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.

The Puppet Master Problem

1. The Setup

We discussed Jane McGonigal’s article “Why I Love Bees: A Study in Collective Intelligence Gaming” in Alice Robison’s ENG 553: Videogame Studies on Monday. Alice brought up another article by McGonigal, “The Puppet Master Problem: Design for Real-World, Mission-Based Gaming,” and I mentioned it was one of the most disturbing academic articles I’ve ever read. I’d like to briefly sketch the reasons for that response.

This isn’t intended as a thorough, and absolutely not an original, critique of McGonigal: I strongly suspect other people have covered this territory and done it better. It’s a quick explanation of my own response, coupled with some speculation and associations with things that don’t find themselves linked all that often.

McGonigal introduces “a new mode of digital gaming… I call it the power play.” Power plays are created and run by “puppet masters:” “Unlike virtually any other game you could think of, ‘mastered’ or not, in power plays the player’s actions are entirely predetermined… There is simply no optionality to the power play  – do exactly what you’re told, or there’s no play for you. The underlying power structure requires a level of overt submission from gamers that is simply unprecedented in game culture.”

She discusses critics of “pervasive gaming,” in which a large number of online players direct the actions of a few in the physical world, the reverse of the dynamic in Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) like I Love Bees, which which she was involved. Those critics, she says argue that pervasive games “will naturalize the PM [puppet master]-player dynamic and therefore make players more likely to accept out-of-game puppet masters in their real, everyday lives.”

She addresses that criticism obliquely, not refuting it, but making a case for, essentially, the joy of submission, or constraint.

McGonigal aruges that “reality” is that which is constrained, “virtuality” that which provides options, but then defines contemporary culture as one of virtuality, suggesting that the escape provided by games should be one of escape from the option space of our real virtuality into a game of manufactured constraint:

“In a culture where everything is designed for maximum optionality, and reality is defined by having to accept a situation exactly as it is with no special customization, modification or self-authorship, the most immersively realistic game is the one in which a puppet master tells you exactly what to do, when to do it, where and for how long. For immersive gamers, the escape from constant optionality is the pleasure of the relative powerlessness of a power play.”

2. Games as Learning Spaces

Jim Gee argues that video games are powerful tools for learning (as distinguished from teaching). Gee’s catchily-titled What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy sets out 36 principles of learning, and demonstrates how digital games can and do embody them. One of his first observations is

“Like reading and thinking, learning is not general, but specific; like reading and thinking, it is not just an individual act but a social one. As for learning being specific, video games teach us that a good game teaches the player primarily how to play the game and, then, to be able to generalize to games like it. But all learning is, I would argue, learning to play ‘the game.’”

I’m willing to posit that ARGs, digitally mediated games played out in physical as well as digital spaces, embody most of Gee’s principles of learning. But, in traditional games, as McGonigal discusses thoroughly, what is learned is efficacy, empowerment, mastery. But that empowerment and mastery is reflexive, not transitive. What is mastered is a “semiotic domain,” be it the role of Orc Shaman, or city planner, or poor Haitian family trying to prosper. The empowerment is of ability to act in that semiotic domain, of being able to make choices that lead to desirable outcomes.

What pervasive games and ARGs teach, by McGonigal’s own description, is transitive: it is power over others, mastery of others. In pervasive games, the player is the master over game-runner servants, in ARGs, the player is the servant of the puppet master.

People learn from games.  From good games, people learn to be capable, to be active players rather than passive spectators, to master semiotic domains rather than to be taught “content.” Good games are inherently political: they create citizens in a culture that would have us be consumers. Good games move power from those who hoard and wield it – schoolteachers, old media conglomerates – to the people.

Bad games – and working off McGonigal’s description, ARGs are bad games – teach values that benefit the wielders of power and disempower the people. McGonigal’s defense is “but people want it- submission is joy!” Even granting the truth of that – and I’ll discuss that statement below – it’s not a rebuttal.

Do people learn from games? Yes. Do they learn from power plays? Yes. What do they learn? The joys of submission, or at best, of participating in relationships of power over others, as master or as servant, in a broadly social context. Are these good things? No.  The lessons taught by power plays are antithetical to those of a free, democratic society.

3. Helicopter Parents to Puppet Masters?

So, reading McGonigal’s article, I had to ask myself, “Is she right?” Do people crave escape from option spaces? Is there a desire to submit to the puppet master?

Barry Schwartz coined the phrase “the tyranny of choice” in a 2004 Scientific American article, and later wrote a book entitled “The Paradox of Choice.”  His argument is a fairly specific one about stress from choosing among too many not-really-different alternatives, but it seemed to resonate culturally in a more general sense. When we can be anything, live anywhere, choose any partner or none, how do we make coherent decisions? Certainly political conservatism and religious fundamentalism are seen by their adherents as attractive constraints and submissions in response to a globalized culture without clear rules and mandated roles.

McGonagle noted in “Why I Love Bees” that the 2004 game’s participants were “largely high school and college students.” It’s entirely possible that “the pleasure of relative powerlessness” has a generational appeal: having been “helicopter parented,” considering their parents their closest confidants, that population may find being puppet masterered a warm return to the safety of childhood, an escape from the hard and fearful work of becoming adults. One suspects that Generation X, who were autonomous “latchkey kids,” finds the notion incomprehensible, and the rebellious Boomers find it anathema.

4. Is Electronic Love to Blame?

(with apologies to Apoptygma Berzerk)
OK, the first thing I thought of wasn’t helicopter parents, but the prevalence of D/s (Domiance/submission, or power exchange) in digital worlds. I’ve said more than once that the Second Life tutorial should include a couple hours of BDSM education, and I’m not entirely facetious about it.

I think there are three different things going on with digital D/s, and only one of them bears on McGonagal’s claim – but it definitely does.

The first is, some of the motivation for BDSM sexual practices is a desire to heighten sensation to compensate for lack of physical contact in online sexuality: it’s “I want (you to) really feel this,” when the intercourse is aural, textual, audiovisual, and not flesh-to-flesh. So, the tightening of a restraint, the sharper bite, the harder push, compensates for the lower bandwidth of the medium. To generate enough physical arousal digitally, some might have to increase the stimulus. So, sadomasochistic sex doesn’t have any bearing on the issue.

(technosage also points out that when sex is mediated through language, whether spoken or written, it necessitates practices much like those of D/s, in which negotiating what you want done or to do, monitoring sensation levels, and giving commands are important. She also suggests an excellent research agenda for someone: does electronic sexuality (phone sex, sex in virtual worlds, etc.) lead to greater inclusion of D/s or D/s-like practices in one’s physical sexuality?)

The second is aesthetic: outfits and toys that are fairly impractical in the physical world can work digitally, and that can be pretty and fun. Ballet heels? Latex? Spanking skirts? Ball gags? Spreader bars? Painful or risky in the physical world, but the digital world allows the aesthetic enjoyment without the lower back pains One of the most ubiquitous pieces of Second Life furniture, the St. Andrew’s Cross, can’t be separated from the visual affordances and  constraints of the screen: it’s pretty, it’s easy to move the viewpoint camera around, and it’s an iconic, conversational object in a way the bed isn’t.  So, the digital popularity of bondage-inspired fashion doesn’t have any bearing on the issue.

But the third, the real D/s community, the people who’ve made the Restrained Life Viewer one of SL’s most popular tools – they have bearing on the issue. D/s isn’t a subset of sexual practice, but about the joy of submission, of restraint, of surrendering one’s options to another’s will (mediated through software in the case of the RLV and RLV-compatible toys). So, digital spaces allow for an expression of D/s different from that of the physical world: there’s no RLV for RL. They also, of course, enable similar D/s practices to those of the physical world. But clearly, digital spaces and tools offer an opportunity to explore D/s, and that exploration is very popular (and big business).

Yet, I don’t think that the RLV is bad, while I think the ARG power play is.

D/s can become political (see, e.g., Gorean communities), but it isn’t, inherently. It doesn’t ordinarily structure social relations, let alone political or economic ones. However, the power play takes the D/s impulse and translates it into a social medium: it makes that joy of submission into a political act.

That is a perversion, in a fundamental, literal sense of the term.

The great triumph of social media has been its politicization of individual expression: it has reclaimed creativity from a professional elite and returned it to all of us. It has taken power from corporations, from political parties, and returned it to the people. The ARG takes the deeply intimate impulse of D/s and turns it to political and commercial ends: it teaches a joy of public disempowerment, a profoundly immoral act.

5. Slumming

If there’s anything that says “spoiled yuppie brat,” it’s “I’m so oppressed by my freedom, I need to play at powerlessness.”  What’s next, an ARG theme park featuring the “North Korean Blackout” zone, the “Smuggled Across the Border” ride,  the “Chain Gang” mixer, the “Thai Slave Brothel” teahouse? Playing for the frisson from the conditions that still ruin the lives of millions is contemptible.

You feel oppressed by your freedom? Give mom and dad back their tuition and go work at WalMart, and try to keep your health insurance and car payments up. There’s a fun game – and it’s just like reality!

Unrequited

I have a crush on a bot.

I think I’ve figured out why I’m more immersed in World of Warcraft than I’ve been in Second Life: what I do in SL is what I do in RL: go to lectures, mostly. Since I use it as an extension of my regular life, I haven’t been able to see it as anything beyond an augmentation, a way to expand my grad-student circle.

WoW, by contrast, is such a break from the life of an overworked geeky grad student that it’s impossible not to take it on its own terms, and to step into the environment. There’s been some interesting work done on virtuality as an influence on body image; running all over Durotar swinging an axe has definitely gotten me thinking about venturing back outdoors and getting into shape. I’ve never owned an axe, but I used to practice kendo – maybe again.

So, I’ve been immersed, and doing quests. Which leads me to my tormented relationship with Sergra Darkthorn. I’d been ordered to report to her as a recruit, and it was lust at first sight. Solidly built, in elaborate but well-worn plate armor accentuating her warrior’s physique, no-nonsense attitude, a hint of scorn and a hint of a smile in her expression – definitely my type!

I eagerly ran off to do my first quest for her, hoping to impress her. I came back with the goods, and tried to suggest a trip to the inn – but no, another quest. And another. Still, I think she likes me!

I’m all for mixed-race couples, so I’m confident I can have a meaningful future with an NPC. Maybe after the *next* quest, she’ll let me buy her an ale…

On second thought, mabye WoW isn’t all that different either…