The Horde is Evil? Part 2

I think I want to start out my analysis of Castronova’s claim that the Horde in WoW is evil, and therefore those who play Horde characters are engaging in ethical misdemeanors, by exploring whether there is a legitimate difference between acts we commit in our normal lives versus acts committed in a virtual environment such as World of Warcraft.

To start us off, here’s the quote from Castronova’s post on TerraNova that more or less serves as the thesis of his argument:

“There are good reasons for playing evil characters — to give others an opportunity to be good, to help tell a story, to explore the nature of evil. But when the avatar is a considered an expression of self, in a social environment, then deliberately choosing a wicked character is itself a (modestly) wicked act.”

I think this opinion is valid, but perhaps not sound: that is, since it’s a conditional (“But when an avatar…”), all he is saying is that, so long as the conditions are met, the results follow. I could restate the thesis this way: “It is only when an avatar is considered an expression of self, in a social environment, that deliberately choosing a wicked character is itself a (modestly) wicked act.” The question becomes, then, “When are the conditions met?” And I think, unfortunately for Castronova, the answer is almost never. For his argument to work, the following things need to be true:

1. An avatar in a MMORPG must be considered “an expression of self” (which itself is a vague and problematic phrase);
2. The avatar must be placed in a social environment (this one is pretty much a given);
3. The player must choose to play a wicked character deliberately, meaning that they must be making a choice to be wicked;
4. The avatars themselves must be inherently wicked.

It’s going to take more than one post to tease out all of the ramifications of these conditions, but let me start out with my personal experience with World of Warcraft. I started out WoW playing a gnome warlock. Why? Because when I played Dungeons and Dragons I always drawn to gnomes: they were smart, tricky, cheerful, optimistic, bookish, and short. In other words, they were me. Fast forward twenty years, and I’m probably even more gnomish now than I was then. But back when I played D&D, I also played human, dwarven, elfish, halfling, half-elf, and even half-orc characters. Why would I do that? Because sometimes the party needed a certain type of character to balance it out — say a theif — and some races made better thieves — say a halfling. Sometimes you make choices other than psychological or aesthetic ones when you play cooperative games for the good of the team.

That’s what happened to me recently, when I found out a few old friends were playing Horde on a different server. I wanted to play with them, so I switched sides and rolled a Blood Elf. What does abandoning my gnome for this new Horde character say about me? I’m pretty sure Castronova’s a reasonable guy; I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t think my choice evil. In fact, he might point out that I did not deliberately choose to play a Horde character, that instead circumstances thrust the Horde upon me. Really I’m just a victim of circumstance.

But what I think my own example reveals is that, were we to carefully explore why people chose the avatars they chose, we’d find that a lot of the time, outside factors preclude us from getting a clean psychological profile from someone’s avatar choice. There are just too many things that might at any moment go into a decision. For instance, when I asked my friend T_______ why he’d chosen Horde in the first place, he said: “Because too many kids play Alliance. More real gamers play Horde.” Many new gamers are drawn to Alliance-types, so to avoid newbies and get to play with hard-core gamers, T________ chose to go Horde. In other words, he was thinking in terms of his game experience, not the moral fiber of orcs and tauren and company. And that’s because WoW is a game; there are game considerations that interfere with the Rorschach-like way Castronova is treating avatar choice.

Here’s another example. I think a lot of the younger (I’m not great with demographics: 12-24?) players may choose an avatar because it “looks cool.” And while you may think that an undead avatar is morally repulsive, the fact is that many people just like the way the undead characters look, without considering what that character choice might represent on a philosophical or psychological way. I think the undead characters look cool; there’s a whole undead aesthetic tied to horror and heavy metal that I really see the appeal of. And how many of you have read on the message boards that young hetero males choose female avatars so that they’ll have a derrière of the opposite sex to stare at as they cruise through the fantastic landscapes of WoW? Sexist? Perhaps. But evil? Perhaps not.

In short, I suspect that the vast majority of players do not choose avatars deliberately to “do something evil.” They may choose to play for innocent game-related purposes; they may be more concerned with looks rather than morality; there are literally dozens, if not hundreds, of considerations that can go into avatar choice, all of which would preclude a Castronova-esque reading. But there’s more: many times, they are not seeking to express their inner selves at all. They may be trying out a new self to see how it fits.

In my next post, I’ll talk more about this vitally important fact about virtual environments, using Bahktin’s idea of the “carnival” to illustrate what happens oftentimes when we dawn a virtual alter-ego.

The Horde is Evil? Part 1

Edward Castronova is kind of my hero. He’s the brains behind The Arden Project, the first MMORPG ever developed with academic purposes in mind, and he got a quarter-million-dollar grant from The MacArthur Foundation to do it. In short, he’s an accomplished academic who writes with intelligence, clarity and humanity, and who’s forging his career on studying virtual gaming. Like I said: my hero.

So imagine my disappointment when I came across his blog post on TerraNova with the title “The Horde is Evil.” Check it out for yourself here.

I think I might blog about this in several parts and see if I can get to a level of cohesion to merit a conference presentation on this. A question such as this shows just how important it is to think of video games as both an artistic and ludic medium (don’t worry, I’ll define these things), and not, with all due respect to Dr. Castronova, as merely a place where expression of personal psychology and ethics takes place.

I put the link to Dr. Castronova’s post above, but here is a quick and I hope fair summary of his position, using what I consider key quotes from his post:

• “avatar choice is not a neutral thing from the standpoint of personal integrity”
• “the Horde, in World of Warcraft, is evil”
• “There are good reasons for playing evil characters – to give others an opportunity to be good, to help tell a story, to explore the nature of evil. But when the avatar is a considered an expression of self, in a social environment, then deliberately choosing a wicked character is itself a (modestly) wicked act.”
• “the words ‘troll’ and ‘orc’ and ‘undead’ have implied evil creatures for as long as those words have been in use in the English language (since the 9th century in the case of ‘orc’).”
• “all you have to do is look at the values expressed by the cultures, and it should be apparent which sets of values are worthy of praise. The human race is the only one with children, and charitable giving, for example. Orcs, on the other hand, value warfare and power. In terms of public ethics, this is a no-brainer to me, really.”
• “But what made me feel most isolated from this community of scholars was the general indifference to the entire issue. To choose orc, it was said, does not carry with it any particular moral or ethical baggage.”
• “Orcs are ancient representatives of a bad, bad thing, and one cannot undo the power of that association in the course of a single videogame, even one played by millions for a year. Orcs are still evil, even though Blizzard says they are not.”
• “I’m defending a point of view that I’m disappointed is not more widely-held among academics, which is that these worlds are not mere play-spaces, nor mere extensions of the real world. They are a place where we can hear a faint echo of things unconscious, even mystical.”

Certainly a thought-provoking position! In a way, there are so many assumptions of a shared vocabulary in the above quotes (and even more so in the full post) that it seems to me very difficult to even begin the conversation. We all share definitions of “play,” “ethics,” “good” and “evil”? Of course not. But there are even trickier, even more elusive concepts at play here: the role of art in the formation/expression of morality and/or ethics; the ability of an individual artist to use a tradition to her/his own ends; the correlation between the choice of an avatar in a game and the personal ethos of the chooser, and just how difficult it is for an interpreter to glean useful information from that one piece of evidence; the difference (if any!) between a narrative environment and a ludic one.

So over the next few days I will use a blend of analysis and personal experience to explore Dr. Castronova’s arguments. My basic theses RIGHT NOW (they are subject to evolution!) are as follows:

• Avatar choice is not a neutral thing from the standpoint of personal integrity (this agrees with Dr. Castronova’s point on the issue);
• BUT there are so many competing issues when it comes to avatar choice in a virtual environment, and even more so when the virtual environment is a competitive one (as it must be in an MMOPRG with PvP elements), that assuming one can make categorical determinations about a person’s ethics or psychological make up based on that decision is itself morally questionable, and should be considered by professional academics studying virtual environments an unethical practice;
• Artists (in this case, the corporation Blizzard) CAN redefine myth and history in their own work for their own ends, and in fact such redefinition is one of the primary ways artists interact with myth and history;
• The Horde is NOT evil: first, we cannot treat The Horde categorically, as the several factions that make up The Horde vary greatly in their motivations and mythologies; second, The Horde factions , just as the Alliance, are allegorical constructs that are meant to illustrate a specific facet, penchant, and, most importantly, failing of real-life humanity. Taken together, anyone who thoughtfully approaches playing a Horde character might be doing it for the sake of The Good, which, in terms of personal ethics and integrity, for convenience’s sake here I will posit as the opposite of Evil;
• World of Warcraft (WoW) is both a narrative and a ludia (sorry for the neologism: I mean by it a “ludic place, arena, or field”), and one of the important functions of play is to allow us to “try on” behaviors with low or zero consequences — and therefore we should not stigmatize players who “try on” The Horde as being unethical or morally lacking, lest we risk removing this important psycho-sociological function from WoW;
• With all of the above said (and hopefully well-argued in future posts), there is a little bit of truth to Dr. Castronova’s main point: a person’s choice of avatar, depending on their motivations, might represent a personal ethics that might be less than ideal from a societal standpoint. Whether it would be possible for an outsider to know with certainty that this is the case may be impossible; nevertheless, while I refute Dr. Castronova’s blanket categorization of The Horde, I agree with him that some players may be engaging in a mild form of “personal wickedness” when they choose to play Horde.

Like I said: there’s a lot to discuss. And like I also said: it’s going to take me more than a few days to get to all of this! :)

Call for Papers: A Special Issue of _Aether_ Focusing on Game Geography

I was taking a look at TerraNova, a virtual environments blog/scholarly community, for a very different reason (on which I will be posting laster), but came across this cool call for papers. Think this is one I will be submitting to:

Aether, an online, peer-reviewed journal, invites submission of papers for a special issue focusing on the geographies of interactive visual media and gaming, to be published in early 2008.

Read the whole post here: http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2007/06/call-for-papers.html#more .

Your New Remote Control

Courtesy of Wired magazine, I bring you the future. Apparently, we’ll all be wearing one of these in order to change channels.

Obviously, this technology is mostly cool and surprisingly advanced. It’s just funny that one of the things the scientists chose to do with this new device is to use it to change channels on your TV. Because using your thumb to punch in numbers on a remote is just so 20th century. :)

Here’s where you can read all about the wonders of optical topography.

Agentquery.com: If you need an agent and don’t know anybody, start here.

Let’s face it: if you are trying to break into the writing business without connections, most likely you’re going to have a rough time. Almost to a one, publishing houses of any size and stature require you to have an agent before they will look at (and most likely reject) your manuscript. But getting an agent is increasing becoming as hard as finding a publisher.

About the hardest way to get an agent is by sending an unsolicited query letter to one who doesn’t know you from Adam. Better ways may include going to conferences, learning the art of the so-called “elevator pitch,” etc. And even then your odds suck salami.

So you might want to add the unsolicited query letter to your repertoire of options. And if you’re going to do that, the first thing you need to do is spend some time finding the right agent to submit to. Not only will this maximize your chances of getting a response, but it will minimize the amount of time you need to spend reading piles of demoralizing form rejection letters — or worse, spending months waiting for form rejection letters.

Enter agentquery.com. It is, I think, one of the best agent search sites on the Web: if not the best. The comprehensive contact information is the least useful thing you’ll get from agentquery.com: much more helpful are the “search by genre” feature and the pretty through biographical information. You can also find agents who will accept queries by e-mail, which I strongly suggest — e-mail makes the whole process faster and cheaper for everyone.

Agentquery.com gives you pretty much everything you need to send an effective query letter — in the top-left corner, be sure to read their advice about getting an agent. Even with all of this help, your odds are crap, but at least you will have avoided amateur mistakes that would make your chances even crappier.

No, I’m not bitter. Why do you ask? :)

Ralan–one of the best writer sites out there.

Really, you can just stop reading here and head over to Ralan.com. Just go and start reading. Really.

If you’re still here, you need more convincing. Fine. Ralan.com is, to my mind, the single best site for anyone interested in publishing science fiction, fantasy, horror, romance, erotica, and/or humor, and if you’re interested in other genres, it’s still a great and useful site or you. Easily the most up-to-date market reports on hundreds of places to publish, from small zines to major publishing houses. You simply have to put it on your list.

Resources for Writers

So one of the reasons I want to keep a blog is purely selfish: I just want a quick place to gather all the Internet tools and resources I regularly use — all those sites and links and whatnot. And hey, if it turns out to be a public service to other writers, so be it! The next two posts list two ery good sites for writers to get to know, and more will be on the way.

Wink-wink, Nudge-nudge: But do you know what I mean?

The One-Sentence Review: Winkie is a good first novel, but its author, Clifford Chase, will write better ones.

The More-Than-One-Sentence Review (SPOILERS!): The writing is solid: richly imagined, sensuous, modest and endearing. For readers like myself, writing this good is mostly what I need to get me through a book; readers like me will delight in Winkie, Clifford Chase’s first novel.

Mostly. Even as, sentence to sentence, I delighted in the turns of phrase, the way Chase describes Winkie’s discovery of his world as he comes to life, I find myself mildly balking at the plot. And not because it’s fantastic or even bizarre, but because the story doesn’t seem to have a cohesive mythos. That’s right, I said it: no mythos.

Here’s what I mean. Winkie is a teddy bear that comes to life and, in a truly spectacular opening scene, gets taken into custody by government authorities who pretty much embody all the legitimate fears that every non-comatose American should have about the Homeland Security world we’re living in. So far, so good — I personally can’t think of a better symbol to highlight the abuses enacted upon the American people and the Constitution, courtesy of the Patriot Act, than the tableau of this sawdust-stuffed bear getting shot 39 times by overzealous law-enforcement agents. T-riffic.

But Winkie eats. He doesn’t need to eat, as he goes weeks, months, even years without touching food. Moreover, he doesn’t have a throat. And I’m not just saying this based on the fact that he’s a damn toy bear, or even on circumstantial evidence, which we have in spades: since we know from the text he was created in a factory like every other teddy bear, and since the factory didn’t see a need to give each bear it made a working esophagus, stomach, intestinal tract, etc., which would make eating possible, you don’t need to spend any time in the CSI lab to figure out Winkie can’t swallow. But like I said, you don’t even need the circumstantial evidence: we are given an X-ray. That’s right: on page 18 of the 2006 paperback edition, we get an X-ray of the hapless teddy. And guess what you don’t see on the X-Ray? That’s right. A rectum.

Oh, I forgot to mention: besides eating, Winkie’s big dream is to poop, which he does, and which he likes. And see, I get it. Pooping teddy bear. Funny. And I even think I have an inkling as to why, symbolically, he poops: he’s coming to life, and living things, well, must expel waste. Right?

But this is a miracle bear with no internal organs save a little squeaker in his stomach. He — oh wait, for a while he’s a she, but gives birth while he’s a he. Long story. Cough. — doesn’t live by the same rules. And he doesn’t need to: the opening sequence is all the convincing we need to believe that this poor little bear is more than alive enough to be shot 39 times by contagious-shooting government agents. The work is done! We believe! But then Winkie starts eating and pooping, because he’s … he’s … trying real hard to become a real boy?

The story, however, becomes more overwrought, and less in control of its own myth. Winkie — at the moment, male — gives birth to a little teddy bear he can call his own. The review of Winkie at KQED described the event — brilliantly! — as an instance of “ursine parthenogenesis,” but I think that using a term like that, while accurate, makes it sound too legitimate and lets Chase off a little too easy. See, now, I’m going to say something now that’s going to be unpopular, because everybody loves Baby Winkie, the innocent, immaculately-conceived progeny of Winkie and the symbol in the story of perfect wonder and love. I could have done without him. Baby Winkie isn’t really necessary to much of anything in the story. See, because when the novel began, Winkie himself was already the symbol of perfect wonder and love. We didn’t need a female-cum-male teddy bear to give birth to an even smaller teddy bear: Winkie could have served that role in the story and made for a tighter, more elegant plot.

And to my way of thinking, Winkie didn’t need to be accused of every — I really do mean every — crime of hysteria, jingoism, and intolerance in all of American history. Our present record on these count can work synechdotally to represent all of those. It’s just one more instance to my mind of a good joke pushed too far to the realm of “Okay already. We get it.”

But that’s too harsh for this book; I feel like I’ve spent too much time bad-mouthing Winkie, when, as I said at the beginning, there is a lot to like about this novel. But I hope that Chase, in his next novel, will go beyond the great writing and the great concept. Yes, there is something more to an outstanding novel than those two things. When it comes to myth-making, Chase should have quit while he was ahead in Winkie, and stuck with the core story, which was more than enough for an excellent book.

But I have faith. This is a good first novel by a novelist who’s going to write much better ones.

On pelting rams

I read an editorial not too long ago that said that the profession of the book reviewer — that is, people who actually get paid to read and review books for newspapers and magazines — is dying out. Books just aren’t as relevant to the culture as T.V. and movies and video games and Web 2.0; the demand for those kinds of reviews is fading.

Now, don’t get me wrong: I like T.V. and movies, and I love video games and Web 2.0 stuff, and I think they should be reviewed professionally (this isn’t a Luddite’s rant against the changing times). But the other thing the editorial said was that book reviews were more and more going to become the purview of non-professionals. To my mind, that’s not exactly a bad thing. Books aren’t going to die out, but they are going to appeal to a smaller audience, much in the way books used to appeal to a much smaller audience (i.e. the few people prior to the printing press who could afford them). Occasionally a book may break out, but more and more I suspect that books will be read and discussed more by the small group of people who remain interested in the uniquely thorough way a book can deliver information or inspire one’s imagination to create an aesthetic experience. So maybe magazines and newspapers–or whatever new forms those media take–won’t reserve space for book reviews.

That means it’s more important than ever for non-professionals to take up the torch and keep the discussion alive. There may be less people reading now, but the readers that remain will be, by definition, more engaged with and passionate about their reading. Like I said, that might not be the worst thing in the world. I teach English, and every semester I run into students who are reading their very first novel in my class. I’m not naive; for many of them, it will also be their last. So be it; they prefer other forms of media. But I am hopeful that the commercialization that has so greatly influenced the publishing industry might wane as books become increasingly less commercial. Corporations are already choosing to focus less money and time on printed media. But if a group of devoted readers remains, that means that smaller independent presses will cater to them in a way that corporations can’t be bothered too, which will lead to more challenging, adventurous, and sophisticated books.

In the not-too-distant future, I think we will live in a world with very few millionaire writers. But I think, while sad in some respects, that that’s okay. Most of us who write write for loftier reasons than a paycheck, and many of us already make a living aside from what we publish. Most of us write for the same reason we read: to be enlightened. So this blog, among the other fun stuff it will cover, will help to keep the discussion of good books alive. Books might not be the #1 fashion anymore, but they still matter, and will continue to, as long as people keep turning to them for their one-of-a-kind way of inducing insight.