Engagement

I have been reading Hamlet on the Holodeck: the future of narrative in cyberspace  by Janet Murray and find myself deeply engaged with the book, reading it as if I were eating a delicious 10 course meal and can't wait to get to the next course--or chapter in this case.  Murray looks at the kinds of imaginative worlds that now exist in cyberpace from the perspective of someone with a literature background, and I really appreciate the depth that perspective brings to the understanding of narrative.  She's also well-versed in science-fiction narrative in general, including the Star Trek series, and since I know every Star Trek episode from almost every incarnation of the series, I'm right there with her.  

It's interesting to me that I find myself more engaged with this book than a recent book I assigned students to read for our memoir class.  The book they read is a good read:  it's funny and poignant and offers comic insights into the life of a young woman in America and her exploits and travels.  But I find as I age I want even more from a book.  I remember a line from a poem by Brenda Hillman that was at least partly about forced entertainment (i.e., we WILL all go as a family on vacation to Disneyland and we WILL enjoy every minute of it):  "Fun," she wrote, "is sad."  In order to enjoy myself I seem to need to be challenging myself in new ways and learning something new.  Learning, for me, is fun.  Being challenged by a book or a game or some new knowledge is, for me, fun.  Being entertained, especially entertainment that is being done to me, rather than something I'm participating in, is not fun.  This is why I do not stay up late with my husband to watch the Jay Leno show.  I would rather retreat to the world of Azeroth where I can kill orcs and save polluted kingdoms, and discover new people and new lands.  

This is perhaps also why I enjoy political satire over any kind of writing or speech that is merely funny.  I can listen to John Stewart, for example, without getting bored or feel that I'm wasting my time.  

It's harder, as I get older, to find writings that really really engage me, that break some frozen sea inside of me, that teach me something new.  This is also why, I think, I'm so interested in the possibilities of narrative and imagination in video games and cyberspace.  It's just beginning to be explored and it feels as exiting to me as modernist poetry did at one time.  

Cruelty

There are three different realms available for play in WoW:  one is a Player-vs-Player realm where players can attack each other at any time without rhyme or reason.  Another is a Role-Playing realm where all players agree to stay in character, and where no player can attack another without the specific consent of the other.  The third is a role-playing realm that allows PvP attacks. 

I prefer the Role-Playing realm because I don't like the idea of having to worry about players attacking me for no reason, and because I'd rather play the game against (and with) the environment.  Players will sometimes ask if I want to duel and I always say no.  Sometimes they don't take no for an answer and keep following you around and asking for a duel, and sometimes they insult you, hoping, I guess that the insult will provoke you to attack them. Such was the case when one player whispered to me once  how awful my armor was.  Instead of attacking him, I just became sad and insecure about my armor.

One recent interchange that I found disturbing involved another player,  a blood-elf, who hid himself in an area where players would normally go to turn in quests.  He had PvP turned on and somehow was able to attack me (I haven't quite figured out how this happened yet, as I didn't have PvP turned on.)  At any rate he was at least 10 levels above me so he would have killed me within seconds.  I pretended to be dead (you can "feign death") and watched him, and an associate, who also appeared from nowhere as they proceeded to kill my pet raptor.  He and the associate then began to spit on me, and emoted that they were "laughing maniacally."  They kept spitting on me, and once they realized I wasn't really dead, attacking me until I died. 

I figured they'd had their fun and would move on, so I resurrected (this is a process whereby you find your spirit at a nearby cemetery and travel back to your corpse where you resurrect at half the health you had).  It is considered bad taste to attack someone when they have just resurrected because it brings no honor to the attacker:  the victim is already in a considerably weakened state and easy to kill.  

These two were waiting for me, though, and they attacked, spit and "laughed maniacally" until I died again.  This time I didn't come back but stayed at the cemetery where you can ressurrect for a considerable penalty if you don't want to try to find your body.

Of course I've witnessed cruelty of all sorts in the real world, and this small bit of cruelty in a virtual world shouldn't have bothered me as much as it did.  At the end of the day I didn't lose anything that valuable, just a bit of time, and I wasn't physically hurt.  But it did bother me, maybe because the kind of cruelty that bothers me most comes from those I can't see.  

Recently my real-life car was vandalized:  some unknown person or persons spray-painted "BLOODS" all over the entire passenger side of the car, covering both car doors as well as the windows.  I have been unable to get the paint off and will wind up having to have the entire car painted.  Our garage was also vandalized around the same time, with odd symbols from a gang around the neighborhood painted all over one side of it.  When the vandalism happened, I wanted to know who had done it.  It mattered to me.  I wanted to face the vandals and tell them what cowards I thought they were.  If you're going to be cruel, I would have said, be cruel to my face.  Do something to me where I can see your face, not in a dark ally at night when I'm sleeping.  

And I wish I had had the opportunity to see the faces of my attackers in the virtual world as well.  Maybe it wouldn't have mattered.  Cruelty is cruelty whether you know the cruel ones or not, whether you can see their faces and smell what they had for lunch on their breath or not. But it seems to me that cruelty in a virtual environment is especially cowardly and deserves a special place in hell.  

Playing

I seem to have a huge need for significant down time in order to be as productive as I am in my professional life.  And I am productive, and efficient when I am writing, teaching or administering the MFA program.  But when I'm "off" I want my off-time to be efficient and productive as well.  I used to read for fun; home after a long day teaching or grading essays or commenting on poems or writing myself I'd curl up with a few books for fun.  But reading no longer seems like fun to me. I spent 90% of my life reading books and student work, and I want to do something else in my down time.   So games provide me with a way to be "intensely idle."  At the end of an hour playing a game at night I feel invigorated and challenged, as if I had taken a brief vacation, and in a way, I have.  I've gone to another world for a hour, one that didn't cost anything but a few pennies at most, and hardly any fuel fossils.  I'm ready to go back to reading and writing and teaching.  

But I think I must also have a gene for wanting to have fun, if that's possible.  My husband thinks my family has some kind of addiction gene and that I have found a way to make that a positive thing by becoming obsessed with whatever it is I'm doing, whether it's planning a conference, teaching a class, doing research for a book or playing a video game.  There may be some truth to that, but I think there's also something there about having fun.  My parents loved to have parties--in their early years they danced and bowled and had people over for escargot and card games.  No one else on our block did anything like that.  I should mention, maybe, that we were Catholic, and it always seemed to me that Catholics had way more fun than Protestants.

At any rate, I also remember my grandmother  liking to have fun, to dress up, to play games with us, joke with us.  We all liked very much the partying that went on at Mardi Gras, the disguise, the fun of it.  We were not a sober family, although my father worked very hard, at two jobs and sometimes more when he was alive.  He played very hard, though, when he wasn't working.  

When I was a little girl, one of my favorite past times was playing with paper dolls.  I loved cutting them out oh so perfectly, then cutting out their clothes, putting them on and taking them off, making them have dinner, or go out on dates, or fight with each other.  I loved doing the same, later, with Barbie dolls, dressing them up and imagining different situations for them.  On rainy days I'd sit all my dolls and stuffed animals in chairs on our porch, set up a chalk board in front of them, and play "school."  

It's clear to me that the playing I did as a child prepared me for some of the successes I had later in life:  it engaged and honed my imagination, and allowed me to imagine scenarios where I was, in fact, the leader, faced with crucial decisions (what should I do about the fact that my Midge dolls didn't seem to want to learn how to spell? Or that Chatty Cathy didn't want to learn to read?).

Sometimes I think the electronic characters I have online are just a more advanced version of  the paper dolls I had as a child. For what might all this killing and dying, over and over again in the game, be preparing me?

Angel in the House

When I first began playing WoW (World of Warcraft) in a serious way, and by that I mean about seven hours a week during which time I also journaled about my experiences, I thought I was a freak.  I wanted to understand what it was my son found in these computer games, and I figured  that  most of the people playing  were young boys.  I've since learned that women represent 38-40% of the gaming market, with most women playing games about 7.4 hours a week.  Which means that of the over 10 million who play WoW, about 4 million are likely to be women.  There is even a website (www.womengamers.com) for women who play.  

I've also learned that many women who play are over 40 and college-educated.  One women, a PhD anthropologist, spoke of "gamer shame"--that it's difficult for her to talk with her colleagues about the fact that she spends her free time playing games.  Many stay-at-home moms play games after they put the kids to bed.  I've  met a number of retired women professionals who play regularly.  Other women I met through the game admitted they had originally gotten interested in the game through their sons.  Some joked that they were addicted.  

And yet marketing for games continues to be addressed to a primarily male audience; the IGDA reports that 88.5% of game designers are men.  This is one reason why WomenGamers.com has initiated scholarships for girls to attend National Computer camps during the summer. Ubisoft, a large independent video game creator in Europe has also formed a group of female gamers for girls who may have been too intimidated to play games online. Women have also begun to complain about the objectivation and hypersexuality of some of the female online characters, so much so that Lara Croft's excessive breasts have been slimmed down some in the most recent version of that game.  Games that feature violence against women or protrayals of women as weak and helpless are targeted by groups like NOW and Media Report to Women.

I have  a couple of different avatars I play in Wow.  One of my favorites in a dranei hunter.  The dranei (the name means "exiled ones") walk upright but have horns and horse-like legs.  The females have large breasts and large behinds with tails that swish like horses do when swatting flies.   The clothes and armor available this character are tight, sexy and often more revealing than anything I'd wear in real life, at least since turning 50.  But she kicks ass.  She can beat the pants off of any monster or male character who messes with her, as long as they aren't too many levels higher.

I can't wait to see what will happen when the number of women designing games increases.  Game developers are reported to be making "kinder and gentler" games to appeal to women, but I think there's lots more that a woman's persective can offer.  We can bring a subtler, more nuanced approach to gaming--one that involves heart and intellect as much as strength and agility. 

Meanwhile I take some pleasure in not so gently subverting the purposes of the game designers in WoW.  In addition to the sexy dranei, I also have a "Death Knight" atavar: these are real killing machines with awesomely frightening armor and huge glowing swords they carry on their backs, swords that are almost as long as the the character is tall.  Despite the fact that the character is built for battle, I have turned mine into an herbalist and alchemist. Last night I played for about half an hour after a tough day at work. I didn't feel like killing things (although truth be told I often come home from work wanting to kill anything and everything), so I had my atavar ride her horse (a "Death Charger,") to a forest where I knew there were lots of herbs and flowers to be picked.  I then had her walk through the forest in all her glorious scary armor, sword glowing, looking for mageroyal and silverleaf, briarthorn and bruiseweed, avoiding wolves and monsters, and sometimes stopping to brew up a healing potion I'll share later with my online friends. 

Virginia Woolf wrote that women writers need to learn to "kill the angel in the house," her point being that women need to be tough-minded, wary of sentimentality and too much kindness.  We need to understand that violence and destruction is implicit in any act of creation.   My Death Knight understands this.  But she also understands that there needs to be flowers at the table and that wounds need to be healed, and she doesn't mind sometimes being the person to pick the flowers and heal the wounds.  In fact, she likes it.  Just don't mess with her when she's in a bad mood.

From The Cage to WOW

In the pilot for the original Star Trek series, broadcast in the early sixties (first called "The Cage," then remixed and repackaged as "The Menagerie"), the crew meets up with a fascinating race of big-headed beings known as the Talosians who have the ability to make illusions seem so real that people don't realize what they're experiencing is an illusion.  The narrative arc of "The Menagerie" involves Spock getting Christopher Pike, his former captain,  back to Talos IV, the home of the Talosians.  Because of their power of illusion, Talos IV has been deemed too dangerous for humans and has been ordered quaranteened. But Captain Pike is horribly disfigured from an  accident and is hardly human anymore: he can't speak, he can't talk and most of his body has disappeared into a huge space-age closed wheelchair.  Thanks to Spock, he winds up living on Talos IV where the Talosians, who have already given a disfigured girl the illusion of beauty, can give him the illusion of a healthy body and and Eden-like world in which to live.  And so they live, we are left to suppose, the two disfigured ones, happily ever after in their virtual world.

Frivolous science fiction, you say?  Think again.  Estimates say that from 5-20% of those who play video games are disabled.  Low estimated suggest that  525, 000 disabled users play World of Warcraft. There's a large deaf community that plays, as well as a number with severe physical motor disabilities such as Spinal Muscular Atrophy, as well as smaller visual impairment disorders and learning disorders.  A community group called Able Gamers is specifically targeted at disabled gamers, and acts as an advocacy group to gamemakers.  One gamer with Multiple Sclerosis who is paralyzed on one side of his body wrote, in a blog, "I feel like blowing things up and killing orcs.  That always makes me feel better.  Gaming therapy--mmmmmm."   

There's a great post with lots of information about disability and gaming and a link to a very moving video of a disabled gamer, Mike Phillips, who has spinal muscular atrophy, playing a game. 

See http://dwarfpriest.com/2008/09/03/is-blizzard-committed-to-disabled-gamers/

And also see:  One Thumb to Rule Them All:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BhHwk9qSvl

The Beak that Grips You

Throughout my son's pre-teen and teen years a major part of our relationship involved the negotiating of the playing of video games:  what kind, which ones, and how much time.  When I had  refused to buy toy guns for him as a child, he turned everything he picked up into a gun:  his butter knife, a straw, even his finger became a weapon.  The same was true with blood and gore video games.  The more I forbid them, the more he wanted them.  He and his friends learned how render useless the parental controls that parents put on their machines (he only recently told me this).  

I could feel him moving farther and farther away from me, especially as he moved into his teenage years, and searched for something we could do together, some way we could communicate.  He began playing Diablo, a game that seemed to me to involve only endless dark caves and caverns where ghouls and skeletons and other horrible things lived.  It seemed a depressing game that had no point but to kill.  He loved it.  He also loved a game called Quake, which involved a lot of killing as well, and lots of blood and gore.  I hated this game, perhaps more than any of the others.  

For Christmas, I bought games like Civilization and Age of Empires, games, I reasoned, that had some educational component.  You could learn something about ancient civilizations, something about what it took to build a city and keep it running.  Sure, there was still killing, but there was lots of other stuff, too.  You could learn about managing resources (you could, in the game, fish all the fish out of the sea or kill all the deer and have nothing to eat).  You could learn about the need to be environmentally conscious; in one game if you were not careful about how you developed your cities global warming could occur and destroy the entire world. If you didn't manage your international relationships well your cities could be blown up by hostile nations.  I remember clearly the moment a beautiful city that had taken me weeks to build was destroyed by an atomic bomb and wiped off the face of the earth within moments. Sure, I'm an adult, I knew this could happen in real life, but something about being invested in creating this city and seeing it physically wiped out in front of my eyes, brought the whole thing home to me in a more visceral way.  

Gray was never more than mildly interested in these games, although there were some times when we were able to play them together; for the first time it was he advising me on what to do.  "Don't build your city there, mom," he'd say, "can't you see that's a bad place, that guys can sneak up from behind that grove of trees and attack you?  And you should always build your city by water and where there's good resources."  

He introduced me to the notion of role-playing games (RPGs); he was also playing Final Fantasy and Zelda on his Nintendo, and I felt better about this games.  We had read Lord of the Rings together and shared a love of fantasy.  We played Myst together as well, a game that was more about puzzle solving than anything else.  I found myself drawn to the games that had a storyline, the ones that involved actual development of a character.  Here was where my intellect and imagination really became engaged.  

One Christmas I bought the game Baldur's Gate for Gray.  An RPG set in a fantasy environment, it put emphasis on character development.  The character makes moral choices and is rewarded or punished in the game for those choices.  Relationships among characters are also developed.  The games opening quotation is from Friedrich Nietzsche:  "He who fights monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster . . . when you gaze long into the abyss the abyss also gazes into you."

Darwin's Dilemma

I purchased my first computer, a Mac, in 1991.  I used it for writing, primarily, but also began to explore the web in my free time with the help of a computer scientist friend.  I swore I would never play games on the computer; even then video and computer games had a bad reputation. My son was seven at the time, and although he had a Nintendo at his dad's house I would not allow him to play video games at mine.   I didn't like the idea of violent games that seemed to only involve killing other creatures. 

I came across a game one day, though, called Darwin's Dilemma that seemed different.  It seemed to have some educational component.  How could something called "Darwin's Dilemma" be just about mindless killing?  Made for Mac, the idea was  to "push" matching creatures together in order to allow the creatures evolve into new ones and so on up the evolutionary chain.  I played the game, and showed my son how to play it, though he was less interested than I.  I don't remember much else about it, except that I enjoyed watching the little critters bump up against each other, and I got  a thrill when they transformed into the next higher stage.  There's a new game (just out this year) called Spore that's based on a similar strategy, although it's much more sophisticated.

I played Darwin's Dilemma the way my writer friends play card games, but it was such fun that I began to search for other "educational" games my son and I might play together.  In 1992 he had foot surgery and had to stay off his feet for two weeks.  I asked his pediatrican how I was supposed to keep an eight-year-old off his feet for two weeks.  

"Video games," he said.

So I caved big time and let the Nintendo into the house.  

Writers and Games

Most serious writers I know who use the computer to write play some kind of computer game as a break between periods of intense writing.  Among my closest friends it is usually a game that has clear boundaries and is very short:  card games work well.  My husband, a prolific free lance journalist, plays Hearts on the computer as a break between writing spurts, as does another friend of mine from Iowa, who writes poetry, nonfiction and fiction and has published several books.  It's a way to clear her mind, she tells me.  Another novelist friend from Pittsburgh, who has published eleven books and for a time supported himself solely as a writer, said he had a card game he played on the computer.  His (now ex) wife would come home and mock him for playing games, and he would point to the books on the shelves that he had written.  

There is a stigma to playing video or computer games so you won't find a lot of writers who will admit they do it.  A colleague at the university where I now work commented to me several times about my predecessor that he used to "sit in his office and play video games all day." I can tell that in her mind, this is one of the worst things he could be doing. And yet he managed to write and publish a book of poetry in the few years he was here as well as do a good job teaching and directing the program. 

It seems that the smaller and more meaningless the game, the more one might be forgiven for playing it, as it clearly is just a way to rest or relax.  

World of Warcraft: Six Months

In July 2008, at the instigation of my son, and because I have long been interested in video games and the ways in which they shape young boys like my son, I created a character (called a toon) on the MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game) video game, World of Warcraft. My then partner and I had had plans to spend a few weeks in a log cabin in the mountains for vacation, but at the last minute they fell through. I found myself with three weeks of vacation that I sorely needed, and no plans.  I knew I didn't want to spend the time reading or writing or doing anything particularly useful.  I teach at the university level and administer a creative writing program; my life is packed with constant reading and writing.  I needed a break from words, a break from doing anything that smacked at all of usefulness.  I had also been concerned about the financial and environmental effects of all the traveling Americans do for vacations.  What if I took a virtual vacation, I thought?  What if I travelled to fantasy lands where orcs and elves and shamans and other wondrous creatures lived?  It would save on gas, be environmentally friendly, and serve my need for escape.

So I created a night-elf female druid toon I named Enheduanna, after the Sumerian poet and priestess Inanna (Sumerian goddess and sister of Gilgamesh).  The story of what  followed, in the next six months (yes, a few weeks stretched into several months as I fell in love with my toon, and with the game and the people I met there) was filled with  all the comedy and tragedy of any work of high literature, and moved me as much as any of the books I would count as most important in the development of my own psyche and vision of the world (Kafka's The Metamorposis, Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being, the poems of Dickinson, Neruda, Plath, to name a few).  After only a week or so playing the game I knew I wanted to write about it.  I felt like an anthropologist (or a spy), and in a way I was.  A woman in her fifties playing a video game dominated by young boys (or at least so I thought when I started), I saw myself as engaging in a kind of immersive journalism.  

I was also well aware of the addictive qualities of this kind of game-playing, and since I had already spent so much time thinking about drug and alcohol addiction (see my last post!) I decided I was particularly well-suited to dive into the game and expose myself to the possibility that I might become addicted to it. I could say, in a high-minded way, that I also wanted to understand better the fantasy worlds of my son and my step son, and it's true that I had that in mind when I started.  I could never have predicted, though, what would happen to me, and how involved I would get, not only in the created world, but in the worlds of the people who befriended me, nor how my playing of the game would impact my home life, and my relationship with the man who recently became my husband. 

Last night I took a final look at the toon I had fallen in love with--not Enheduanna, who was the victim of virtual identity theft only a month into the game (more about that later)--but her sister Liahuanna, a level 71 night elf hunter.  I moved her around the screen, admired once again the green markings on her cheek, her long green hair, her finely muscled calves, the rare armor she sported that had taken me so long to earn.  She had been six hard months in the making.  I whispered goodbye and hit the Delete Character button.

I'd like to write here, in serial form, the story of those six months that led up to the death of my toon. Stay tooned!