Communities of Play: Emergent Cultures in Online Games and Virtual Worlds
Interview with the Avatar (Mid-January, 2005)
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- Reflections on Uru Server Shutdown Anniversary (9 February 2005)
Interview with the Avatar (Mid-January, 2005)Sometimes I come out of these interviews feeling both emotionally drained and exhilarated. Tonight I had a long session with Raena, the woman who was in part responsible for salvaging the disaster around the article. This was by far the most intense interview to-date, in part because she was so honest…she glossed over nothing, and told me things that no-one else has told me, about the darker side of the transition. She is a very thoughtful person, and her openness was somewhat astounding, even more so in light of the fact that she approached me wanting to tell me her story. Much of the story was similar to the others. Finding emergent patterns has been surprisingly easy because the responses are so consistent. One pattern is this notion of time compression, which jibes with my research and that of almost everyone I’ve read. In spite of the fact that the pace of text communication is much slower, emotional experiences tend to become compressed, and friendships form much more quickly than they would in “real life.” In the case of the Uru people, this process was intensified by the time constraints of the Uru closure (knowing the world was ending), and by their shared trauma. Raena also talked about her relationship to her avatar… the sense of death… she talked about “the end of the world,” and how she and her friend wanted to ‘party like it’s 1999’. She talked about what it felt like to move from the first person experience of the Myst games into the avatar-based environment of Uru. Having a representation of herself was a big deal for her, and it gave her a sense of “proprioception” (her word.) It seems many of the Uruvians felt their avatars were dying, and even though they’ve tried to approximate their Uru avatars in other worlds, it’s obvious that they miss the nuance of the Uru avatars, the “realism,” the modest attire, the ability to show age. They often complain about the cartoonyness of There.com avatars, although they like their expressiveness. Though Uru avatars are more “high fidelity” than There.com avatars, I find them to be a little strange. They all have this sort of glazed Mona Lisa smile. The one part of the story that was entirely new to me was the tale of Teddy and Daisy, the backstory of which was known to most of the original TGUers by now. I know them as real life partners, and I had met them together that day in the Moroccan pavilion, back in the pre-Uru, text-chat days. I had even seen a photo of the two of them in real life on the Imager in Teddy’s Relto in Until Uru. So imagine my surprise when Raena reveals to me that Teddy was Daisy…or rather, that Daisy was his first incarnation in Uru. Since most Uru players created their avatars as representations of themselves, or as a variant of themselves (“you are you”), there was no reason to suspect that any cross-gender play was occurring. Raena had, to her own surprise, made a number of friends in Uru, the closest of whom was Daisy. The Daisy I know is his wife, who never played the original Uru game. Apparently the original “Daisy” revealed his true identity to Raena just hours before the server shut down, when he appeared as a male avatar. Raena was upset by this, in part because of the deception, but more so because she had really wanted to say goodbye to her friend Daisy. But he couldn’t log off and switch avatars, because it was too risky as the server was being put to sleep. (Teddy later told me that when he first started playing Uru, he had not anticipated that he was actually going to make friends, so this situation somewhat threw him for a loop.) Raena also told me that somewhere in the back of her mind, she had always sort of suspected that Daisy was really a man, due to her sense of humor. When he came to There.com, he followed the custom that players had adopted of recreating their Uru avatars in There.com. He continued to play as Daisy, and his wife, not an Uru player, joined him as Teddy. They maintained this charade until the advent of voice, which eventually forced them to come clean via the Koalanet forums. They stayed swapped for a time, but the gender-switched voices bothered some, so eventually they simply traded avatars, the male partner now inhabiting the male avatar, and vice versa. Teddy’s reason for the gender switch, as I learned from reading the forums afterward, was to avert any concern of his wife’s that he might engage in an online affair, a situation that had broken up a friend’s marriage. For the most part, from this point forward, each used the avatar of the proper gender (although Teddy also occasionally used the male avatar he had created to make his “confession” during the Uru closure.) In some way this job is a lot like being a therapist… you want to get stories out of people… you want to get them to describe things as vividly as possible but also to find out their interpretations, how they felt about these things when they were happening. Maybe (and of course I’m hypothesizing here) but maybe in part because so many of them are women, as well as men who are a little older, it is easier for them to talk about their feelings. I can’t help but compare these conversations to those I’ve had with players in Lineage, mostly young men in their late teens or early twenties. The depth of insight here is so much richer… I really don’t have to do much interpretation because they are doing it all for me. The hard think to know is when to stop. I am sort of enraptured really; and every time I hear the story of the server shutdown, it still sends a chill up my spine. I relive it with them each time it is retold. While each of them lived it once, in some way I have relived it dozens of times because I have relived it through each of their eyes, through multiple subjectivities. In losing her Uru avatar, Raena said she felt like she had experienced a kind of death. In way it’s true. And does Cyan/Ubi have that right to kill an avatar? I suppose technically, they do, because they own it. Yet who really owns the avatar? The avatar is nothing without the player, but the “code” that comprises it is owned by the company. It’s as if your soul were owned by you, but your body were owned by somebody else. Clearly, losing an avatar is very painful, because it is a part of the person, even if they’ve only been an avatar for a short period. It is like losing a limb, or perhaps how a child feels when their favorite toy is lost… there is an emotional attachment that happens through play…That seems like an apt metaphor. Hmmm… that’s very interesting. We become emotionally attached to our projected identities. It’s what Halopainen and Myers referred to as “somatic displacement,” the ability to project yourself into an object, such as a doll or a toy car. (Holopainen and Meyers 2000) This seems consistent with the ways we project alter-identities into avatars. This type of emotional attachment can be very real and very powerful. When you lose your avatar, you feel as though you have lost a part of yourself. I think this is really interesting. The avatar becomes like a ghost limb—you can feel it even though it is no longer there. This is perhaps what Sandy Stone called “falling in love with our prosthesis” (Stone 1996), but it’s also a feeling I have about my own avatar when I’m not logged on. The avatar also serves as a bridge to others, a kind of interpersonal connecting tissue. We know that these connections are real, even if the worlds that facilitate them are virtual. To the people experiencing them, they are very real and intense, and in some ways can be more intense then rl… I know this is true. I’ve experienced it myself. My two hours with Raena was more intense than the dinner I had with my housemate earlier this evening. I learned more in two hours about Raena, who I’ve never met, than I know about my housemate, who I’ve lived with for nearly a year. It’s mysterious, but amazing. I’m really excited about this work. There is something important and powerful that I’m uncovering here… peeling away like layers: the social… the psychological… the distributed self, as Turkle calls it (Turkle 1995), and then the social construction of the self… The avatar is a precious entity, because it is an extension of yourself, a social prosthesis, especially when the game embodiment is compensating for a physical embodiment that has broken down (Lynn in her wheelchair, Cola with her arthritis) it’s even more important. Because not being able to run and jump isn’t just a physically painful experience… it’s also socially painful. There are aspects of yourself that must be shut down that can be reawakened through an avatar. Lynn can run, jump, ride horses, and be a soccer ball in There.com. So in a way Lynn in Uru or in There.com is more the real Lynn, than Lynn in the wheelchair in Cedar County, New Mexico, who has lost part of her identity and her social agency with the loss of her ability to walk. I feel like I know a side of these people that no-one in their real lives will ever know. And since I have made it my business to know as much about them as I possibly can, I feel I’ve taken on a big responsibility. I’ve become the steward of their collective “self.” TGU itself is an avatar in a way. It’s the aggregate avatar of all the individual TGU avatars, isn’t it? This is a very interesting way to look at it. “Me and my shadow…” hmmm… Reflections on Uru Server Shutdown Anniversary (9 February 2005)I gathered with the European contingent at noon, along with a couple of U.S. folks, Lynn among them. She always makes a point to be present with every grouping in every time zone, and I think this is significant to her role in holding the group together. I was expecting there to be discussion about the shutdown, and there had also been storytelling planned, but we never got around to that. Instead, Lynn suggested hide-and-seek, which took up the next three plus hours. It was fascinating. Here we were, this group of adults, mostly over 40, some over 50 even, playing a children’s game in a virtual world. How many other occasions do we have to do this? Lynn was even on the phone (we could hear her over Teamspeak) telling her friend we were playing hide-and-seek. Hide-and-seek had been a favorite activity in Uru Prologue, even though it’s not really part of the game, but the brand of hide-and-seek they play is very much unique to the Uru environment. They particularly like playing in Eder Kemo, the garden age. I asked them why they never play hide-and-seek in There.com. “Because of the nametags,” they said. This subversion of the environment into a playscape is a trademark play style of the group, and they do this in each environment in a different fashion, experimenting with, and sometimes against, the virtual world’s given properties, capabilities, and bugs. It is particularly interesting to look at the way that certain game features promote or restrict certain types of subversive play. An interesting research question would be to look at ways of creating features specifically designed with this type of play in mind. Before we started, there were some rules that had to be sorted out with respect to the new Ki pack that had been given everyone as a Christmas present by the hackers that set up Until Uru. The Ki extended features of the game, including a hug without opening the Ki, higher jumps, and the ability to float. The group decided it was okay to float and to use the higher jump commands to find hiding places; the person who was “It” could use higher jumps but not the float to find people. You were not permitted to spawn to escape detection. All this was negotiated in advance, like game rules in a real world playground. Naturally, using my new “participant engagement” method, I played along. This strategy has been somewhat challenging since I am a “noob” by Uruvian standards, and since this was my first time, I fumbled along trying to get the hang of it. On the first round, while looking for a hiding place, I accidentally linked into out of the Age. When I returned at the spawn point, Phae’dra was there and immediately said “I found Arte.” I explained that I had just spawned in, but it made us all laugh. On the second round, I was slightly less inept at finding a hiding place, although I was one of the first people discovered. In this version of the game, once you are found, you have to help the “It” person to find the others, which is really much more fun than hiding. One of the things I immediately noticed was the cleverness of some of the hiding places. For example, there was one spot where a couple of people were hiding that was one of those rifts in cyberspace. If you did a particular high jump in the right spot in the tunnel, you could land on the back of the cave ceiling, which wasn’t a “real” place in the game. From here you could see the “back of house,” as if you’d gone inside the wall of a theme park ride. From this vantage points, you could also see other parts of the Kemo that were not visible from other locales. This was one of a number of ways the new Ki commands introduced some new possible hiding scenarios to the game. Since they all know the space so well, and have spent a lot of time looking for hidden clues, they know all the nooks and crannies. The know the cubbyholes, the backs of things, the weird ledges that require runs and jumps to get to, arcane combinations for getting on top of things that would otherwise seem inaccessible. The best hiding place of all was by Kellor, who figured out a way hide inside the trunk of a Braintree. The trunk collision detection was flawed in some way and it was the exact width of an avatar. As a result, he was able to just stand inside the tree trunk, and visible from the waste up, he was hard to detect because he was not discernable as a geometry element. Everyone gathered round to express their appreciation for the cleverness of this hiding place. This was a big part of the experience—trying to come up with a really clever hiding place that everyone else would appreciate for its creativity. Since the group places such high value in solving puzzles, finding hidden things, and being clever about it, it was a really pleasure to play the Uru variation of hide-and-seek because it turned out to be a very sophisticated version of the game. This is another case of the ways in which players subvert or reframe the virtual environment to their own ends. So in a sense the virtual world becomes more like a playground than a game, a terrain that can morph or take on a variety of shapes, that can be adopted at will by simply changing the game terms. This week Uru is a hide and seek game; maybe another week it is a treasure hunt. This week There.com is a card game, next week it is a cross-country race. The playing board is constantly being redefined. This is significantly different from a game like Monopoly where the game board is fairly static, even if the theme changes. Whereas on a checkers/chess board, you can play a couple of different games, and of course with playing cards, a seemingly infinite number. It’s like a playground in which a vertical wall, a ball, some rope and a piece of chalk allow you to constantly reconfigure the play parameters of the space. This causes me to question this notion of the magic circle a bit. How finite is it, really? The magic circle is really nothing more than a mutual agreement to abide by a set of social constraints. These can be independent of the terrain, and they can also be highly malleable and contingent on people and context. In some cases, the social constraints are terrain-dependent; for example, we play Monopoly on a Monopoly board; but there is no reason we could not make up a new set of rules to play on the same board; and no reason we can’t play that same set of rules in a different board, depending on its configuration. Monopoly could be played with chalk in a playground, or even on the city streets, as long as you had some markers to represent player progress and some form of currency, etc. This is the principle behind the “Big Game” “Pac-Manhattan,” in which the rules of Pac-Man are played out in full scale in the streets if New York City. (REF) In fact, Thereians later invented a series of board games in which avatars served as playing pieces. I think one of the phenomena at play here is that players run out of things to do as prescribed by the game. The TGUers have already solved all the puzzles in Uru, so now they explore and invent new modes of play. The most noteworthy thing about the anniversary gathering was that it was not a grieving of the past. There was some passing reference to the initial loss of Uru, but they also reminded each other of what they had gained. The flavor of the event, stated by Lynn up-front, was really more a celebration of play and community than anything else. And under that lies this new theory I am formulating. One of the reasons the emotional bonds of social play can be so intense is because in these liminal zones people “let their hair down,” as Lunar pointed out in my interview with him. And people can do things, like Teddy’s gender-bending, that in any other space would be completely socially inappropriate. But because it is a liminal space, anything goes, and all manner of experimentation and subversion are accepted as part of the territory, although hurting others is not tolerated, at least not among this group, and deception can be an egregious crime, although it can also be tolerated within certain bounds. In addition to the Until Uru event, there was also an event in Second Life hosted by the Uru refugees there. At the behest of some of the Second Lifers, I invited a few of my Thereian friends, including Lynn, with whom I had now become good friends, and we all went to the event together. Although I seldom saw anyone but the creators in the Uru area of Second Life, this event had the largest turnout of any event I had attended in any area of Second Life. It was impossible to actually count the number of people present. As usual, the high traffic also revealed the prime vulnerability, the Achilles tendon of virtually all MMOGs: It’s not clear exactly how many people gathered in the Second Life Hood, perhaps as many as 100, because at a certain point, we were all ejected into a barren desert. Once again, the server had failed. This was unfortunate because this was one of those highly emotional occasions where people really wanted to be together. Download 0.83 Mb. Share with your friends:
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