The Horde is Evil? Part 3 — Carnival!

If you haven’t yet, scroll down to get the low-down on this series of posts. Basically, I am exploring why Dr. Edward Castronova, one of the country’s leading experts on virtual environments, would say that people who play Horde characters on World of Warcraft are engaging in “a mildly wicked act,” and whether he’s right. I think he’s mostly wrong, but is slightly justified in a few limited ways that are worth talking about.

But first, why he’s wrong :). To help me, I’m going to use a literary critic my the name of Mikhail Bakhtin. I’m going to try and keep this unpomous and unstupid, but I am dealing with literary criticism here; sorry in advance if I occasionally fail. :) But I think Bakhtin’s a smart and interesting thinker, so hopefully things will stay light ‘n’ lively.

Here again is Castronova’s thesis:

“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 [sic] an expression of self, in a social environment, then deliberately choosing a wicked character is itself a (modestly) wicked act.”

In my last post, I took issue with the “deliberately choosing a wicked character” part of his definition. You might deliberately choose to play the “evil” side of a game for a bunch of reasons that have nothing to do with “being” evil: whatever “evil” means (and which Castronova never defines). Hell, Castronova even stipulates a few of the reasons at the beginning of his post, and I give two big ones in my previous post. But I want to explore a different aspect of Castronova’s argument: the “when the avatar is considered an expression of self.” Because it most definitely is not always an expression of self. Sometimes it is a purposeful expression something outside the self.

In other words, I humbly submit that virtual environments constitute a modern-day carnival.

So what’s a carnival? This is where I turn to Bakhtin for some very interesting insights:

“Carnival festivities and the comic spectacles and ritual connected with them had an important place in the life of medieval man. Besides carnivals proper, with their long and complex pageants and processions, there was the ‘feast of fools’ (festa stultorum) and the ‘feast of the ass’; there was a special free ‘Easter laughter’ (risus paschalis), consecrated by tradition. Moreover, nearly every Church feast had its comic folk aspect, which was also traditionally recognized. Such, for instance, were the parish feasts, usually marked by fairs and varied open-air amusements, with the participation of giants, dwarfs, monsters, and trained animals. A carnival atmosphere reigned on days when mysteries and soties [short super-sarcastic plays] were produced. This atmosphere also pervaded such agricultural feasts as the harvesting of grapes (vendange) which was celebrated also in the city. Civil and social ceremonies and rituals took on a comic aspect as clowns and fools, constant participants in these festivals, mimicked serious rituals such as the tribute rendered to the victors at tournaments, the transfer of feudal rights, or the initiation of a knight. Minor occasions were also marked by comic protocol, as for instance the election of a king and queen to preside at a banquet ‘for laughter’s sake’ (roi pour rire)” (6).

(By the way, I am getting my quotes from this page, which in turning is quoting from: Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Trans. by Helene Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984. Note to self: verify all quotes before presenting at conference!)

In sum, almost every important festival that Catholicism/Christianity sponsored was satirized by its comic-folk-tradition correlative. Note especially the “giants, dwarfs, monsters, and trained animals” comment: these festivals were grotesqueries and exaggerations designed to lampoon hieratic traditions. WoW has plenty of giants, dwarves, monsters, and animals. Coincidence? I think not. :)

But why were these comic rituals so important to medieval culture? Along with the official Church rituals, they were a stabilizing force for the society. While the “serious” rituals reiterated the status quo ideology of God and Country, carnivals provided a uniquely democratic counterpoint to the highly caste-regulated social hierarchy.

“Rank was especially evident during official feasts; everyone was expected to appear in the full regalia of his calling… and to take the place corresponding to his position. It was a consecration of inequality. On the contrary, all were considered equal during carnival. Here, in the town square, a special form of free and familiar contact reigned among people who were usually divided by the barriers of caste, property, profession, and age. The hierarchical background and the extreme corporative and caste divisions of the medieval social order were exceptionally strong. Therefore such free, familiar contacts were deeply felt and formed an essential element of the carnival spirit. People were, so to speak, reborn for new, purely human relations. These truly human relations were not only a fruit of imagination or abstract thought; they were experienced. The utopian ideal and the realistic merged in this carnival experience, unique of its kind” (10).

I hope you’re seeing already how these statements readily apply to virtual environments. It doesn’t matter how much money you have in real life when you begin to play WoW; it doesn’t matter if you are a successful investment banker or a 13-year-old kid; it doesn’t matter what your gender or age is, or with what ethnicities you identify. In the “carnival” world of WoW, the relations in the context of the game are purely human ones. Other traditional social markers are mutable, protean, and even purchasable via the game’s local economy.

(Caveat: Real money, real gender, real ethnicity, etc. actually do matter to a degree in WoW; the fact that 3rd-world players can make a real-life living in WoW by farming gold shows just how permeable the line between reality and play can be. But there is no doubt that WoW lends a degree of anonymity to its players that allows players to easily engage in carnivalesque, role-violating behavior.)

Even with the above caveat, however, I think even the greatest naysayers would have trouble denying that virtual environments like WoW provide an alternate reality that rejuggles life’s social and economic hierarchies. In fact, that is part of the fun, part of their raison d’être: you don’t have to be who you are in your ordinary life when you play this game. You can be a hero, a powerful being in control of uncanny superhuman abilities. Or you can be a monster. And being a monster during carnival is permitted, even encouraged. The Grotesque is celebrated during carnival as a necessary part of life; it is part of the truth of reality and the cyclical nature of life.

Okay, next post, more on the Grotesque. In the mean time, this was a long post: go outside and get some sun!

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 .