In learning how to interact in
online communities, people also came to realize that there was no way for
anyone to tell if you were telling the complete truth about yourself, or if you
were lying from the day you set your digital feet into this anonymous world. It was easy to pretend to be someone else, or
to even just shuffle around your own personality and amplify aspects of it
online that might be lost in regular, day-to-day life. Many children love to ‘play pretend,’ and
online, anyone could experience that fun and freedom again.
In regular, everyday life, people do not normally take the chance to assert
personality traits different from their established patterns of living. It is too risky—to pretend to be other than
you are could cause humiliation, or the loss of important social ties,
rejection by friends and family. Fortunately,
role-playing, especially role-playing online, negates all those risks. You are only who you say you are, without the
risk of losing social status in your everyday life. The online gaming MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons)
that grew out of in-person role-playing games such as Dungeons and Dragons have a distinct and immutable advantage over
face-to-face gaming: the physical aspect is missing—the normal way in which
someone’s appearance influences our awareness of them, even though we may try
to overlook the physical and focus purely on the mind, does not influence our
interaction with that player. It is very
difficult, in a face-to-face setting, to discount something physical that we
find distasteful or attractive about someone, especially if we have just met
them to play an elaborate game. (Turkle,
1995:180-192)
Playing a character in a MUD is different from simply playing a computer
game. In a MUD, what you do matters—you
character’s actions effect other characters, who are the extension into the
MUD’s world of another person. MUDs are
more real than the simple pixels of a computer game. One can easily be caught up in the drama of
the MUD world: some people live their physical lives side-by-side with their
online lives. People who work at a
computer all day, or have lifestyles conducive to quick breaks but a lot of
time spent close to the computer (such as college students with high-speed
internet connections) will simply let the MUD environment run in a background
window while they do their other work. When
they have time, they can be their other persona, interacting online in the
world of the MUD. (Rheingold, 2000:149;
Turkle, 1995:186-192). Sherry Turkle
likens this ability to live parallel lives, this variety, to the intellectual
culture she encountered while living in Paris
in the 1960s and 1970s, which was heavily influenced by the philosophy of
Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deluze and Felix Guattari. (Turkle, 1995:14-15)
Turkle’s interpretation of this philosophy is that ‘each of us is a
multiplicity of partisan fragments…desiring connections.’ (Turkle, 1995:14) In other words, each of our facets yearns to
connect with other people. Online, you
can play a part of yourself, one that may lie dormant through your physical
life.
In their book Affairs of the Net,
Dr. Adamse and Dr. Motta relate the story of Sharon, a 32-year-old housewife in
Kansas, who
used the internet as a way to reach out and meet people. She also used it to explore an aspect of her
sexuality that she had been suppressing for most of her life. Online, Sharon
was able to connect with other people who shared her interests in BDSM
(Bondage, Discipline and Sadomasochism) without feeling as if she was
endangering her marriage or her reputation in her Midwestern town. It was safe physically, as well. If at any point she did not like the way the
fantasy situation was going, she could log off and still be unharmed, at home. The ability to chat with others who also
shared her interests was a great relief, a panacea for her dejection. She was eventually able to express her hidden
characteristic to her husband, without having to say a word to him: she let him
watch her chat in a BDSM room, revealing her stifled desires to her husband
with little embarrassment. (Adamse and
Motta, 1996:1; 20-21)
MUDs are an opportunity for people who may never have even considered
going on the stage to encounter some of the layers of self that actors are
taught to find to play a part. I was
taught in acting school that every character’s attributes can be found in
yourself by simply shuffling the deck of your own personality and finding their
strengths and weaknesses within yourself.
MUDs have the added advantage of being open to all: there are no
auditions and no physical restraints. You
are in control of the role you have in the scenario, and you write your own
dialogue in this piece of improvisational theatre. Sometimes, an online game will have general
rules and guidelines. Some MUDs require
online credit or online money to travel through the world so that your
character can gain experience and learn new skills. In the online game EverQuest, users choose characters to play, and based on the race
of the character (Elf, Dwarf, etc.) you are inserted into the home area of that
race. As the game requires players to
gain experience and seek the help of others to travel far from their ‘home’
environment, they become close at first mainly with others who have chosen to
play the same kind of character, and will band together in ‘guilds’ with them
to go and explore other aspects of the MUD, to meet other kinds of characters,
gain experience through killing monsters, and earn online money to use in the
MUD. (Haycot and Wesp, 2004)
Many players become very invested in the welfare of their online personas. What happens in the MUD is emotionally real,
as it has an effect on these real people.
What happens, then, when your online persona is killed in the MUD? Howard Rheingold explains the feeling of loss
as ‘gutting.’ (Rheingold, 2000:160) He quotes Richard Bartle, community-creator
of an early MUD to explain further:
Losing your persona in a game is terrible. It's the worst thing that can happen to you
and people really get put up about it.
It’s not ‘Oh, I’ve just lost all
that work and all that time and effort.’
It’s ‘I’ve just died, this is terrible!
Oh my God, I’m dead! Empty!’ (Rheingold, 2000:160)
Not only can you create multiple characters to play online, but you can
also construct buildings and landscapes, objects and wardrobes, all to your own
liking, in text. Some people (especially
college students living in dorms) prefer to think of the living spaces they
create for themselves online as their home: they are able to make their online
home more comfortable and lavish than their physical home, and are able to
better control their environment online than they are in the world where they
keep their computer. (Turkle, 1995:21;
193-194) Imagination and a facility for
description are definite assets in the worlds of MUDs, for once you have
created something in the text of the MUD, it remains and can be experienced and
explored by other users, even if you are not online. For others, it is simply a matter of being
able to find your creations, and having the skills to interact with them.
As I learned while studying Early Childhood Education, the noted Swiss
psychologist, Jean Piaget (1896-1980) found that young children learn best
through exploration of the world, and through trial and error, by testing their
own theories and discovering how things work through observation. Learning by rote has little to no meaning for
them, as it also does not for many older people. For example, to learn another language well
it is best to travel somewhere to surround yourself with that language, instead
of trying to memorize a handy list of phrases to be able to ask people where
the bathroom is, but not be able to understand the response. There is very little meaning to a fact or
rule that is memorized without understanding how it works. Thus, the fact that the structures that any
player sets up in a MUD through description are still there even when the
player has gone offline allow a certain freedom for the new MUD player. Instead of being presented with a long list
of rules they are expected to master before they enter the MUD, players can
enter and are not presented with nothingness, because they don’t know how to
build something permanent of their own yet; they can explore the world in place
and find out where structures are and what they are like, as a guide, should
the player wish to make their own text-building.
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