Privilege & Courage 2: Digitally Transgendered

Yesterday I started a short series of posts by introducing two approaches to identity, privacy and social media. One holds that affiliating with an institution obligates a person to only display the institution’s values in crafting their online idenitity. The other doesn’t think the paycheck or affiliation buys conformity outside the job.

I’ve long supported the second, and I said I’ve lived by that. That’s true as far as it’s gone, but I don’t think it’s gone far enough. I’ve got some measure of privilege and social capital, and it’s time to start spending it.

After a year of flailing, long conversations with friends, the reading of books academic and popular, and screwing my own courage to the sticking place, it’s time for me, as a friend once said in a really good criticism of me, “to get some skin in the game.”

Hi, I’m Kas, and I’m digitally transgendered.

What does that mean?  Given a choice, I present online as a woman – and as one very particular look, that’s what I see in the mirror of my mind’s eye. I don’t *hate* wearing a male avatar in RL, but I’d sure like the choice, and I don’t get to have it. So in digital spaces, I’m usually a woman, under something like the name Kaseido Quandry, and something like this look.
It suits me, deeply, and after a year of trying, liking it too much, backlashing and then tiptoeing back again, I’m ready to be out and open about it.

A lot of you know me as Kas. I’m Kas in my guild in WoW. I’m Kas in my work with World2Worlds Inc., a virtual worlds service provider. More of my friends call me Kas than don’t these days.

I’ve done a couple presentations in class where I’ve shown my Kas identity without comment: one on Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, which was full of screenshots of Kas-me. Another on Fallen Earth, same thing. And you know, it’s cool. But it’s time to go beyond “don’t ask, don’t tell.”

I’m going to be chairing a conference in January live in Second Life and in the Great Hall at the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law at ASU, and teaching a semester-long course on virtual worlds with a Second Life component. And I’ve been agonizing over whether to present as girl-Kas or boy-Kas, a look I’ve trotted out a few times during my backlashes (and boy-Kas has always had an odd feel of roleplay about him, in a way girl-Kas doesn’t. That tells me something).

My decision solidified when a friend who identifies as goth told me,

The (delightful) Lady of the Manners makes plain acknowledgement of the fact goths choose to look spooky and weird. While they may not do it for attention, they will get attention and so they can expect many questions. To deny yourself the chance to dress up in the first place, thus avoiding such questioning, is kind of sad. The alternative is to be the sort of person who stands up for themselves, embraces the less-than-ordinary and certainly remains memorable. When you consider the sort of people you’re going to be teaching, many of whom may play female Sin’dorei or even live their secret second life as the opposite gender, not only are you likely to get a sympathetic crowd but maybe one who’ll feel they can open up to you more!

Hell, if it raises so many questions you could even turn it round into an impromptu seminar. Discuss the issue.

I’d been unsure if I wanted to be identified professionally as “gender boy,” concerned that the course message of “law and governance of virtual worlds” would be hijacked by “teacher’s a tranny!” And of  course, generally chicken

But you know, it’s who I am. There’s a *ton* of us in SL, many in high profile corporate jobs. And while ASU is in a very conservative community, well, they can just read my social media policy

Tomorrow, part 3: thinking about the personal today and the political yesterday has synthesized into a research agenda for me, I think.

Immense thanks and gratitude to my three dear friends who’re pioneering the way. I can’t dream of paying you back for your help and support, so I’m going to try to pay it forward.

Fallen Earth: Field Notes 1

I’ve decided to acknowledge that my cyclical frustration with social virtual worlds is in a deep trough, and choose something other than Blue Mars for field observations for EDT 691, Research in Virtual Worlds. I’ve taken on the post-apocalyptic MMO, Fallen Earth.

Sunday morning I read several blog posts in succession that gave the game glowing reviews, leading me to think that it was different enough from World of Warcraft to be intriguing, yet similar enough that some of my experience and skills would transfer. I’m sick to death of Tolkienesque fantasy worlds, and I’ve been actively looking for an MMO in another genre, but have been put off by bad reviews of Champions Online, and found my trial of City of Heroes aesthetically unappealing.

I decided to download the game from Steam rather than ordering disks from Amazon (or, gods forbid, going outside to a store!). I started the download around 10 am, stopped it in the evening to play WoW, and restarted it before bed. The download didn’t complete until early Monday morning, as my computer had gone into hibernation during the process. Then, on setup, it required a patch almost the size of the initial download. I set it to run while I went off to class, and came home to a (supposedly) complete and ready to play game around 9 pm.

Character creation is a huge part of the game experience for me, and will immediately make or break my gameplay. Avatars in Fallen Earth draw on an artistic style similar to that of Dragon Age Origins, sort of “realistically ugly” for the setting. As with that game, bodies aren’t customizable at all, except Fallen Earth allows a choice of height (one forum poster suggested pulling the slider to the lowest setting, to make yourself a smaller target!).

The body types aren’t egregious, but they aren’t great. The male is of fairly average build, the female sort of anorexic, with a hip-to-waist ratio I’ve never seen on an actual human woman, but seems the inevitable default in games. The skin tones are okay, with palettes intended to be “white,” “Asian” and “Black,” and all conventional human tones. Per usual, the Black tones are more “Florida golfer” than “African,” but the Asian ones are quite nice.

There’s a really good, broad range of tattoos and piercings available, which also seems to be a common feature currently.

I was able to recreate my cross-world “Kaseido Quandry” avatar pretty well, while my “older, badass version of my atomic self” rendering came off looking more like mental patient/hospital orderly

The game starts with a sandbox tutorial, with access to full game chat channels, including a default Help channel that’s become general chat despite the GMs’ constant efforts to limit the forum though calls to take general chat elsewhere.

Unfortunately, the very first quest in the tutorial revealed a flaw running throughout Fallen Earth: it drops key files like whoa.

Quests are indicated by a gold rotating biohazard symbol over the questgiver. In the tutorial, you rez in some sort of personal chamber or cell, and can see the symbol over a computer terminal in the next room. The quest is given by voice and text: it’s a woman elsewhere in the facility who says that she’s going to help you escape. She commands you to go to the next terminal and “activate the LifeNet” before proceeding.

There was no next terminal. Across the way was a bank of computers symmetrical to the questgiving one, except for an open space in the middle where the actual quest terminal would be.

So, I looked all over the room, and ran out in the hall, to find a door that wouldn’t open until the LifeNet was active.

I was too embarrassed to ask for help: I thought that failing the “report to” starting quest was the ultimate in noob stupidity. I relogged to see if that might make a difference, but no. I then went to the forums and searched for “LifeNet,” and found that the missing terminal was a bug that could be fixed by running “Perform Complete File Check” from the login screen.

And, sure enough, it found another 3000 files to download. I logged back in to find symmetrical terminals, activated the LifeNet, and was good to go.

It’s *Our* Story: Character & Narrative in Alter Ego, Blue Mars and Dragon Age Origins

I’m not sure how I found Alter Ego, but I spent a few really engrossed hours with it last night. It’s a browser based (also available in Android and iPhone apps) text game, a decision tree covering life choices from birth to death. It’s charming, warm, very immersive, and really delightful. And it provides an interesting perspective on narrative and gameplay, character creation and immersion.

Alter Ego

Alter Ego looks like an iPhone screen, with a branching tree of attractive icons representing family, love, finances, work, health, and so on. Clicking on each icon generates a situation with a choice, that may in turn branch from one to four times. A separate box keeps track of character stats: trustworthiness, happiness, confidence; cash and debt; and a few other things.

And that’s pretty much it. You make choices, choices shape your character, your character shapes the arc of your life. Then you die.

My projective identity (no character names) felt real. I felt her frustrations, her triumphs, her losses – and her death after a healthy old age brought a melancholy completeness: I/she/we didn’t have quite the life I/she/we wanted, but it was rich and full, and very much complete at the end of her days.

It was cathartic, and in a way quite profound. Despite a major rewrite of childhood, her middle age nonetheless looked very much like mine: we’d converged around our core *character* – whether measured by stats or expressed in our choices. That realization gave me an “aha” moment in a way that twenty grand of therapy couldn’t – I lived it and saw it, right there on the screen.

Experiencing it through my projective identity made it real in a way that other means of learning really couldn’: that “alter ego,” that life re-roll, became my story, as much as my own life is (interestingly, WoW Insider ran a column today on “Real Life Character Re-Customization,” addressing something very similar)

A powerful, moving psychological/narrative experience had emerged from some icons and a long list of questions.

Character and Immersion: It Ain’t Graphics

Yesterday saw a bunch of gee-whiz tweets and retweets from the official Blue Mars channels, including a short video of Blue Mars running in panorama on three widescreen monitors.

I didn’t tweet my response, because I wanted to consider it (I’ve been in a “knee-jerk negativity about virtual worlds” phase, and didn’t want to just “bah, humbug” without some thought).  My immediate response was, so what? It’s pretty scenery, and I couldn’t care less. Give me people, give me a UI with effective tools for communication and expression (through text, images and building). What matters is the human world, not pretty reflections off the waves.

I was right. Alter Ego, with no more pretty than some well-designed graphic icons, deeply engaged me for the better part of an evening. Blue Mars, despite my needing to cover the world for a class, hasn’t pulled me back in weeks.

Why?

Realism and immersion aren’t generated by graphics engines, they’re generated by people, real or fictive. This is hardly news to old-time MUDders (I’m not one, but I’ve talked to them extensively), but continues to escape software engineers and too many game designers.

Dragon Age Origins

Another example: I played this week with the Dragon Age Origins character generator.

As Tobold observed, it’s not a character generator, it’s a face generator. As such, it’s really quite good (except, why is it, in game after game, you can make an avvie with nice African features but not African *hair*?).

But, using a D&D-like system, your characters are almost entirely pre-rolled, there’s no way to create a character bio, no real choice of starting talents. And you can’t modify the avvie bodies at all: not only that, the bodies across races and factions are identical aside from height (at least among the humans and elves) – so a human rogue and an elf warrior look pretty much identical below the (choose your length) neck.

So how is it a character generator?

Simple, if you think like a software engineer: it’s all about the visuals, the surface, the code that generates graphics.

Dragon Age Origins encourages you to upload your characters to a social network (an interesting take on the “alone together” phenomenon of people not really playing MMO’s socially – so Dragon Age Origins is the natural next step beyond being able to solo to level cap in WoW: it’s a solo game where you can show off your achievements socially without having to actually play with other people).

But what do you upload? Some largely pre-set stats and a profile icon.

Why not backstory? Why not the output of a little “character generator” like Alter Ego, that indicated how the character might likely behave: are they dishonest, sexually assertive, likely to try talking their way out of a fight first but brutal in finishing it, uninterested in wealth but drawn to power? How much more interesting that would be than the width of my avvie’s nose and the extra point I put in DEX?

It’s *Our* Story

This week I’ve been reading First Person: New Media as Story, Performance and Game, an anthology covering the ludology/narratology dispute in games studies. Ultra-short version? Academic wank and turf wars. Ultra-short re-roll? “Tastes Great!/Less Filling!”  Short version? Ludology stressed games-as-rule-sets, holding in its extreme view that there’s no possible room for narrative or story in games. Narratology basically wanted to read games as just like movies, with player-actors. Yes, that’s unfair, pejorative, and grossly oversimplifying. If you want the full deal, read the book.

What struck me was that both factions were arguing over the head of the player, as it were. Both seemed to be grounded in an auteur model, just arguing over what was being authored, a rule set or a text.

But what all these examples I’ve mentioned here have in common is player authorship of emergent narrative. I wrote a life in Alter Ego, not the very skilled authors of the questions and decision tree. I created, however tentatively, three characters for Dragon Age, not Biosoft. If anything interesting happens in Blue Mars, it won’t be due to the CryEngine, but due to the people.

Here’s another interesting example: there was a consensus the other day that story is irrelevant in boss fights in WoW. I think they’re only half right. I’d say, Blizzard’s story is irrelevant in boss fights, because we’re too busy enacting the events that will figure into our narratives, our guild’s tale of the time we took on the boss. And note – the bloggers weren’t saying that Blizzard’s story is irrelevant -  not at all – but that it’s best gotten from media that do a better job of delivering authored stories: novels, manga or comics. Let each medium do what it does best.

Good designers give us good tools, an engaging setting, and let us get on with living, and then telling, our own stories. Bad designers (and a lot of academics) still think it’s their story.

It’s our story, all of it.

Dreaming in KOTOR

After a class presentation on Monday where I argued that Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic is unethical in the way it creates ethical dilemmas for our player character/projective identity, then limits the player’s responses in ways sometimes deeply frustrating, the game and I clicked at such a deep level that I’ve been dreaming in character extensively every night since.

What changed? I think I’ve achieved some measure of literacy with the adventure-game format, and the game progressed to a phase where it was getting everything right. The basic structure has your adventuring party traveling between planets. The first two have to be taken in fixed order, then you’re free to take the next four in any sequence, leading into a fixed endgame. Since the middle worlds can be taken in any order, they have to be at roughly the same level – so the first one the player encounters will be very hard, the last fairly easy.

The first world I went to completely stymied me on the boss fight, so I re-rolled. By the time I got back there (at the 10 hour rather than 17 hour mark), it was tough but straightforward. The next two worlds I went to were absolutely delightful: story and gameplay integrated smoothly, the visuals were terrific, the challenges just in that “flow” zone of pleasantly frustrating.

One of KOTOR’s interesting mechanics has been the conversation/quest interplay with the NPCs in your party. Each has a backstory (including the hilariously bloodthirsty droid, HK-47). The more you converse with them, the more, obviously, they reveal about themselves – but the conversations also unlock side quests involving their pasts. It’s an interesting solution to the problem of creating strong characters in games.

Some of the character-development quest/conversation arcs work better than others, and in general they’re pretty heavy-handed. Carth’s quest for his son, lost in a war zone as a baby and rumored to be in the Sith Academy, was standard melodramatic fare, but Bastila’s search for her father’s journal and choice whether to keep it or offer it to her hated mother, and the Mandalorian mercenary Canderous’s slow reveal of why he’s come along both felt rich and engaging.

The game’s built around a powerful plot arc involving a quest for the source of the Sith lords’ power and a means to bring them down – and I’m hugely glad I was unspoiled for the plot developments. Last night had me screaming “OMFG!” at a major plot turn, much as I’d seen something being foreshadowed all along.

I think re-rolling was the key element in the depth of my engagement with the game: the choices I made at the game-mechanics level for customizing my player character and party members paid off in much better gameplay, and playing as my constant digital-worlds alter ego, Kaseido Quandry, rather than a generic character, made the ethical choices and plot developments much more personally resonant than if I were playing with a character who wasn’t so strongly my projective identity.

I’m on our last world before the finale now. I’m a little concerned that I’m low-level: I passed up a few side quests, and a lot of the money-making side opportunities, so I’m not in uber-leet gear.

I was just too greedy for the story….

KOTOR: Re-roll, Hour 7

In Alice Robison’s ENG553 Videogame Studies yesterday, we did updates on our gameplay. Just about everyone doing single-player adventure games was frustrated enough that they’d have quit, were they not covering the game for class. Me too: Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic definitely would’ve been in the sell-back bag were it not for class.

I’ve been stuck on a boss fight (the Kashyykk encounter with Calo Nord), and utterly unmotivated to play.  It seems like my criticism that narrative and gameplay aren’t well-integrated in the adventure genre wasn’t an idiosyncratic observation. We’ve also all encountered problems with walkthroughs, which tend to be written by game experts, and not terribly helpful for those of us struggling with our gaming basic-literacy skills.

But, I’m on tap to do a 30 minute academic-conference quality presentation on some aspect of KOTOR next week: and that’s plenty motivation to get back to the game. I knew I wanted to use the “Elise and Her Lover” quest to discuss the interplay between game mechanics and ethics, and that meant re-rolling in order to go through it again for screencaps and textual analysis.

I spent some time last night with the game forums, and found all sorts of goodies. I modified the .ini file to allow direct-save screencaps, which will make pulling shots for my presentation vastly easier than trying to alt-tab and paste while the game’s running. I also enabled windowed running, another huge aid to the documentation process.

My character this time is a mod: I’d been thinking of using a mod to play a non-human, probably a Twi’lek, but somebody’d done a mod to create a face pretty close to my cross-platform “Kaseido Quandry” look. So, this time out I’m a Scout again, but with my standard name and look. It’s a nice treat, happy as I was with the “Catience Winoda” avatar.

And, best of all, there’s a cheat code that disables the constant repeat of that fighter-combat minigame every time you fly between planets! I haven’t enabled any cheats that affect the character’s experience, but I’ll probably play around with some more visual mods.

My re-roll’s been shockingly easier: at 7 hours 40 minutes I’m less than three hours from being caught up with Catience, who’s stuck at the 17 1/2 hour mark. Looks like I have massively increased my literacy, with the specific conventions of the game and with the genre. Now that I have some vague idea how the Wizards of the Coast d20 character design system works, I’m manually leveling my main and the characters in my party, rather than letting the software auto-level party members. I think I’m getting stronger specialization without making anyone too weak to hold their own in the group. We’ll see how the Calo Nord fight goes with this new, improved team.

I’m positioned at the start of the “Elise and Her Lover” quest, all Jedi’d up and ready to go. Not bad for an evening and an afternoon, and it leaves me in good shape for getting the presentation done by Monday, along with a long review paper on Celia Pearce’s Communities of Play by Tuesday.

Tomorrow will probably be a power-read, unless I decide I’m actually having fun with KOTOR this time out, and do my screencapping so I can go on with the gameplay.

Guest Post: Pirate-ette?

I’ve invited my classmate, Julie Ashley, to guest-blog today. She posted this to our class forum, and I enjoyed it so much that I wanted to be able to publicize it to my vast readership (Hi, you two!).

Comment and tell Julie she needs to write more – I’m trying to pull her into the blogoverse!

So, I mentioned in class that I was trying to mod my player character in Pirates! so I could swashbuckle as a woman. Honestly, I was picturing a cross-dressing pirate wench who could fence in a cuirass just like any guy (with only the hint of somewhat flattened breasts). She’d have some other just-under-the-radar pirate chicks on her crew, and they’d keep the male pirate crew around for combined extra muscle, companionship, and stud stable. Maybe after a long day of dancing in drag with governors’ daughters, terrorizing and plundering trade ships, escorting new governors to Caribbean islands, and digging up buried treasure, my pirate would take off her armor and just be a girl with the other crossdressing chicks on her girl.

In a game with a single avatar option — a blue-eyed pirate guy with brown hair in a ponytail — I felt like I was crossdressing already. An important minigame consists of wooing and dancing with governors’ daughters, who in turn provide you with rescue quests, handy gifts, and treasure maps of lost Incan/Aztec/Mayan cities. Further, one category on your game “status” scorecard consists of points earned for courting, rescuing, and marrying a daughter. So unless the game added the option of plain, attractive, and beautiful governors’ sons rather than governors’ daughters (and then let each player order her or his own gender choice from a sort of in-game menu), I would be forced to crossdress anyhow if my avatar was female.

If the broken links can be believed, several female pirate mods USED to be available. Now just a single mod seems to be. The mod did make me a female pirate — clearly by grafting a “beautiful” governor’s daughter or barmaid’s head and buxom torso onto the male pirate’s lower body. At certain angles and points in the action, you just can’t miss my she-pirate’s package. Never fails to amuse. One other weird glitch: if your player character has acquired the special brace of pistols, these do not appear in the she-pirate’s hands. Instead, she swoops her hands out of the holsters to reveal….curled fingers, which, miraculously manage to shoot a bullet into her opponent’s right shoulder. Fingers like that could come in handy!

Further, the female pirate only shows up when I play the fencing mini-game. Since she’s got very low and burgeoning cleavage, this seems an inopportune time to whip off the boy-costume. (Never mind that her face suddenly changes into a totally different and female face during those fencing scenes too.) At all other times, I’m still the guy pirate and I sort of need a shave. I tell my game-self that the she-pirate is crazy brilliant to reveal her true assets at just the physically-vulnerable moment of battle: she’s not just risking a cutlass slash to that milky white animated skin; she’s actually using that cleavage to confound and distract her male opponents. (Would you really stab a girl, enemy captain? Haven’t seen anything like this since you left port, have you, poor sucker?)

I would love to be a rakishly sensitive crossdresser when I woo the governor’s daughters, but in those and all of my non-fencing moments, I’m still the same-old humdrum male pirate. Not nearly the mod of my swashbuckling dreams. Makes me wish I knew how to mod it myself. I can’t believe no one’s done it right yet! Undoubtably, this is how most modders start….

But I still want to play more than I want to muck around with mods and cheats. Just moved up to the third and middle difficulty level. Made me a fresh pirate named him/her Orlando in honor of V. Woolf’s gender-bender. I’m trying a new strategy this time, sacking lots more cities and pursuing quests earlier in my career. I’ll just have to plunder as a she-male for another three dozen hours or so.

Harshing Your Squee

We had a rare treat yesterday in Alice Robison’s ENG 553: Videogame Studies: Jim Gee dropped in for an hour and a half chat.

Jim ranged from the politics of healthcare in the US, to the lack of innovation in distance education, to the wild success of the American school system in turning out docile, uncritical service workers. A couple student questions, including one of mine, turned on his concept of “affinity spaces,” as distinct from another popular term in the literature, “communities of practice.”

He stressed that affinity spaces are purposeful communities, where, paraphrasing, other issues are left at the door. He gave the example of a pickup group in World of Warcraft, where you don’t care if the other player is a good person, or shares your opinions and values, but only on how well they play their class. He also said that internet-based affinity spaces give you the opportunity to set aside your physical-world signifiers like race, gender and class, but implied that it’s more than an opportunity, rather more of a mandate, since those things are seen as extraneous to the purpose of the space.

I didn’t, and don’t, buy it, but I didn’t have a ready and compelling critique. Reading Miguel Sicart’s The Ethics of Computer Games today, I came across a useful tool to hang a critique on.

Sicart (the book is adapted from his PhD dissertation in philosophy, so the language is difficult – though he’s amazingly clear for a philosopher) presents a model called the “ludic hermenuetic circle” (warned you!). Unfortunately, the diagram isn’t online, and my scanner’s not working, so bear with me here…

One of Sicart’s main points is that the player of a game isn’t some being that popped into existence at the login screen: they bring a lifetime of experience, both in games and in the world, and they bring their culture(s). What the diagram conveys is that the gameplay is an interaction of the affordances and constraints of the game, the player’s experiences, the game community and the player’s involvement with it, and the player’s culture and values. It’s all a whole.

So, for example, when I’m playing Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, my play experience is directly informed not just by what’s on the software disc, but by my knowledge of the Star Wars saga, my experience as someone who sucks at console shooters, my mouseless laptop, and my own history of thinking about, and experiencing, matters of race, gender and sexuality. Your play experience will have some commonalities and some differences.

Now, say I enter into an active community of KOTOR players. Gee’s formulation would have me check my personal history, values and culture at the door.

Really?

No, not really.

What this view means in practice (though I’m sure it’s not Gee’s intentional formuluation – I’ll come back to issues of intentionality either below or in a later post) is, “check your *minority* attitudes at the door.”

Sicart makes an outstanding point about game culture:

If the community is comprised exclusively of those who can afford to log onto the Internet regularly and/or spend vast amounts of time participating in the common creation of the game culture, then there may be silent web-less majorities that do not follow the values of the community, thus distorting the values of the game as they can be perceivedd. That is, the values of the game as deduced from its communtiy may only be the values of an elite group with time and technical knowledge and capacities.

There’s a concept of “reflexive” and “projective” users, that’s useful here (from Christina Lindsay’s “From The Shadows” in How Users Matter, Oudshoorn and Pinch, eds.): designers often design for other people just like them – that’s the reflexive user. They also have views, maybe broader and more nuanced, of who their users are – that’s the projective user. These categories are often narrower, and sometimes have very little relation to, the actual users.

So, in the KOTOR case, the projective users of the game were experienced Xbox players. Then the game was ported to PC, and actual users came in who weren’t familiar with or skilled at console games – and those mingames that formed gates for console players became barriers for people without console skills. Actual users varied from projective users, and they found problems the designers never intended.

Now, the same thing happens with race, gender, sexuality and class.  One of the things happening on the Blue Mars forums was actual users confronting the designers’ decisions to make avatars look like the developers’ reflexive users: young white and Asian guys, with limited and really fake opportunities to present oneself as female, conservative, older, of African ancestry.

Now, there are three responses. One, “STFU and play,” was taken by a developer in a recent post (with a terrific critique by Cuppycake here). This view says that your identity is irrelevant to the play experience. But if it was irrelevant, then the designers would happily play gay, shapeless African women. That doesn’t happen. So what they actually mean is, your *minority* identity is irrelevant to our *majority* creation – *your* identity doesn’t matter, but *mine* does.

The second is I think what Gee is getting at, though I may be wrong. “Look, here’s your chance to pass as a buff, high status straight white guy! Lucky you!” Despite my sarcasm, there’s some real value here. People *can* set aside their low-status signifiers and be judged on the merits of their play, commentary or creations, and that’s of enormous value. However, there’s a price, and that price is being seen as a projective user, rather than as an actual user.

I think this is where a lot of racewank comes from, though it’s a subject I’m very weak on. In a space where nobody has signfiers, most everybody assumes most everyone belongs to the projective users, to the majority. And then somebody says something about a minority that they’d never say if they thought there actually were minorities present, and a flame war starts.

So “no signifiers” *never* means “race, gender, sexuality, age, don’t matter.” It means “each of us assumes all the others are members of the majority.” Which is equalizing, but equalizing at the price of people losing their particularity, their history, their culture.

But we *don’t.*

As Sicart says, we’re all embodied players, and we carry our past, our values and our culture with us. We *can’t* check them at the door.

I’m reminded of one of the early Death Knight quests in WoW, where we, as a servant of the Lich King, steal and don the Scarlet courier’s gear – and suddenly all the Scarlets, whom we’re at war with, appear as friendly to us. Sure, I can stand and talk to High General Abbendis in the middle of the Scarlet army and chat with her, safe in my Scarlet disguise. But let me tell you, if I said “HAI GUYS IZ SCOURGE”  I’d get killed on the spot.

That’s the experience of being any sort of minority, cultural or player, in a lot of “affinity spaces.” As long as we’re all Scarlets here, it’s all happy fansquee. But just go and say “I’m really enjoying my undead lifestyle,” and just watch the flame war start!

The third response is that of the actual user who says, “deal with me, respect me, give me the affordances as a minority that you give to the majority.” *You* get an avatar that looks and moves like you – give me one. You get to flirt with the NPCs you find cute, give me the same ability.

Somehow that’s immensely controversial in the community of developers and players who fit the reflexive-user model.

So, when we speak out in affinity spaces, most of us really aren’t there to harsh your squee by bringing nasty real-world politics into your game space. We’re just bringing *ourselves,* just as you do, but want *our* selves to be acknowledged, represented and respected in the space just as *your* selves are.

I want to squee too – but it’s hard to do with a lame-ass avatar!

KOTOR Hour 14: Game, Meta-Game and Projective Identity

I’m back to Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, and finding that the game and meta-game are merging into one examination of motive. One of the lessons of the narrative of KOTOR is that impatience and an urge to rush off to glory lead to the Dark Side. It’s also one of the lessons of its gameplay. Catience Winoda may be on her way to becoming an exemplary Jedi, but I fear I’m opening to the temptations of becoming a Sith … critic! [shudder]

Minigame Lessons

If I weren’t playing KOTOR for class, I’d have abandoned it at the fighter-combat minigame on leaving the planet Taris. At a classmate’s suggestion, I tried the minigame again with a mouse, after failing six times with the laptop touchpad and arrow keys. The game was a *lot* easier with the mouse, and I destroyed all but one of the pursuing fighters in short order… four times. The first three times, a last fighter I could never find destroyed us. I’d committed to ten tries, and I really wasn’t expecting to succeed, but on the tenth try, I got the last fighter, and the game could progress.

On thinking about putting minigames in plot-critical positions, I’ve come to think that it’s worthwhile. Actually playing out major turning points in the game gives a greater feeling of involvement and accomplishment than a boss fight or cutscenes. The first plot-critical one, the swoop race, made me feel like I/Catience really was a hero – and left me finding the rescued Jedi, Bastila, much more annoying than if I hadn’t just risked my neck to free her!

*However,* each one of those games is an opportunity to lose players. Each game makes progress in the game and genre the customer bought dependent on their success in a game genre they never asked for – and may suck at.

A simple solution would be to allow the player to choose a separate difficulty level for the minigame. I might have raised the level on the swoop race, since the posted time of 31 seconds was pretty easy for me to beat. Someone who hates racing games might choose an option that would set the time at, say three minutes

Likewise, I’d have chosen an option for the fighter combat with, say, three instead of 10 fighters, moving like my dead granny on a bad day. Someone else might choose more fighters with a better avoidance pattern and heavier weapons.

At the lowest setting, the minigame would be pretty much a walkthrough – which would allow an uncomfortable player to have the first person experience – and still get on with playing the game they bought.

Jedi Trials

On delivering Bastila to the Jedi, they invited me to train, given the freaky Force visions I’ve had since the beginning. The offer highlighted a problem with the multiple-choice conversation mechanics: while some options remain available despite the order you take them in, some are permanently foreclosed, and there’s no way to know which is which. For example, one of the Jedi masters told me that Bastila had mentioned we’d shared a Force vision the night before. I had four or five response options, one of which was “How did she know I had the vision too?” I chose another response, fully intending to come back to that question – but it never appeared as an option again.

Likewise, later on I was called on to conduct a murder investigation as part of my training, and one of the suspects started with “Do you know who I am?” I answered “No,” to bring him down a peg, but never had the opportunity again for him to tell me who he was.

The training consisted of three trials: the first a call-and-response test that required careful note-taking, the second a Facebook-quiz to help me select which of three Jedi classes I’d choose (Consular, a mix of the fighting type and mind-powers type, focused on mental discipline and balance rather than combat or another class I’m not entirely clear on. The third was to purge a grove of the Dark Side  – which I did by being nice to an emo girl

So now I’m a Jedi, tasked with resolving a feud before it blows up into a gang war, and doing some assorted good deeds I got talked into, including finding some middle aged lady’s missing sex droid (for realz!).

Thoughts on the Nature of Games

I’m finding KOTOR a strange game. I’d been wondering if it even was a game, or an interactive story: I’m definitely constrained in some narrative choices. I’d like to play out my Dark Side alt to see how different the story is, but I get the sense that, like a Disneyland ride, the train pretty much goes down one set of tracks, but I get the chance to manifest different values along the ride.

I think KOTOR is a game, as it presents a series of consequential choices. The consequences seem as much at the meta level as at the game level: I get to witness my choices, and decide whether I am (or am choosing to present as) a kind person, or greedy, or cruel, or gratuitously violent. Catience Winoda as a “projective identity,” to use Jim Gee’s term, is just that – a projection of the moral choices I make as the game continues to offer them to me.

I find, though, that “KOTOR as moral game” leaves me frustrated sometimes with the combat-game elements. I have to fight through packs of horndogs to get to the rescues, the negotiations, the mysteries, and I wish I could just handwave them away. Though I get XP for the puppy fights, it doesn’t feel like enough to be worthwhile, and it doesn’t feel integrated into my goals, like the gang fights on Taris or the battles against Mandalorian hoods on Dantooine. It’s grinding without enough reward to compensate.

I’m also finding Dantooine, unlike Taris, too slow. Faced with a choice of grinding out puppy fights and finishing a stack of side quests before I can get on with the Sith War storyline… I’ve turned to blogging, and may well go into WoW to get things done.

Lesson? If your game is built around a strong and compelling storyline – and KOTOR very much is – everything else, the side quests, the minigames, the trash mobs, can provide frustration, boredom, and an opportunity to quit and not return. I’m not saying game and plot elements have to be relentlessly linear, just relentlessly relevant.

Frustration and the Meta-Game

Projective identity? Much like the presumed-dead Dark Lord Revan, Catience is/I am too eager to get into the fight to faff around with local policing and varmint control. Are we on our way to the Dark Side, or providing a justifiable critique of game structure? Where is the line between the game’s ethical choices and those of the meta-game? When does Revan’s and Catience’s concern for the good of the many over the few blur into Sith/Soviet social engineering at gunpoint? Does my concern with gameplay in the service of narrative indicate an intemperance and impatience that could lead me to the Dark Side?

I have to conclude that the game is playing me, and that “game criticism” is in fact a moral justification for my undue focus on linearity and glory, and indicative of a lack of patience and balance – and is in fact the meta-version of the same phenomenon that opened Revan to the Dark Side. Catience got chided for wanting to prioritize her training over the task of defusing the growing feud, but the warning was aimed more at me. Catience doesn’t like the puppy fights, but is happy with the good-deed-doing: I’m the one booking fittings for my long black cloak.

Darth Kas grows impatient…

Blue Mars, Newly Rezzed

After okaying my avatar creation, I appeared in a slow-to-rez area (in retrospect, I don’t think it ever actually did in the five minutes or so I spent there), populated by three or four guys chatting, and one other female av, who moved through and out quickly.

Conversation came up in a chat window and also as awkwardly-placed bubbles, overlapping the (really neglible) UI. The chat bubbles aren’t as godawful as Google Lively’s were, but I found them too small to read and badly placed. And, *no* user options, so no apparent way to turn them off.

I tried moving around, with pretty much no success, and used one of the destination signs to leave, in hopes of finding some less laggy area to get my bearings in.

On teleporting out of the “home” area – not “orientation” or “welcome,” as neither of those was present – my “Beach City” destination rezzed more quickly than a moderately busy SL sim, and looked *fantastic.* OTOH, it seems likely that my dual-core, 4 gig RAM laptop won’t be up for the challenge, and I’ll need to run BM on my quad core Alienware desktop instead. BM has *no* HUD, no options, no performance tools, but I’m guessing I’m getting about 4 frames per second.

Beach City was significantly less laggy than the home area, though, and I was able to figure out that WASD did enable movement, and more effectively for me than the waypoint system. Guild Wars uses waypoints, and I find them awkward and immersion-breaking, as opposed to using the arrow keys to move steadily and organically -but that’s a matter of personal taste. BM enables both, and I’m glad of the choice.

The default clothing options for women are short denim shorts or a miniskirt; men get jeans. Tops are a nice polo or a tank top, and of course the infamous bikini. The lack of a longer-than-crotch-length option is seriously annoying. The default female walk is ludicrous, more hip-swingy than the most lascivious SL walks, but improbable rather than sexy. One comes away with the feeling that the avatar design team never actually met women, but read about them in Japanese translations of 1960s Bulgarian girly mags.

Eventually I clicked on the “?” button. It delivered a tutorial on walking and running, then popped up again a few minutes later, to deliver a tutorial on camera movement. The information was immensely useful: despite some 15 minutes of trying things on my own, I hadn’t figured out camera movement. Turns out that the camera can be moved, with right-click + mouse drag – which is bloody awkward on a laptop, but at least it’s possible. The “get a random tutorial when the question mark appears” system is odd and unhelpful: had I known what was on offer, I would have clicked much earlier. The third time it appeared it offered “Walking and Running” again: apparently there are only two tutorials. “Chat” and “UI” would be nice.

I saw another av – but had no idea what to do. There’s no hovering name tag, no “click to view” option – clicking sent me running toward where the other av had been, as she ran off at an angle. There doesn’t seem to be an equivalent to the SL profile, or the WoW roleplayer’s addon that serves a similar function. Or, for that matter, the gear check you can get in WoW from clicking on someone’s icon. This is deeply limiting for social interaction, and crippling to professional interaction.

Having gotten the basics of moving and camming down, and seeing nothing readily apparent to do, I logged, ending my first session.

Impressions? I’m reminded of vintage 2007 criticism of SL: lots of gorgeous buildings in deserted regions, because builders hadn’t provided any reason to stay. I don’t think that’s what’s going on in BM, but I do think that a similar mentality is at play: as early SL sim builders were motivated by building, rather than community, they built gorgeous stuff that people would look at once, then leave. Similarly, the BM designers clearly care passionately about what the world looks like, but it seems like avatars and social tools were at the bottom of the development list.

It’s engineer’s mentality, but software doesn’t make a community, social bonds do. And they don’t seem well-supported so far in Blue Mars.

Avatar Creation in Blue Mars

I’ve created my avatar in Blue Mars: Kaseido Quandry for consistency.

Interestingly, I had to choose an avatar gender before downloading the client and being able to see what the default avatars looked like. I’ve found my gender choice is often a factor of whether I can get a distinguished, older-looking male av or not: I’ve honestly never been tremendously happy with my male avs in SL – mostly a function of not being able to find a good skin that’s tanned, with a blond goatee and some weathering:

That’s male-Kaseido in SL, which, meh.

OTOH, Perfect World does a male av I’m really happy with:

Anyway, not knowing what I’d be getting, I chose female, and set myself the challenge of seeing how closely I could match WoW-Kaseido and SL-female-Kaseido:

On starting the Blue Mars avatar creator, I had a choice of default faces. Following a tip from SL blogger GoSpeed Racer, I switched to the Advanced menu, which provides a handful of sliders for each of head, eyes, eyebrows, nose and lips. Oddly, moving the sliders makes the hair fluff out and back, which distracts from the fairly small range of movement in the actual features at issue. Also, oddly, there’s no clear choice of eye color – you get a very dark brown, and that’s that.

There’s a choice of two hairstyles, in blonde, black and reddish brown – “hacked off at chin length with dull scissors” or “Brady Bunch Bangs.” I went with the bangs in blonde.

Some of the slider descriptions were less than obvious – “drawn/pursed” and “puckered/retracted” for lips are still a bit unclear to me, even after playing with them (did I mention the hair-fluffing is distracting?) Likewise, I’m not sure what “heavy/light” for the head does.

By contrast, “Variation” seems to take the current portrait and generate a 3X3 grid, of, well, variations. It helped me get rid of the sort of mean look I hadn’t been able to lose by manipulating the sliders. It’s a fun tool – and somehow managed to get me some lighter lion-golden eyes.

On finishing my face, I was asked to confirm, told that I won’t be able to change my avatar for my first three weeks. I clicked OK, and was taken inworld: there are no customization options for *anything* but the face, a la WoW. And, all the faces look 18-22, though there’s a decent range of skin tones available.

To sum up: the avatar creation tools are midrange for 2003: better than WoW’s, more extensive but distinctly less attractive than Guild Wars, more attractive but less extensive than City of Heroes, and more attractive but less extensive than SL of that era. For 2009? Sub-par and disappointing.

Next up, my first trip inworld.