Masculenities

Man, it’s been a while since I updated this silly thing. Well…

Sherry Turkle: “by enabling people to experience what it feels like to be the opposite gender or to have no gender at all, the practice encourages reflection on the way ideas about gender shape our expectations” (77).

Horsley: ‘’It could be argued that simple binary gender gender-switching actually further entrenches traditionally held ideas, by suggesting that conventional roles are so firmly established that a person must simply pick one or the other, based on the package of qualities it comes with, and how appropriate these are for the situation at hand” (77).

“As well as recognizing that class, race, sexual orientation, and many other factors all enter the equation a the level of identity, the term “masculinities’ refers to the fact that no two people’s performance of any so-called masculine traits will ever be exactly the same.” (70)

I’ve been in avatar spaces for a very, very long time. I think my first encounter was when I was only thirteen years old or so, on a message board for my favourite computer game. I’d heard all kinds of horror stories about the internet from my mom, so I never told anyone my identity. It was pretty common on this board to pretend to be a character in the game, so I made one up.
Being a thirteen year old girl, I created a character which in internet roleplaying and writing parlance is called a ‘Mary Sue’ – that is, an overpowered, perfect character with vast cosmic powers and very little interesting personality. She had red hair, she could throw fireballs, she was part dragon, and as a writer I’m disgusted by her to this day. There’s nothing wrong with living out a fantasy, but if you’re going to do that at least live out an interesting fantasy. There’s a joke now on some roleplay communities that all elves are royalty since so many young women play elf princes or princesses.
That’s changed a lot since then. The last character that I actually made up for a text-based roleplay was a male gentleman-thief with a kind of obsessive-compulsive disorder towards stealing. The only REASON he was a thief, in fact, was because he genuinely couldn’t help it. Later when I re-adapted him for another game he ended up being a powerful cosmic being, but that’s because that was the baseline norm for that game.

I think later I’ll go into a more complex analysis of my character choices over the years, but for now I’ll talk about my choices in Second Life.

I’ll say right now that I don’t have much respect for Second Life. I think it’s a badly executed game with a poorly designed engine and amounts to a glorified chatroom. You can talk all you like about artistic freedom and educational opportunities offered by the ability to construct space, but the fact remains that your average monkey isn’t going to build anything interesting and is probably there for anonymous internet sex. I’ve been in places like that before, and I really, REALLY didn’t want anyone picking me up or flirting with me. That happened to me constantly in Guild Wars – the moment someone found out that in real life I’m female they’d take that as a clue to shamelessly attempt to pick me up. Thanks guys, but I’m here to kill monsters, not to look for a date. As such, I went for a male avatar.

But my so-called masculine avatar wasn’t very masculine. I adjusted him, made him thin and lanky – not weak, per say, but the body of a sprinter or a dancer, not a muscle man. He had an androgynous, feminine face, floppy hair, and generally wore black and red. I completed the look with bright red eyes, for a devilish touch.

The same’s really true of the feminine avatars I’ve made – the adjustable ones, anyway. My female avatars are generally spunky tomboys, easily mistaken for male. Regardless of the actual gender of my avatar they lean close to the middle and end up, ultimately, very androgynous.

Apparently I have to stop for now, so I’ll continue this thought later. Sorry for the length.

Okay, so now a continuation.

While wandering around in Second Life, I found an area offering free ‘abstracts’ – avatars that weren’t even remotely human or even alive. That’s how the space ship thing happened. I’ve been on a huge robot kick lately – while my tastes usually run more towards Jules Verne esque steam-powered monstrosities, I have a fondness for sleek, futuristic machines too, and so the appeal of having an avatar with no identifying gender characteristics at all was too much to resist.

And I think that’s what it is, ultimately, with me. I reject all ideas of gender, even in my every-day life. I’ve never thought of myself as a traditional ‘girl’ – my family tried to buy me Barbie dolls as a child, but all I wanted to do was play with dinosaurs, Legos, and Star Wars action figures. My childhood heroes were Indiana Jones and Han Solo (I guess I had a thing for Harrison Ford); but also Rogue from the X-Men, a no-nonsense ‘badass’ who wouldn’t take anything from anyone. I read pulp fantasy novels and science fiction, I never wanted to wear skirts or pretty dresses; and before I moved I was always hanging out with the ‘boys’.

At the same time I didn’t want to be a boy, and I wasn’t a full tomboy either. I hated sports, I still preferred sitting inside and reading books or making up stories to running around. In terms of my videogame tastes, I was less for Doom and more for Myst and Might and Magic, games that were less about straight combat and more about nonlinear thinking. In the end, I didn’t and still don’t think of myself as feminine or masculine, and I think those two labels are something we need to get rid of, social constructs generated by centuries of norms. Yes, there are physical and psychological differences between men and women, but I don’t think they’re the ones that society thinks they are. Women can be assertive and strong; men can be gentle and caring, and that’s not a bad thing on either end.

I think I’m starting to ramble, so I’ll just update this and leave it at that.

Avatar – What It Is

What It Is – Part 1

I’m not exactly sure that the Sims is the best way to talk about avatar construction. In the Sims, the avatar does not represent you, and you are not interacting with other human beings. When I was playing the game, the avatars I was using were not me, I didn’t feel like they were me. They were dolls, people I control. In all honesty, I feel more connection with the faceless, nameless player character in the original Myst than I do with the dolls from the Sims. Indeed, I play in large online games where people take on the personalities of existing fictional characters – interactive crossover fanfiction, essentially – and I feel more like my representation of, say, Two-Face from Batman is more “me” than the little dolls I’m playing with in the Sims, because I am active in making up the story, I’m creating that interpretation of the character. Maybe it’s just me, I don’t know, but the Sim characters fail to evoke any sense of connection, any more than my Barbie dolls ever did.

To me, an avatar is about control. It’s not really an avatar unless it is your avatar, something that you can control if only in the mildest degree. Again, to use Meadows’ examples, I feel more connection to Mario than I do to my Sims – in some ways, I become the plucky Italian plumber fighting back giant plants and mutant turtles to rescue my beloved Princess. I do not become this ordinary pair of ordinary yuppies living their boring, ordinary lives.

I’d like to take the time to go off on a little tangent now and discuss Myst, one of my favourite games of all time, and its unusual way of tackling the avatar problem. In Myst, you are indeed in control, you wander around and solve puzzles… yet you never, ever see what your avatar looks like. Up until the fifth Myst game, the Stranger (as the fans like to call the avatar) was never given a gender, a name, a face, or a timeline. Surfaces in Myst are conveniently non-reflective; your perspective exists in such a way that you never see your own shadow. The only expression of selfdom that you have in Myst is your interaction with the environment.

And what interaction! Myst was an entirely open-ended game. Though there was indeed a plot to be followed, the points to this plot could be uncovered in almost any order. You were given a choice of four worlds, or Ages, to explore beyond the first island (so, five in total), and though what you could explore was limited by the technology of the time (the game was essentially an interactive slide show, so you couldn’t wander completely freely) you could tackle the islands in any order you wished. Thus, while you encountered the same clues regardless of where you started, the order in which you encountered them was different, and so the pieces of the picture that you put together was different. Finally, there were a number of choices near the end that would drastically affect the final outcome of the game, including how the characters in the game would ultimately react and interact with you. In the end, though your character had no face and no name, their personality was filled in by the way the player interacted with the world. In many ways, it was easy to imagine that this wasn’t some character, some superhuman imaginary person, but you yourself who had found the mysterious Myst book and been teleported into a new world. Many of the players of the game reported that Myst felt almost real, that the combination of (for the time) technically lavish environments with this deep interactivity made it feel like you were really there.

Interestingly, I felt that when Uru: Ages Beyond Myst came out, the game lost some of that initial charm. No longer was it a first person perspective where you could imagine yourself wandering about – there was a visible avatar mediating your experience. No matter how you sliced it, there was this little pixilated you (or someone else, if that was how you wanted to roll) walking around, interacting with characters and objects. For me, it actually became more difficult to put myself in that place.

More difficult that is, until I started interacting with other players.

For some reason, when two players interact, I found that it increased the strength of the metanarrative – that now, because two people were accepting the reality of this unreality, I could somewhat better imagine myself in that role. I remember spending one day on the Age of Ahonay, a strange world consisting of four rotating spheres, the first of which was populated by little creatures called Quabs. After solving the puzzle on Ahonay, I returned back to my neighborhood hangout, and typed in “Hey, everyone, I just got back from Ahonay! Brought you all some Maryland-style Quab soup!” Most everyone there knew that I was not only a Marylander, born and bred, but that I was the ridiculous sort who puts Old Bay on everything and loves crabs… and so it became true in our headspace. There was no physical crab soup, but everyone could imagine that I had caught these little creatures, cooked them up and made them into delicious soup for the group.

Not sure where I was going with that tangent. But! Onward.

Part Two

I find the metafiction of this incident quite interesting – from a postmodernist’s perspective this whole thing is a perfect example of how fictionality blurs and can even destroy reality. What was “real” here? What wasn’t real? It’s impossible to tell.

Part Three

See my previous comments about Myst concerning how a first-person avatar can in some cases be more effective than a third-person avatar, as it gives the player freedom to truly imagine themselves in a role (kind of like the difference between a book and a film – a book gives a person the leisure to truly imagine the characters; a film does not)

Part Four

To me, ultimately, what an online avatar should be is an expression of the self – just like your clothes or your taste in music or the objects you decorate your house with say certain things about you, what sort of avatar you use says something about you. The fact that I, in my various online games, prefer avatars of either completely ambiguous gender or opposite gender (I almost NEVER use female avatars); that I prefer to give the impression of general intelligence; that I like characters who are either partially or wholly mechanical in nature (cyborgs, giant robots, etc) says something about me as a person (what, exactly, I don’t care to speculate about). An avatar is, ultimately, an expression of selfdom.

On Classrooms in Digital Spaces

First, before I begin the actual assignment, I’d like to post a short response to Robbins-Bell’s article on the use of virtual environments such as Second Life in higher education. While Robbins-Bell brings up an excellent point in that these spaces provide unique oppertunities for the study of gender identity and the self, we must not draw too-broad conclusions about the universial applicability of avatars, and of the ability to have classrooms in virtual spaces.

First of all, I contend that the application which Robbins posits is not nearly as wide as she seems to think. I hold that while you could study gender identity in a digital environment, pretending to be the opposite gender online teaches you only what it is like to pretend to be the opposite gender on the internet, and nothing about what gender is like in real life. The same goes for her example of pretending to be a handicapped person. The focus here is too narrow.

Furthermore, while she states that the chaotic nature of spaces such as Second Life are an asset, I disagree completely. Holding a class in Second Life would be incredibly distracting to me. I have enough trouble staying focused in a class where I’m expected to use the internet at all – give me a completely digital environment and I would be lost. Why pay attention to the teacher when you can wander around, fly, and shoot lasers? Who cares? The classroom would cease to be a classroom and instead become a game I’m playing about a classroom, and I don’t think I’d get much studying done.

Second Life is also NOT a replacement for real, in-classroom learning. There are certain experiences that you can’t get through a computer screen, that you must have face-to-face. Filtering the universe through silicon and light is a sure way to not know if anything’s real at all.

That said.

One of the most unique online experiences I’ve had was my short stint playing in Cyan Worlds’ Uru: Ages Beyond Myst, a game that has sadly been canceled due to lack of interest. In Uru, your character is you (the title is a pun, meaning both “you are you” and I think something like “city” in ancient Babylonian), only a “you” that has been “called” to participate in a very strange archaeological dig. What’s strange is that while there is a professional team, people have been showing up randomly to the site of the dig, saying only that they felt “called”. You are one of these people (along with all of the other players), and it’s your job to discover the mysteries and secrets behind the lost city of D’ni.

As the game progresses you find out about Linking Books, strange objects which allow teleportation to other worlds, the greatest technological achievement of the D’ni people. And then the real story begins to unfold…

The game was based on Cyan’s bestselling Myst franchise, and what made it stand out to me was the focus on exploration rather than pure social interaction or fighting. Most of the players in the game actually remained in-character, that is, unless stated otherwise they treated the world as real within the context of the game. They really were exploring the vast city of D’ni. Furthermore, there was quite a lot of intellectual legwork involved. The main part of the game relied on puzzles – pulling switches, pushing levers, and so on, sometimes even solving mathematical equations or comparing creature taxonomy or memorizing a set of ancient symbols. Solving a puzzle would unlock a piece of the story – usually a bit of D’ni history. The story itself was a complex melange of fantasy, science fiction, and anthropology. Some of the discoveries were indeed fantastical and some of the revelations felt like something out of a soap opera, but others were genuinely interesting and really did make me, the player, feel like an archaeologist exploring a great ruin.

One of the most interesting parts of the puzzle was the D’ni language, a concept introduced in the 1997 game Riven but which continued through Uru. There was a small but very dedicated group of players, most of them amateur linguists, who devoted their time to studying the D’ni language. At first, they worked only on figuring it out, but when they ran out of words Cyan actually began to work with the players to further develop the language. A number of players – myself included – learned quite a lot about linguistics, language development, and sociolinguistics this way, all inspired by a computer game. Player discussions on D’ni culture brought up questions of anthropology, history, and literature which went far beyond the comparatively simple scope of the game, and often players were asked to help write parts of D’ni history.

The best part of course was the community. Myst Online had one of the most friendly communities I have ever encountered online. There was none of the faction squabbling that you get between furries and 4-chan, and while the community had its disputes (one of the biggest was which should be canonical – the game’s portrayal of D’ni being under New Mexico, or the depiction in original novel from 1997 of it being somewhere under the Middle East), they were solved quickly and with few hard feelings. Players were always willing to help each other out in solving puzzles. The only sad part was that Cyan never updated any of the puzzles or worlds, due to a lack of staff and funds.

In the current day and age, Cyan has released its source code to the fans, allowing them to create their own stories and environments.

I promise, I’m going somewhere with this.

So, here we have an example of a community based around a game based around archaeology and linguistics. So what if instead of being an archaeological dig in a fictional city, why not have one in a real place, like, say, Egypt? Students could learn techniques of anthropological inquiry and even proper procedures for archaeology (though NOT actual techniques – those must be learned in the field), they could study ancient Egyptian by solving puzzles based on clues in the environment. A teacher would be on hand to answer questions and gently direct students – a technique already used by Myst Online in the form of volunteer moderators.

Other examples could be learning history through online wargames similar to Civilization but with a much more educational focus. This technique is already used in classrooms in the form of Reacting to the Past, a kind of roleplaying game in which students take on the roles of historical figures and read texts relating to the time period in question.

The problem is, as always, divorcing the subject matter from the real. While in the Egypt example it might be difficult for students to visit egypt in person, how is wandering around a digital egypt that much different from reading about it in books, other than the novelty of technology? and as to roleplaying, as a long-time roleplayer I must say that it can be much more fun to do in-person, even if doing it online helps you to keep track of what has and hasn’t been said better.

The assignment du jour seems to be to take a look at three Web 2.0 sites and compare their goals and functionality, based on the article by Bryan Alexander.

(As an aside, I’ve never liked the term ‘Web 2.0′. It seems… strange.)

As such, I’m going to take a look at an aspect that I don’t spend much time on – social bookmarking. Back when del.ico.us first emerged, my friend Jai insisted that I get an account. My interest in it lasted all of a week. While del.ico.us gave me the ability to have a large number of bookmarks accessible at one time, I didn’t care at all about the “social” aspect – what reason have I to share my bookmarks? They’re for my personal use, right? And so I went back to my overcrowded bookmark folder in Mozilla Firefox.

Alexander’s article makes some good points about the functionality and usefulness of sharing bookmarks. IT’s a unique way of networking, you can find out what bookmarks are popular without actually having to ask anyone, it’s easy to use and it’s free. I’m still not keen on sharing my own bookmarks with friends, but I suppose I can see the use of people sharing what bookmarks they, personally, found useful.

As an experiment, I searched for Napoleon on each of these and noted my results and whether or not it’d be useful for a paper on the historical figure; this was mostly for my own curiosity.

First, I’ll look at del.icio.us.

(For the curious, there is my page. It’s rather a blast-from-the-past for me, many of the pages listed no longer exist or are no longer of ANY interest to me whatsoever.)

The interface is fairly streamlined, and rather clean when compared to some other websites I’ve seen. I can also see myself wasting a lot of time here succumbing to what I call Wiki-syndrome – the tendency to follow interesting links and then get sucked into a giant mess of open tabs and irrelevant but highly interesting information.

Napoleon Test Results: The third bookmark down was useful, as was the seventh, but the rest were for the film Napoleon Dynamite. Not exactly helpful for an academic paper. Furthermore, there’s no way to establish the authenticity of the web pages or whether they’d be good for citing as a legitimate source – anyone could have written them, we have only the word of some mysterious person on a bookmarking site.

Shadows.com, unfortunately, seems to have died and disappeared into the aether, replaced by a scammer squatting the URL. That’s unfortunate, as the idea that Alexander presents in his article is an interesting one – it would be nice to have discussion pages on each tag. Perhaps then one could see based on the comments if the page in question was, say, good for research or just a silly Napoleon Dynamite related page. However, such a thing might only work in principle, not in practice – behold YouTube.com comments, which tend to be inane and completely unhelpful (“lol that’s a gud movie dood”). More likely one would just get long strings of identical “That’s a good link” comments instead of any actually helpful information.

Raw Sugar also seems to have changed in function since the writing of Alexander’s article – whatever it is, it’s no longer a bookmarking site. The idea presented in the article is that in addition to social bookmarking, one can also have a user profile and other blog-like features. While this is a nice little widget, it seems supurflous – websites like Facebook exist for those features, which may be why the site is no longer a social bookmarking site.

Del.icio.us seems to have won out here – the other competitors mentioned by Alexander don’t seem to exist anymore, and the Wikipedia list has shrunk from the 40+ cited in the article to 27. Clearly, the novelty of social bookmarking has worn off somewhat. And even if the other websites existed, del.icio.us seems to have the most simple functionality – comments would be largely useless in the end, and profiles are superfluous. Simple, streamlined, and functional are the words of the day here, and thus it is that del.icio.us is the only surviving site out of the three mentioned by Alexander in his article.

An Introduction and Statement of Purpose

I feel it prudent to place here an introduction and statement of purpose. I know, I know, that’s what profiles are for, but I feel as though I should put something here as well.

This is a blog for a college class, Writing in Digital Environments. In it I shall be posting various assignments which I do for the class, along with the occasional musing about the nature of writing, identity, and the internet in general. Still, this is not a blog for complaining about life, it’s not for politics – it is a formal blog created for assignments in a class.

As to myself, I’m a 21 year old (almost 22) aspiring writer who hasn’t a clue what I’m going to do with my life once I actually graduate. I’m taking this class becuase I have a bit of a passion for both writing and the Internet – I spend almost 90% of my free time online. The internet, to me, is the most significant invention of the 20th century. It’s completely changed the way human beings relate to each other and information, fundamentally altered the way we communicate.