WoW » Aporia

10 Big Pieces: My Life as a Night Elf Priest, part 2

Sep 022010

My previous post focused on the many strengths of Bonnie Nardi’s new book, My Life as a Night Elf Priest: An Anthropological Account of World of Warcraft. This one is more critical, looking primarily at her deployment of theory. In all, the book is exceptional, and an invaluable resource, but particularly if used in the classroom, should be accompanied by serious discussion of some of its problematic issues.

Dismissiveness and Contempt

This is a subset of a larger problem of Nardi’s, a general ivory-tower disdain for popular cultural production that comes through time and again, despite a grounding in a democratic aesthetic theory. Still, specific instances of ignorant dismissiveness stand out as both unprofessional and inappropriate for a generally positive analysis of a pop-culture phenomenon.

In her explanatory chapter on the nature of WoW, after explaining the difference between PvP (player versus player) and PvE (player versus environment) specialized game servers, she describes roleplay servers as “devoted to role-playing in which characters speak in a kind of humorous, ersatz Ye Olde English patois (see Kavetsky 2008),” and unsurprisingly notes “I have conducted no research on these servers.”

Her statement is wrong, misleading, contemptuously dismissive – and utterly needless. For the same amount of effort she could have included a neutral and accurate sentence about them. But, this attitude fits with her general lack of respect for popular creativity.

That lack of respect, unsurprisingly, is fully voiced in her discussion of Second Life. “On the whole,” she says, “participants have gravitated toward creating content devoted primarily to two activities: shopping and sex.” Of course, no citation is provided. Even granting the statement as true, which I have no reason to do, she still fails to note that in a market economy, which Second Life has, the creating of content will be devoted primarily to sale, which she dismisses as “shopping.”

She adds, “In a world in which people can do whatever they want, the reproduction of consumption as a primary activity is, in my view, a somewhat disappointing turn (although consistent with the larger culture).” This “view” runs contrary to her embrace of John Dewey’s aesthetics, as I’ll discuss below. It does manage to reject capitalism, personal initiative and the design arts all in one snotty, ivory-tower turn of phrase.

She goes on to cite Malaby (2006) (that date is important) to the effect that “the virtual world evolved into something of a junk heap,” because creative tools were given to ordinary people and not reserved for gifted professional designers. I’m not making this up: much of the middle section of the book is a glorification of the professional game designer and a slam at all the fields of study which find value in amateur creative production.

While noting that the “design of Second Life – its bid for tools-without-rules” led to complaints from its designers at its ugliness – almost makes a valid point, but slides away from it. The SL mainland, an anarchic realm under Linden Lab’s direct control, has always been largely hideous. This is in fact due to the Lab’s ideologically-driven choice to provide no restrictions whatsoever. What Nardi ignores, however, is the countless thousands of owner-zoned regions which are home to astonishing beauty, enabled by simple zoning rules that were created not by the professionals, who failed to do so, but by amateur creators and managers, who succeeded where those professionals failed.

To note that, however, would have involved removing ideological blinders, setting aside prejudices, and actually looking at the reality. Much easier to sniff dismissively.

The Magic Circle

It’s rather astonishing that a major scholar has, in 2010, devoted an entire chapter to trying to keep this zombie of a concept in motion. To her credit, the third, directly observational, section of Nardi’s book completely contradicts her attempts to deploy the Magic Circle.

While clearly articulating that game play “is not a sequestered activity walled up in a magic circle,” she argues that “we must revive Huizinga’s notion of the magic circle in its fullness,” because “the meaningfulness of play is bound within the activity of those who actually play.” What she means is that “non-players are apart from the world in which a person’s actions are sensible, interesting, compelling, meaningful.”

It’s not hard to see that there’s no group or activity for which it isn’t true that what defines the group (job, religion, culture, bowling league, whatever) is that the group values the group activities more than those outside the group do. This pedestrian observation hardly requires resuscitating the deservedly-discredited notion of a “magic circle” around game play.

The Dewey Dichotomy

One of the theoretical foundations of the book is John Dewey’s theory of aesthetic experience. His focus on performance and collective expression fit well with her other theoretical tools. However, she quotes, and then proceeds to deny over and over, Dewey’s statements on the aesthetic as essentially human, populist, democratic, anti-elitist. Dewey states that in pre-modern times “the arts of the drama, music, painting, and architecture thus exemplified had no particular connection with theaters, galleries, museums. They were part of the significant life of an organized community.”

Nardi notes that “[m]odernity sequesters the aesthetic in regulated institutions ouside the normal processes of living. Dewey suggests how deeply peculiar this is.” Yet, much of the book does precisely that: sequestering the aesthetic pleasures of WoW within a museum-like elevating of the designed artifact above player participation and contribution. Her WoW is a temple in which the masses are invited to come perform the orthodox rituals: while she recognizes that other activities take place there, she regards them as utterly aesthetically inferior to both the temple and the sanctioned rites. Squaring this elitism with the democratic Dewey is an impossibility that Nardi simply passes on: she notes Dewey’s views and simply moves on.

Producer-centrism

Nardi seems to position her book as a necessary counterbalance to undue academic stress on the users of technology and the amateur producers of aesthetic artifacts and experiences. While she is certainly right in crediting the outstanding creative work of the WoW development team, it’s an odd reading of the technology and society literature that claims that the balance has tipped too far to user studies.

The academy, motivated in no small part by self-importance, has tended to see itself as allied with the elite priesthood of scientific and technological creation, rather than the unwashed masses of users. User studies have barely begun to redress the neglect of serious analysis of user deployment and modification of technology.

While true that games scholars tend to neglect game-as-software and game-as-code, due in part to their lack of programming and computer science experience, that imbalance does not equate to an imbalance in analyzing the social and aesthetic experiences of game play, the claim which Nardi does seem to make. Conflating the two enables a justification of snobbery, but over-emphasizes the value distinction between professional and amateur aesthetic creation around WoW.

Activity Theory

I‘m just starting to read Kaptelinin and Nardi’s Acting With Technology: Activity Theory and Interaction Design, so I don’t feel qualified to critique activity theory yet. I do note that it’s got some strange approaches to agency, again privileging the designed artifact, it seems, over the user, and smelling more than a bit of both rational actor theory and technological determinism. While this fits with Nardi’s overall cultural elitism, I suspect it raises some deeper problems in assigning and analyzing agency, though largely beyond the scope of Nardi’s work.

In summary, My Life as a Night Elf Priest is two books: one absolutely stellar participant-observer anthropological account that’s clear-eyed, insightful and accessible, and one work of applied theory with a highly problematic elitist bias. Skipping over Part Two of the book in casual reading or in classroom use might well be a good idea.

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

1 Response »

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.

Calvinball, FIFA and Second Life: The Politics of Play

2 Responses »

Aug 072010

Last time I started addressing the question of whether an achievement system would be good for Second Life. I untangled the differences between leveling, reputation and achievements, three terms used confusingly and interchangeably in the blogosphere discussion. I said that while a reputation system could be a great idea for SL, it’d be nigh-impossible to implement, and would be useless and disingenuous as a tool for early retention, or “improving the first hour experience.”

Here I’m going to digress completely on the way to explaining why an achievement system wouldn’t do what SL uber-blogger Hamlet Au wants it to do: help draw gamers into SL and keep them coming back. Before I can do that, I’ve got to talk about FIFA, Calvinball, and what gamers actually do.

The scoreboard will be frozen at Q to 12 until further notice

Why Most Folks Don’t Get SL

Gwyneth Llewelyn argues that SL “appeals to a very small niche market, one that reaches out to people with this amazing and extraordinary ability of knowing how to entertain themselves.” She’s absolutely right, and that’s probably the single best statement of both SL’s appeal (one utterly lost on the Lindens, as far as I’ve ever seen) and the narrow demographic limit of it.

She contrasts those who engaged in creative free-form play as kids with those who mostly were passively entertained by TV, saying SL’s for the former and not the latter. She’s right, as far as she goes. But where things get interestingly complicated is with a demographic shaped neither by freeform play nor TV, but by games.

SL really doesn’t work as passive entertainment. It’s a social and/or creative environment. If you don’t make or script things, or engage with people, your experience of SL (like mine was my first couple of attempts at making a go of it) will be cruising around looking at stuff (entertaining for an hour or so, maybe) and/or, as Harper Beresford puts it, “dressing your dolly.” Which, again, without some instrumental end, gets old pretty quickly. So, people expecting TV-style pushed content will “not get it,” get bored and leave after an hour or so – or come in very occasionally for a talk or a concert or whatever.

Games, Play and Entertainment

As has been widely observed, SL doesn’t work for many people expecting a game-like experience either. But games are very different from freeform play on the one hand and passive content consumption on the other. Games are spaces of action within externally imposed constraints. Games needn’t have win conditions (you can’t “win” an MMO), needn’t have explicit rules (the fun of computer games for many lies in deducing the rules from observed events – in essence, in applying the scientific method in the same way as any experimental physicist. Gamers call this “theorycrafting.”), needn’t have tokens, game pieces or avatars.

Really, the only thing games have in common is the acceptance of a set of constraints, or rules. Johan Huizinga and theorists following him would add as crucial that they’re “not serious,” that they include “play” as something categorically different from “work.” Gwyn implicitly follows this approach in her excellent discussion of the importance of play. But play is a different beast from games, and Huizinga suffered from a bad case of Edwardian-bourgeois rose colored vision in seeing games as protected bastions of unseriousness.

“Kick the can” is play: the players decide for themselves what is and isn’t legitimate within the immediate circumstances: what’s a goal, what’s out, what moves are fair and what’ aren’t, when the play starts and ends. “Soccer” (or “football,” for everyone but Americans) is a game: players accede to a formal rule set, one that’s not local or contingent, but universal.

The Politics of Calvinball

Gwyn and I are both active and outspoken in a community within SL, the Confederation of Democratic Simulators. The CDS is deeply riven now between two incompatible views of politics and community. One is that of the game, one of play.

Gwyn and her colleagues see the proper formation of a community as one of a game: take a pre-existing formal rule set and follow it, and the resulting experience is that of living in a polity. My colleagues and I see community as play: get together, improvise some locally contingent rules, decide what’s fair and what’s in and out of bounds on the fly. What results is living in a polity.

My ideal polity would be a permanent, floating game of Calvinball. (I note there’s a problem of scale: I’m working on a post on that. You can have a world federation of football, where a world federation of Calvinball is um, not so likely. Contrariwise, a boy and his stuffed tiger can play Calvinball, but not FIFA-rules football. This is actually a crucial, and sticky, problem in political theory!)

(1.8 Score may be kept or disregarded. In the event that score is kept, it shall have no bearing on the game nor shall it have any logical consistency to it. (Legal scores include ‘Q to 12′, ‘BW-109 to YU-34, and ‘Nosebleed to Pelvic Fracture’.))

Gwyn’s would be FIFA fooball, whose “Laws of the Game [were] modified at the 123rd Annual General Meeting of the International Football Association Board (IFAB) in Newcastle, Northern Ireland on 28 February 2009.”

Note that tag line in the FIFA logo: it’s a crucial political statement. The good at issue isn’t that of the players but of the game. I think the CDS conservatives would agree: the good to be maximized is that of democracy-as-rule-set, and not that of the “players”/citizens or their “team”/community.

One of the main problems I have with the CDS is the same one that Gwyn has with an achievement system (though she really means either “an un-game-like reputation system” or “game-like elements in the abstract”): SL is inherently a Calvinball space, and there’s something wrong (both in the sense of “bad” and of “incorrect”) in mandating FIFA-style rules within it.

Mandatory vs. Optional Rule Systems

In the comments to Gwyn’s post, she reaches a political position we can agree on: she argues that rule sets are fine if they’re freely, individually and locally chosen – and not externally imposed. She, along with others commenting on her post, calls for opening the SL user interface the way many MMO UI’s have been, for user modification. Then, if anyone wants to impose a formal rule set on their SL, they can install a mod to enable or enforce their rules. If not, then not.

(another note: the Restrained Life Viewer already does this, and is an ideal, if somewhat unlikely, example of successfully consensually applying FIFA rules to SL )

This is brilliant and important stuff. My friend and colleague Mark Chen will be defending his doctoral dissertation in a couple weeks, in which (among other things) he analyzes the role of one user mod in World of Warcraft, which transformed a group’s experience of WoW from one of play to one of a game. Mods are also a powerful tool of political speech within the game environment: they’re a tool for talking back to developers, as popular and effective mods are often absorbed into the formal client or “rule set,” transforming the experience for everyone.

Opening up the UI thus would enable two different sorts of SL experiences: the Calvinball sort that has been the core of SL since Philip Rosedale’s initial vision, and a whole range of FIFA-like games.

That said, of course there have been game-rule enabling tools in SL all along, particularly combat HUDs. SL has a damage system built into it, something a lot of people don’t know, and most ignore. However, there are any number of combat systems enabling everything from samurai duels to Battle Of Britain fighter combat.

Game-like Systems as Misrepresentation

Imagine if the first thing you saw in SL was a combat HUD! While people interested in combat would have a much easier time getting started, it would fundamentally misrepresent the SL experience to the majority. Any game-like system poses the same problem.

Presenting game constraints right off, as if they were an essential part of the SL experience, would be misleading. It would, as I said in a previous post, lack integrity – as so many of Linden Lab’s flailing attempts at capturing the social media/gamer market have. People have a highly refined nose for the phony, and that sort of phoniness would be lethal.

Don’t Game the Gamers!

Say SL did have a World of Warcraft-style achievement system, as I discussed in my previous post. Let’s handwave what seems like the impossibility of coding such a thing in a user-created-content environment. It would, as I said, be useful for veterans, and would fit with integrity into the SL world.

But let’s look at it from the perspective of a WoW player coming into SL for the first time, with no understanding of social virtual worlds.

OK, there’s no quests: no game elements which enable progression along a clear (if not unavoidably linear) track towards a clear and universal goal, the level cap. There’s no ranking system based on universal criteria, no uniform measurement of accomplishment. There’s no end state: no “elder game” to work towards unlocking.

But there’s an achievement system! Our WoW player is familiar with the achievement system added to WoW in the last expansion: an entertaining bit of trivia that can generate personal side goals and that reveals information about their own and other people’s play styles. So our gamer goes out to get some achievement points.

There are achievements for doing some basic things: buying an article of clothing, attending a live music event, rezzing a prim. Our gamer does those things.

And now they’ve seen a little bit more of SL’s content. But do they have a reason to stay? Not thanks to the achievement system. Why? Because all that system has done is show them more of a world completely unlike the game environment!

SL remains a Calvinball space. It remains a world by and for people who can entertain themselves, as Gwyn said. It remains a world flat-out incomprehensible to the gamer. The gamer has spent her whole life working within systems, decoding systems, achieving the goals of systems. And SL remains a place built on the pure absence of systems!

One might as well argue that avatars should all go around with exclamation points over their heads to make gamers feel welcome. Games (FIFA spaces of formal rule systems) and play (unstructured ad-hoc Calvin creativity) remain utterly different and incommensurable things.

Claiming otherwise is a transparent lie. Remember, gamers spend their whole life decoding systems and figuring out the rules. How long do you think you can fool them in SL, and what do you think their reactions will be when they realize you’ve tried to manipulate them in a way anyone who’s beat tic-tac-toe can see through?

Don’t insult gamers’ intelligence or their core competences. It’s no way to win friends and retain customers.

There is no way to square the circle, to topologically transform SL into a game space. Forget about attracting gamers; work on recruiting and retaining those Calvinball champions!

Reputation and Achievement in Second Life

3 Responses »

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.

Community, Liberty and Privacy - Round One

2 Responses »

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: Women and Gaming

No Responses »

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.

The Politics of Frozen Pizza

1 Response »

Apr 212010

I haven’t been blogging much: my time’s been going into two very similar efforts: grinding rep at the Argent Tournament, and putting the “participant” in “participant observer” on the Confederation of Democratic Simulators forums and meetings.

Though, come to think of it, introducing mounted combat on chocobos might be just the thing for spicing up the CDS’s verbose political culture…

Anyhoo. Sometime before July, the CDS and the community of Al Andalus in Second Life will be deciding whether to finalize or undo the merger of the two communities that took place last year. Aside from the usual politics of power and personality, the issues regarding the merger stem from two very distinct political cultures, and the question for each side as to whether compromise or co-evolution is possible or desirable.

There was a charming CDS forum post this morning that spun off a nice metaphor for the differences between the two communities. The poster made some suggestions for improving a political institution that apparently has never, apparently, worked to general satisfaction, but disclaimed expertise, saying “I can barely follow the directions for frozen pizza, and in fact I’ve burned half of one while writing this.”

I think the CDS and Al Andalus would approach a frozen pizza very differently. For an academic training in Science and Technology Studies and working on the interplay between politics and technology, the frozen pizza is a wonderful symbol.

The frozen pizza is a received, standardized product. It’s not custom made (and certainly no Ben’s Pizza), but it’s a good enough substitute for everyday eating. It transfers some of the time, effort and skill required from the user to larger, more experienced institutions, thus freeing up the user to do other things they value more highly than learning to make pizza from scratch.

Now, making pizza from scratch is something some people really enjoy. The existence of frozen pizza doesn’t prevent them from doing so, but enables the rest of us to enjoy a pretty decent pizza cheaply and readily.

There are two approaches to making a frozen pizza. One is to pop it out of the packaging, follow the directions on the bottom of the box – and experience indifferent and highly variable results. That’s how the author of that post was able to burn *half* a pizza: failure to account for local conditions

There’s another way. It’s not making a pizza from scratch, but it’s taking that standardized product and optimizing it for local conditions.

I add garlic and oregano: I find the basic pizza too bland for my tastes. It also took some years of occasional experimenting to figure out just how long to cook the things (more or less within the range in the directions) to account for how frozen the pizza is when I pop it in the oven (straight from the store and a little mooshy, or rock hard from my freezer?), the peculiarities of my oven, and how fast I tend to get up from my work in the office and get to the oven when the timer goes off.

Frozen pizzas are like governance structures. Few people want to invent them from first principles to fit their specific situation, be it a community in Second Life, a World of Warcraft guild, a chess club, a municipality. It’s a lot easier to just take something off the shelf, freeing up time from building a government from the ground up, to put that time into business, arts or socializing in SL, playing WoW or chess, or providing police and trash pickup.

The problem comes when you uncritically follow the directions on the bottom of the box. Those directions are designed for the average set of circumstances, and when applied, often result in a deeply unsatisfying product: the half-burnt pizza, the one where the middle is a soggy mass, the government unresponsive to the particular needs of the community.

A good standard governance model needs more oregano. It needs to be carefully and thoughtfully adapted to local circumstances, and it’ll probably take an number of iterations, of repeated trial and error and careful critique, to get just right.

Nobody wants a crappy half-cooked pizza. But people seem to end up with crappy half-cooked governments. That’s because ideology creeps in, “an imaginary response to a real situation,” to paraphrase Marx.

Ideology says that the directions on the bottom of the box are goddamn holy writ, and deviation is unpatriotic and sinful. Ideology says that the makers of the pizza have special expertise far beyond the ken of the common pizza-eater, and deserve utter deference. Ideology says that local variances are a problem to be dealt with through forcing the kitchen to conform to the pizza directions, and not the other way around.

Al Andalus puts freaking pepper flakes on their pizza, and doesn’t cook it nearly as long as the directions call for!

I like it there

Me, I make a pretty decent frozen pizza – but I always burn my mouth on them, because I can’t wait long enough for them to cool.

To paraphrase Tip O’Neill, all politics is pizza.

The Pleasures and Politics of Canon

1 Response »

Feb 242010

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We must love our orthodoxies, even the implausible ones…

Raising Your Hand on the Horseless Carriage

5 Responses »

Feb 132010

I went to my first SL Bar Association meeting today. It was quite decent as meetings go, but something caught my interest more than the agenda. The meeting was held in text chat, and the group apparently has a norm of emoting “raises hand” and waiting to be called on by the chair rather than just typing out – though the norm wasn’t universally followed.

Now, your cognition might not have ground to a screeching halt at that, as mine did. But, consider the venue: a text-chat meeting in Second Life.

Some time ago, a professor of mine mentioned in class that a friend of hers had looked into SL as a teaching tool and dismissed it when she found out there wasn’t a default animation for students to raise their hands. I cracked up, belly laughing, snorting – and then realized not only was my professor not joking, she didn’t get the humor herself.

So it bears explaining.

Let’s look at hand-raising. It’s a technological solution to a cognitive problem, one that’s become a custom. The cognitive problem is, humans are pretty bad at finding meaning from more than one person speaking at a time. Voice and music, voice and much ambient noise, no problem – but multiple voices, we’re just not good with. So we adapted a technological kludge: a visual tool for ensuring only one voice gets heard at a time (and incidentally, assuring the accountability of the chooser to the chosen, but that’s a separate issue).

And hand-raising is a neat solution to that little cognitive flaw of ours. We’re raised with it, and it seems second nature. It becomes customary for situations in which multiple people would like to speak at once.
But of course, in a virtual environment where nobody is speaking, but conversing in open chat – it’s a solution to a problem nobody is having! We can process successive lines of text quite easily – it’s called “reading,” and people learn to do it about the same time they learn that “hand raising” kludge. No matter how many people are “speaking” at once, the client renders it all as a text -the letters aren’t all superimposed over each other, but come neatly formatted and tagged by sequential speaker.

This is one of the great strengths of the medium: with our ability to process multiple simultaneous written inputs, the conversational bandwidth is vastly higher than with speech. Add a text backchannel to a speaker, and you’ve got a beautifully rich event. And unless people are very new to the medium, or more than 40 people or so are actually text-chatting all at once, it’s really not hard to follow. It’s just reading.

So what’s with the “raises hand” thing? Custom. People don’t think about why they use technology the way they do once it becomes familiar. And when new technologies are introduced, they go through a period of being treated as just like old technologies. It takes a while for people to understand they’re different, and to discover new uses and customs for them. Thus, automobiles started off as “horseless carriages,” a new technology “just like” a familiar old one. Computer GUIs were “electronic desktops” complete with “file folders” and “trash cans,” just like the familiar physical office space. And virtual world meetings have “hand raising.”

Sometimes, though, the new technology’s affordances – the things it allows you do do that other technologies don’t – and the cultural expectations of old-tech users crash head on, with nary a horse to be found. 2008′s “Convergence of the Real and the Virtual,” the first academic conference held in World of Warcraft, epitomized that. Traditional academic speakers, used to deference to their credentials and their place at a physical podium, melted down when confronted by the virtual-meeting norm of backchannel open conversation and engagement with the speaker.

Whether from a traditionalist’s view or an early adopter’s view, it was the sort of trainwreck you can’t take your eyes from. By the third day, however, everyone seemed to have adapted their cultural expectations to the affordances of the technology, and finished with a smooth and enjoyable day.

What of the SLBA’s hand-raising then? It’s a cultural marker, to be sure: it says that the people aren’t, as James Paul Gee would put it, fluent in the “Discourse” of virtual worlds meetings. Now, the “horseless carriage” trope serves a purpose: it smooths the adoption path. By obscuring differences and affordances, it allows noobs the opportunity to get comfortable with the technology in their own time. While it’s not a leet discourse, “horesless carriage”-ing is a technology with its own affordances.

For a group bringing new people into the virtual space, making them feel comfortable, and then socializing them into the discourse, it’s a kindess. For an organization seeking to have impact as knowledgeable participants in the Discourse of virtual worlds professionals – well, as WoW’s trade chat would have it – “lol noob!”

The Trough of Noobery

No Responses »

Jan 312010

Dear Student:

No, you’re not any one of my students in particular: this song isn’t about you. But you are a composite. You’ve asked me a set of questions about virtual worlds, ones that I haven’t been able to answer satisfactorily for either of us. I’m going to try again here, and see if a day’s reflection and consultation can make a difference.

You’ve made some observations and asked some questions that I think sum up as, you’re not readily connecting with the space and don’t see why you should learn it. I think what underlies your (very legitimate) questions is, you’re in the Trough of Noobery, and it sucks to be there.

I said in the first class that there are three reasons for studying governance of virtual worlds: as a model, a small-scale online reproduction of larger and more complex offline phenomena; as a convenient nexus of offline political, economic, legal and cultural forces, all interesting in their own right; and as a potential source for innovations that might transform offline institutions.

Let’s talk about the model. What I’m having you do is model an experience many of you will have in your professional lives, not least of all those of you who want to practice law: entering into a new field, leaning what it’s about and what’s important, earning respect among the people in that field, and being able to make meaning within it.

We all do this throughout our lives, from starting at a new school or job, moving to a new town, picking up a craft or hobby. Those things are either inevitable or freely chosen: your parents got relocated, and you were dragged along, or you decided you really want to spend your evenings learning luge, or Thai cooking. In both cases, theory and methodology really don’t help: you’re either fine, or stuck, without them. Desperation or desire will propel you out of the Trough of Noobery sooner or later.

But the professional case, the one we’re modeling in this class, is an intermediate: somewhere between compulsion and desire, tools come in handy for navigating your way down the the road to Leetville.

So far, you’ve read insiders’ views and outsiders’ views, academic articles, works of in-depth journalism, newspaper articles and blogs. You’ve gotten a bit of political science, anthropology, economics and law. These intellectual tools, we think, are good and useful, but mostly for people who’re already out of the Trough of Noobery and rolling down the road to Leetville. You’re not there yet, and telling the political scientists and economists to get out and push isn’t getting you the momentum to get out of the Trough.

You have to do that.

You have to be a noob, and you have to keep going through that till you reach comfort and fluency on the road to Leetville.

We haven’t stressed this enough in class, in part because we’re really not sure how to approach it (and pretty sure, from keeping up with the field, that nobody’s really sure), but what we want you to be able to do by the end of the semester is to be able to make meaning convincingly and coherently, at a graduate-appropriate level, in a game world and a social world.

That’s why we’re suggesting alternatives to the traditional seminar paper: we’re confident you know how to make meaning in school. You’ve had a lot of practice at that. What we want you to do is enter into a new field, figure it out, and “read” (understand what people are saying, and what they mean by it) and “write” (create something that people in the space consider meaningful and useful) in it.

Much of legal practice is built around this skill set. A client comes to you with a problem. You need to understand what it is they do well enough to understand the problem in their terms. Then you have to sort through your knowledge of the law, figure out what applies and what doesn’t, and then (ideally) translate that in terms that the client can understand, so they know what the law expects of them. Then, you have to explain the situation, to a judge (who doesn’t know anything about the client’s business or situation), a jury (who doesn’t know anything about either the law or the client’s situation), or a potential investor (who understands finance, but not the law or the client).

That’s some very sophisticated “reading” and “writing” across a range of very different, mutually ignorant, communities.

That’s the skill set we’re hoping to train you in, in this class. We’re not here to get you to develop a hobby, or to share our hobbies. We don’t much care if you like either world we’re using, or if you like virtual worlds at all, at this point. We do care that we do a good job teaching you, and you do a good job learning, how to enter into a technologically-bounded space and become literate within it.

So what can you do to get past noob-hood and come out literate?

My PhD program faces the same sets of issues: how to take a bunch of lazy noobs and get them making meaning in their academic field. One of the things they’ve done is to create a mandatory 1-credit course, in which we have to attend an on-campus academic talk every week, like it or not. It sucks, and I whine, but it works.

We’re not going to mandate time inworld, or that you attend one event a week. We didn’t establish those ground rules, and we’re not going to change the rules in mid-game. But if you want to do well, if you want to achieve literacy, try this:

This week:

Go to one of the freebie stores on the notecard we gave you. Get some clothes and change into them.
Go to one of the events on the weekly recommendations. No, go to two, one academic/professional and one social, like a live music event.
Talk to strangers until you’ve found someone you’d like to add to your friends list.

That’s the advice for SL. The advice for WoW is much the same: level to 15 or so, and join a pickup group to fight (not get run though, fight), Ragefire Chasm. Or click the PvP button and join a battleground. Or join a pickup group to quest for a couple hours. Buy and sell a green item in the Auction House. Raise your professions and at least one of cooking, fishing or first aid to equal your defense level.

Do that, and you’ll be out of the Trough of Noobery and well on your way to Leetville – and to success in the class.

Older Entries

10 Big Pieces: My Life as a Night Elf Priest, part 2

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

Calvinball, FIFA and Second Life: The Politics of Play

Reputation and Achievement in Second Life

10 Big Pieces: Women and Gaming

The Politics of Frozen Pizza

The Pleasures and Politics of Canon

Raising Your Hand on the Horseless Carriage

The Trough of Noobery

Archives

Meta

Tags

Archives

Meta