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.

Julian Dibbell’s Play Money: Games Being Played

For EDT 691, Research In Virtual Worlds, I’ve been asked to do a writeup for discussion of Parts 5-8 of Julian Dibbell’s Play Money: Or, How I Quit My Day Job and Mad Millions Trading Virtual Loot:

Game designer Sid Meier famously defined games as “a series of interesting choices.” With that definition in mind, Dibbell identifies in Parts 5-8 of Play Money a number of games, some of which he plays and some of which he observes being played around him. Let’s take a look at those games and the “interesting choices” involved:

1. The Economy Game. This is of course the game that Play Money is ostensibly about: a meta-game of economics that players created around the actual game of Ultima Online. As Dibbell gets deeper and deeper into his personal economic game (since it has a clearly defined goal and end state, it’s much more of a “game” for traditional theorists than the MMO that enables it, ironically), he comes to discover that there isn’t one economic game, but a number of very different ones.

These games can be ranked in order of abstraction, or degrees of distance from the core game of UO. Dibbell begins by acting as a merchant within the context of the fictional UO world: running a mall, buying low and selling high. The story of Play Money through the middle of the narrative is one of Dibbell’s increasing abstraction from the game, until he finds himself fully occupied in currency speculation and looking down upon the people still engaged in the concrete game that first attracted him.

Questions: What are the similarities and differences between the rules, values and goals of the various economic games played around UO and those played around “RL”?  What draws (some) people to find pleasure, or compulsion, in ever more abstract activities, and what are the implications of that phenomenon for games studies, and games in education?

2. Cops and Robbers: One of the most lol-worthy moments of an entertaining book was Dibbell’s narration of Rich Thurman’s scheme to hook his botnet up to the A.L.I.C.E chatbot, to confound corporate investigators. Yet Dibbell defines his victory condition as a legitimate, negotiated and accepted settlement with the cops, reporting his income to the IRS. Dibbell is fascinated by, drawn to, and eventually joins, the robbers: the “series of interesting choices” in his gameplay generates a consistent arc towards the Robbers – yet he retains an end state of being accepted by the Cops.

Questions: is Cops & Robbers a particularly American game? Do we love and yearn to be the outlaw more than other cultures? Yet our legendary outlaws, like Dibbell, yearn for legitimacy – even if they have to buy it. What are the implications of this ambivalence for faction design in games? For the creation and regulation of communities, digital and physical?

3. The Turing Test: The Turing Test is much more interesting than a programming challenge involving natural-language generation. It’s a means for thinking about the social role of virtuality, and about the nature of the human.

Turing described his test towards the end of an era when the Machine was the epitome of the Human: Taylorism in the workplace sought to transform the human into an automaton; military culture had, in the aftermath of World War I, transformed from glorifying the passionate individual into the mass army, the pilot as the extension of the bomber, and would soon reach its apotheosis in a hyper-rationality which transcended into pure nonsense, as depicted in Dr. Strangelove.

Yet, Turing’s test was intended to help create a machine to take on just those characteristics that humanity sought to shed: personal warmth, psychological insight, and sociability. Like Cops and Robbers, The Turing Test derives its play appeal from antinomies.

The Turing Test, though, was initially a game playing off a fundamental antinomy, and in that form may be one of the most widely played games on the internet: that between male and female.

Dibbell, like many people, finds a deep issue raised by the internet to be that of authenticity, an issue at the heart of The Turing Test. He ultimately concludes, “it’s a waste of precious time and creativity to wonder whether the model is the same, on some deep, ontological level as what it simulates. The question, rather, is whether it’s the same in every way that matters for the purposes at hand.”

Questions: Now we’ve reached the question at the core of virtual and games studies. Is the model the same for the purposes at hand? If not, is it better, worse, or another set of playful antinomies? What can the model teach us that is obscured by the original? Is there, ultimately online, any reason to privilege the original at all, or is it simply Life 1.0, a buggy beta to be patched, upgraded, and eventually replaced whole?

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.

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.

KOTOR Day 2.5: Race and Sexual Orientation

I should be working through the excruciating reading for another class, but found my mind drifting to elaborate a point I made in passing in my last post, about KOTOR’s NPCs. It’s not so much that the NPCs are racially diverse, as that there are a large number of visible Black and Hispanic characters. At the same time, the NPCs strongly reinforce gender stereotypes and heteronormativity, in ways that could easily and subtly have been avoided.

Black and Hispanic NPCs, with a broad range of accents, are prominent on KOTOR’s first planet, Taris, across the three economic/cultural zones. One of the first encountered is Zelka Forn, an older doctor with a Midwestern accent, who’s secretly running a hospice for critically wounded Republic soldiers, and seeking to develop a plague vaccine. Another is the “Equipment Emporium” merchant, Kebla Yurt (I love the names!) a woman with a honey-sweet New Orleans accent.

The Black and Hispanic NPCs tend to all be positive characters, while the obnoxious Upper City snobs, anti-alien street preachers and gangsters tend heavily to white. After a while I felt the casting wasn’t race-neutral, but was intended to support the air of bigotry and class stratification on Taris.

Oddly though, Asian characters are virtually un-represented: I don’t think I’ve seen any. One Nordic woman, one of the dueling ring champions, rounds out the mix.

Gender in KOTOR is shaping up to be interesting. Player characters can choose either gender, with no effect on stats. However, several NPC encounters have a gender/sexual orientation dimension, and some mixed things seem to be going on with the gender-casting of NPCs (I briefly glanced at a spoiler that suggested there’s an endgame issue related to gender, but I’m working not to spoil myself).

Taris seems to be fairly traditional in its sex roles. The women in the cantinas are dancers or molls; the gangsters uniformly male. One assassin and one duelist, though, are female, and both quite tough (I haven’t successfully collected the bounty on the assassin -she’s rated a level 8 or so, and I just dinged level 5).

One NPC encounter had me baffled till I read the walkthrough description. There’s a disaffected junior Sith soldier in the Upper City cantina. I’m trying to develop my Persuasion, so I chatted her up, thinking I might be able to get her to turn coat, or sneak me into the Sith base. Across the bar from her is a more senior male Sith officer, not at all disaffected.

When I came back to the cantina later, both were gone. The walkthrough explains that there are three ways to get into a party in the Lower City for a quest objective. One, the one I took, is just to crash the place. But two other ways are by being hit on by the Sith: only male player characters can get an invitation from the woman, and only females from the male officer.

*pause* *blink*

Why?

As I’ve mentioned, NPC encounters offer as many as six dialog choices. Why not offer “[Persuade] Flirt with Sith” as an option for both, regardless of player character gender? Frankly (grabbing a pair of media slash goggles that’re always lying around here somewhere), neither struck me as straight in the first place: the bored recruit definitely gave off the “I’ll do anything” vibe, and the officer, in typical Sith/Imperial fashion, seemed like a lintbrush would be his partner of choice. :p

So why *code in* heteronormative flirtation?

Well, because There Are No Gays In Star Wars. To be fair, one, Bioware backed down, and two, there probably isn’t a bigger, nastier ball of flamebait than the discussion of sexual orientation, and the use of terms for orientation, in games and by gamers.

Still, it would have been deeply screwed up to create a game mechanic where only Black player characters could get friendly treatment from the doctor (my Catience looks mixed-race – would she get a 10% discount, maybe?), so why this?

Code is law, it doesn’t have to be discriminatory law….