Troubled Gender in a Virtual World

The application of the theses about gender and interaction of writers such as Judith Butler, Rosi Braidotti and Roseanne Alucquere Stone in the online world of a RPG (role playing game) allows a depper observation of the stereotypes and memes of our society, the ceremonies and uses that define life and it’s conditions, the definition of humane and constructed.

What would the philosopher Judith Butler say or write about my avatar
Wordacea? Wordacea is a powerful shaman in a virtual world where
elves, wizards and warriors fight for supremacy. Should anyone care
which sex or gender a person is in a
virtual world where pixels create the illusion of a landscape?

Wordacea is a virtual character in a virtual world and she was chosen
by me because her race and physical characteristics give me some
advantages in virtual fights against virtual monsters and virtual evil
characters. She is a Barbarian and her home is a snow-covered
landscape, quite similar to that of Sweden, the place where I live.

Everquest, made in the US by American engineers and designers, is a
cultural product showing our stereotypes, clichés and flaws. The
cities in the game are frozen in time and remind one of Thomas Moore’s
Utopia, where neither class struggle nor mayhem disturb the city’s
perfect harmony.
The characters in the virtual reality are devoid of all physical
attributes, the heroes and the villains don’t sweat or get dirty.
Neither are they subject to any normal physiological urgencies.

The selection of races and physical attributes was tailored by the
designers to allow the players to accomplish different tasks and
quests. Magical qualities, the ability to heal or physical stamina
are crucial in the initial stages of the game.
With the help of magic objects or weapons the player can enhance
a weak character or try to make up for a bad choice. Professions
such as shamans, bards, warriors and wizards, can be combined to
achieve the ultimate goal, the best
all-round fighter or the wizard who can turn the tide in a struggle.

The players in games such as Everquest are nomads, their quests make them
travel between different landscapes and cities. There are hundreds of
different worlds in Everquest, jungles and snow-covered peaks, urbanized
patches of civilization allow the players to rest, eat
and buy weapons.
They are nomads by choice and in order to understand them it is interesting
to read Judith Butler and Rosi Braidotti, two
of the most innovative thinkers in the field of gender
studies. Braidotti’s work with “Nomadic Identities” challenges the
old concept of identity as a monolithic structure, impermeable to
any change or modification.

The nomadic identity assumes that everyone can choose to highlight a
part of one’s identity, highlight a quality or cover up a failure or a
minor fault. Our identity is intimately related to our sexual
preferences, to our belonging, to our holding certain religious beliefs or
subscribing to certain political or philosophical ideas.a religion, to
a political or a
philosophical idea.
In the online world games are played and simulations enacted, the
construction of a dramatic persona, a character or avatar, can be
a wonderful case study for the purposes of analyzing the construction
of an individual in a social context.

When I choose my avatar I try to mimic myself, but not my ordinary
self, but the individual I wish I was or dream of being.one of those
multiple layers of my personality.

Judith Butler writes about the pain, about how seeing somebody else’s
pain can make us
empathic and cause us to change our perceptions of the “other”. The
“otherness” in
virtual simulated reality is hard to portray, some of the foes are black or
brown or are in disguise, (In the 1970s the French-Chilean sociologist
André Mattelart
and the playwright Ariel Dorfman wrote a wonderful book, “To learn how
to read Donald Duck”.
The books is about how Disney used the plot in
Donald Ducks adventures to set boundaries for Anti-Americanism.
All the ducks on the opponents (and therefore the enemies of the US)
were Korean, Cubans
or Muslims and were involved in the different kind of geopolitical
struggle where
the US was involved), but it demands a high skill to identify the true
nature of your
virtual opponent.

In “Everquest” bodies are beaten or wounded without pain or
mayhem, death is bloodless and painless, and you can be resurrected by
some fellow player after paying a penalty where you lose some
experience points. The religious experience of the resurrection feels
trivial in a world where life is trivial too, digital heroes have no
parents and no childhood, as Ridley Scott and Philip K. Dicks
“replicates”, they are born fully developed, ready to take on the duty or the
task we have designed for them.

Food or drink add nothing to my virtual experience, the “agape”, the
Greek word to celebrate conviviality and joy through the sharing of
food and wine is absent from virtuality. The feeling of comradeship,
“le compagnonage” is hard to substitute with guilds where members only
share a limited virtual experience. In games such as Ultima Online,
the pioneer of RPG games online, it was possible to buy or build a
house and see your guild comrades “live”, on the screen.

In her book “The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the
Mechanical Age”, cyber theory writer Sandy Stone writes about a woman
with
a multiple personality disorder (Stone is herself a transgender individual,
a woman who lived an earlier life as a man). Both Sandy Stone and Sherry
Turkle saw in the online world an utopia where people could live
“multiple selves” or “parallel lives”, the ability to transcend the
limitations and
conventions imposed on us by biological hazard.

The ability to tailor my avatars, to choose their skins, faces,
bodies, names, backgrounds and affections, make me, the player, or the
researcher, almost a God. I can be a “demiurge”, a craftsman able to
create new worlds. But I am also a voyeur, the possibility of changing
my gender and my libidinal attraction give me an insight into
Otherness, into how the “Other” experiences or feels.
An avatar is accepted such a fictional construct but the fictive framework is
often loaded with multiple levels of content. Can a virtual persona
be raped? In “My Tiny Life” Julian Dibbell tells the story of a
virtual rape in a virtual community called Lambda Moo

.

The lawyer and feminist activist Catherine MacKinnon
stated that a
virtual rape leaves the same scars in the soul of the victim as a real
rape leaves in the body of the victim and she appealed for
legislation where virtual crimes were punished.

Wordacea’s gender was never contested by anyone, she had a female
shape, with big breasts. But she was able to use an axe or to take
care of a sick person, she was a trained shaman, a caretaker, and in spite
of her rough appearance, she was able to care for anyone in need of
her caring. To be androgynous and behave in a androgynous way should be the
norm in a virtual world where the limitations and the boundaries of
the physical world are absent.

But the mental boundaries and the social and mythological structures
of our fantasy make our virtual experience flawed. Our “memes” are a
collective construction based on a shared cultural heritage and
memory. Legends and myths shape a culture and construct an identity.
The transmission of those values is often related to institutions like the
family and the school, bearers of the tradition and containers of the
accumulated knowledge.

But how can we transmit those values in a virtual landscape where
family and birth don’t matter? Gender and behavior related to
gender discussion are not an issue in games where fight and struggle
determine the development of the virtual characters. All characters
must know how to use a weapon to defend themselves or attack a
foe. In the first levels of the game, the physical strength of the
character is crucial to determine its survival. And Everquest is a
classical Darwinist game, the survival of the fittest.

I feel the death of my avatar as a kind of physical and psychological
loss. The search for the corpse, the
mourning and the feeling of being catapulted to another dimension
are very real. In spite of my
intellectual rationalization I feel as if I had I lost a limb, or a
dear friend, or
my beloved.

It’s doesn’t matter that the game can be restarted and my avatar can be
resurrected from the land of the dead, I dream about online
immortality and about a gender neutral marriage ceremony, I want to
marry a female avatar and live with her in happiness for the rest of
our virtual lives.