlier in my career. I’ll just have to plunder as a she-male for another three dozen hours or so.

Older Entries

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

We Can Do Better

Identity at the Participant/Observer Crossroads

10 Big Pieces: Women and Gaming

Ilinx of Gor

Research Ethicist of Gor, another sequel

Part 2 – Passing or Clashing?

Julian Dibbell's Play Money: Games Being Played

Guest Post: Pirate-ette?

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