Reading list

I've been doing quite a bit of reading about virtual worlds over the last few months. The focus has mainly been on SL and WoW, but some general/theoretical stuff crept into the mix. For now, it's just a list of names; I will come back and annotate them later.

Here's the list, in the order that I read them (or will read them, for those yet unread).

Tom Boellstorff, Coming of age in Second Life

Edward Castronova, Synthetic worlds: The business and culture of online games

-- , Exodus to the virtual world: How online fun is changing reality

Janet H. Murray, Hamlet on the holodeck: The future of narrative in cyberspace

Zach Waggoner, My avatar, my self: Identity in video roleplaying games

Bonnie Nardi, My life as a night elf priest: An anthropological account of World of Warcraft

Ken Hillis, Online a lot of the time: Ritual, fetish, sign

T.L. Taylor, Play between worlds: Exploring online game culture

Celia Pearce and Artemesia, Communities of play: Emergent cultures in multiplayer games and virtual worlds

William Sims Bainbridge, The Warcraft civilization: Social science in a virtual world

RP

Roleplaying.

Different kinds of RP in SL: sci-fi, Pandora, Western, post-apocalypse, sexual.

Some would say that all of life is roleplaying: that we are different people at work than we are at home with our children.

Important distinction: an alt is not roleplaying, not in and of itself, though one may use an alt to keep one's RP separate from one's daily life.

Play

When we are in SL, are we "playing"?

What does "play" mean anyway? When a hobbyist carpenter turns a table-leg on a lathe, is that playing? When a Grand Master takes part in a chess tournament, is he playing?

Lalo commented on an earlier post that augmentationists play with Second Life, as though it were a toy, whereas immersionists play in SL, as though it were a playground.

To be expanded.

Alt

Short for: alternative account, a second name under which to log into Second Life.

I suspect that most people who embody strongly in SL have alts: that the experience of embodying in this particular shape/gender/species would make them curious about how it would feel to embody in a different one. That is how Wol came to be, and I can confirm that the embodiment is very different.

(There are of course other reasons too: builders and store-owners and famous people often use an alt as a stealth account for times when they want to be in-world without interruption; people with intensely busy social lives have alts as a way to get around the 25-group limit; invested roleplayers and the sexually adventurous use alts to segregate their "fun" persona from the habits and conventions of their "normal" identities.)

A successful alt is a minority personality, the virtual incarnation of a piece of yourself which doesn't get expressed in your usual lives. Wol has abilities and attributes that aren't easily available to the rest of my identities, and we are trying with some success to learn from her.

Given this, it's not really surprising that alts start as "just a name" but develop into distinctive personalities who are in meaningful ways not your usual "you." This has been confirmed nearly unanimously by people I've spoken to about their alts.

Alts generate a great deal of unhappiness in people who don't have one: they are felt to be deceptive or fraudulent. There is an overlap between the fear of alts and the fear of "false genders" i.e. that the attractive female you just met is really your gaming buddy Fred in disguise. (Actually it occurs to me that the word "disguise" is a very revealing one in this context. To me alts are not disguises, they are something different. When Wol wears silks and a mask, that is her-wearing-a-disguise; when her typist logs in as an alt, that is not her: the alt is a different person. To be discussed.)

Identity

It is interesting and highly significant that almost everyone who blogs about SL or posts photos from SL on Flickr, does so in their avatar's name. [More later, it's 3:30am and I am happy but exhausted after seeing Grace McDunnough perform at SL Pride.]

This is of course simplistic and reductivist, and intentionally so. These posts are not meant to be fair and balanced essays to be delivered de haut en bas, I am gathering talking points for a workshop. However, the observation stands — with one qualification: it depends on the speaker's relationship to their audience.

When [Botgirl|Grace|Dusan|whomever] blogs about SL-ness and identity, they are by and large speaking as one of us, peer to peer, within a community and a shared culture. They can assume that we will to a large extent share their experience (by being inworld) and interests (by being curious enough to be reading their blog) — though this does not mean that we necessarily share their values (cough Prokofy Neva cough).

When they talk to "outsiders," they often do so in their RL names, for example Hamlet Au's New World Notes lists both of his identities. [more later]

Anonymity

Tabitha Eichel made a great long comment on the Linden's drive to link our SL and RL identities, which was republished by Hamlet Au on his New World Notes blog. Here's the heart of the matter:

Why is it so hard for some people to believe that a large portion of the Second Life community is there for escapism and not to interact with real identities? This escape was what made Second Life desirable for many people. Not everyone is beautiful, popular, confident or whatever in the real world. There are many difficulties interacting with real people, that were negated in Second Life. It didn't matter what you looked like or where you were from. That made Second Life great for us.

But now, just like in real life, the beautiful, confident, fully-abled, popular people are calling the shots.

Quite right*, and it's why the Lindens are absolutely wrong to force this integration. Read the rest here.

I'm not quite as happy with the word "anonymity" though, because I think that our identities in SL are not truly anonymous but rather pseudonymous: I don't know the RL name of the person behind the SL avatar "Agatha Macbeth," but after talking to her for half a year, I feel that I know that person quite well.

We are not blank pages. We have identities in SL, we have reputations and histories and connections here. I'll expand on this idea later.

* I'm a bit uncomfortable with "escapism," but that may be just a question of vocabulary.

Augmentationism

Dusan Writer wrote a really interesting piece about the direction that the Lindens seem to be taking SL: integrating it into our offworld-but-still-digital real lives. I find this direction really worrying, because I do not wish to have my lives commingled in this way. There are some people offworld whom I tell about my time in SL, just as there are some people inworld who have also met my meat avatar, but that's as far as it goes. Right now, I control who knows what about me, and I wish it to stay that way. The Lindens' new plan feels like it will take that out of my hands.

Augmentationism is one of a set of words describing people's opinions (or opinion-driven actions) about what SL is for. Augmentationists believe that so-called real life is the only valid reality, that anything that happens outside of RL cannot possibly be other than a more-or-less meretricious form of entertainment. Hence they believe that SL exists to enrich and enhance our offworld lives. They believe that SL has no separate existence, no culture of its own, and no community.

I suppose there's no reason why an augmentationist could not have a differently-gendered avatar or be another species, but those whom I have met tend to believe that these things are false, morally wrong. Some even reproduce their RL appearance in their avatar (though these too are often suspiciously tall and fit and beautiful).

(The opposite of augmentationism is immersionism, but that's a subject for another day.)

Game

1. Second Life is a game, according to Linden Labs, because that places it in the category of "online entertainment" for taxation and general legal purposes.

2. Second Life is not a game, according to almost everyone who visits it regularly. I have never heard a SL resident refer to it as a game or an entertainment.

Discuss.

Gender

"OMG most of the women avs in SL are males in RL."

For starters, that is not true, at least not everywhere. Almost all of the women who attend Kira and Play as Being are also female in RL, for example — and they are a third to half of the attendees at most events.

But the larger question is, why does it matter? Why do people not say "OMG did you know that almost all of the lions in SL are human in RL?"

Backformation

Taking skills learned in Second Life into RL.

Example: one of Rivka's associates, a transwoman, who studied female AOs and animations here for tips on how to appear more womanly in RL.

Embodiment

This is the key concept: that the pixels on screen are me, that what they do is happening to me.

Strong or weak embodiment.

"/me reaches across the table and takes your hand"