State of Play 2: Virtual World Identity Panel

New York Law School | October 30, 2004

Moderator: Nick Yee (Stanford University, Terra Nova)

Panelists:
Aaron Delwiche (Trinity University)
Jerry Kang (UCLA School of Law and Georgetown Law Center)
Celia Pearce (California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology)
Neil Gotanda (Western State University College of Law)

Blogger’s note: I would have loved to provide a direct word-for-word transcript of this panel. Personally, I was looking forward to this one the most and it did not disappoint. However, many of the panelists spoke way too fast, even for my l33t typing skillz. I think they wanted to cover as much material as possible within the time constraints given. In any case, I must first offer the disclaimer that this summary includes a great deal of paraphrasing and humbly apologize in advance for any misinterpretations of panelists’ dialogue because of this. I invite the panelists to correct any misinterpretations and to post follow-up thoughts. I do want to go ahead and post even an imperfect summary of the panel as I’d hate for this one to get lost in the shuffle. It was an absolutely fascinating discussion and many extremely important and engaging points were expressed.

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The panel began with opening comments by Nick Yee, including the question: “Is there really anything new about our virtual world identities or do they merely reflect existing constraints, privileges and affiliations from the real world?”

Presentations from Panelists:

Aaron Delwiche

Aaron professed his interest in global youth cultures and virtual environments which he believes have the potential to transgress national boundaries and undermine nationalism. He then shared experiences from his recent case study of Ragnarok Online players in Thailand. He noted that in Thailand game playing is seen as an RL social problem, because it is considered “too addictive” with kids spending too much time in the game. This has led to RL restrictions on the hours of the internet cafes in Thailand.

Aaron discovered that the primary motivation of gamers was social in that the reason they played the game was because they wanted to interact with other people. Not necessarily through online interaction but rather through offline interaction with their friends in the game cafes while playing Ragnarok.

Aaron also discovered that the Ragnarok players in the case study did not use the environment to radically recreate their identities in the virtual world. Thai respondents in the study were indeed baffled by the concept of using online space to become "someone else." This perhaps has something to do with the fact that anonymity doesn’t come into play for Ragnarok players who are participating in the experience with all of their (offline) friends in a RL environment.

As it turns out, Ragnarok players in Thailand are relatively isolated because of the fact that they are unable to communicate with users in other parts of the world. This was obviously quite disappointing to Aaron because he had wanted to observe interactions between different cultures/nations. However, he was heartened by the fact that there was some activity that encouraged the mixing of different local groups in which various preexisting rivalries between schools were set aside during game play.

Aaron closed by noting that virtual worlds' ability to transform the real world is of great importance and the recognized that these worlds can destabilize fixed notions of identities which are in truth much more flexible.

Jerry Kang

Jerry began by explaining how "cyber-race" goes back to the idea of race as a social construction, and outlined a methodology for thinking about race in cognitive terms. Jerry explained that when we see an individual we map them into sets of categories. As soon as you map someone into a category you open up a set of meanings based on that.

He presented 3 models for ways race can be approached in online environments:

1 - Abolition: Attempting to "destroy" race as we know it in America and prevent racial mapping by pursuing a practice of racial anonymity. In essence, creating "raceless" places.

2 - Integration: Recognizing different racial identities and encouraging online interaction. Basically Brown vs. Board of Education brought into virtual world. This is done with the hope that real interaction mediated by cyberspace could decrease instances of racism, and these lessons could then be brought into RL.

3 - Transmutation: People flirting with different identities to destabilized fixed categories. Destabilizing the idea that biology is destiny.

Jerry believes that abolition works best for online marketplaces to combat discrimination. Abolition creates cloaking devices to prevent prejudice and the removal of visible race ensures fair treatment of all customers. In social spaces integration can work to help decrease racial prejudice. However this requires racial authentification. If someone is falsely performing race there should be a way to verify this.

Jerry also pointed out that no one believes they are racist (even when they are). However racism can often be deeply internalized. Psychologists have developed game-like tests to determine internal prejudices that measure reaction times to various faces and words. Results literally indicate that "we all shoot black people faster and miss guns in white people's hands." He believes more positive experiences in virtual worlds and video games can help alter these control processes.

Celia Pearce

Celia logged in live to There for her presentation and spoke through two layers of mediation: 1) her There avatar, Artemesia and 2) through Mary Flanagan, who read Artemisia's chat text aloud to the audience.

She began by speaking from a place within There built by refugees from the game Uru. The players chose There out of a number of other virtual worlds that were considered. They used their new-found home in There to emulate objects from Uru, for example the fountain shown on screen, which is a recreation of a fountain that existed within Uru.

Artemesia also showed a library with books that have links to numerous stories, videos, and slideshows the players have made recording their experiences in Uru. Particularly important are the records of the Last Days of Uru, the period just before the world was shut down. This essentially serves as a historical archive of a virtual society that was in danger of extinction. These players created a kind of "fictive ethnicity" in the game they left. They specifically created artifacts, customs, and language created within a "D'Ni culture" of Uru. Examples of cultural artifacts of language include a word "shora" which means "peace" and an ethnic garment called "yeesha."

In RL, the majority of these players are women in their 50’s who began as Myst fans (solo players), many of whom identify as "shy." When Uru went online they "burst forth" into this multiplayer instantiation of the game and formed a very powerful bond as a result. When interviewing players they particularly cite their shared values which include puzzle solving, anti-competition and helpfulness. There are about 300 people in this group and a few new ones have joined since they came into There. They have been in There for 6 months now and in that time the size of their group has not waned, even when the server code was released and they are able to host their own Uru servers.

Neil Gotanda

Neil commented that his presentation would essentially be following up on TL Taylor's presentation in the "The Culture of Play" panel earlier in the day, by focusing more specifically on the distinction between pleasure and play.

Neil noted that racialization does take place in virtual reality and that he would be using Marxist political theory to provide context. His work draws on the work of Anthony Farley, author of "The Black Body as Fetish Object." [Oregon Law Review 76 (Fall 1997) (Symposium: Citizenship and its Discontents: Centering the Immigrant in the Inter/National Imagination): 457-535.] in which Farley argues that race is pleasure, specifically a form of "white pleasure."

Neil discussed work on the comparative racialization (in RL) of Asian-Americans and African-Americans. For Asian-Americans there is a racialization process comparable to black/white racialization. There is a history of bodies/types used to racialize various Asian-Americans, African-Americans and European immigrants, including how various European immigrants eventually became placed into the category of "white."

Next Neil discussed the transition to "races" within MMORPGs: elves, dwarves, etc. and noted that we have the ability to create racialized bodies in cyberspace. This takes place in the realm of consumption (bringing Marxist theory in here). They develop economies of pleasure. Racing is a form of pleasure – "Race is the preeminent pleasure of our time." It's also important to realize that not all bodily pleasures are sexual. People can create pleasures out of very unusual things – race is one of those things. An S/M element comes into play during the process by which one man tries to transform the other through his will.

Neil noted that in the "races" of Final Fantasy 9, the differences of the bodies allow denial of racist structures. He also viewed the Trader Malachi incident as a case in which the developer is a participant in taking pleasure from the creation of a character who subordinates women. And some players may actually take pleasure in performing the masochist part of this scenario as well.

Inter-Panel Q&A:

This part of the panel involved the moderator (Nick Yee) asking panelists various questions, following up on content discussed in the presentations.

Question 1:
Nick shared Ragnarok Online’s policy against "gender bending." In Ragnarok, when you sign up they include a question asking players to identify gender along with billing address, credit card, etc. Then when they proceed to the avatar creation stage, they discover that they are only allowed to create characters in that gender in order to "avoid role playing related conflict." Do you think people should be allowed to perform other roles?

Aaron: it’s a bad thing, in line with their localization policies as well.

Artemesia/Celia: In There, there was a lot of explicitly transgender activity, there is a whole TG community and they value the ability to experiment in this area. It’s particularly amusing when they use voice.

Jerry: In certain cases you want racial authentification, but in other places you might be perfectly fine….my goal is to create a diversity of places.

Neil: This is a pleasure economy, and therefore I read the effort to prevent TG participation to be a homophobic reaction to the pleasures derived from this type of activity and as laziness on the part of the operator.

Artemesia/Celia: Kind of a tangent, but age is an issue as well. When I first came to There it was very common for males 14 years or so to pretend to be adults and hit on women. Exactly the opposite of the anxiety most people have that adults will exploit children sexually. Also, the Uru people have told me that one of their favorite things about Uru was that they could determine their age as older women they don’t like being forced into the younger avatar form that There requires.

Question 2:
For a long while female avatars could weave canvas and linen faster and males could mine faster in ATITD. What do you think of gender based advantages?

Aaron: Personally uncomfortable with hardcoding those assumptions of gender, but not for elves/dwarves.

Artemesia/Celia: I have spoken with young males and they tell me 2 things about playing female characters. One, they get twinked a lot more and the other is they experience sexual harassment. Most of them find this latter experience educational and useful and it affects their behavior playing male characters

Jerry: Making the claim of being historically accurate doesn’t work in ATITD because you’re playing in English etc. Grand Theft Auto also claims to show realism – in some sense it’s accurate to say that, however we have to recognize that if you believe we are what we eat, in terms of consuming visual imagery, then these things are being cached in our heads. This is ultimately deeply morally negligent.

Neil: In the pleasure economy there are multiple economies going on…pleasure is derived by the males in the masochistic pleasure of being sexually harassed.

Artemesia/Celia: I think that one thing people don’t talk about much is the gendered aspect of the play mechanics. I think it’s very significant that the Uru group is anti competition and is primarily female. They advocate a cooperative style of gameplay.

Question 3:
Regarding the architecture of these environments--- are there identity shaping mechanisms that developers absolutely should or should not build into these worlds?

Aaron: This is a decision that should be shaped/measured by the developers. It has to be negotiated to a certain extent by the players and developers.

Artemesia/Celia: Among immigrant communities in There, there is a tendency to carry over avatars from other games. Sometimes they look much like the real person but they go to great ends to replicate their identities across game worlds. This game also has a profile feature that lets people put a lot of info about themselves and most people put in some personal information. I get the feeling that at least in social worlds people are not role playing per se as they do in Lineage or EverQuest, rather they are playing out alternative aspects of their real personas.

Jerry: I am keenly interesting in importing RL identity into cyberspace and bringing it back out. I like bilateral movement, I want permeability. I’m interested more in social world stuff than social game stuff. Our children will think about this as one aspect of their social lives.

Neil: Reiterating the notion that much of the literature of race theory and feminist theory shows that there are serious consequences of these issues.

Question 4:
Social engineering question: is it possible for the architect of a virtual world to create things that architect social change in the real world?

Jerry: "That is the whole game." I am keenly interested in developing markets for big ticket items to decrease discriminatory impact. There are governmental implications: imagine a "Fed World" where citizens can interact with their government – what would it be like to go in with a character randomizer? This would change social interactions. It's all about the racial schemas in our head. These things lead us to have biased views. How much are we covering ourselves by saying the market dictates these choices? You can't get out of the responsibility that what you're doing is social engineering.

Aaron: One difference between mass media and gaming is that gaming representations are created by many different users, interacting with one another. I am uncomfortable with social engineering on behalf of one or the other. In a fantasy game world we don't need to try and engineer these things, as identity is already being destabilized. We can just catch that wave and those trends will help to destabilize race.

Artemesia/Celia: I think it is a mistake not to realize that all games already are social engineering. Every game has an ideology at its core whether the designers know it or not. So I think it's very interesting for example that Uru which was cooperative and which was about restoring a lost culture resulted in people who were ejected from the game trying to restore their own lost culture. The ideology transferred across game worlds and the values as well. EQ has a very distinct ideology which values competition, elitism and things like that, whereas SL values construction and free speech. I think we have to recognize these mechanisms are in each game from the get-go.

Neil: I agree with Artemesia, these thing are social engineering and call for critiques. The notion that there is a natural market world into which PC regulators are going to intervene ignores the cultural engineering already in place.

Jerry: The Lineage thing that Constance [Steinkuehler] showed us [in the earlier "The Culture of Play" panel] disturbs me to no end. A group of kids wanting to slaughter groups of farmers. Think about what this represents. We hate immigrants who are 'illegal' and yet we hire them to clean up, etc. They support that activity by buying the adena and yet they want to kill them. There are parallels with the situation with the Chinese workers who built the railroads in America and yet experienced extreme forms of racism. This is extremely hypocritical…people find it funny but I find it shocking.

Artemesia/Celia: I agree with Jerry and I think the thing is that we have to critique these ideologies way more than we have been doing because to understand the emergent behavior you also have to look at the ideologies that they arise from and are built into the games. I think it's also key that the Uru people chose There rather than Star Wars Galaxies for example, which was being considered because it was a more flexible environment for their social experiments.

Comments

[Andrew Burton]

1.

Are there Uru refugees in There too? I know they have an island in Second Life.

[Lisa Galarneau]

2.

Absolutely fanstastic summary, Betsy. Thanks so much for posting it.

[Richard Bartle]

3.

Betsy Book>Celia logged in live to There for her presentation and spoke through two layers of mediation: 1) her There avatar, Artemesia and 2) through Mary Flanagan, who read Artemisia's chat text aloud to the audience.

The purpose of making us endure this was never explained. She hadn't lost her voice, she just chose to have Mary read out what she was typing. I wouldn't have minded so much if she'd told us at the end why she'd done it, but she didn't. Indeed, I got the feeling that people weren't ever going to ask, either because they were too polite or because they figured that's just what she wanted...

>They have been in There for 6 months now and in that time the size of their group has not waned, even when the server code was released and they are able to host their own Uru servers.

Celia said that she was concerned that they might leave There and set up their own Uru server instead. I meant to ask her what that word "concerned" was all about, but there wasn't enough time for much Q&A.

Richard

[Betsy Book]

4.

My pleasure, Lisa. Andrew, yes there are Uru refugees in There and Celia showed a live demo of their home base in There in which they had even recreated some of the artifacts from Uru, for example the fountain. I found this really interesting because speaking from a purely stylistic standpoint There is quite different from Uru. But visual formatting aside I can see why a group of women in their 50's would be more comfortable in There than in SWG if it came down to a choice between those two worlds.

I'm intrigued by this idea of groups of nomadic refugees porting their community groups from one world to another. Sometimes out of necessity (world shuts down) sometimes by choice (they get sick of it). Has anyone studied/written about this? Links please if you have them.

[Richard Bartle]

5.

Betsy Book>I'm intrigued by this idea of groups of nomadic refugees porting their community groups from one world to another.

I'm intrigued as to why they didn't go back when offered the choice.

I once saw a TV programme in the UK that featured (among other things) a group of people from the Indian sub-continent who had emigrated to Britain. After many years, they still felt out of place in Britain; however, when they returned to India/Pakistan for visits, they felt out of place there, too. Celia's story reminded me of that: in an attempt to keep Uru's original community intact, the refugees have nevertheless overcome the original defining quality of their group. Rather than being defined as Uru refugees, they now define themselves as Uru emigrants.

>Has anyone studied/written about this? Links please if you have them.

Damian Schubert mentions the effect of immigration into M59 of former players of Neverwinter Nights, but only as part of a longer piece. Other than that, nothing immediately springs to mind.

Oh, there was a paper about movement within a virtual world and across shards, by Christian Carazo-Chandler called Online Migration and Population Mobility in a Virtual Gaming Setting - Ultima Online. Unfortunately, the article is itself now offline, so I can't give you a link to it.

Richard

[Raph]

6.

There are piles and piles of anecdotal evidence regarding guild migration. if you want to go to primary sources, it's happening right now with many guilds looking to migrate into World of Warcraft and Everquest II. SWG has Eve and Jumpgate emigrees, for example. When UO opened, there were whole communities of M59ers and Realm players.

One of the most interesting is the Shadowclan Orcs. Originally a roleplaying group that played UO, they developed a pidgin language for their group, elaborate rules of behavior, and so on. As the market grew, they migrated into new games--not abandoning UO, but expanding their territory. They had to adapt their pidgin and customs to each new game. Observing them has been fascinating.

http://www.shadowclan.org/

[magicback]

7.

So would the development of the Shadowclan Orcs be considered as transformation? Unhindered by the circumstances of our birth, we can become who we want to be and create our own "race"; less pleasure-seeking motivated, but more soul-seeking motivated.

[Soosi]

8.

I was only made aware of this site today, otherwise I would have posted much sooner to clear up the numerous inaccuracies in Celia Pearce's description of our Uru group in There.

1. Examples of cultural artifacts of language include a word "shora" which means "peace" and an ethnic garment called "yeesha."

The word is Shorah not shora. It does means "peace" but it is also a greeting somewhat equivalent to "Aloha".

Yeesha is a very important character in the Myst/Uru games and books, not a piece of clothing.

2. In RL, the majority of these players are women in their 50’s who began as Myst fans (solo players), many of whom identify as "shy."

We have members from 13 years old up to well in their 80's, with an average age around 40. There are slightly more women than men - about 55% women, 45% men.

3. We used to consider ourselves Uru refugees, never emigrants. We also did and still do consider ourselves citizens of There. Certainly we have mementos of and tributes to Uru in There but the majority of our community areas and homes reflect each individual's taste, design and style with nothing Uru about it.

4. When the server code was released we began hosting our own Uru servers. Many of us divide our time between Uru and There, others spend more time in Uru, others more time in There. We also have a large contingent in Second Life.

5. We have hundreds of members who have never been to There or only visited briefly and have kept together through our websites, chat-rooms and forums.

6. Celia chose not to use voice in There which has severely handicapped her study of and understanding of our group (and most everyone else in There). So much is lost when you are typing your conversation and many people found it difficult to answer her questions adequately when they had to type and not speak. Furthermore, by only observing our group, not joining us, she completely misunderstood us and made erroneous conclusions, which is apparent in her descriptions of us. This has upset much of the Uru community in and out of There.

Soosi
Mayor of The Meeting Place (Uru)
Mayor of The Meeting Place of Uru (There)

[Edward Castronova]

9.

Soosi, thank you for your responses. I'm glad you took advantage of this forum to give us your perspective, and to correct inaccuracies, regarding the research that's been done. When we set up the site, we hoped it could serve exactly this purpose. This kind of dialog helps everyone see what is really going on.

[prabhat]

10.

informative