identity » Aporia

Reputation and Achievement in Second Life

Aug 072010

What’s wrong with an achievement system for Second Life? After criticizing it strongly a few days ago, I’m going to change my mind and argue: not nearly as much as I’d first thought. However, I’m going to draw an important distinction that’s gotten lost in the discussion, one between an achievement system (good) and a reputation system (bad!).

Second Life’s blogger-of-record, Hamlet Au, has been calling for the reinstating of an “achievement system” in order to increase SL’s appeal among gamers – a huge population that tends to not “get” SL at all. Unfortunately, what he argues for is not an achievement system at all, but a reputation system. Au uses “achievement,” “reputation” and “level” interchangeably, confusing the issue hopelessly.

Unfortunately, the many bloggers who’ve taken exception to his support for the return of SL’s reputation system have followed his lead in treating as synonymous several different systems with radically different social consequences.

Gwyneth Llewelyn argues against Au, claiming that an achievement system would turn SL into just “another form of entertainment” – specifically, something like an MMO. But what she’s referring to also is a reputation system, something that to the best of my knowledge does not exist in MMOs, and certainly not in the most popular ones.

Reputation Systems

Before my time, SL had a reputation system, a Digg-like tool for promoting or demoting other people’s (or their content’s) reputations. It was gamed so severely, and so easy to abuse, that it was retired years ago. Digg, as it turns out, has been subject to the most vicious sort of political manipulation for some time itself.

I don’t know much about reputation systems, so I’m going to leave my discussion at the observation that in an emotionally laden context they’re a terrible idea (though they work very well in the commercial contexts of eBay and Amazon vendors), and are an open invitation to griefing. Oldtimers who experienced the apparent fiasco of SL’s system can comment on that, or, you can read the Digg manipulation link for a sense of how badly these things can go wrong. I note, however, that a merchant-ranking system might be quite valuable for SL.

Achievement Systems

An achievement system is a very different beast. Here, the platform (not other players/participants!) awards individuals points for doing particular things – things extrinsic to the game goals! They’re typically socially visible, and serve as both a bragging tool and a quick visual identifier of people’s seniority and expertise – like Boy Scout merit badges or the military “ribbon rack.”

Here’s the achievement page for my main character from World of Warcraft:

This shows at a glance what my interests are, what kind of player I am, and in a sense, who I am in WoW: I’m immersed in the gameworld mostly, more than being a large-group raider or player vs. player combat fan. This information is readily available to anyone: the WoW UI allows you to “compare achievements” on clicking on another avatar, and the WoW Armory, where this is drawn from, displays the information publicly.

WoW only recently added this system: there was nothing like it for most of the game’s very successful history. It’s not universal in games at all: it’s an outgrowth of social media. The single-player game Dragon Age uses a web-based, social, achievements system. XBox Live added one within the past year as well. This is a new tool.

I’ve got to stress again that achievements are extrinsic to the game goals. They’re for things like looting a lot of gold, raising one’s ability with crafting, exploring odd corners of the gameworld, participating in holiday events, and suchlike. They have no bearing on progression within the game. They are not a leveling system.

Is the information achievements provide socially useful? Yes. Can it be gamed by third parties, like a Digg ranking? No: the game software tracks progress and adds achievements automatically. Does the achievement system become an essential part of the game? By no means.

Sometimes I pursue particular achievements as a personal goal: this coming week I’m going to get the ones for Crusader/Ambassador status at long last. Sometimes they take me by surprise: “there’s an achievement for that?!” I rarely look at anyone else’s achievements, other than to see what friends have been doing lately.

But the system enables all sorts of activities, some personal, some social, some constructive, some silly. It usually does not affect anyone’s core experience in the environment.

Level Systems

Now, a level system is entirely different yet again. Levels mark a mandatory path towards a defined end state, the level cap. Achieving the level cap indicates mastery of the content, and in many MMOs, is the ticket into the “elder game” of group raiding, as opposed to questing. Levels are the product of earning experience points (XP) which come mostly from doing the core tasks of the RPG part of the MMO: killing stuff and doing chores (which usually involve killing stuff). You play the game in order to level: that’s pretty much the object of the game.

Obviously, this in no way applies to social virtual worlds, and that’s the distinction between the Facebook game Sorority Life, which involves dressing avatars, and Second Life. Sorority Life is a game, top to bottom. Like an MMO, you do tasks for XP in order to level up, there’s (semi-) voluntary PvP content, a roleplay element (you have boyfriends, cars, and you can “dress your dolly), and an achievement system, which, like that of WoW, is an indicator of what kind of player/person you are in that space. It’s not social, not persistent, other than that there are avatars.

There’s no amount of tweaking that could turn one “SL” into the other. They’re apples and fire trucks. So there’s no point in even talking about somehow grafting a leveling system onto Second Life.

An Achievement System for SL?

Let’s talk specifics, then. Say SL had a (developer-imposed, highly visible) achievement system. So what?

It wouldn’t solve the first hour/retention problem at all! However, it would be a useful tool for self-analysis, goal setting, and social evaluation for those of us who stay. For that, I think it’d be a very good idea, but I can’t for the life of me see how it might be implemented.

What would my “achievement page” look like for SL? I’d have a ton of points in nightclub attendance, far far too many in bureaucratic meeting participation, I’d be maxed out in shopping. I wouldn’t have any in roleplay or combat, only the first handful in building, none in scripting. The graphic result would be a good at-a-glance picture of who I am in SL.

But how could that possibly be coded in a user-created environment? How would the client software know when I attended my thousandth dance club night? My 50th Representative Assembly meeting? My 200th shoe sale? Inventory-related achievements would be easy, grid-location ones possible, but capturing either the creative skills or socializing that together are what SL is about seems unattainable. How would the “master scripter” achievement be determined by the software?

Most importantly, though, for the current debate is the unavoidable conclusion that it wouldn’t be a meaningful addition to the “first hour experience,” or aid in early retention. It would, as I argued before, be disingenuous and inherently deceptive.

My next post will explain why, via international football rules, Calvin and Hobbes, and gamer culture.

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:”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who cares? Today SL, tomorrow the world.

Mixy Things 1: The CDS as Modernist Bastion

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Jul 302010

Last week I found myself deeply immersed in a group of texts that went together all too well, and generated some insights into how and why my long-time interests and quandaries are related. Put Bruno Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern, Henry Jenkins’ Textual Poachers, politics in the Confederation of Democratic Simulators, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles and Stargate: SG-1 into a brain blender, and here’s the tasty energy drink that results: a series of posts on the politics of modernism, hybrids, fandom and cyborgs.

The CDS as Modernist Bastion

As I’ve been preparing to write my second year project paper on the now-terminated merger between the CDS and Al-Andalus, I’ve struggled to understand one key element. There’s been an asymmetry of mistrust that’s seemed to me to defy rational understanding, so I started casting about for non-rational explanations.

My partner technosage offered a key insight, that’s seemed to connect a number of my current projects (particularly my ever-forthcoming work on Gor – this substantiates the gut feeling I’ve had that the CDS has a lot in common with Gorean communities). She suggested that an explanation for the confusing (to me) package of views held by the CDS conservative faction was united by an abhorrence of “mixy things,” and that the Al Andalus principals (in which I have to include myself, at least in the context of recent political debates) are very “mixy” people.

What’s mixiness? Harraway’s cyborg feminism embodies it (and I’m deeply grateful to Kristine Ask for connecting the cyborg/trickster/kokopelli dots for me), and it’s part of what Latour describes as the “amodern.” It’s a taste for hybridization, of category-erasing, of synthesis and adaptation. It’s me comfortably one gender in RL and another in SL. It’s believing that a single principle (say, “democracy”) can and should manifest differently in different environments. It’s a view that most things are contingent and few fundamental, that the global and the local are inseparable, that nature, culture and technology are one seamless ball and not foods that can’t be allowed to touch. It may in fact be a preference for the treyf over the kashrut, and hence our opponents in the CDS were quite right for considering our politics unkosher.

The CDS conservatives share a basket of traits and views: they regard nation-state institutions as coequal with democracy and equally applicable everywhere; they are “immersionist,” resolutely pseudonymous within Second Life, and policing a tight border between SL and RL. They trust pseudonymous avatars with large amounts of RL money, with negligible oversight, but are deeply suspicious of identity-transparent people and RL-based checks and balances. They loathe Al Andauls’s manager, Rose Springvale, in a way that transcends politics and requires an explanation that encompasses revulsion, not mere dislike or opposition.

What unites all these things? Well, there are several important factors, one being political-cultural differences between Europeans and Americans. But another is between modernism and Latour’s amodenism.

Latour argues that modernism did two simultaneous but contradictory things: it enabled the creation of “hybrids” (we’ll be coming back to that word a lot) of nature and culture while simultaneously insisting on rigid dichotomies between them. He describes a “double separation,” between humans and nonhumans on the one hand and “above and below” on the other,” arguing that it was exactly the denial of the existence/legitimacy of hybrids that enabled their proliferation, and that the whole enterprise worked until it was so successful that we’ve ended up choking on hybrids, with a mental and political tool kit that denies their existence.

This explains – or at least describes – how it’s been that the conservatives and I spent six months entirely arguing past each other. We simply were inhabiting different ontological planes that didn’t intersect. They inhabit a mental landscape where things don’t mix. RL and SL identities, strictly separated, same with trust mechanisms. A solution valid in one environment is valid in all, and to mix it with other elements is a perversion.

For us in Al Andalus, we live in the mixiness: the community has a mission specifically linking SL activity to RL political problems. We’re comfortable being avatars and corporate directors, of treating SL as both recreation and a venue for professional standards and practices. Rose is a terrifying hybrid, truly a cyborg feminist: alluring and professional, SL avatar and RL mom, a Texas liberal, a legal and a creative writer, a Protestant leading a Muslim community. It’s notable that the loathing largely came from older men, a class of people many of whom find “professional woman” entirely too much of a repugnant hybrid to start with, let alone all the other antinomies.

The CDS enterprise is resolutely, fundamentally (in both senses of the word) modernist: its goal is to impose modern political institutions onto the environment of SL. Al Andalus is equally resolutely amodern, encompassing antimodern critics from within Islam, some occasional postmodern cynicism, and quite a lot of amodern hybrids.

The merger of the two communities proved up Latour’s statement that “the modern constitution allows the expanded proliferation of the hybrids whose existence, whose very possibility, it denies.” Al Andalus spun off of the CDS three years ago, explicitly to undertake a hybrid project, of using SL as a meaningful laboratory for RL political change.

The merger was undertaken by people who read the mission of “political experimentation” each community claimed as common, when in fact it was contradictory: the CDS experiment being one of fundamentalist modernism, an imperialist expansion of bureaucratic state institutions into virtual space, the Al Andalus experiment one of radical hybridization of online and offline.

The merger was doomed to fail: our ontologies were so different we were literally inhabiting different worlds, with different physics. We didn’t just disagree, we didn’t even perceive the same world.

Next up: Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles and John Connor as amodern hero.

Community, Liberty and Privacy - Round One

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Jul 172010

One of the most serious issues confronting any community, online or offline, is where to strike the balance between community cohesion and effectiveness on the one hand and self-expression on the other, and how to use various tools – law, custom and software – to preserve that balance.

I’m going to look at the matter in two parts, one with respect to the huge protest this past week (2,495 pages of comments on one thread alone!) over Blizzard’s changes to the World of Warcraft forum posting policies, and in a subsequent post about a very different manifestation of a similar problem in Second Life’s Confederation of Democratic Simulators.

Free Speech

No community ever has held the view that people have an absolute right to say what they want, when and where they want.

The absolutist view is unsustainable on any grounds. Yes, the First Amendment to the US Constitution states that “Congress shall make no law… abridging freedom of speech,” but “no law” has never meant “no law.” The Constitution itself enables Congress to pass copyright laws, which clearly restrict speech. While the 14^th Amendment applied the First to the States, for centuries state and federal law has regulated commercial speech (you can’t claim your hair tonic cures baldness, warts, bad breath and gives you eternal youth, nor that your rat parts and sawdust hot dogs are 100% beef, you can’t tell investors your ponzi scheme is a sound investment, etc.), has imposed “time, place and manner” limits on all sorts of speech (you can’t use a bullhorn in a residential neighborhood at 3am, and your parade needs a permit), and on pornography, incitement to violence, slander, and suchlike.

Here’s a critical flaw in the reasoning of free-speech extremists: most speech is regulated not by acts of the legislature but by custom and culture, and enforced not by fines and jail terms but by shushing, shunning or slapping. Extremists take “no law” as meaning “no restraint,” when traditionally the scope of law in regulating behavior was vastly smaller than that of religion, tradition and culture. The culture of 1786 America regulated speech so tightly that there was little need for intervention by law. Over subsequent centuries (well, the past 40 years or so, actually), culture in America has lost much regulatory force, while law has picked up the slack.

Nonetheless, to know what speech (when and where) is permissible requires a hard look at culture as well as law. Between the two, there are and everywhere and always have been significant limits on speech.

Balancing

So, with the absolutist position out of the way, reasonable people can differ over where to place the slider on the scale between social cohesion and individual expression.

Internet communities have tended to place the bar very, very far down towards the individual speech end. This is the product of several convergent factors. One is ideological, an outgrowth of the naïve or primitive libertarianism which was the dominant political view of internet pioneers. One derives from American culture at large, which for several generations has stressed rights over responsibilities, and another is a misunderstanding of America’s fairly broad legal protections for speech.

The case for placing the slider down towards the community end is the belief that bad speech drives out good, that consideration of others is morally superior to unfettered self-expression, and perhaps that ends (social cohesion, effectiveness in accomplishing tasks) are generally more valuable than means (a close parallel to the constitutional-law distinction between substantive and procedural due process).

While it’s pretty clear that neither unlimited speech nor complete repression is defensible, reasonable people can differ about where to find the sweet spot between the two.

Privacy

Privacy is closely related to free speech, though it often plays out politically in a very different way. Privacy is the notion of an individual’s right to control speech about themselves: both the right not to speak, and the right not to be spoken about. As with speech, it’s never been an absolute right, and cultures differ wildly over where to strike the balance between personal control over speech about oneself and the public “right to know.” Where that balance point should lie is one of the most divisive issues in online culture today, of course.

The Blizzard debacle involved an attempted technological intervention at a point of intersection of two controversial issues, speech and privacy, managing to violate the general consensus over the balance point for both while proposing a technological fix that patently couldn’t solve the problem it was intended to.

Technological Solutions

We’ve developed a number of tools for dealing with disputes over where to put that slider. One is the spam filter: spam is enormously expensive but broadly legal. We’ve chosen (for reasons of ideology, difficulty in defining the problem and in enforcement) to generally permit spam, while giving people a software tool to prevent their exposure to it. It’s a largely workable solution, if not necessarily fair or optimal.

Blizzard tried a different technological solution to the problem of severe trolling and flaming on the World of Warcraft official message boards. Apparently driven by a belief in The Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory (and in practice possibly by a deal with Facebook), it tried to mandate that all forum posts be made under a verified real name.

Tens of thousands of posters (paying customers!) protested the policy on the forums, and after about a week, Blizzard backed down.

Blizzard’s approach had two justifications, one explicit and one implicit. The explicit one was that Blizzard adheres to “The Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory,” which holds that online anonymity breeds bad behavior. The implicit one was a business decision to monetize customer data by linking it to real names – yet even the business case is rooted in an ideological view that individual control over speech is a bad thing, that the public right to know your identity is greater than your interest in controlling access to it.

There are two problems with the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory: one is that anonymity offers protection from severe harassment, the other that anonymity enables all speech, only some of which will be by fuckwads. Removing anonymity chills all speech, and first chills speech by those most concerned with their reputations. Those opposed to the measure argued that “internet fuckwads” are likely to be less concerned with their reputations than others, and thus more likely to dominate forums after those who don’t want to give the fuckwads access to their RL information have left.

This is a logical conclusion, if you look at how the anonymity ban was supposed to work. The idea was that people would be less likely to be abusive if their real name was attached to their posts. Why? Because of fear of reprisal. The measure only makes sense if one assumes that other members of the community would use a poster’s RL name to damage him somehow. In other words, the ban on harassment could only work by enabling worse harassment than is possible under conditions of anonymity.

Spam filters work by removing the problem of viewing spam, even if they fail to remove the problem of the costs of transmitting spam. RealID could only solve the problem of broad internet harassment by enabling narrower, more severe harassment. This is not a good technological solution.

Cultural Solutions

In his terrific, readable new book, Cognitive Surplus, Clay Shirky makes a strong case for cultural solutions to the problem of balancing cohesion and self-expression.

Shirky makes an essential point about governance: it works best when internalized. Most governance is self-governance: we don’t do bad things in the first instance because of the state criminal code, but because we follow the dictates of a mature conscience.

A slightly different way of putting it would be that rules of governance are most effective when there’s congruence between the formal rules and what most people think is right. Failures of governance arise when there’s a significant gap between the two. Abortion law and intellectual property law are two major examples, as are Blizzard’s and Facebook’s privacy policies.

Unlike many academic authors, Shirky actually prescribes some guidelines for how to create a culture that internalizes policies: start with a small group committed to whatever set of principles you want the group to adhere to. Design technological defaults that reward the behavior you want and discourage the behavior you don’t. Enable the community to enforce standards through culture in the first instance, minimizing the need to resort to the external application of law (or policy, or ToS) enforcement.

In short, enable, encourage and support internalization of the norms you want.

Blizzard’s Case

Blizzard failed to do that. It’s stated that it values a position on the cohesion/expression slider that favors cohesion, a position that a very substantial majority of forum posters seem to share – few people were making the case for trolling and flaming. Yet Blizzard neither enforced their position, nor given the community the tools to enforce it. Contrast the commercial fansite WoW.com: it enables voting on posts, and posts voted down are grayed out – still readable if you really want to, but with a clear indication of community disfavor. The WoW.com forums are readable and interesting; the official forums are a mass of irrelevant crap, flaming and trolling.

To be sure, paying people to actively moderate a forum with many thousands of daily posts would be terrifically expensive – but WoW.com, as with many other discussion sites, shows that there’s a readily available set of tools to do the job. Just as we use stoplights instead of a policeman at every intersection, the job of enforcing rules can be passed off to a technological agent. But community rating systems are better than a stoplight: they don’t just replace the external authority, they enable the authority of the community itself: they’re a technological manifestation not of the law book and jail cell, but of the individual conscience informed by social consensus.

The RealID fiasco was a case of applying a technological solution that failed to enforce a norm shared by Blizzard and the forum-posting community. In looking at the CDS next time, we’ll see a fit between technology and values, but a problem in a set of values that contradict each other, producing a failed community.

10 Big Pieces: Gang Leader for a Day

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Jun 152010

At GLS 6.0 last week, in presenting “Legal Anthropologist of Gor! a methodological conundrum,” I argued that online researchers have largely been ducking a serious issue of ethics and methodology. It was definitely an “out on a limb” move for a noob – I was betting that (a) I hadn’t missed something everybody else knew about and (b) I wasn’t going to get crushed like a bug for my temerity.

Immediately after the panel, Constance Steinkuehler, who I fangirl like whoa, came over and very intensely talked with me for a good while, a pep talk that’s the highlight of my academic apprenticeship. Among other things, she recommended Sudhir Venkatesh’s Gang Leader For A Day, as an example of someone working in the territory in RL that I want to explore online.

I ordered it while I sat there I regularly read a lot of great stuff, but this one’s the highlight of my year. Even if I weren’t doing participant-observer fieldwork myself, Venkatesh’s story of his graduate work with a Chicago street gang is more gripping than any movie. It’s a great read, and it gave me one huge insight, along with a lot of smaller ones.

Fourteen years ago I came across a question that I took on as my own, and in fits and starts came to recognize as what I want to devote my life’s work to. Science fiction novelist Kim Stanley Robinson, in his Mars trilogy, and later in Antarctica, asked, what kind of a society do bright, capable people create when you take them out of the establishment world of nation states and finance capitalism? He argues that what you get looks like the academy writ large: apprenticeships, a gift economy, management and administration as a burden rather than a (healthy) goal, meritocracy.

I was drawn to similar people, similar environments: my mentors at NASA founded a polar research station to ask very similar questions, and I got my start kibitzing on their work. I started writing about the political economy and cultural dynamics of the space community, speculating on what might evolve on space stations or planetary research outposts. I argued that Robinson’s socialist-utopian answer wouldn’t always be true, that other concurrent forces would shape different ends. But that was the idiom I kept writing in during my space phase, from 1996 to 2004.

In 2007, I ventured into Second Life, after hearing of how my old NASA colleagues had thrown a Yuri’s Night party there. I saw right away that the forces and people I was interested in were right there, doing every day the work I speculated about for some future Mars mission or distant polar station. But, I never clicked with the environment, largely for a bunch of personal reasons, but in part, I think now, because what was actually happening there didn’t mesh with my theories and expectations at all.

Not only were people not building Polanyi’s Republic of Science, they were providing a texbook-perfect proof of the failure of anarcho-capitalism (an ideology I’d strongly adhered to until then), as the Linden-owned mainland quickly turned into a pit of griefing, bad architecture and incessant petty annoyances. But they were building and doing amazing things, in unexpected directions.

What surprised me about Venkatesh’s book was how similar the society of Chicago’s housing projects was. I’d been asking, “what do smart, privileged people build in highly technological spaces away from (some of) the constraints of the status quo?” Venkatesh came to ask, “what do people who have next to nothing, who’ve gotten the short end for generations, build where the status quo has largely abandoned them?”

Turns out, there are an awful lot of similarities. The institutions arising from the projects – gangs-as-police, gangs-as-corporations, fixers, grifters, hustlers, communities of support and cooperation – none of these things are alien to the social history of Second Life, or of World of Warcraft, or of any significantly large and complex grouping of people who, out of freedom or necessity, improvise their own institutions.

The structures of power in the projects look very much like those of the “adhocracies” or “dictatorships” of SL communities, gaming guilds, LiveJournal roleplay communities – and nothing like those of the bureaucratic modern nation-state.

I’m going to be building an argument that that’s no coincidence, that what we learn in “bowling with others,” so to speak, is that the social dynamics of human groups is really fairly constant, and that it will adapt itself around, route itself around, institutions that seek to make us other than what we are. The attempts to create the Christian city on the hill, the New Soviet Man, all the projects of the right, left and otherwise that sought to remake us, simply fail.

Only by understanding who we are – and recognizing that while advanced technology or malign neglect may create freer spaces for expressing our nature, it is always there, constant, and at work – can we build tools for solving social problems that have some hope of actually working.

My class of law and graduate students struggled in frustration with the free rider problem, coming to recognize it as a variant of low voter turnout, economic incentives to pollute, and a host of other issues. Advocates of the state order in the Confederation of Democratic Simulators cannot account for the immense unpopularity of their model, and turn to vicious personal attacks to cover their political failures. The Goreans argue that both submission and mastery are deeply ingrained, each joyous in their way, and roleplay accordingly.

These responses may be frustrating, ugly, horrifying – but they are real. Venkatesh struggled with the chasm between his faith in the status quo and his admiration for people working to fill in where it had failed.

I think there may be two sets of responses to a failure of modernity, a failure of the institutions we forced ourselves into in the 18th through 20th centuries. One looks backward from the chaos, and seeks to impose clarity and order. These are the fundamentalisms of the book, be that book scripture or roleplay canon. These argue that order must be imposed, boundaries policed, categories reified, a place for every one and every one in their place.

The other, one I openly advocate, not despite but because of my presence as a researcher in fundamentalist communities – looks forward from the chaos into a new synthesis, a perpetually dynamic equilibrium, and celebrates the blurring of types, the intermixing, intermingling, the miscegenation of peoples, genders, politics and forms. It looks to the cyborg, but to the Dionysian, the embodied, the radical politics of the intermingled mind and flesh, rejecting the sanitized and compartmentalized world of the fundamentalism.

Technosage said the other day that embodied politics is vigilante politics – and I’d add Venkatesh’s “guerrilla sociology” as well: it holds that passing off responsibility to institutions, from persons to mechanisms, is simply wrong. We need tools to use to solve our problems – but we must not let the tools use us. In the world of modernity, we have. Systems – of politics, of finance, of sexuality – have run and shaped us, rather than us using those tools to shape our world towards useful and agreed ends.

In this, I agree with technoskeptics like Langdon Winner, but I find these people look backward in an unconstructive way. I think the solution is to do as the people in the Robert Taylor Projects did, as people in Al Andalus in SL have done, as radicals in education are doing, and act as if the system doesn’t matter.

The solution is to be ourselves, know ourselves, and build what works for us. Some of us will get crushed: Al Andalus may not survive the months-long assault of conservatives, vicious old men and hand-wringing incompetents. Promising educational projects may not survive the pressure of fixed curricula and standardized testing.

But some of us will thrive, and succeed by simply out-competing the tottering old institutions. There’s no guarantee at all that what survives will be the most progressive, rather than the most ruthless. Forced simplicity may beat out embraced complexity. That’s the struggle for our time, though.

Identity at the Participant/Observer Crossroads

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May 292010

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Postmodern Mirror

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Mar 232010

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!”

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