Gaming the System: Deconstructing Video Games, Games Studies, and Virtual Worlds 2018006657, 2018012742, 9780253035738, 9780253035721, 9780253035714

Table of contents :
Front Cover
Half Title page
Series page
Title page
Copyright page
Dedication
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Terra Nova 2.0
2. The Real Problem
3. Social Contract 2.0
4. In the Face of Others
5. Open-ended Conclusions
Bibliography
Index
Back Cover

Citation preview

GAMING THE SYSTEM

D I G I TA L G A ME S T UD IES Robert Alan Brookey and David J. Gunkel, editors

GAMING THE SYSTEM Deconstructing Video Games, Games Studies, and Virtual Worlds DAVID J. GUNKEL

INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS

This book is a publication of Indiana University Press Office of Scholarly Publishing Herman B Wells Library 350 1320 East 10th Street Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA iupress.indiana.edu © 2018 by David J. Gunkel All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992. Manufactured in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Gunkel, David J., author. Title: Gaming the system : deconstructing video games, games studies, and virtual worlds / David J. Gunkel. Description: Bloomington, Indiana : Indiana University Press, 2018. | Series: Digital game studies | Includes bibliographical references and index Identifiers: LCCN 2018006657 (print) | LCCN 2018012742 (ebook) | ISBN 9780253035738 (e-book) | ISBN 9780253035721 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780253035714 (paperback : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Video games—Philosophy. | Virtual reality—Philosophy. | Video games—Social aspects. | Virtual reality—Social aspects. Classification: LCC GV1469.3 (ebook) | LCC GV1469.3 .G86 2018 (print) | DDC 794.801—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018006657 1 2 3 4 5 23 22 21 20 19 18

For my father, Peter Gunkel

CONTENTS

Preface

ix

Acknowledgments

xi

Introduction

1



one

Terra Nova 2.0

29



two

The Real Problem

61



three



four

In the Face of Others

124



five

Open-Ended Conclusions

156

Social Contract 2.0

92

Bibliography

167

Index

195

PREFACE

Ian Bogost (2007) famously changed the direction of video game studies by focusing attention not on narratives or the logics of play but on the mode of argumentation that is contained, produced, and advanced within the operational procedures of the game. Instead of pursuing research by following the established routes, Bogost introduced and demonstrated the opportunities and challenges of investigating games as a form of rhetoric—“procedural rhetoric”— by which “arguments are made not through the construction of words and images, but through the authorship of rules of behavior, the construction of dynamic models” (2007, 29). This book introduces and develops another shift in perspective. Its concern, however, is not the argument in the game but the game in the argument. An argument—whether in academic research, law and regulation, marketing and advertising campaigns, or on the streets and in popular discussions—is nothing other than the attempt for one party to gain a discursive advantage over an opponent. Crafting a persuasive argument, following the twists and turns of another’s logic, and developing an insightful critique of the different positions that are already available are all aspects of an elaborate game. And the fact is that some individuals play it better than others. In the ancient world, it is Socrates who is considered to be the reigning champion. In the modern period, however, the prize could easily go to Immanuel Kant. Kant, in fact, did not just play the game; he gamed the entire system. He knew the deck was already stacked against him, and that if he played by the established rules, there would be no chance of winning or progressing to the next level. So rather than continue to play by the existing protocols and procedures, he simply altered the rules of the game. For those who do not know the story, here is the short version: In the Critique of Pure Reason (episode one in Kant’s critically acclaimed trilogy), Kant notes how efforts in philosophy had run aground. For close to two thousand years, he argues, philosophers have been asking questions that they never quite seemed to get any traction on answering. So Kant, instead of trying to deal with and respond to the existing queries, games the system by changing the questions and the terms of the inquiry. As he described it, “Hitherto it has ix

x

Preface

been assumed that all our knowledge must conform to objects. But all attempts to extend our knowledge of objects by establishing something in regards to them a priori, by means of concepts, have, on this assumption, ended in failure. We must therefore make trial whether we may not have more success in the task of metaphysics, if we suppose that objects must conform to knowledge (Kant 1965, B xvi). Frustrated by failed attempts to determine whether and to what extent knowledge conforms to things in the world, Kant flips the script and plays an entirely different game, one based on different kinds of questions and involving a different set of rules. Kant, therefore, was not content to continue playing by the existing procedures and protocols but questioned the very operational limits of the game itself in order to shift perspective and formulate new and previously unheard of possibilities. This is precisely the task and objective of Gaming the System. Following Kant’s example, what I am interested in identifying and critically examining are those philosophical problems regarding video games, game studies, and virtual worlds that seem, for one reason or another, to be intractable, irresolvable, or inconclusive. This is done not in an effort to offer some novel or innovative solutions to the existing problems but to challenge the terms and conditions of the standard modes of inquiry in order to change what is asked about and why. And this effort falls squarely within the proper purview and domain of what is called “philosophy.” As Daniel Dennett (1996, vii) once explained (and in the first lines of the preface to one of his books): “I am a philosopher, not a scientist, and we philosophers are better at questions than answers. I haven’t begun by insulting myself and my discipline, in spite of first appearances. Finding better questions to ask, and breaking old habits and traditions of asking, is a very difficult part of the grand human project of understanding ourselves and our world.”

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

four of the chapters included here are based on and constitute significantly expanded and updated versions of research that was undertaken and produced for other opportunities. The first chapter, “Terra Nova 2.0,” was assembled from research that was originally produced for and presented during the Ninety-Third National Communication Association (NCA) convention convened in Chicago, Illinois, in mid-November of 2007. I am grateful to the other participants, Edward Castronova, Lisa Nakamura, and Robert Brookey, for their insightful comments and incredibly useful suggestions, and to the NCA members who came to the session with enthusiasm for the subject and a bunch of really good critical questions. An expanded version of the conference paper was developed in coordination with Ann Hetzel Gunkel and published in a special issue of Critical Studies in Media Communication (Gunkel and Gunkel 2009), which was edited by Robert Brookey, my former Northern Illinois University colleague and partner in crime with the Indiana University Press Series in Digital Game Studies. Additional comments and suggestions were provided by the faculty and students of the Institute of American Studies and Polish Diaspora at Uniwersytet Jagielloński in Kraków, Poland, during the fall semester of 2011. My thanks to Agnieszka Stasiewicz-Bieńkowska for organizing this event and to the students and faculty of the Institute for their interest and insight. The second chapter, “The Real Problem,” was initially developed for and presented at 10 anos de Filocom: a Nova Teoria nos 44 anos de ECA Escola de Comunicações e Artes da Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil on November 24, 2010. I am grateful to Ciro Marcondes Filho, who organized this meeting and invited my participation; Francisco Rüdiger, Eugênio Trivinho, and Massimo di Felice, who served as respondents; and the students and faculty of ECA/USP, who provided extremely useful questions and insightful commentary. A shorter and arguably less developed version of the text that is included here was initially published in New Media & Society (see Gunkel 2010). The third chapter, “Social Contract 2.0,” was originally written at the invitation of Can Bilgili and published in a Turkish translation under the title “Toplumsal xi

xii

Acknowledgments

Sözlesme 2.0: Hizmet Kullanim Sartlari Anlasmalari ve Siyaset Teorisi” in the book Kültür, Kimlik, Siyaset (Baski Mayis 2013). Special thanks to Neşe Kaplan for providing the translation and to Can Bilgili for the invitation to participate in the project. An English version of the text is available in the Journal of Media Critiques (Gunkel 2014) and was presented in bilingual versions at Encontro Nacional da Rede de Grupos de Pesquisa em Comunicação in Natal, Brazil on November 20, 2013, and at Uniwersytet Mikołaja Kopernika in Torun, Poland on January 13, 2016. My sincere thanks to Ciro Marcondes Filho, Lauren Ferreira Colvara, Alex Galeno, and Eloisa Klein for their assistance with and support for the lecture in Natal and to Ewa Binczyk for her hospitality and invitation to speak in Torun. The fourth chapter, “In the Face of Others,” is an amalgam of three closely related research efforts: “Communication and Artificial Intelligence: Opportunities and Challenges for the 21st century,” which was published in Communication +1 in August 2012; “Another Alterity: Rethinking Ethics in the Face of the Machine” in David J. Gunkel, Ciro Marcondes Filho and Dieter Mersch (eds.), The Changing Face of Alterity: Communication, Technology and Other Subjects (Rowman & Littlefield 2016); and “The Other Question: Socialbots and the Question of Ethics” in Robert W. Gehl & Maria Bakardjieva (eds.), Socialbots and Their Friends: Digital Media and the Automation of Sociality (Routledge 2016). My thanks to Zach McDowell and Briankle Chang at Communication +1 for their editorial insight and assistance, to my coeditors of The Changing Face of Alterity for their friendship and incredibly productive conversations and debates over the years, and to the editors and other contributors to the Socialbots book for their challenging questions that led to even more interesting opportunities and outcomes. Gaming the System was written in spring semester 2017. The writing was supported by the generous gift of time provided by a sabbatical leave from Northern Illinois University, the manuscript was ushered through the twists and turns of the publication process by Janice Frisch with the capable assistance of Kate Schramm, the index was compiled by Danielle Watterson, and the cover was inspired by Brian R. Gilbert’s incredibly original designs for the promotional poster (https:// www.brnglbrt.com). Like all previous publication efforts, this entire enterprise would not have been possible without the love and supported of my family: Ann Hetzel Gunkel, Stanisław Gunkel, and Maki, the GSP who always knows how to keep it real.

GAMING THE SYSTEM

INTRODUCTION

all systems are formal structures with rules that govern their behaviors and operations. This holds for belief systems like Judaism or Christianity, social and economic systems like communism or capitalism, systems of thought like Platonism or Hegelianism, and gaming systems like the puzzle game Myst, the first-person shooter game Doom, or the MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game) World of Warcraft. As rule-based structures, all of these could be classified as and legitimately called “games.” And as with any game, users first need to learn the rules and then conduct themselves in such a way as to follow or break these stipulations, reaping the benefits from the former, or suffering the consequences of the latter. Some games are rather simple, and the rules are easy to learn and utilize. Judaism, for example, is a system of belief that operates—at least in its original form—on the basis of ten simple principles or commandments. By contrast, Hegelianism is a rather complex system of thought that requires considerable effort to learn, mobilize, and play successfully. The same is true of video and computer games. Some applications operate with a rather simple rule-set, like Doom. Others, like Second Life (which many researchers argue is not even a game, strictly speaking), may have less specific requirements but still impose some restrictions on what can and cannot be done within the confines of the program. The phrase gaming the system, which serves as the title to this book, indicates a mode of engagement that goes above and beyond just playing by the rules. It designates an intention and effort not simply to play the game as is—to play by (or even play against) the established rules and regulations—but to learn to manipulate the rules in such a way as to gain an advantage or to modify the program to make the system function differently and otherwise. This takes additional effort that goes beyond simply learning to play the game: it requires careful, perspicuous attention to the operational limits of the game itself and a level of understanding that often exceeds the grasp and comprehension of the system and its designers. 1

2

Gaming the System

This is precisely the task of criticism, but not as it is usually (mis)understood and characterized. In its colloquial form, criticism is often seen as a negative transaction involved with identifying problems for the sake of error correction. In other words, it is typically understood as a means by which to isolate bugs within the system in order to institute necessary repairs, upgrades, or patches to fix its operations. This common perception of criticism as a form of “debugging,” although entirely understandable and seemingly informed by good common sense, is guided by a rather limited conceptualization of the role, function, and objective of critique. There is a more precise and nuanced definition available in the traditions and practices of critical philosophy. As Barbara Johnson (1981) insightfully explains, “a critique of any theoretical system is not an examination its flaws or imperfections . . . designed to make the system better.” Instead, “it is an analysis that focuses on the grounds of that system’s possibility. The critique reads backwards from what seems natural, obvious, self-evident, or universal, in order to show that these things have their history, their reasons for being the way they are, their effects on what follows from them, and that the starting point is not a given but a construct, usually blind to itself ” (xv). Understood in this way, critique is not simply about debugging. It does not target problems in the operations of the system in order to fix them and make things run better. There is, of course, nothing inherently wrong with such a practice. Strictly speaking, however, criticism involves more. It consists in an examination that seeks to identify and expose a particular game’s fundamental operations and conditions of possibility, demonstrating how what initially appears to be beyond question and entirely obvious does, in fact, possess a complex legacy and logic that not only influences what proceeds from it but is itself often not recognized as such. What follows under the title Gaming the System is this kind of critical effort directed toward video games, game studies, and virtual worlds. But saying this already leads to a problem with names and naming.

Nominal Problems From the beginning—even before beginning—words are already a problem. Although the act of identifying the object of investigation is often considered to be standard operating procedure at the outset of an examination, it turns out that ascertaining the correct term (or terms) in this particular circumstance is exceedingly complex. What the investigation targets and seeks to study has, in fact, been identified by a number of different monikers, many of which are not even names, but rather, acronyms, such as MUD, MMO, MUVE, or the unpronounceable MMORPG. Consequently, at the beginning—even before saying (or being able to say) anything about the object of the investigation— we first need to address and sort out this nominal problem (a problem that can be considered “nominal” in both senses of the word insofar as it is something

having to do with names but also presumed to be less significant than the actual investigation of the actual thing that is named).

Video, Computer, and Digital Games

3

Introduction

One of the earliest terms in circulation has been (and continues to be) “video game”—also written as “videogame.” What is identified by this seemingly simple expression, however, is anything but simple. As Mark J. P. Wolf (2001, 14) points out, “defining the limits of what is meant by ‘video game’ is more complicated than it first appears.” In an effort to provide a more complete and attentive characterization, Wolf recommends dealing with each element individually. “By the strictest definition,” Wolf explains, “‘video’ refers to the use of an analog intensity/brightness signal displayed on a cathode ray tube (CRT), the kind of picture tube used in a television set or computer monitor, to produce raster-based imagery. A slightly looser and more common definition of ‘video games,’ closer to the popular usage of the term, would also include games that do not have raster graphics, like vector graphic games, and games that do not use a CRT, such as Nintendo Game Boy games, which use a liquid-crystal display” (16). The term “video,” therefore, puts emphasis on a particular kind of display technology and, although it had been initially limited to analog hardware, now extends to all kinds of visual display systems, such that “video” has “become something more conceptual and less tied to a specific imaging technology” (Wolf 2008, 5). The word “game,” as Wolf explains, includes four defining features: “Elements one would expect to find in a ‘game’ are conflict (against an opponent or circumstances), rules (determining what can and cannot be done and when), use of some player ability (such as skill, strategy, or luck), and some kind of valued outcome (such as winning vs. losing or the attaining of the highest score or fastest time for the completing of a task)” (2001, 14, emphasis in the original). Although these four elements, Wolf argues, are present in any application or experience that would be called a “game”—whether a board game like chess, a team sport like hockey, or a ping-pong simulation displayed on the CRT screen like Pong— different programs contain them to “differing degrees.” In other words, the way the player of a first-person shooter like Doom or Call of Duty implements these four elements can and will be different from the way that they are deployed and utilized in a puzzle game like Myst, a sandbox game like Minecraft, or a life simulation game like The Sims. Although the terms “computer game” and “video game” have been used ­interchangeably, the two are not necessarily synonyms. Arguably the first video game, strictly speaking, was Thomas T. Goldsmith and Estle Ray Mann’s Cathode-­ Ray Tube Amusement Device (1947), an interactive artillery game where users controlled the arc of a projectile (represented in the form of a glowing dot) by adjusting knobs on the CRT display screen. Likewise, Ralph Baer’s early console,

4

Gaming the System Figure 0.1. “Ralph A Baer: Replica ‘Brown Box.’” From the Online Collection of the Strong: National Museum of Play. http://www.museumofplay.org/online-collections/22/43/110.4140

the Brown Box (1966), was an analog electronic device that connected to the CRT screen of a standard television and produced an interactive gaming experience (Fig. 0.1). By contrast, “computer games” are games where gameplay is controlled, managed, and processed by a computer. As the online exhibit at the Computer History Museum points out, “computer games are as old as computers.” Even if “the earliest machines were not intended specifically for play,” engineers and designers were actively involved in developing gaming applications. Notable examples include William Higinbotham’s two-player game Tennis for Two (1958), which was implemented on a special-purpose analog computer and utilized a standard laboratory oscilloscope for its display; Steve Russell’s Spacewar! (1961), a single-player game written for the DEC PDP-1 and displayed using the mini-­ computer’s CRT monitor (Fig. 0.2); and Maze War (1974), one of the first (if not the first) first-person shooters, initially developed by Steve Colley and then implemented as a multiplayer application on ARPANET by Greg Thompson. As the underlying digital technology and distribution networks of the personal computer and television have converged, the line that had at one time differentiated a “video game” from a “computer game” has become increasingly difficult to identify and defend. According to Wolf (2001, 17), for example, “‘computer games’ are most usefully seen as a subset of video games, due to shared technologies such as the microprocessor and the cathode-ray tube.” But just seven years later, Wolf seems to reverse this order by situating “computer game” as the generic term: “The term ‘computer games’ is sometimes used, though it

5

Introduction Figure 0.2. Spacewar! running on the Computer History Museum’s PDP-1. Image by Joi Ito, https://www.flickr.com/photos/35034362831@N01/494431001, licensed under CC BY 2.0

covers a wider range of games (including those without any graphical displays), and it is arguably more accurate, since the majority of video games depend on a microprocessor” (Wolf 2008, 5). For Caspar Hartevelt, however, “computer game” and “videogame” (which he writes as a compound word) are two subspecies of a more general category that he calls “digital games” and characterizes as follows: “I prefer the term ‘digital games’ over ‘computer games’ and ‘videogames,’ as these terms refer in a strict sense to either PC games or console games (i.e., games played on Playstation, Xbox or Wii), respectively. The term ‘digital’ includes all games with a computerized backbone. In addition, it is the perfect antithesis of analog. Analog games are, among others, board and card games” (Hartevelt 2012, 8). And for others, like Ulrich Wechselberger (2009) and Steven Conway and Mark Finn (2013), all three terms are equally interchangable: “To simplify matters, this paper uses the terms digital game, video game, and computer game synonymously” (Wechselberger 2009, 91); “Whether referred to as digital game, computer game, or videogame, this chapter uses such terms as synonyms for games played through the medium of electronic computing regardless of format” (Conway and Finn 2013, 232). Although all three terms circulate in the literature, “video game” has been and continues to be the popular designation (Fig. 0.3).1 Whatever their exact relationship, these different names derive from and focus attention on the enabling technology. This mode of identification is consistent with the emergence of other forms of information and communication technology, such as “wireless,” which was the initial designation for radio and

Ngram Viewer Graph these comma-separated phrases: between 1975

and 2008

case-insensitive

video game,computer game,digital game

from the corpus

with smoothing of

.

Twe et

Embed Chart

0.000120% 0.000110%

video game (All)

0.000100% 0.000090% 0.000080% 0.000070% 0.000060% 0.000050% 0.000040%

computer game (All)

0.000030%

6

Gaming the System 1 of 1

0.000020% 0.000010% 0.000000% 1975

digital game (All) 1980

1985

1990

1995

2000

2005

(click on line/label for focus, right click to expand/contract wildcards)

Figure 0.3. Graph generated by Google Books Ngram Viewer for the terms video game, Search in Google Books: computer game and digital game, covering the years 1975–2008 (the last year for which data is 1975 - 1986 1987 - 2003 2004 - 2005 2007 - 2008 game English currently available). Image created 2006 on February 24, video 2017, with Ngram Viewer, http://books 1975 - 1987 1988 - 2004 2005 2006 2007 - 2008 computer game English 1975 - 2001 2002 - 2005 2006 2007 2008 digital game English .google.com/ngrams Run your own experiment! Raw data is available for download here.

indicated the transmission of telegraphic and voice data without the supporting wired infrastructure, or “cell phone,” which derives its name from the technical features of the cellular network that support its operations. This form of nomenclature has an obvious advantage. Because these names originally derive from general technical features, they are often able to cast a rather wide and seemingly all-inclusive net. By focusing on the enabling technology, terms like “video game,” “computer game,” and “digital game” are able to encompass a wide range of different formats, user experiences, and genres, including single-player first-person shooters, such as the Wolfenstein series and Halo; chess and go-playing programs like IBM’s DeepBlue and Google DeepMind’s AlphaGo; text-based interactive educational games like the Oregon Trail; online role playing games like Everquest, World of Warcraft, and The Sims; and causal games for the mobile device like Farmville, Fruit Ninja, and Angry Birds. At the same time, however, the word “game” can have a counteracting effect, excluding some applications and experiences that do not quite fit the operational definitions. Perhaps the best example of this is Second Life. Second Life, as Giuseppe Macario and Cory Ondrejka (2014, unpaginated) explain, “is a publicly Internet-accessible 3D environment created in 2002 by the Californian company Linden Lab and launched three years later, which presents itself as a persistent, open, unlimited, highly customizable space. The interface and the iconography are strongly influenced by video games, but it cannot be considered a video game proper because of the lack of goals to achieve, points to gain, or levels to complete.” An application like Second Life, then, is both more and less than what is typically identified by the term “video game,” which means that, as Steven Conway and Jennifer deWinter (2016) conclude, “the most important video game emerging in the mid-2000s was not a game at all” (120). Similar difficulties have occurred with social media applications. As Jesse Schell confessed during a presentation he delivered at Dice 2010, “Facebook knocked us [the gaming industry] on our © 2013 Google - Privacy & Terms - About Google - About Google Books - About Ngram Viewer

8/19/17, 1

The Acronyms As with all things related to computer technology, acronyms seem to proliferate with little or no restraint, and the current list is rather impressive with well over a dozen different configurations. RPG (role playing game) is by far one of the oldest in the collection and refers to a kind of fantasy game where participants create and assume the role of a character, or what will eventually come to be called “avatar.” These characters occupy a fictional world that has its own physical properties, rules, and behaviors, which, although not necessarily exact reproductions of the “real world,” are nevertheless internally consistent and systematically regulated. Gameplay involves the development of complex narratives that are collaboratively created through character interactions and imaginary engagements with the features of the game environment. It is, as Edward Castronova (2005) has accurately described it, a kind of “improvisational theater” (107). Despite the name, therefore, RPGs are not necessarily “games.” As Patrick Williams, Sean Hendricks, and W. Keith Winkler (2006, 4) point out, “there are never really ‘winners’ or ‘endings’ in RPGs. Rather, the players are interested in experiencing a good story, but also improving their characters’ strengths and diminishing their weaknesses, thereby allowing them to experience grander and more epic stories.” The most popular RPG has been Dungeons and Dragons (D&D), a tabletop fantasy adventure game created by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, and first published in 1974 by Tactical Studies Rules, Inc. or TSR. Online RPGs are similar in design and function to the tabletop versions but are accessed and controlled by way of a multiaccess computer system, either a timeshared mainframe or a computer network. Single player, dungeon adventure games began to appear shortly after the initial publication of D&D and include Will Crowther’s ADVENT (aka “Colossal Cave Adventure”), a text-based adventure game (Fig. 0.4); pedit5 and m199h, both of which were single-player games distributed over PLATO, a timeshared computer system at the University of Illinois; and ZORK, which was developed by group of students at MIT (Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Crowther, and Dave Lebling) for the PDP-10 and

7

Introduction

collective ass.” Compared to state-of-the-art video and computer games, Facebook and its casual gaming applications like Farmville and Mafia Wars had not been considered impressive or even a serious contender in the gaming world. But Facebook, as Schell insightfully pointed out, did something innovative: it allowed users to mobilize their social networks in ways that games, even online role playing games, did not. As a result, Facebook managed to surprise the gaming industry by capturing both attention and market shares. And Schell’s presentation, aptly titled “Design Outside the Box,” was designed to get game developers to recognize the importance of the social media platform and to learn from its innovations, even if Facebook remained, strictly speaking, “outside the box” of what has typically been considered a game.

8

Gaming the System Figure 0.4. ADVENT or Colossal Cave Adventure (1977) running on a PDP-10. Public domain image provided by Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Colossal_Cave _Adventure#/media/File:ADVENT_—_Crowther_Woods.png

distributed over ARPANET. The first widely available multiuser game was Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle’s MUD1, which was developed at Essex University and made available on the internet in 1980. This first MUD, which stands for Multi-User Dungeon (later Domain and/or Dimension), was directly influenced by Trubshaw’s interest in D&D and designed to emulate the multiuser experience of a tabletop RPG. The success of MUD1 inspired numerous clones, copies, and modified versions. By the end of the 1980s there were, according to the estimates of Amy Bruckman, some two hundred different varieties of MUDs available on the internet (Kelly and Rheingold 1993). These second generation MUDs— which also go by names like TinyMUD, MOO, MUSH, MUSE, and MUCK— introduced two notable innovations. First, users had the ability to modify the game environment. The world of MUD1 was fixed and predefined by the computer program. Subsequent MUDs, like the MOO (MUD Object Oriented), allowed users to reconfigure the environment and even contribute new features and content. As Kevin Kelly and Howard Rheingold (1993) explain, “You and the other players can add or modify rooms, as well as invent new and magical objects. You say to yourself, ‘What this place needs is a tower where a bearded elf can enslave the unwary.’ So you make one, just by typing in its description. In short,

9

Introduction

the players invent the world as they live in it. The game is to create a cooler world than you had yesterday.” Second, as MUDs evolved and proliferated, they began to lose their thematic and structural attachments to the tabletop RPG. “Probably the most interesting development in MUD history,” F. Gregory Lastowka and Dan Hunter (2006, 20) explain, “occurred in 1989, when James Aspnes wrested MUDs away from their D&D roots by writing a short and easily portable MUD program known as TinyMUD. TinyMUD deemphasized traditional D&D elements such as killing for points.” By the early 1990s, then, there existed numerous MUD implementations that were not fantasy adventure games or even games at all but interactive social environments. “Around 1989/90,” as Bartle (2016, 112) explains, “there was a Great Schism in virtual world development. We got a split between social worlds and game worlds. The gamers still used MUD to mean all virtual worlds, but the socials used it to mean just the game worlds, referring to the non-game worlds by whatever codebase they used (MMO, MUSH, MUCK, whatever. They used MU* to refer to all virtual worlds, including game worlds—except for those who only used it to mean social virtual worlds.” MUDs and MOOs were entirely text-based experiences or, as Kelly and Rheingold (1993) describe it, they were “online virtual worlds built from words.” The features of the environment were presented in the form of brief descriptive statements that would update with new information as the user moved through the virtual space, and user activity, like movement through space or interactions with other players, were typed at the command prompt, usually in a Telnet window. By the mid-1990s, as computing power increased and graphical capabilities became more widely available, MUDs and MOOs began to incorporate images. These “graphical MUDs,” as they were initially called (Bartle 2003, 3), were eventually renamed MMORPG, Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game. By most accounts (Safko 2012, 388; Jøn 2010, 97) the term MMORPG was coined in 1997 by Richard Garriott, who created the Ultima series of games. Looking at the distribution across the literature on the subject, usage of the terms MUD and MOO appear to have peaked just as MMORPG was introduced, and the new acronym has clearly outpaced every other alternative since the turn of the century (Fig. 0.5). What really mattered for the growth and popularity of the MMORPG, however, was not the inclusion of graphics, but the number of user eyeballs this capability was able to attract and hold. As Bartle explains, “MUD still held on as the dominant umbrella term until the arrival of Meridian 59. Most virtual worlds before then were textual rather than graphical; there were some with graphics, but these were called graphical MUDs rather than anything special. What M59 brought (or was expected to bring) that made a difference was not the graphics per se but the players attracted by the graphics. Thus we got ‘Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games,’ or MMORPG for short (well, less long)” (2016, 112, emphasis in the original). And growth in the user population has been undeniably

Ngram Viewer Graph these comma-separated phrases: between 1975

and 2008

MMORPG,Massively Multiplayer Online,MUD Object Oriented,Multiple Usercase-insensitive Dungeon

from the corpus

with smoothing of

.

Twe et

Embed Chart

0.00000600% 0.00000550% 0.00000500%

MMORPG

0.00000450% 0.00000400% 0.00000350% 0.00000300% 0.00000250% 0.00000200% Massively Multiplayer Online

0.00000150%

10

0.00000100% 0.00000050% 0.00000000% 1975

Gaming the System 1 of 1

1980

1985

1990

1995

2000

2005

MUD Object Oriented Multiple User Dungeon

(click on line/label for focus)

Figure 0.5. Graph generated by Google Books Ngram Viewer for MUD, MOO, MMO, and Search in Google Books: MMORPG covering the years 1975–2008. Image created on 24 February 2017 with Ngram Viewer, http://books.google.com/ngrams 1975 - 2002

2003 - 2005

2006

2007

2008

1975 - 2002

2003 - 2005

2006

2007

2008

massively multiplayer online

1975 - 1994

1995 - 1998

1999

2000 - 2006

2007 - 2008

mud object oriented

mmorpg

English

English

1975 - 1994

1995 - 1994

1995 - 1997

1998 - 2008

2009 - 2008

multiple user dungeon

English

English

Run your own experiment! Raw data is available for download here.

impressive. Even at the height of their popularity, in the early to mid-1990s, the typical MUD/MOO rarely had more than a hundred users logged in at any one time, and in 1992 Pavel Curtis estimated the total number of active MUDers worldwide at a modest 20,000 (Rheingold 2000, 149). What distinguishes MMORPGs, like Meridian 59, Ultima Online, and their successors, is the sheer number of subscribers. Ultima Online, for instance, had 200,000 users by 1998 and the most popular early MMORPGs, like Lineage and EverQuest had a subscriber-base approaching the one million mark. By 2012, World of Warcraft was boasting a global population of users in excess of 11 million (Mildenberger 2013, 78). Despite its relative popularity and saturation in the literature, the term “MMORPG” is not without its difficulties. First, unlike the other acronyms, it is exceedingly difficult or virtually impossible to pronounce (Bartle 2016, 124), making MMORPG cumbersome for every mode of communication beyond written documents. Second, there are difficulties with the “G.” Not every instance of a massively multiplayer online experience that includes aspects of role playing is in fact a game, strictly speaking. As Geoffrey Sampson (2008, 118) points out, “An MMO that focuses mainly on battles, where the avatar can ‘win’ or be defeated and ‘die,’ is appropriately described as a ‘game,’ but the term scarcely applies to MMOs (such as Second Life) which are more oriented to socializing and developing virtual communities.” Similarly and in direct response to the question “Is Second Life is a MMORPG?” Linden Lab has provided a rather ambivalent answer: “Yes and no.” It can be considered a MMORPG to the extent that its “interface and display are similar to most popular massively multiplayer online role playing games (or MMORPGs)” (Linden Lab 2008), but it “lacks the goals and built-in rewards and rules of a game” (Humphreys 2006, 82). © 2013 Google - Privacy & Terms - About Google - About Google Books - About Ngram Viewer

Virtual Worlds As is already apparent, one of the more common, generic characterizations that has been offered to explain, define, or substitute for the various terms and acronyms

8/19/17, 10:26

Ngram Viewer Graph these comma-separated phrases: between 1975

and 2008

case-insensitive

virtual world,computer game,MMORPG

from the corpus

with smoothing of

.

Twe et

Embed Chart

0.0000500% 0.0000450%

virtual world

0.0000400% 0.0000350% 0.0000300%

computer game

0.0000250% 0.0000200% 0.0000150% 0.0000100% MMORPG

0.0000050% 1980

1985

1990

1995

2000

2005

(click on line/label for focus)

Figure 0.6. Graph generated by Google Books Ngram Viewer for virtual world, computer Search in Google game, andBooks: MMORPG covering the years 1975–2008. Image created on February 24, 2017 with 1975 - 1993 1994 - 2003 2004 2005 - 2007 2008 virtual world English Ngram Viewer, http://books.google.com/ngrams 1975 - 1987 1988 - 2004 2005 2006 2007 - 2008 computer game English 1975 - 2002

2003 - 2005

2006

2007

2008

mmorpg

11

Introduction

0.0000000% 1975

English

Run your own experiment! Raw data is available for download here.

is the phrase “virtual world.” Richard Bartle’s “From MUDs to MMORPGs: The History of Virtual Worlds” (2010), for instance, situates MUDs, MMORPGs, and every permutation and spin-off situated in between these two acronyms as particular instances in the evolution, development, and linage of “Virtual Worlds.” And according to Castronova, “virtual world” has prevailed over the competition simply because it is the simplest designation available: © 2013 Google - Privacy & Terms - About Google - About Google Books - About Ngram Viewer

“Virtual World” [VW] is a term used by the creators of the game Ultima Online, though they seem to prefer “persistent state world” instead (www.uo.com). Neither is a universally accepted term. Perhaps the most frequently used term is “MMORPG,” which means “massively multi-player on-line role-playing game,” apt since VWs were born and have grown primarily as game environments. However, virtual worlds probably have a future that extends beyond this role. Moreover, MMORPG is impossible to pronounce. Other terms include “MM persistent universe,” with “MM” meaning “massively-multiplayer;” also, there is Holmsten’s term, “persistent online world.” “Virtual worlds” captures the essence of these terms in fewer words, with fewer syllables and a shorter acronym; by Occam’s Razor, it is the better choice (2001, 6).

1 of 1

As the “better choice,” it is no surprise that “virtual world” now has a reach that easily exceeds many of the other currently available expressions (Fig. 0.6). Despite (or perhaps because of) its popularity, there is, as David Bell (2008, 2) points out in the first issue of the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research (JVWR) “no agreed upon definition, and the term is used in different ways at different times by academics, industry professionals and the media.” This polysemia is not necessarily a problem; it can also be an opportunity. “What are virtual worlds,” the editors of JVWR (2017, 1) ask, “and what is virtual worlds research, within the context of this journal? These are evolving questions that we hope the formation of a community of scholarship will explore and expand.” Despite this, the journal does recognize the need to articulate a basic definition as “a base to build upon” and the common starting point for subsequent discussions and debates: “We

8/19/17, 10:

12

consider virtual worlds to be computer-based simulated environment where users interact with other users through graphic or textual representations of themselves utilizing textual chat, voice, video or other forms of communication” (JVWR 2017, 1). Although not explicitly identified as such, this basic formulation is indebted to and draws on the work of Castronova, who proposed an influential working definition some seven years prior to the founding of the journal. “A virtual world or VW,” Castronova writes, “is a computer program with three defining features”:

Gaming the System

• Interactivity: it exists on one computer but can be accessed remotely (i.e., by an internet connection) and simultaneously by a large number of people, with the command inputs of one person affecting the command results of other people. • Physicality: people access the program through an interface that simulates a first-person physical environment on their computer screen; the environment is generally ruled by the natural laws of Earth and is characterized by scarcity of resources. • Persistence: the program continues to run whether anyone is using it or not; it remembers the location of people and things, as well as the ownership of objects (2001, 5–6).

These three basic characteristics (although not always identified by the exact terminology that had been utilized by Castronova) find their way into many of the subsequent definitions: “A synchronous, persistent network of people, ­represented as avatars, facilitated by networked computers” (Bell 2008, 2); “Virtual worlds are persistent virtual environments in which people experience others as being there with them—and where they can interact with them” (Schroeder 2010, 2); “Essentially, a virtual world is an automated, shared, persistent environment with and through which people can interact in real time by means of a virtual self ” (Bartle 2010, 24) (Fig. 0.7). Consequently, the moniker “virtual world” is not just popular in the literature; it also appears to provide a good generic designation. It is an expression that is not tied, either conceptually or nominally, to a specific kind of application, like games, or a particular kind of technological equipment, like video. It can therefore serve as an umbrella term that covers games—including both single and multiplayer digital games played on a variety of devices (i.e., consoles, PCs, and mobile devices) and analog tabletop games—as well as other applications, like LambdaMOO, Second Life, or even Facebook, which are typically not considered to be games. At the same time, however, this kind of generality can be a liability. First, depending on how it is defined and operationalized, the term can be too broad, incorporating objects and experiences that one might not necessarily want to include. As Schroeder (2008) points out, “If the sensory element of experiencing a place or space other than the one you are physically in, or of experiencing other people as being there with you, is taken away, then anything goes and

13

Introduction Figure 0.7. Screenshot from the Avatar Repertory Theater’s 2010 staging of Oedipus Rex in Second Life. Image by MadameThespian, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Avatar _Repertory_Theater_-_Oedipus_Rex_-_in_Second_Life_13.jpg, licensed under CC BY SA 3.0

definitions become meaningless: why shouldn’t books, text-based Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs), dreams or many other phenomena be called virtual environments or virtual worlds?” Second, because the term “virtual world,” as Bell (2008) points out, already admits a range of different denotations and connotations, the relationship of “virtual world” to the other terms in the taxonomy remains equivocal and ambiguous. According to the editors of JVWR (2017): “The term virtual worlds, includes, is similar to, or is synonymous (with extensive qualifications) to the terms of virtual reality, virtual space, datascape, metaverse, virtual environment, massively multiplayer online games (MMOs or MMOGs), massively multiplayer online role playing games (MMORPGs), multi-user dungeon, domain or dimension (MUDs), MUD object oriented (MOOs), multi-user shared hack, habitat, holodeck, or hallucination (MUSHs), massively-multiuser online graphical environments, collaborative virtual environments (CVEs) or multi-user virtual environments (MUVES), and immersive virtual environments (IVEs).” So, what is it? Is “virtual world” a hypernym—the general name designating all these other things such that MUDs, MOOs, and MMORPGs are just hyponyms or specific instances of the general category “virtual world”? Is it a polyonym, just one more name among other names that can be substituted for one another insofar as they all essentially identify one and the same object? Or is “virtual world” a synonym or even a quasi-synonym, which means that it would either have the same or nearly the exact meaning and significance as one or more of the other terms? The problem, as the editors of JVWR demonstrate, is not that it is one or the other; the problem is that “virtual world” is considered—or at least can be considered—all of these.

Word Games

14

Gaming the System

This attention to words is not just about playing around. It is serious philosophical business, especially in the wake of what has been called “the linguistic turn.” For those unfamiliar with the phrase, it denotes a crucial shift in perspective, when philosophers came to realize that the words they use to do their work were themselves something of a philosophical problem. Despite the fact that this turning point is routinely situated in the early twentieth century, it is not necessarily a recent innovation. The turn to language has, in fact, been definitive of the philosophical enterprise from the very beginning—or at least since the time of Plato’s Phaedo. In the Phaedo, which narrates—among other things—the last hours of Socrates’s life, the aged philosopher pauses to reflect on where it all began. In recounting the origin of his endeavors, Socrates describes how he initiated his research by trying to follow the example established by his predecessors and seeking wisdom in “the investigation of nature” (Plato 1990, 96a). He describes how this undertaking, despite its initial attraction and his best efforts, continually led him astray, how he eventually gave it up altogether, and how he finally decided on an alternative strategy by investigating the truth of things in λόγος—a Greek word that signifies “word” but is typically translated by a number of related terms: language, reason, logic, and argument. “I thought I must have recourse to λόγος and examine in them the truth of things,” Socrates explains (Plato 1990, 99e). Examining the truth of things in λόγος, however, does not mean that Socrates denied the existence of real things or was interested in considering these things merely as they are represented in language. Socrates was no social constructivist. “Now perhaps my metaphor is not quite accurate, for I do not grant in the least that he who investigates things in λόγος is looking at them in images any more than he who studies them in the facts of daily life” (Plato 1990, 100a). What Socrates advocated, therefore, is not something that would be simply opposed to what is often called “empirical knowledge.” Instead he promoted an epistemology that questions what Briankle Chang (1996, x) calls the “naïve empiricist picture”— the assumption that things can be immediately grasped and known outside the concepts, words, and terminology that always and already frame our way of looking at them. In other words, Socrates recognized that the truth of “things” is not simply given or immediately available to us in its raw or naked state. What these things are and how we understand them is something that is, at least for our purposes, always mediated through some kind of logical process by which they come to be grasped and conceptualized as such. In other words, words matter. In the face of competing terminology, like “video game,” “MMORPG,” “virtual world,” and so on, the way we typically resolve this difficulty follows a ­procedure that was initially formulated in another Platonic dialogue, the Cratylus. In trying to ascertain “what kind of correctness that is which belongs to names” (Plato 1977, 391b), Socrates discovers what we have already seen in the

15

Introduction

taxonomy just provided—a seemingly endless chain of reference, where one term is substituted for or used to explain the other terms. This insight, which is often attributed to structural linguistics and the innovations of Ferdinand de Saussure, is something that is, as Jay David Bolter (1991, 197) points out, immediately apparent to anyone familiar with the design and function of a dictionary: “For the dictionary has always been the classic example of the semiotic principle that signs refer only to other signs. . . . We can only define a sign in terms of other signs of the same nature. This lesson is known to every child who discovers that fundamental paradox of the dictionary: that if you do not know what some words mean you can never use the dictionary to learn what other words mean. The definition of any word, if pursued far enough through the dictionary, will lead you in circles.” The principle challenge, then, is to devise some way to put a stop to this potentially infinite regress of names and naming. This is the task that is taken up by Socrates in the course of the Cratylus. The Cratylus, in fact, supplies two possible solutions. On the one hand, Socrates suggests that there must be some kind of “proto-name” that puts an end to the sequence of terminological substitutions by referring not to other names but to the exact thing that is named (Plato 1977, 244c). This primary or primordial designation would, presumably correspond exactly to the thing it names, and not need other names in order to explain or justify it. But the argument developed by Socrates in the attempt to advance this proposition demonstrates the exact opposite, showing that any attempt to justify the correctness of a name to the thing it names can only take place in and by using other names. On the other hand, then, the regress can only be arrested by an arbitrary but deliberate decision. In the Cratylus this decision, which is quite literally a decisive cut or de-cision that interrupts the potentially infinite substitution of terms, is determined to be the purview of what Socrates calls the “name maker” or “law giver” (Plato 1977, 388e). The series of terminological substitutions is therefore terminated, as Slavoj Žižek (2008a, 95) describes it, “through the intervention of a certain ‘nodal point’ (the Lacanian point de capiton) which ‘quilts’ them, stops their sliding and fixes their meaning.” This nodal point or knot in the network of interchangeable terms has been called the “master signifier”—a signifier that, although essentially no different from any other sign in the group, is situated in such a way that it masters the entire sequence of terminological substitutions by providing a kind of final reference or guarantee of meaning. This transpires not because of some natural and essential connection between this name and the thing it names but by way of a deliberate and contingent decision, or what Žižek (1992, 119) has called “an abyssal, nonfounded, founding act of violence.” Someone or some group—what Socrates calls the “name-giver” or “the law maker”—asserts one particular term over and against all the others as the universal one that encompasses or masters the entire field. “It is the point at which one can only say that the ‘buck stops here’; a point at which, in order to stop the endless regress, somebody has to say, ‘It is so because I say it is so!’” (Žižek 2008b, 62).

16

Gaming the System

This is precisely what transpires in the literature of game studies. Faced with a set of virtually interchangeable terms, where no one term occupies the ideal position of “proto-name,” researchers have no choice but to make a choice. “The object of this book,” Jesper Juul (2005, viii) declares, “is games played using computer power, where the computer upholds the rules of the game and where the game is played using a video display. I will be using video games as an umbrella term to describe all such PC, console, arcade, and other digital games.” Grant Tavinor (2009, 17) institutes a similar, albeit less decisive, decision: “I have settled on videogame as the generic term in this book partly because it d­ ominates current usage, partly because it does have a generic sense that cuts across the nominal variants just noted, and partly because it has the virtue of referring to the visual aspect of games, a fact which will assume importance later in this book.” Castronova, who originally decided on the term “virtual world,” makes an entirely different decision at the beginning of the book Synthetic Worlds: “While there might be a number of useful new terms,” Castronova (2005, 11) admits, “I will stick primarily with the term synthetic world: an expansive, world-like, large-­ group environment made by humans, for humans, and which is maintained, recorded, and rendered by a computer.” Geoffrey Sampson (2008, 118), however, takes a very different path, deciding on one of the acronyms: “The term ‘massively multi-player online role playing game’ is cumbersome, and it gets abbreviated in different ways: MMPORG, MMORPG, MMOG, MMO. Some commentators prefer the simpler term ‘virtual world’—but that is too vague, since there are many things at the artificial-intelligence end of computing that might be described as virtual worlds but are nothing to do with what we are considering here. I shall use the abbreviation MMO, for simplicity and also because the concept of massive numbers of participants interacting online is really more central to the ‘game’ ­concept.” These acts of decision are clearly necessary and expedient. One needs to make such determinations in order to get on with the examination and to be able to say anything at all about the object under investigation. And this decision (again, quite literally a cut insofar as the English suffix –cision is derived from the Latin word caesa, meaning “cut”), is not something that is typically advanced and defended through extensive argumentation. More often than not, it is simply declared as a fait accompli, or what Žižek (1992, 119) has called “an abyssal, nonfounded, founding act of violence.” A researcher, therefore, selects one term from the field of competing options, simply declares that it is what she or he has decided, and then sticks with it. Despite it utility, however, so much is already decided here that “goes-without-saying” (Barthes 2012, xi). In making this kind of determination, certain elements and aspects are brought into focus while others are (perhaps unintentionally or unknowingly) sidelined or marginalized. Consequently, the choice of words—whether “virtual world,” “videogame,” MMORPG, or any of the other designations—is never neutral. Like the frame of a camera, the choice of a particular moniker frames certain objects, problems, and possibilities by

Method This attentiveness to words is something that is perhaps best summarized by one of the more famous (or infamous) statements of Jacques Derrida (1976, 158): “il n’y a pas de hors-texte” or “there is nothing outside the text.” What he meant by this, however, is not what many critics have assumed or accused him of saying: “That does not mean that all referents are suspended, denied, or enclosed in a book, as people have claimed, or have been naïve enough to believe and to have

17

Introduction

situating them within the field of vision; but doing so also unavoidably excludes other aspects and opportunities from further consideration by locating them in the margins or just outside the field of vision. This is precisely the theoretical insight that is developed and mobilized in the “linguistic turn.” Language, on this account, is not simply a set of prefabricated, ready-to-hand words that can be organized and combined together in order to say something intelligible about things in the world—things that presumably exist and have been presented prior to becoming represented in language. Instead language participates in shaping and making this reality accessible in the first place. In other words, words do not merely represent things as some derived and pale reflection of what is. Instead, words reveal and provide access to being. Or as James Carey (1992, 25) cleverly describes it by way of Kenneth Burke, “words are not the names for things . . . things are the signs of words.” Understood in this fashion, different words reveal different things or different aspects of things. As Heidegger (1962, 262) explains, it is in and by language that an entity comes to be extracted from its undifferentiated entanglement in the stuff of its environment and exhibited as such. Although this may sound counterintuitive, it is a concept that has gained considerable traction in the latter half of the twentieth century. 2 In his seminal book, Tractatus LogicoPhilosophicus, for instance, Ludwig Wittgenstein famously argued that “the limits of my language mean the limits of my world” (1995, 149), indicating that the world one knows and operates in is shaped, formed, and delimited by the words that one has at his or her disposal. Because of this, we should not be too quick to pass over the problem of names and the opportunities and challenges made available in and by language. Instead of following the usual procedure and simply declaring a choice and then sticking with it, we will remain attentive to the circulation of different names, the expressions of power that come to be exercised in and by naming, and the terminological debates that are situated within the material of language itself.3 This means that the object and objective of the investigation is not just what has been called “video game,” “virtual world,” “MMORPG,” and so on; it is also the way that these various designations have been devised, developed, and debated in the technical, popular, and academic literature. The target of the investigation, therefore, is not just video games and virtual worlds but also the words that have been used to talk about and make sense of them.

18

Gaming the System

accused me of believing. But it does mean that every referent, all reality has the structure of a differential trace, and that one cannot refer to this ‘real’ except in an interpretive experience” (Derrida 1993, 148). Working with this particular insight requires a methodology that is designed for and that can scale to this opportunity and challenge. This is what is called “deconstruction.” According to Derrida, the word “deconstruction” (to begin with a negative characterization) does not mean to take apart, to un-construct, or to disassemble. Despite this now rather widespread, popular misconception that has become something of an institutionalized (mal)practice, deconstruction is not a form of destructive analysis, a kind of demolition, or the process of reverse engineering. As Derrida (1993) himself has said quite explicitly (and on more than one occasion), “the de- of deconstruction signifies not the demolition of what is constructing itself, but rather what remains to be thought beyond the constructionist or destructionist schema” (147, emphasis mine). Deconstruction, therefore, names something entirely other than what is understood and delimited by the conceptual opposition situated between “construction” and “destruction.” So, what exactly is deconstruction? Here is how Derrida described the practice in an interview that was initially published in 1971: What interested me then, which I am attempting to pursue along other lines now, was . . . a kind of general strategy of deconstruction. The latter is to avoid both simply neutralizing the binary oppositions of metaphysics and simply residing within the closed field of these oppositions, thereby confirming it. Therefore we must proceed using a double gesture, according to a unity that is both systematic and in and of itself divided, according to a double writing, that is, a writing that is in and of itself multiple, what I called, in “The Double Session” a double science. On the one hand, we must traverse a phase of overturning. To do justice to this necessity is to recognize that in a classical philosophical opposition we are not dealing with the peaceful coexistence of a vis-à-vis, but rather with a violent hierarchy. One of the two terms governs the other, or has the upper hand. To deconstruct the opposition, first of all, is to overturn the hierarchy at a given moment. . . . That being said—and on the other hand—to remain in this phase is still to operate on the terrain of and from the deconstructed system. By means of this double, and precisely stratified, dislodged and dislodging, writing, we must also mark the interval between inversion, which brings low what was high, and the irruptive emergence of a new “concept,” a concept that can no longer be, and never could be, included in the previous regime. (Derrida 1981, 41–42)

If we take this apart—if we “deconstruct” it to redeploy what would, by comparison, need to be characterized as the “wrong” (or at least the “insufficient”) sense of the word—we can extract and identify several important features.

Conceptual Oppositions Deconstruction names a way—what Derrida (1981, 41) calls a “general strategy”— to intervene in “the binary oppositions of metaphysics.” According to the twentieth-century innovations of structuralism and poststructuralism, what we

19

Introduction

know and are able to say about the world can be characterized and arranged in terms of conceptual opposites, dualities, or binary distinctions. As Mark Dery (1996, 244) explains it: “Western systems of meaning [what Derrida calls “metaphysics”] are underwritten by binary oppositions: body/soul, other/self, matter/spirit, emotion/reason, natural/artificial, and so forth. Meaning is generated through exclusion: The first term of each hierarchical dualism is subordinated to the second, privileged one.” In other words, human beings tend to organize and make sense of the world through terminological differences or conceptual dualities, such as mind and body, male and female, good and bad, being and nothing, and so on. And the field of game studies is no exception—in fact, it is exemplary. “Many discussions in game studies,” as Nicholas Ware (2016, 168) explains, “have centered on binaries. In the 1990s, much was made of the real vs. the virtual. In the oughts, narratology vs. ludology.” Other influential conceptual distinctions in the field include: game versus player (Voorhees 2013, 19), work versus play (Calleja 2012), hardware versus software (Aslinger and Huntemann 2013, 3), and casual versus hardcore (Leaver and Willson 2016). For this reason, as Juul (2005, 11) concludes, “video game studies has so far been a jumble of disagreements and discussions with no clear outcome. . . . The discussions have often taken the form of simple dichotomies, and though they are unresolved, they remain focal points in the study of games.” For any of these conceptual opposites, the two terms have not typically been situated on a level playing field; one of the pair is already determined to have the upper hand. Or as Derrida characterizes, “We are not dealing with the peaceful coexistence of a vis-à-vis, but rather with a violent hierarchy” (Derrida 1981, 41). In the conceptual duality of real versus virtual, for example, the two terms have not been equal partners. The former already has a presumed privilege over the later, and this privilege is perhaps best illustrated in The Matrix films. Early in the first episode of this cinematic trilogy, Morpheus offers Neo a choice between two pills—a red pill that leads to an authentic life in the real world and a blue pill that will keep one enslaved in the computer-generated virtual reality of the Matrix.4 In the face of these competing options, Neo does what appears to be the “right thing”; he reaches out and takes the red pill. Like the prisoner in Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” Neo selects truth as opposed to illusion, reality as opposed to fiction, and the real world as opposed to the virtuality of projected images.5 Deconstruction constitutes a mode of critical intervention that takes aim at these conceptual oppositions and does so in a way that does not simply neutralize them and remain within the hegemony of the existing system. This latter ­procedure, what Derrida calls “neutralization,” is precisely the “solution” that Nicholas Ware (2016) advocates, when he argues that the “versus” that separates the two terms (i.e., real versus virtual, narratology versus ludology, and so on) be turned into an all-inclusive, neutralizing “and” (168). Derrida explicitly rejects this sort of effort as insufficient and ineffectual insofar as it actually does little or nothing to challenge or alter the rules of the game. Deconstruction, therefore,

takes another route. It comprises a general strategy for challenging existing ways of thinking and its systems of power, formulating alternative possibilities for “thinking outside the box.”

Double Science

20

Gaming the System

In order to accomplish this, deconstruction consists of a complicated double gesture or what Derrida also calls “a double science.” This two-step procedure necessarily begins with a phase of inversion, where a particular duality or conceptual opposition is deliberately overturned by siding with the traditionally deprecated term. This is, quite literally, a revolutionary gesture insofar as the existing order is inverted or turned around. But this is only half the story. This conceptual inversion, like all revolutionary operations—whether social, political, or philosophical—actually does little or nothing to challenge the dominant system. In merely exchanging the relative positions occupied by the two opposed terms, inversion still maintains the conceptual opposition in which and on which it operates—albeit in reverse order. This can be illustrated, once again, in the Matrix trilogy by way of the character of Cypher. Cypher is a member of Morpheus’s crew, who, after experiencing life in the real world, decides to return to the computergenerated fantasies of the Matrix. Cypher therefore opts for the blue pill. In being portrayed in this fashion, the character of Cypher functions as Neo’s dramatic foil; he is, as Frentz and Rushing (2002, 68) characterize it using digital notation, “the 0 to Neo’s 1.” In deciding to return to the computer-generated fantasies of the Matrix, however, Cypher simply inverts the ruling conceptual opposition and continues to operate within and according to its logic.6 Simply turning things around, as Derrida (1981, 41) concludes, still “resides within the closed field of these oppositions, thereby confirming it.” For this reason, deconstruction necessarily entails a second, postrevolutionary phase or operation. “We must,” as Derrida (1981, 42) describes it, “also mark the interval between inversion, which brings low what was high, and the irruptive emergence of a new ‘concept,’ a concept that can no longer be, and never could be, included in the previous regime.” Strictly speaking, this new “concept” is no concept whatsoever, for it always and already exceeds the system of dualities that define the conceptual order as well as the nonconceptual order with which the conceptual order has been articulated (Derrida 1982, 329). This “new concept” (that is, strictly speaking, not really a concept) is what Derrida calls an undecidable. It is first and foremost, that which “can no longer be included within philosophical (binary) opposition, but which, however, inhabits philosophical opposition, resisting and disorganizing it, without ever constituting a third term, without ever leaving room for a solution in the form of speculative dialectics” (Derrida 1981, 43). The undecidable new concept occupies a position that is in between or in or at the margins of a traditional, conceptual opposition—a binary pair. It is simultaneously neither-nor and either-or. It does not resolve into one or the other

Beyond Method Technically speaking, deconstruction is not a method. This is because “methods,” as Rodolphe Gasché (1986, 121) explains, “are generally understood as roads (from hodos: “way,” “road”) to knowledge. In the sciences—as well as in the philosophies that scientific thinking patronizes—method is an instrument for representing a given field, and it is applied to the field from the outside.” Deconstruction, however, does not admit to this kind of abstraction and formalization. As Derrida (1993, 141) explains, “deconstruction does not exist somewhere, pure, proper, self-identical, outside of its inscriptions in conflictual and differentiated contexts; it ‘is’ only what it does and what is done with it, there where it takes place.” Consequently, “there is no one single deconstruction,” but only specific and irreducible instances in which deconstruction takes place. Unlike a method that can be generalized in advance of its particular applications, deconstruction comprises a highly specific form of critical intervention that is context dependent. This means that deconstruction is less a method—a road to be followed—and more of what Ciro Marcondes Filho has called metáporo. According to Marcondes

21

Introduction

of the two terms that comprise the conceptual order, nor does it constitute a third term that would mediate their difference in a synthetic unity, a la Hegelian or Marxian dialectics. Consequently, it is positioned in such a way that it both inhabits and operates in excess of the conceptual oppositions by which and through which systems of knowledge have been organized and articulated. It is for this reason that the new concept cannot be described or marked in language, except (as is exemplified here) by engaging in what Derrida (1981, 42) calls a “bifurcated writing,” which compels the traditional philosophemes to articulate, however incompletely and insufficiently, what necessarily resists and displaces all possible modes of articulation. Perhaps the best illustration of deconstruction’s two-step operation is available in the term “deconstruction” itself. In a first move, deconstruction flips the script by putting emphasis on the negative term “destruction” as opposed to “construction.” In fact, the apparent similitude between the two words, “deconstruction” and “destruction,” is a deliberate and calculated aspect of this effort. But this is only step one. In the second phase of this double science, deconstruction introduces a brand-new concept. The novelty of this concept is marked, quite literally, in the material of the word itself. “Deconstruction,” which is fabricated by combining the de– of “destruction” and attaching it to the opposite term, “construction,” is a neologism that does not quite fit in the existing order of things. It is an exorbitant and intentionally undecidable alternative that names a new possibility. This new concept, despite its first appearances, is not the mere polar opposite of construction; rather, it exceeds the conceptual order instituted and regulated by the terminological opposition situated between construction and destruction.

22

Gaming the System

Filho (2013, 58), a method is, “by definition, a pre-mapped path that the researcher needs to follow.” It is, therefore, generally “fixed, rigid, and immutable” (58). By contrast, metáporo, a neologism introduced by Marcondes Filho, is more flexible and responsive to the particular: “If on the contrary, one opts for a procedure that follows its object and accompanies it in its unfolding, this opens a way, a ‘poros’ or a furrow, like a boat that cuts through the water without creating tracks. With metáporo, the object follows its own way and we accompany it without previous script, without a predetermined route, living in what happens while pursing the investigation” (Marcondes Filho 2013, 58).

Plan of Attack Applying the method (or, perhaps more accurately stated, the “quasi-method”) of deconstruction to video games and game studies produces four individual movements or chapters. The objective of each chapter is not to take apart or to disassemble things—the vulgar definition of deconstruction—but to unravel, follow, and repurpose the sediment of metaphysical concepts that have already determined how we approach, understand, and make sense of video games, game studies, and virtual worlds. The chapters, therefore, do not develop one sustained argument or one single application of deconstruction; rather, they constitute individual interventions that take place as particular instances of deconstruction. For this reason, the sequence by which one reads the chapters need not be limited to what is presented here, and readers can and are invited to access them in whatever order they find interesting, useful, and engaging.

Terra Nova 2.0 The first movement—and what is designated as chapter 1 in the numbered sequence—takes up and investigates the new world of video games. In fact, the dominant metaphor that has been used to describe and situate this technology and its social impact has, more often than not, been “new world” and “new frontier.” According to R. V. Kelly (2004, 72), for instance, the experience of entering the virtual space of a MMORPG “is like being the first person to walk on the shores of a new continent thousands of years ago. The continent is full of animals, and they’re yours for the taking. You stand on the cliff edge gazing down at the herds and you know you’re going to flourish. There’s no feeling that is more addictive than this sense of discovery of the richness of the world around you and your own competence and independence in that world.” But this “new world” imagery is not something that is limited to descriptions of the gaming experience; it has also found its way into and informed game studies scholarship, where researchers have often mobilized this terminology. Case in point: the collection of essays on Second Life, edited by Donald Heider (2009) and called Living Virtually: Researching New Worlds as well Wagner James Au’s popular blog on virtual worlds and virtual reality (VR) that he calls New World Notes.

The Real Problem What makes the experience of virtual worlds unique and significantly ­d ifferent from that of other forms of visual art, media, and entertainment is that they are not so much viewed as they are entered. “You are not,” Castronova (2001, 6) explains, “looking at a painting. You are in it. And it is not a painting at all, but an immersive scenery that induces you and thousands of other people to play parts in what becomes an evolving and unending collective drama.” How this immersion transpires and takes place is through the instrumentality of the avatar—a digital representation of the user in the computer-generated space of the game. From the beginning, the avatar has been a privileged subject and crucial point of contact for both gamers and game studies scholars. Players report spending an inordinate amount of time working and reworking their avatars’ appearances, even paying out of pocket for upgrades that are not available in the basic package. And this kind of personal investment and involvement was, in fact, an intended effect of using this particular moniker, which was originally derived from Hindu mythology. As Maurício Leisen (2016, 111) explains, “It is worth noting that this term, as the concept for the graphical representation of the user within a digital space, emerged as an attempt to make the player feel responsible for the characters in the game Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar (Origin Systems 1985).” Likewise, game and internet studies scholars appear to be obsessed with this stuff, pursuing examinations of the complicated structures and ­a rticulations of identity made possible by the avatar, the relationship between the user’s true identity and that expressed by his or her virtual proxy, or the playfulness ­available with electronic cross-dressing and other forms of identity play. “By ­acting through avatars,” Beth Simone Noveck (2006, 269) explains, “players take on a role distinct from, yet related to, their own identity. This makes the experience of participating richer and more experiential than the anonymity of the old frontier.

23

Introduction

By deploying this historically powerful and persuasive imagery, game d­ evelopers, players, the popular media, and academic researchers draw explicit connections between video games, MMORPGs, other online social ­experiences, and the European encounter with the Americas and the western ­expansion of the United States. Although providing a compelling and often easily ­recognizable explanation for the opportunities and challenges afforded by these new technologies, the use of this terminology comes with a considerable price. This chapter explores the concepts of the “new world” and the “new frontier” as they have played out in game design, marketing efforts, and academic research not with the goal of tearing down the experience or getting “politically correct” about what is often considered to be mere entertainment but to demonstrate how this seemingly simple and often unquestioned choice of words has significant ­consequences for the way we understand and conceptualize video games, game studies, and ­v irtual worlds.

24

Gaming the System

At the same time, avatars can be freed from the constraints of gender, race, and class that may impede participation.” The second chapter takes aim at and deconstructs this conceptualization and understanding of the avatar. It does so not by targeting the virtual side of the real/virtual dichotomy but by investigating the complexities of the real— the undeniably useful but ultimately confused and somewhat misguided concept that has been operationalized in all these efforts. What is at issue, therefore, is not the usual questions and concerns regarding avatar identity but the assumed “real thing” that is determined to be its underlying cause and ultimate referent. In addressing this subject matter, we will consider three influential theories of the real—extending from the standard formulations of Platonism, through Immanuel Kant’s modern interventions and epistemological recontextualizations, to recent innovations introduced and developed by Slavoj Žižek—and investigate their effect on our understanding of computergenerated experience and social interaction. The objective of this effort is not to play around with philosophical questions concerning the true nature of reality. The goal is to get real about computer-generated experience and personal identity, providing a new way to conceptualize and to make sense of the avatar and its consequences.

Social Contract 2.0 The third chapter gets political. MUD1 and its numerous spinoffs—what Richard Bartle (2006, 32) has called the “the world’s first virtual world”—were, by all available accounts, lawless frontier towns where virtually anything and everything was possible. Eventually, however, someone or some group institutes rules. This is done in response to crisis, the need to control the experience as a commercial service, or simply due to the efforts of responsible citizens interested in producing better opportunities for themselves and others. These rules, which go above and beyond the restrictions programmed in a specific game’s codebase, are generally formalized in a contractual document called End User License Agreement (EULA) or Terms of Service (ToS). As Gregory Lastowka and Dan Hunter (2006, 130) explain: “Virtual worlds, to some extent, are just a massively social implementation of traditional genres of computer games. They depend primary on software rules, because, like Space Invaders, they are fundamentally code. . . . But unlike traditional computer games, virtual worlds do not rely exclusively on software for their rule system. Instead, unlike most other computer games, virtual worlds are accompanied by explicit textual rule sets that are carefully drafted by lawyers and game designers and designed (at least in part) to curtail antisocial behaviors. These nonsoftware rules of virtual worlds are often expressed in standard end-user license agreements.” Formulated as a contract, the EULA/ToS requires users to consent to the rules that it imposes prior to entering and participating in a particular virtual world. Although these

In the Face of Others These political documents are necessary, because, unlike single-player video games like Space Invaders, MMORPGs and other online virtual worlds already involve others. But the “other” in a virtual world is no longer—and perhaps never really was—limited to other human beings. In fact, in the face of the avatar, one cannot (as we will already have seen in chapter 2) be entirely certain about who or what stands behind and authorizes the actions of the virtual proxy. It maybe another person like me; it may be a person very different from me. But it could also be otherwise. It could, for instance, be a community of different people. It could even be a bot or nonplayer character (NPC)—an avatar not ­connected to or controlled by anybody but manipulated and directed by the ­computer. This uncertainty about the other and the possibility of other forms of otherness complicate the social and moral situation that is confronted in online social worlds. As Norbert Wiener, the progenitor of the science of cybernetics insightfully predicted over fifty years ago, the social situation is evolving. At the beginning of The Human Use of Human Beings (1988), Wiener writes the ­following: “It is the thesis of this book that society can only be understood through a study of the messages and the communication facilities which belong to it; and that in the future development of these messages and communication facilities, messages between man and machines, between machines and man, and between machine and machine, are destined to play an ever-increasing part” (16). In the social relationships of the future (we need to recall that Wiener wrote

25

Introduction

contractual agreements look to be nothing more than legal documents—and documents that many users never actually read or consult—they do have real social and political consequences. This chapter, therefore, advances what initially appears to be an unlikely ­t hesis—namely, that the most influential and important political documents of the twenty-first century are these often-overlooked contractual agreements to which users must consent (or, more often than not, merely click “agree”) in order to participate in a video game, MMORPG, or social network like Facebook. The demonstration of this thesis is organized into three parts. The first situates EULA and ToS contracts within the history and lineage of modern political thought in general and social contract theory in particular. The second pursues a close textual analysis of EULA/ToS documents in order to identify and evaluate the kinds of social interactions and political affiliations these agreements make possible and the type of activities and associations they necessarily limit, marginalize, or exclude. The final section extrapolates the broader social and political consequences of the EULA/ToS, arguing that informed users not only need to read these contracts carefully but also need to recognize the way these seemingly unimportant documents define and delimit the very terms and conditions for social involvement and interaction in the twenty-first century.

26

Gaming the System

these words in 1950), the machine will no longer comprise a mere instrument or medium through which human users communicate and socialize with each other. Instead, it will increasingly occupy the position of another social actor with whom one communicates and interacts. In coming to occupy this other position, we inevitably run up against and encounter fundamental questions regarding social standing and responsibility— questions that not only could not be articulated within the context of the previous way of thinking but also would have been considered inappropriate and even nonsense if they had been articulated from that perspective. What, for example, is our responsibility in the face of these others—an “other” who could be something besides another human user? How do or should we respond to these forms of otherness, and how will or should these other entities respond to us? Although these questions open onto what many would consider to be the realm of science fiction, they are already part of our social reality and are being modeled and played with in video games and virtual worlds. How we decide to respond to these opportunities and challenges will have a profound effect not just on our interactions within the virtual world but also on the way we conceptualize our place in the world, who we decide to include in the community of socially significant subjects, and what we exclude from such consideration and why.

Open-Ended Conclusions The book ends without a conclusion, or at least without that kind of final chapter that would be designated “conclusion” and that would have wrapped-up everything in a nice, neat package. This is not some clever dodge, cute rhetorical gimmick, or a product of that kind of “obscurantism” for which Derrida was so often criticized.7 It is necessitated by the approach, objective, and procedure of the investigation. Any attempt at “gaming the system,” like the critical effort of deconstruction, is already situated within and working in response to a specific set of rules, requirements, and circumstances. Like a game mod, deconstruction cannot stand on its own and is not intended to; it becomes what it is only within the context of the texts it occupies, responds to, and plays with. Consequently, what results from this kind of effort is not a set of stand-alone, generalizable insights and outcomes that can be extracted and enumerated, but a necessarily incomplete and ongoing involvement with the systems in which and on which it operates. “Leading poststructuralists [like Derrida],” Mark Taylor (1997, 269) notes, “realize that, since they remain unavoidably entangled in the systems and structures they resist, the task of criticism is endless.” For this reason, the activity of deconstruction is not, strictly speaking, ever able to be finished with its work or to achieve final closure. As Derrida has described it (1981, 41), the end of deconstruction—“end” understood as the goal or objective of the activity—is to be “an interminable analysis.” The final chapter takes up and deals with the meaning of this rather cryptic phrase, producing a kind of inconclusive conclusion.

Notes

27

Introduction

1. This use of the Google Books Ngram Viewer to represent the change in the occurrence and use of different terms in the existing literature is neither unique nor innovative. I borrow this strategy from Eduardo Navas (2012), who employed it to sort out and make sense of the different terminology surrounding the theory and practice of “remix.” Though providing a quick, visual overview of the relative change in the use and popularity of terminology over a specific time period, the tool has a number of limitations. Specifically, it is currently restricted to books published in the English language between the years 1975 and 2008, which is the most recent year for which data is available. Consequently, the resulting graphs do not account for data from other kinds of publication (e.g., academic journals, newspapers, magazines, and websites), from languages other than English, or for years after 2008. This is—especially in the case of this material—a serious limitation insofar as video gaming and game studies are a well-established global phenomenon that have experienced remarkable growth in the years since 2008. Despite this limitation, however, the graphs do present data derived from a reasonably defined sample and show how usage of the different terms has changed relative to each other over a selected period of time. 2. Similar positions have been developed and advanced in the fields of (1) linguistics with the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which in its strong form argues that the language one speaks determines his/her social reality (Sapir 1941, 162); (2) sociology with Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s The Social Construction of Reality (1966), which proposes that language and other symbolic forms construct the reality in which human beings live and operate; and (3) critical theory with Jean Baudrillard’s Simulations (1994, 1), in which Baudrillard famously argued (by way of reference to a short story by Jorge-Luis Borges) that “the territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory—precession of simulacra—it is the map that engenders the territory.” 3. Richard Bartle (2016, 8) provides an instructive illustration of what such attentiveness to terminological plurivocity might entail and look like in practice: “Normally, the terminology I use would be virtual world for virtual worlds in general, social worlds for ones along the lines of Second Life with no built-in gameplay, and game-like worlds for the ones along the lines of World of Warcraft that are played as games by most people who use them. However, just for you, I’ll generally use MMO in this book rather than ‘game-like worlds.’ Except I might call them virtual worlds anyway, or game worlds when contrasting them with social worlds, or even games if some point I wish to make isn’t MMO-specific.” 4. Despite the fact that The Matrix is rather “old” in popular culture years—the first film was released in 1999—the trilogy continues to have traction. This is especially the case for the red/blue pill distinction, which has become something of a cliché understood even by those individuals who have had little or no exposure to the films. This can be seen, for instance, on the website for Google’s TensorFlow, an open source software library for developing machine learning applications. The basic introduction on the “Getting Started” page offers users two ways to proceed, represented by a red pill and a blue pill: “To whet your appetite further, we suggest you check out what a classical machine learning problem looks like in TensorFlow. In the land of neural networks, the most ‘classic’ classical problem is the MNIST handwritten digit classification. We offer two introductions here, one for machine learning newbies, and one for pros. If you’ve already trained dozens of MNIST models in other software packages, please take the red pill. If you’ve never even heard of MNIST, definitely take the blue pill” (TensorFlow 2017). 5. For a more detailed consideration of the points of contact between Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” from book VII of the Republic and the Matrix trilogy, see Gunkel 2000, 2006, and 2007a. 6. This may also be the reason why the final film of the trilogy, significantly titled The Matrix Revolutions (2003), has been considered by both fans and critics to be less successful than the two previous films. After turning things inside out and upside down, The Matrix Revolutions ends with a

28

tenuous peace and ceasefire between the machine world of the Matrix and the human city of Zion. The trilogy ends, therefore, not by resolving the crisis or by coming up with some new alternative, but by preserving and reaffirming the conceptual opposition with which the entire narrative sequence began. 7. A particularly telling example can be found in a rather infamous open letter published on May 9, 1992, in the Times of London, signed by a number of well-known and notable philosophers, and offered in reply to Cambridge University’s plan to present Derrida with an honorary degree in philosophy. “In the eyes of philosophers,” the letter reads, “and certainly among those working in leading departments of philosophy throughout the world, M. Derrida’s work does not meet accepted standards of clarity and rigour” (Smith et al. 1992, 138).

Gaming the System

chapter one

TERRA NOVA 2.0

the title to this chapter is something of a mashup. it combines an archaic fifteenth-century Catalan and Portuguese phrase used by Europeans to characterize the “new world” of the Americas and the “2.0” designation of contemporary tech-speak, commonly utilized to identify a new version or release of a particular piece of software or application. This concatenation of a term derived from the European age of discovery with a popular designation associated with recent innovations in computer technology is more than a clever nominal operation; it designates, in a kind of shorthand formula, a deep-seated and persistent ideological connection. What the phrase “Terra Nova 2.0” indicates is a new version or implementation of the European concept of the New World. This new “new world” is not some recently discovered continent located on the other side of planet Earth or even a distant world situated light years away in the final frontier of space. It designates the encounter with “virtual worlds” made up of nothing more than bits of digital data processed on computers and distributed at velocities approaching the speed of light over the global network of networks we call the internet. Although these computer-generated realities are routinely called “games”—or, more specifically, “role playing games” (RPGs) “massively multiplayer online” (MMO) games, or “massively multiplayer online role playing games” (MMORPG), research has demonstrated that they are much more than fun and games. As Edward Castronova (2001) pointed out in his seminal paper “Virtual Worlds: A First-Hand Account of Market and Society on the Cyberian Frontier,” an MMO, like Sony Online Entertainment’s EverQuest, constitutes a “new world” or “frontier” that is, at least in terms of its social structure and economy, a very-real and viable alternative to the physical territories we currently inhabit. The conceptualization of the virtual world of computer games as a kind of second-generation terra nova is not something that is unique to Castronova’s essay; it is operationalized in much of the current popular, scholarly, and technical literature on the subject. It is, for example, evident in the work of Wagner James Au (2007), who was at one time the official embedded journalist of Linden Lab’s Second Life. Au, who reported on in-world events and activities, originally 29

30

Gaming the System

published his stories on a blog he called New World Notes, many of which were subsequently collected in a book, The Making of Second Life: Notes from the New World.1 Likewise, the terms “new world” and “frontier” have been employed by real-world journalists in articles covering this technology, such as The Guardian’s “Braving a New ‘World’” (Pauli 2006), IT Times’s “Is Second Life a Brave New World?” (Tebbutt 2007), The Stanford Daily’s “A Whole New ‘World’” (Ford 2004), Frankfurter Allgemeine’s “World of Warcraft: Die Neue Welt” (Rosenfelder 2007), and Mother Jones’s “Even Better than the Real Thing: Sweatshop Gamers, Virtual Terrorists, Avatar Porn, and Other Tales from the Digital Frontier” (Gilson 2007). They have been deployed in recent scholarly literature with T. L. Taylor’s (2006) Play Between Worlds: Exploring Online Game Culture, the first chapter of which is titled “Finding New Worlds”; Cory Ondrejka’s (2006) “Finding Common Ground in New Worlds,” which was published in the inaugural issue of the academic journal Games and Culture; and Rich Vogel’s (2007) paper “Utlima Online—The Last Great Frontier,” which was presented at the third Games, Learning, and Society conference (GLS 3.0). The designations are also frequently found in game titles— for example, Atlantis III: Le Nouveau Monde, Conquest of the New World, 1503 AD The New World, and Frontier 1895—and in entries and comments posted on gaming blogs, for example, Greg Lastowka’s (2003) “New Worlds/Old World” posted on the aptly named weblog Terra Nova; Ninemoon Family’s (2007) “Granado Espada: Dispatches from the New World”; and Duckling Kwak’s (2007) comment on the Second Life blog, “SL is a new frontier; by definition, we are all pioneers.” I could go on. If all of this sounds vaguely familiar, there is a good reason for it. It turns out that the same discursive maneuvers and rhetoric accompanied the introduction of cyberspace and first-generation network applications, like chat rooms, LISTSERV, MUDs/MOOs, USENET, BBS, email, and Web 1.0. As I had previously argued in my first book Hacking Cyberspace: “Immediately after its introduction in 1984, cyberspace was proclaimed the ‘electronic frontier’ and a ‘new world.’ Terminology like this currently saturates the technical, theoretical, and popular understandings of cyberspace. From the ‘console cowboys’ of Gibson’s Neuromancer to the exciting ‘new worlds’ announced by John Walker of AutoDesk and from the pioneering work of Ivan Sutherland and Tom Furness to John Perry Barlow and Mitch Kapor’s Electronic Frontier Foundation, the spirit of frontierism has infused the rhetoric and logic of cyberspace” (Gunkel 2001, 14). The examination and critique of this “new world rhetoric” was initiated over two decades ago with Chris Chesher’s “Colonizing Virtual Reality” (1993); Mary Fuller and Henry Jenkin’s “Nintendo® and New World Travel Writing: A Dialogue” (1995); Ziauddin Sardar’s “alt.civilization.faq: Cyberspace as the Darker Side of the West” (1996); and an essay I wrote with Ann Hetzel Gunkel called “Virtual Geographies: The New Worlds of Cyberspace” (Gunkel and Gunkel 1997). These publications tracked, investigated, and critiqued the seemingly innocent circulation of this discursive material, demonstrating that the deployment of phrases like “new world”

Words and Worlds The concepts “new world” and “frontier” have a certain instrumental utility. They are, as Castronova (2005) explains, “the simplest answer to the question of what synthetic worlds really are” (8). Computer games, especially online role playing games (RPGs) like World of Warcraft, Ultima Online, Mass Effect 2, and Terra Online, but also the nongaming social environments of the Sims and Second Life and next-gen social VR platforms like Sansar, are often described as alternative realities that present users with a new world of possibilities—new territories to explore, new identities to embody, new people to encounter, and new opportunities to develop. As Au (2008, i) describes it with a suitable sense of drama: “This is the story of an empire that exists inside a metal box. . . . It is not a story about computers or software programs defined by the torrential flickering of ones and zeros. The world that comes into being through that process is, in every meaningful sense, a part of the one we already know” (i). Consequently, it appears that “five centuries after Columbus and almost four centuries from the landings at Jamestown and Plymouth, we have again embarked on a new frontier adventure” (Cooper 2000, 17). This sounds good. Everyone enjoys a good adventure. But the concepts, “new world” and “frontier” are not innocent or value neutral.

31

Terra Nova 2.0

and “electronic frontier” come with a considerable price, one that has potentially devastating consequences. Now this terminology returns and, judging from its popularity, seems to have been deployed and applied with little hesitation or even acknowledgment of the critical investigations that were introduced at the end of the previous century. So what if anything has changed? Is this just déjà vu all over again, or is there something about the virtual worlds of the MMO/RPG/MMORPG that makes it different this time around and allows us to redeploy the rhetoric and logic of terra nova without its attendant problems and complications? Have we finally been able to reengineer the Enlightenment dream of a new world in such a way as to mitigate or avoid the problematic baggage this concept originally entails? Or will Terra Nova 2.0 stage a replay of European colonial conquest, occupation, and exploitation? The following investigates these questions and is divided into four sections. The first considers the history and legacy of the terms “new world” and “frontier.” The second examines how and why this terminology has been deployed in the literature of video games and game studies. The third critiques the application of this terminology by investigating three related aspects—the forgetting of history that is part and parcel of both technological innovation and new world adventures, the ethnocentrism implicated in and perpetrated by new world exploration and frontier settlement, and the unfortunate consequences these particular actions have for others. The fourth and final section examines the effect this critique has on our understanding of virtual words and future research in games, gaming, and online social interaction.

They have a complicated history, and this history has significant consequences and implications.

Historical Context

32

Gaming the System

The term “new world” refers to and designates the European encounter with the continents of North and South America, which began with Christopher Columbus’s initial Caribbean landfall in October of 1492. Although the exact origin of the phrase is still disputed by historians, it is widely recognized that it was initially popularized in Europe by way of a 1502/03 document attributed to Amerigo Vespucci, written in Latin, and titled Mundus Novus (Caraci 1992; Zamora 1993). Ten years later, the Catalan/Portuguese version of the phrase Terra Nova appeared as the generic name applied to the landmass of the Americas on Martin Waldseemüller’s influential world map, Carta marina (Johnson 2006, 32). In the European imagination, this “new world” was understood as an alternative to the “old world.” It was situated on the other side of the globe, was populated with unfamiliar fauna and flora, and was inhabited by other, unknown peoples. As Kirkpatrick Sale (2006, 234) points out, “whatever Europe understood the New World to be—and it was many things, not all clearly assimilated yet—it was a new world, another half of the globe not known before, plainly different from Europe and even the Orient, rich and large and mysterious, a place of new peoples, new vistas, new treasures, new species.” “New World,” then, names not only a specific geographical location but, perhaps more importantly, designates a powerful and seductive idea, that of a different and uncharted territory open to and available for European exploration, exploitation, and eventual settlement. The term “frontier” has a similar lineage. Instead of naming the European encounter with the Atlantic coast of the Americas, however, it identified the western movement of white European settlers across the North American continent. Although the word had been used at the time of this migration to identify the receding boundary of the American West, the idea of the frontier was largely a retroactive construct. “The frontier was,” as Ziauddin Sardar (1996, 18) reminds us, “an invented concept which recapitulated an experience that had already past.” In fact, the concept of the American “frontier,” which is attributed to the historian Frederick Jackson Turner, was introduced and theorized only after the announcement of its closure by the US Census Bureau in 1890. Turner formulated what came to be known as the “frontier hypothesis” (Billington 1965) in a paper that was read at the ninth annual meeting of the American Historical Association, which was convened in Chicago at the same time as the World Columbian Exhibition’s celebration of the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s discovery of the New World. “Up to our own day,” Turner (1894, 199) writes, “American history has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West. The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development.”2 Conceptualized in this way, the frontier was not just an arbitrary line or boundary situated somewhere west

For I stand tonight facing west on what was once the last frontier. From the lands that stretch three thousand miles behind me, the pioneers of old gave up their safety, their comfort and sometimes their lives to build a new world here in the West. . . . Today some would say that those struggles are all over—that all the horizons have been explored—that all the battles have been won—that there is no longer an American frontier. . . . But I tell you the New Frontier is here, whether we seek it or not. Beyond that frontier are the uncharted areas of science and space, unsolved problems of peace and war, unconquered pockets of ignorance and prejudice, unanswered questions of poverty and surplus. . . . I am asking each of you to be pioneers on that New Frontier. (Kennedy 1960)

For Kennedy, the western frontier may have reached its termination on the Pacific coast of California, but the idea of “new frontiers” could be abstracted and extended beyond that geophysical limit. In doing so, Kennedy’s speech also demonstrates the extent to which the frontier hypothesis was already animated and informed by technology and what David Nye calls “technological foundation stories.” “These stories,” Nye (2003, 11) argues, “described the creation of new social worlds, ranging from frontier settlements to communities based on irrigation. In each case, a new form of society based on successful exploitation of a new technology became possible. The stories were central to the new nation’s perception of history and geography, which is to say its perception of time and space.” Consequently, technological innovation was, from the very beginning, an integral and constitutive component of the frontier narrative. “For Americans settling a new continent,” Nye concludes, “technologies became central to stories explaining how they had developed their New World” (19).

Extension of the Concept Because the terms “new world” and “frontier” were already more than mere geophysical markers, they were easily applied beyond their original context and scope. As Ray Allen Billington (1965, 41) points out in his reconsideration

33

Terra Nova 2.0

of the Mississippi river; it designated a particular understanding of American history, one which, according to Turner, was directly influenced and informed by the Columbian voyages. “Since the days when the fleet of Columbus sailed into the waters of the New World, America has been another name for opportunity, and the people of the United States have taken their tone from the incessant expansion which has not only been open but has even been forced upon them” (Turner 1894, 227). According to Turner’s hypothesis, then, the frontier was to be understood as more than a geophysical boundary. It constituted something of a national ideology, one that not only narrated the growth and development of the young nation as it expanded westward but also explained the formation of a distinct national character—what some have called the “pioneering spirit.” Some sixty years later, John F. Kennedy tapped into and deployed this ideology as part of his 1960 acceptance speech to the Democratic National Convention at the Memorial Coliseum in Los Angeles, California:

34

Gaming the System

of Turner’s hypothesis, “modern technology has created a whole host of new ‘frontiers.’” In 1901, for example, Charles Horton Cooley, the progenitor of the sociology of communication, employed the term “new world” to explain the social effects of innovations in the field of telecommunications. “We understand,” Cooley (1962, 65) wrote, “nothing rightly unless we perceive the manner in which the revolution in communication has made a new world for us.” Echoes of this “new world metaphor,” as Fuller and Jenkins (1995) have called it, can also be detected in the early writings addressing cyberspace and the internet. Cyber-enthusiasts like John Perry Barlow (1990) and Timothy Leary (1999), for instance, often mobilized the figure of Columbus and his discovery of the New World as a way to characterize the impact and importance of computers, computer networks, and related information and communication technology (ICT). And this “impact” is, at this early stage, characterized as overwhelmingly positive and full of wild optimism. As Nicole Stenger (1992, 58) described it: “Cyberspace, though born of a war technology, opens up a space for collective restoration, and for peace. As screens are dissolving, our future can only take on a luminous dimension! Welcome to the New World.” “Frontier” is employed in a similar fashion. In 1996, for example, the conservative think tank The Progress and Freedom Foundation published a white paper that drew explicit connections between the Columbian adventure in the Americas, the expansion of the American frontier, and the new opportunities introduced by ICTs. “The bioelectric frontier,” the authors wrote, “is an appropriate metaphor for what is happening in cyberspace, calling to mind as it does the spirit of invention and discovery that led ancient mariners to explore the world, generations of pioneers to tame the American continent, and, more recently, to man’s first explorations of outer space” (Dyson et al. 1996, 297, italics in the original). Similar comparisons can be found in both the name and initiatives of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which was founded by Mitch Kapor, John Gilmore, and John Perry Barlow in 1990 to protect the rights of the new cyber-pioneers and homesteaders; Howard Rheingold’s The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier (1993); and Jeffrey Cooper’s “The CyberFrontier and America at the Turn of the 21st Century: Reopening Frederick Jackson Turner’s Frontier” (2000). As its title indicates, Cooper not only leverages Turner’s “frontier hypothesis” but characterizes the internet as reopening the American West. Although he makes brief mention of some of the “costs that settlement imposed in degradation of environment, near-extinction of species and habitat, and displacement of the indigenous populations,” Cooper, like most cyber-enthusiasts, provides a rather sanitized and sanguine image. “I suggest,” Cooper (2000) explains, “that this new cyberfrontier is playing the same role as did ‘the West’ earlier in American history and, moreover, that it will engender many of the same types of impacts on the nation as a whole” (4). In the discourse of information technology, however, “new world” and “frontier” have always been more than metaphors. This is especially apparent

Video Game Worlds These conceptual formations are also at play in video and computer gaming. Although Fuller and Jenkins (1995) trace discursive connections between new world travel writing and the narrative structures of computer gaming, Ziauddin Sardar (1996, 17) discovers a more fundamental connection between the two. “Many computer games, like ‘Super Mario Brothers,’ ‘Civilization,’ ‘Death Gate,’ ‘Merchant Colony,’ and ‘Big Red Adventure’ are little more than updated versions of the great European voyages of discovery. These are not games but worlds, constructed Western Utopias, where all history can be revised and rewritten, all non-Western people forgotten, in the whirl of the spectacle.” According to Sardar’s argument, computer games not only employ the rhetoric of but actually constitute a new world, and as such provide the space for an exercise of what can only be called “colonization.” A comparable insight is provided by James Newman (2004, 108–109), who finds “colonization” to be one of the structuring principles of game play. Typically, videogames create “worlds,” “lands” or “environments” for players to explore, traverse, conquer, and even dynamically manipulate and transform in some cases. As we have noted in the discussion of the typical structuring of the videogame into levels or stages, progress through a particular game is frequently presented to the player as progress through the world of the game . . . videogames may be seen to offer the equivalent of de Certeau’s (1984) spatial stories, with gameworlds presenting sites imbued with narrative potential and in which play is at least partly an act of colonization and the enactment of transformations upon the space.

Similar lineage and development is present in the evolution of single-player ­simulation games. It is, for example, evident in MECC’s The Oregon Trail. Originally released in 1974, The Oregon Trail was an educational computer game based on and designed to teach school children about the American frontier and the westward movement of white European settlers. In the game, players assumed

35

Terra Nova 2.0

with first generation writings on cyberspace and virtual worlds. “In the rhetoric of the virtual realists,” Benjamin Woolley (1992, 122) writes, “this ‘nonspace’ was not simply a mathematical space nor a fictional metaphor but a new frontier, a very real one that was open to exploration and, ultimately, settlement.” According to Woolley, the virtual environments created in the nonspace of cyberspace are not to be understood as something like a new frontier; they are, quite literally, a new world—a very real space (albeit one which is entirely virtual) that is open to exploration and colonization. This particular understanding of computer-generated cyberspace as an another spatial dimension open to exploration and adventure is firmly rooted in William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984), the proto-cyberpunk novel that introduced the neologism, and Neil Stephenson’s Snow Crash (1992), which describes something he called “Metaverse,” a network accessed, immersive virtual reality environment occupied by and experienced through user controlled avatars.

36

Gaming the System Figure 1.1. The Oregon Trail CD-ROM for Windows 3.1 / Mac. From the Online Collection of The Strong: National Museum of Play. http://www.museumofplay.org/ online-collections /22/66/116.3203

the role of a wagon-train leader with the objective of successfully leading a group of pioneers from Independence, Missouri, to Oregon’s Willamette Valley in the year 1848 (Fig. 1.1). If The Oregon Trail sought to simulate and play with the experience of the American frontier, Sid Meier’s Colonization (1994) invited players to do something similar with the European age of Discovery and the colonizing of the Americas. In the game, “the player could,” as Esther MacCallum-Stewart and Justin Parsler (2007, 207) explain, “take the role of either English, Spanish, French or Dutch seafarers. Colonisers had to establish successful settlements by setting up small towns and balancing their resources, harvesting the land and negotiating with the local natives for trade and land space. . . . The final objective of the game was to fight off an invading army from the country of origin, and achieve Independence” (Fig. 1.2). The concepts of the “new world” and “frontier” play a similar role in the development of role playing games (RPGs). It is, for instance, the organizing principle of

37

Terra Nova 2.0 Figure 1.2. Screenshot of the map for FreeCol, a clone of Sid Meier’s Colonization distributed as free and open source software (GNU General Public License v2). Image by FreeCol Developers, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeCol#/media/ File:FreeCol0_5_2_mapboard.jpg

TSR’s Dungeons and Dragons (D&D). Although a low-tech, tabletop RPG published in the same year as The Oregon Trail, D&D introduced the basic framework and structure that informs the text-based, multiplayer online virtual worlds of MUDs/MOOs and their graphical progeny, the MMORPG. According to Gary Gygax, the inventor of the game, D&D occupies the place of the frontier during the closing decades of the twentieth century: “Our modern world has few, if any, frontiers. We can no longer escape to the frontier of the West, explore the Darkest Africa, sail to the South Seas. Even Alaska and the Amazon Jungles will soon be lost as wild frontier areas. . . . It is therefore scarcely surprising that a game which directly involves participants in a make-believe world of just such a nature should prove popular” (Gygax 1979, 29; quoted in Fine 1983, 55). Gygax, like Turner (1894), perceived the closing of the geophysical frontier and, like Cooper (2000), situates the RPG as a new frontier—a new world that is open for exploration, adventure, and settlement.

The New, New World The 3-D graphical environments of the MMO and MMORPG, which were designed and are understood to be the next iteration of RPG technology (Castronova 2005, 9; Lastowka and Hunter 2006; Taylor 2006, 21), capitalize on and deploy all these elements.

Definitions and Descriptions

38

Gaming the System

These computer-generated virtual environments—whether explicitly designed to be single player adventure games, role playing games, or developed as some other kind of immersive social experience—are characterized and defined as “new worlds” and “frontiers.” This is immediately evident in handbooks and user guides that seek to explain the technology and its operations. Brian White’s Second Life: A Guide to Your Virtual World (2007, 347) is a particularly good example. In this guidebook, White characterizes Second Life as “an exciting new world where cultural and technology are rapidly evolving hand in hand,” and he provides users with the basics in a chapter titled “Exploring the New Frontier.” In other instances the concepts are directly applied and utilized in the design of games and their marketing literature. A good example is Amazon Game Studios’s New World, a soon to be released open-ended sandbox MMO set in ­“seventeenth-century colonial America” where, as Dave Maldonado creative director at Amazon Game Studios explains, “everything that they [European explorers] were afraid of, everything they had hoped for, that they wanted to believe in, that they wished wasn’t true . . . all of that stuff is real” (Amazon 2016a). New World is therefore designed to mobilize and to play with all the elements— actually and imagined—that had been associated with the New World of the Americas and the European age of discovery. And like the New World (or at least the mythology Europeans had told themselves about it), the advanced marketing for the game situates the MMO as a limitless and open territory that can be determined and shaped by each individual player. Carve your own destiny in New World, a massively multiplayer, open-ended sandbox game set in a living, cursed land. Choose how you play, what you do, and whom you work with or against in an evolving world that transforms with the seasons, weather, and time of day. Band together to reclaim monster-haunted wilds and build thriving civilizations, or strike out on your own, surviving in the face of supernatural terrors and murderous player bandits. Focused on emergent gameplay and rich social features—including deep Twitch integration with broadcaster-led events, achievements, and rewards—your only limit in the New World is your ambition. (Amazon 2016b)

The concept of the frontier—from the American west of Turner’s frontier hypothesis to JFK’s final frontier of space—has been invoked and mobilized in a similar fashion with titles like InnoGames’ The West (2007); Rockstar Games’ Red Dead Revolver (2004) and Red Dead Redemption (2010); Vault Interactive’s The Final Frontier: Space Simulator (2017); and Perfect World’s Star Trek Online (2016). Here, for example, is the backstory used by Rockstar games to position and promote their two Wild West adventure titles: The calm of the frontier was shattered and a young man’s innocence was lost when he witnessed the brutal murder of his family. Years have passed but the forged memory and the need for reckoning have not. Now a bounty hunter, you must

journey to uncover the truth and to reap vengeance on those responsible. You are Red . . . and this is the Wild West. (Rockstar Games 2004) America, early 1900’s. The era of the cowboy is coming to an end. When federal agents threaten his family, former outlaw John Marston is sent across the American frontier to help bring the rule of law. Experience intense gun battles, dramatic train robberies, bounty hunting and duels during a time of violent change. Red Dead Redemption is an epic battle for survival in a beautiful open world as John Marston struggles to bury his blood-stained past, one man at a time. (Rockstar Games 2010)

Terra Nova 2.0

This connection, however, is not just a matter for the guidebooks, the marketing literature, and the design of games; it is also deployed and developed in critical assessments provided by game studies scholars and researchers. As R. V. Kelly 2 (2004, 9) reports in his examination of the MMORPG, “This isn’t a game at all, I realized. It’s a vast, separate universe with its own rules, constraints, culture, ethos, ethics, economy, politics, and inhabitants. People explore here. They converse. They transact business, form bonds of friendship, swear vows of vengeance, escape from dire circumstances, joke, fight to overcome adversity, and learn here.” For Kelly 2, MMORPGs are not merely an entertaining pastime. They constitute an independent and fully realized world, one that not only offers escape from the restrictions of the “old world” but provides for new and improved opportunities. Engaging with the world of a MMORPG, therefore, is similar to, if not the same as, embarking on a voyage to the New World or the American frontier. “It’s the equivalent,” Kelly 2 (2004, 63) writes, “of getting on the boat to come to America or piling into the Conestoga wagon to head out west.” In this new world, one not only escapes the limitations and trappings of the old world but can also begin a new life. The game, like the New World of the Americas and the frontier of the American West, “offers a chance to completely redefine and reinvent yourself ” (63). This rather seductive ideology of self-fulfillment and reinvention on the frontier of the New World—an ideology that is well-established in both the historical accounts and literary dramas of frontier adventure—is something that has also been identified and deployed in Scott Rettberg’s (2008, 23) investigation of World of Warcraft: “While we all find ourselves living lives that we have in part determined by our choices and in part been thrown into by virtue of being born into them, in World of Warcraft and in other MMORPGs we have the opportunity to wipe the slate clean, to start again and choose new lives in a new world.” A similar characterization is supplied by Castronova (2005), for whom RPGs, MMOs, and MMORPGs constitute “synthetic worlds” (4), “an alternative Earth” (6), a “new world” (9), or a “frontier” (8). In fact, it is the latter term that, according to Castronova’s judgment, provides “the simplest answer to the question of what synthetic worlds really are” (8). For Castronova, then, these role-playing computer games are not analogous or comparable to the frontier; they are quite literally a new territory. This particular formulation is emphasized

39

40

Gaming the System Figure 1.3. Linden Lab Mainland Continents (2009). Image provided by NCI/Carl Metropolitan 2009, http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Second_Life_Road_Network_Directory, licensed under CC BY SA 3.0

in a footnote concerning Second Life. “The synthetic world of Second Life sells server resources to those who want them, and nobody bats an eye when they call it ‘land,’ for that is what it is. Land. Space. Lebensraum. The New World. Terra Nova” (Castronova 2005, 306). The use of the word “land” by Linden Lab and the organization of this land in terms of geographically situated continents is, on Castronova’s account, an entirely appropriate characterization and not simply a clever image or metaphor (Fig. 1.3). This is because Second Life, like other MMOs and MMORPGs, constitutes another world, a very real world with real social and economic opportunities for individuals and communities.3 This terra nova, however, is not located somewhere across the Atlantic or on the other side of the Mississippi; it situated, as Au (2008, i) accurately describes it, “inside a metal box”—or, more precisely, in the computer-generated environment and experience

Discursive Consequences and Impact Understood and explained in this way, MMOs, MMORPGs, and other online nongaming virtual worlds like Second Life participate in both the ideology and rhetoric of the European “age of discovery” and American expansionism. This includes concepts of individual freedom and egalitarianism that inevitably pull in the direction of utopianism, among other things. New worlds, no matter their location or configuration, have always been considered an alternative to and an improvement over the old world. “During the Renaissance,” Carlos Fuentes (1999, 195) writes, “the discovery of America meant, as we have seen, that Europe had found a place for Utopia. Again and again, when the explorers set foot in the New World, they believed that they had regained paradise.” And the virtual environments created by various forms of ICT turn out to be the perfect place for relocating, recycling, and recoding this utopian fantasy. Kevin Robins (1995, 135) explains, “You might think of cyberspace as a utopian vision for postmodern times. Utopia is nowhere (outopia) and, at the same time, it is also somewhere good (eutopia). Cyberspace is projected as the same kind of ‘nowhere-somewhere.’” Despite the fact that Gibson and Stephenson’s cyberpunk science fiction present distinctly dystopian visions, the first generation of writings on cyberspace were unapologetically idealistic and utopian. These techno-enthusiasts, as Sardar (1996, 34) pointed out at the time, “are latterday Utopians, the counter-part of Sir Thomas More, Francis Bacon, Tommaso Campanella, and other European Utopians who cannibalised the ideas and cultures of the ‘New World’ to construct their redeeming fantasies.” And this utopianism persists in the design and understanding of computer games. In fact, as Alexander Galloway (2006, 1) argues, “all video games are, at a certain level, utopian projects, simply because all video games create worlds in which certain laws are simulated and certain other laws are no longer simulated. The freedom to selectively simulate, then, operates in a video game as the most important scaffolding for utopia.” We should remember that this particular form of techo-utopianism is not something that is limited to recent innovations in information technology and digital media, but rather, it has been part and parcel of virtually every innovation in communication technology (Gunkel 2001, 43). Electric telegraphy, for

41

Terra Nova 2.0

produced by the circuitry of this box and accessed over the internet. And as with the New World of the Americas and the western frontier of the United States, people have begun migrating to this new land, settling on the frontier, and colonizing this vast, new territory. “Statistics reported in this book,” Castronova (2005, 9) writes, “will suggest that many people are diving into the new worlds right now, with enthusiasm. Evidently, they find the physical environments crafted by computer game designers much more attractive than Earth. Accordingly, these travelers or colonists have come to maintain a large fraction of their social, economic, and political lives there.”

42

Gaming the System

example, was powered by an ideology that deployed the rhetoric of and made explicit connections to Christian eschatology (Carey 1989, 17). Radio had been, at least during the first decades of its dissemination, promoted as a kind of deus ex machina that would repair the deep wounds of industrialized modernity (Spinelli 1996). Television, as Marshall McLuhan (1995) famously argued, abolished the physical limitations of terrestrial time and space, reducing the effective size of the planet to a “global village” (5). And the internet, as Julian Dibbell (2006, 23) describes it, was supposed to have created a “commercial utopia” or “a realm of atomless digital products traded in frictionless digital environments for paperless digital cash.” The new worlds of MMOs, MMORPGs, and other forms of computer simulated virtual worlds are no exception; utopian ideas and rhetoric saturate the contemporary discussions, marketing campaigns, and debates. Second Life, which was one of the more popular and populous virtual worlds throughout the first decade of the twenty-first century, has been routinely described in terms that evoke such optimism.4 “Our goal with Second Life,” Philip Rosedale, the founder and CEO of Linden Lab, has stated, “is to make it better than real life in a lot of ways” (CBS News, 2006). Or as Marco della Cava (2005, 1) reported in an article for USA Today titled “Utopia goes Digital,” “Is the real world grating on you, with its wars, overheated summers, and incessant Tom Cruise updates? Just hop online and create a digital you that lives in a utopian cyber-realm.” Even in those circumstances where the assessment is more measured, utopianism is still the operative category. Grey Drane (2007, 1), for instance, is not ready to call Second Life utopia, but he still finds it connected to and involved with utopian ideas. “OK, I’m not suggesting that utopia can be achieved in Second Life, but it might be the kind of environment in which you could play around with what the word ‘utopia’ might actually mean.” This utopianism, however, is not something that is limited to the world of Second Life or the popular hype that had surrounded it in the early 2000’s. The same is true for other virtual worlds and their critical assessment in the scholarly literature. Kelly 2 (2004, 9), for instance, argues that MMORPGs offer alternative worlds that are not just different from but “better than the real world.” And in justifying this statement, he mobilizes a frontier mythology that is distinctly American. “A MMORPG, after all, is a completely separate and egalitarian world where energy and resolve determine your fate and where appearance, age, connections, and socioeconomic advantage are all meaningless. In a MMORPG, it doesn’t matter how young and pretty you are, how svelte you are, what color your skin is, how much money you were born into, how well you did on your SATs, or who you know. The only thing standing between you and success is you” (63). For Kelly 2, then, the MMORPG fulfills all the promises of the techno-libertarian idea of utopia—a new world where the limitations and trappings of old world traditions and institutions do not matter, and a man (because the rhetoric of this

Adventures in Game Studies Because the technology is already situated and understood as a new world, gamestudies scholars and researchers often locate themselves in the position of explorers, and their accounts typically read like a travel journal, a frontier chronicle, or Columbus’s Diario—those writings that Fuller and Jenkins (1995) called “new world travel writing.” Frank Schaap (2002, 1), for instance, describes his ethnographic investigation of MUDs and MOOs in terms that evoke new world travels: “The journey is not just about getting to know a strange land and understanding the Other and his culture, it is also, and maybe more importantly, a way to better understand the Self, one’s own country and culture.” Like Columbus and several generations of European explorers to the New World, Schaap characterizes his research as a voyage to another world, where he confronts the Other and returns home with a new understanding of self and country. This particular narrative trajectory, which is deployed by and manifest in many of the canonical works of Western literature, is one of the fundamental characteristics of what Edward W. Said (1979) designated as “Orientalism.” And Wendy Chun (2003, 4) has traced explicit connections between the concept of Orientalism and the literary

43

Terra Nova 2.0

ideology is always masculine) can determine his own life, his own opportunities, and his own success. A similar argument is supplied by Castronova. In his initial paper on the subject of MMORPGs, Castronova (2001, 15) elucidates the growing popularity of these virtual worlds (VWs) by mobilizing the same mythos: “Unlike Earth, in VWs there is real equality of opportunity, as everybody is born penniless and with the same minimal effectiveness. In a VW, people choose their own abilities, gender, and skin tone instead of having them imposed by accidents of birth. Those who cannot run on Earth can run in a VW. On Earth, reputation sticks to a person; in VWs, an avatar with a bad reputation can be replaced by one who is clean.” According to Castronova, the virtual environment of a MMORPG like EverQuest provides users with an equal-opportunity world, where they are effectively liberated from the inherent baggage and unfortunate restrictions imposed by terrestrial existence. For this reason, Castronova eventually goes so far as to risk venturing the “outrageous claim” that “synthetic worlds may save humanity” (278). And if they do not actually achieve what we currently understand by “utopia,” they do at least provide the best chance to explore and examine its possibilities. “It may well be the case that no one spends time in worlds constructed as they ‘ought’ to be; if we build Utopia and no one comes, we need to get serious about revising our notions of Utopia. The point here is that Utopian concepts need to be part of our strategy in making use of this technology. Let’s build places that we truly believe are the best possible places to be. The very act of building them is a discussion about the future of humankind” (Castronova 2005, 262).

44

Gaming the System

constructions of cyberspace, demonstrating how “the narratives of cyberspace, since their literary inception, have depended on Orientalism for their own disorienting orientation.” A similar approach is evident in Kelly 2’s Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games. Kelly 2 begins his examination with a first-person account of his own adventures in the new world of a MMORPG, and, like many new world ­adventure tales, he narrates how he is lost and on the verge of death, if not already dead: “Somewhere in the middle of the virtual forest my corpse is rotting away. Its flesh will decay overnight if I don’t discover its final resting place, and I’ll lose the trinkets that are stored on the cadaver—serious trinkets, important trinkets” (Kelly 2 2004, 1). Likewise, Taylor (2006) introduces and contextualizes her investigation of EverQuest by providing a firsthand account of her entry into the world of gaming and her first adventures in the world of the game. And Castronova does something similar. In the “Virtual Worlds” article from 2001, he not only includes entries from his journal but explicitly identifies his own research efforts with that of a new world explorer. In the past, the discovery of new worlds has often been an epochal event for both the new world and the old. The new world typically has a herald, a hapless explorer who has gotten lost and has wandered aimlessly about in strange territory, but has had the wit and good fortune to write down what he has seen, his impressions of the people, and the exciting dangers he has faced, for an audience far away. In similar fashion, I stumbled haplessly into Norrath in April 2001, and then spent four months wandering around there. It took me about six weeks to get my bearings. I began recording data in May. And I assure you, I faced many dangers, and died many, many times, in order to gather impressions and bring them back for you. In the end I have been able to include only a small fraction of what I have learned, indeed only enough to give a flavor of what is happening. I apologize to readers who find that I have left out something of great importance. (Castronova 2001, 4)

In providing this reflection, Castronova explicitly characterizes his own research efforts in terms that evoke the heroic adventures of the “great” European ­explorers—Christopher Columbus, Amerigo Vespucci, Hernán Cortés, Pedro Álvares Cabral, Walter Raleigh, and so on. Virtual worlds like EverQuest’s Norrath are brand-new worlds and, because of this, the researcher plays the role of the hapless explorer who ventures into the unknown, faces unprecedented dangers, and returns home with fantastic tales of exotic peoples, strange lands, and exciting opportunities. This self-characterization of the researcher as a kind of new world explorer has also been visually represented in the construction of avatars employed by scholars and reporters involved in embedded reporting or ethnographic studies. In The Making of Second Life, W. James Au (2008, xvii) describes the creation and general look of his avatars in the following manner: “I created an avatar, a somewhat stylized variation of myself, dressed in a crisp white suit, in tribute to Tom Wolfe. In the combat-allowed war zones—and from

45

Terra Nova 2.0

Figure 1.4. W. James Au’s “Hunter S. Thompson-esque avatar” (2004). Image provided by New World Notes. http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2004/08/permission_to_h.html

the beginning, those were raging—I had an avatar made to look like Hunter S. Thompson, with aviator sunglasses, a Colt .45, and an open bottle of Jim Beam” (Fig. 1.4).

The Darker Side of the West Defining and characterizing MMOs, MMORPGs and other online social appli­ cations like Second Life as a “new world” or “frontier” seems innocent enough. In fact, these terms are not without a certain amount of discursive utility, as is immediately evident from their seemingly unrestrained proliferation in the popular press, technical literature, game designs, marketing campaigns, scholarly investigations, blogs, and so on. By describing the virtual worlds of online RPGs, MMOs, MMORPGs, etc. in this manner, one connects this “practical virtual reality” technology, as Castronova (2005, 3) calls it, to the history and legacy of European exploration and the westward expansion of the United States, two epoch-defining events that are noteworthy for their sociopolitical innovations, economic opportunities, and celebrated adventures. This is why, for Castronova, at least, “frontier” comprises the “simplest answer to the question of what synthetic worlds really are” (8)—simplest because the term “frontier,” especially for an American audience, already has a well-established cultural legacy that makes an immediate

association between this form of technology and an historic concept that has been definitive of the “American experience.” This terminological utility and its rather widespread discursive success can, however, have the unintended side effect of insulating developers, players, and game studies scholars from recognizing the problematic sociocultural baggage that is also part and parcel of these traditions.

Rethinking History 46

Gaming the System

Although the concept and significance of the “new world” remained relatively unchallenged for several centuries, it gets submitted to critical reevaluation in the later-half of the twentieth century. As the quincentennial of Columbus’s first American landfall approached, scholars and educators, especially in the Americas, engaged in a wholesale reassessment of the Columbian legacy (see, e.g., Brandon 1986; Fuentes 1999; Pagden 1993; Zamora 1993). The most polemic of these criticisms ventured a fundamentally revised image of the admiral and subsequent European explorers and colonizers, one in which these events were interpreted not as heroic acts of discovery and adventure but as the first steps in what became a violent invasion, bloody conquest, and unfortunate genocide. “The New World,” as Fuentes (1999, 195) argues, “became a nightmare as colonial power spread and its native peoples became the victim of colonialism, deprived of their ancient faith and their ancient lands and forced to accept a new civilization and a new religion. The Renaissance dream of a Christian Utopia in the New World was also destroyed by the harsh realities of colonialism: plunder, enslavement, genocide.” Similar criticisms were leveled against the image of the American frontier. Shortly after Turner’s death in 1932, a new generation of historians took issue with his “frontier hypothesis,” finding, among other things, questionable forms of provincialism, determinism, and ethnocentrism (Billington 1965, 2). Despite these critical insights, however, virtual world developers, MMORPG players, and game studies researchers have deployed—and continue to deploy—the terms “new world” and “frontier” with little or no evidence of any hesitation or critical selfreflection, leaving one to reissue a query that was initially proposed by Fuller and Jenkins (1995, 59) over a two decades ago: “One has to wonder why these heroic metaphors of discovery have been adopted by popularizers of new technologies just as these metaphors are undergoing sustained critique in other areas of culture, a critique that hardly anyone can be unaware of in the year after the quincentennial of Columbus’s first American landfall.” This lack of consideration is evident, for example, in Kelly 2’s research and the experiences of the gamers he interviewed. “Many of the players I spoke with,” Kelly 2 (2004, 72) writes, “mentioned that they owned reprints of the diaries of Christopher Columbus, the ship’s logs of Captain Cook, the journals of Lewis and Clark, the travelogues of Marco Polo, or the histories of Magellan, Ibn Battuta, or Zhang He. They were fascinated with exploration. And MMORPG games were the closest they could come to discovering new continents on their own.” In reporting this data, Kelly 2 explicitly recognizes a connection between

47

Terra Nova 2.0

the history and the literature of exploration and the experience of MMORPG gameplay. MMORPGs, on this account, simulate new worlds or uncharted territory and offer players the opportunity to experience the thrill and adventure of discovery firsthand. At the same time, however, Kelly 2’s account provides no acknowledgement of the profoundly complicated history that is part of the age of discovery and that is both recounted and recorded in this literature. This selective and arguably superficial reading of history is, however, not without justification. If MMORPG developers, players, and researchers do not explicitly account for the problems and complications that have become historically sedimented in the terms “new world” and “frontier,” it is because both computer technology and the concepts of the new world and frontier are presumed to be liberated from the burden of history. Computer technology has often been characterized as radically ahistorical. “New technologies are,” Simon Penny (1994, 231) argues, “often heralded by a rhetoric that locates them as futuristic, without history, or at best arising from a scientific-technical lineage quite separate from cultural history.” New technology, ICT in particular, is often characterized as radically distinct and different from anything that came before, providing for a significant break with tradition that facilitates an easy escape from both cultural context and history. Even though technology is always the product of a specific culture and introduced at a specific time for a particular purpose, the futuristic rhetoric that surrounds technological innovation allows for this context to be set aside, ignored, or simply forgotten. As Ken Hillis (1999, xvii) summarizes it, “Cyberspace and VR are, respectively, a frontier metaphor and a technology offering both the promise of an escape from history with a capital H, and the encrusted meanings it contains, and an imaginary space whereby to perform, and thereby possibly exorcise or master, difficult real-world historical and material situations.” This tendency to escape from or exorcise history is also one of the integral components of the myth of the New World and the American frontier. “The imagination of Americans after 1800,” David Noble (1964, 419) argues, “was dominated by the belief that the American West represented a redemptive nature which would provide spiritual salvation for the men who settled upon it. European man, corrupted by civilization, was reborn, made innocent, when he abandoned old world history for new world nature.” The new world of the Americas was situated and idealized as a place where Europeans could forget the problems and complications of the old world, exit the burdens imposed upon them by history, and begin anew. America, as Jean Baudrillard (1988, 76) once characterized it, “lives in a perpetual present.” Consequently, what allows MMORPG players, developers, and researchers to set aside the complex histories associated with the New World and frontier is the fact that these terms already deploy, validate, and justify a forgetting of history. If the New World was where Europeans came to forget their past and begin anew, MMOs, MMORPGs, and related virtual worlds appear to be where one now goes to forget the unfortunate history and legacy of this forgetting.

The Legacy and Logic of Ethnocentrism

48

Gaming the System

Although the “darker side” of this history appears to have been effectively suppressed by those involved with virtual worlds, their descriptions and characterizations are nevertheless ethnocentric. And to make matters worse, this ethnocentrism is itself a byproduct of the forgetting of history. The concepts of the “new world” and “frontier” are not semantically empty or neutral. They have been derived from and are rooted in a distinctly white, European understanding and experience.5 They are, therefore, already involved in a particular set of assumptions and values that are culturally specific and by no means universally accepted or applicable. The characterization of the New World and the frontier as vast open territories, ripe with new economic opportunities to be exploited, and providing the perfect location for potentially utopian communities is a fantasy that is unique to Renaissance Europe and the relatively new nation of the United States. Other populations do not share these values and assumptions; neither do they experience frontiers and movement into and through the frontier in the same way. The native peoples of South and North America, for instance, account for the so-called “age of discovery” and the settling of the American West with an entirely different and much less optimistic interpretation. This is particularly evident in critical reassessments of the dominant historical narratives as provided by scholars Tzvetan Todorov (1984), Berry Lopez (1992), and Carlos Fuentez (1999); by performance artists Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gómez-Peña (Fusco, 1995); and efforts to write alternative histories like those formulated by Jonathan Hill (1988), Alvin Josephy (1993; 2007), and Francis Jennings (1994). Deploying the grand narratives of exploration, colonization, and settlement as if they were somehow beyond reproach and universally applicable has the effect of normalizing a culture’s experiences and asserting them over and against all other alternatives. This is not only presumptuous; it is the ethnocentric gesture par excellence—one assumes that his or her experience is normative, elevates it to the position of a universal, and imposes it upon others (Gunkel 2001, 34). In using the terms “new world” and “frontier,” game developers, players, and researchers impose a distinctly Euro-American understanding, colonizing both the idea and the technology of the virtual world.6 This kind of implicit ethnocentrism can, for instance, be found at play in Castronova’s account of migration. Although “migration” sounds considerably less disturbing than “colonization,” its account is nevertheless dependent upon and informed by an ethnocentric bias. As Castronova (2005, 306) indicates, “the idea that we’re seeing a migration into a new frontier of cyberspace was first suggested by Vlahos.” Writing in 1998, Michael Vlahos describes the initial migration of people to the “infosphere,”7 another name for the then nascent cyberspaces created and sustained by computer networks, like the internet (Vlahos 1998, 498). “Human migration to the Infosphere,” Vlahos (1998, 500) writes, “represents an historical shift on several levels of significance. It is a true transhumance—a

49

Terra Nova 2.0

movement of human society to a new place, much like the colonizing of the New World, while still connected to the old. It is thus a migration away from—as well as toward—the in situ and material patterns of all human relationships to something very different and more complex. This entails a migration from long familiar patterns of culture. Human culture has always adapted to fit new environments, and the change is often as difficult as it is exhilarating.” Castronova provides a similar account, when he describes the current migration to MMORPGs as involving a movement of people justified and explained by the promise of better opportunities and experiences. “However we refer to these territories,” Castronova (2005, 11) explains, “the most general causes and effects of any migration into them may not be hard to predict. Human migration is a well-known and well-studied phenomenon. A simplified economic story would say that those doing relative [sic] less well in one place face the risks of change and head off to a new place. They stake claims there but retain ties with their former neighbors. If they do well, they stay; if they don’t they go back. . . . While this is a happy story in the long run, nonetheless, it is also a story of great change and short-run stress.” Despite what might appear to be a neutral stance, this account of migration is unfortunately biased and ethnocentric. It privileges the interests and fate of the migrating population, emphasizing their new opportunities, their hardships and stresses, and their connections to the old world they have had to leave behind. What such an account conveniently leaves out is any consideration of the effect that this mobility has on the indigenous peoples who were historically the unfortunate victims of such movement. Consider, for example, the narrative structure usually employed in the mythology of the American West. The standard story, one told in countless Hollywood westerns, goes like this: At one time, a group of brave pioneers left the comforts of home and hearth. They embarked on a longand-dangerous journey to a new land west of the Mississippi River. They endured many hardships and had to deal with all kinds of stress, but eventually—through their own hard work and ingenuity—they were successful in domesticating this wild and uncharted territory. This is, no doubt, a good story, and it makes for some compelling and enduring drama. Unfortunately, it also effectively excludes consideration of those indigenous peoples that Columbus had originally misidentified as “Indians.” Or, if there is some consideration, these others are more often than not reduced to one more challenging hardship that needs to be endured and eliminated—what is often called quite pejoratively “those pesky Indians.” In organizing the explanation so that it is told from the perspective of the migrating population, those individuals who Castronova calls “travelers” or “colonists,” one participates in and perpetuates ethnocentrism.8 Stating this, however, appears to ignore the fact that MMOs, MMORPGs, and other forms of computer-generated virtual worlds are not (in most cases) inhabited by an indigenous population who would be subject to displacement, enslavement, and colonization. What makes these new worlds different is that this time around, there do not appear to be victims. “I would speculate,” Mary

50

Gaming the System

Fuller writes, “that part of the drive behind the rhetoric of virtual reality as a New World or new frontier is the desire to recreate the Renaissance encounter with America without guilt: this time, if there are others present, they really won’t be human (in the case of Nintendo characters), or if they are, they will be other players like ourselves, whose bodies are not jeopardized by the virtual weapons we wield” (Fuller and Jenkins 1995, 59). Understood in this way, computer technology simulates new territories to explore, conquer, and settle without the principal problem that has come to be associated with either the European conquest of the Americas or the westward expansion of the United States. Unlike the continents of North and South America, these new worlds are not previously inhabited. “Plenty of humans,” Castronova (2007, 63) points out, “lived in the allegedly New World happened upon by Christopher Columbus. Not so with new virtual worlds. On the day of launch, these are truly newly created terrains that no human has yet explored.”9 MMORPGs, then, reengineer or reprogram the concept of the New World, retaining all the heroic aspects of exploration and discovery while stripping away the problems that have historically complicated the picture. As I had previously argued, “The terra nova of cyberspace is assumed to be disengaged from and unencumbered by the legacy of European colonialism, because cyberspace is determined to be innocent and guiltless. What distinguishes and differentiates the utopian dreams of cyberspace from that of the new world is that cyberspace, unlike the Americas, is assumed to be victimless” (Gunkel 2001, 44).

A Difference that Makes no Difference The new worlds created in and by computer simulation are not occupied by others; they are effectively open and empty. They therefore appear to be available for frictionless and guilt-free exploration and settlement. Understood in this way, movement into and through the virtual world of a MMO or MMORPG seems to be a matter of individual choice, and the decision is ultimately based on what appears to be best for the user. As Castronova (2005, 11) described it, “those who do well by moving, move; those who do well by staying, stay; and everyone eventually finds the best possible place to be.” Although this sounds reasonable, it is insensitive to the very real conditions of others both inside and outside the space of the game. First, though some virtual worlds are, in fact, basically empty—like the sandbox game Minecraft—many more have modeled indigenous populations as part of the game’s experience. This is the case with Sid Meier’s Colonization (originally released by MicroProse in 1994) and its 2008 reboot Civilization IV: Colonization, which presents players with a vast new world already inhabited by various kinds of indigenous peoples (Fig. 1.5). Although players of the game have a choice between trying to cooperate with the native populations or exploiting them, critics of the game indicate that it is easier to complete the scenario and win the game by reproducing the historical subjugation and even extermination of the indigenous peoples. As Rob Foreman (2006, 1) argues, “This game is inherently

51

Terra Nova 2.0 Figure 1.5. Screenshot for 2KGames’ internet distribution of Sid Meier’s Civilization IV: Colonization (2008), showing a graphic style that utilizes imagery connected to the history of European exploration and colonial conquest. https://www.2kgames.com/civ4/colonization/

troubling. Its object is to grow crops, earn money, build a colonial foothold in the New World and—most importantly—carry out genocide, wiping out the player’s choice of Indian tribes that already inhabit these Americas. They inevitably get in the way of deforestation, road-building, and seizure of land. All of these activities reflect historical colonization, and all of them contributed to the eradication of Native American livelihood.” Although the native tribes that are designed into the game are simulated and no real persons are actually harmed as a result of gameplay, Colonization represents and situates native peoples in such a way that they are made available for this kind of objectification and exploitation. In doing so, the game leverages and reinforces problematic stereotypes of the “Injun” that have been developed and popularized in American literature, film, and television (Churchill 1998). Similar difficulties with what Lisa Nakamura (2002) has called “cybertypes” have been identified and critiqued with the portrayal of other kinds of racially and ethnically distinguished others within video games—for example, African Americans and Latinos in the Grand Theft Auto franchise (Leonard 2006; Miller 2012), Asians in World of Warcraft (Nakamura 2009), and Middle Easterners (usually called “Arabs” or “Muslims,” though not without problematic

52

Gaming the System

complications) in virtually every first-person shooter and combat simulation game (Sisler 2008). Although one might be tempted to justify these portrayals as nothing more than an effort at historical accuracy and realism or even explain it as a kind of postcolonial object lesson (Langer 2008), these design decisions lend legitimacy to existing stereotypes and contribute to what David Leonard (2006, 83) has called “the racist pedagogies of video games.” Muniba Saleem and Craig Anderson (2013), for instance, have found that playing combat simulation games in which Arabs (and this umbrella term is already as problematic as something like “Indians”) are portrayed as terrorists significantly increases players’ anti-Arab bias and the perception that Arabs are aggressive extremists. Consequently, games that do include native populations, such as the aptly titled Colonization, situate native peoples as objects of subjugation and conquest and even those that do not have an in-game indigenous population as part of the gaming experience redeploy and legitimize many of the consequence of this ethnocentric hegemony. Second, the virtual world, as Sardar (1996, 19) reminds us, “does have real victims.” These victims are not situated within the space of the game; rather, they are those others who cannot, for numerous reasons, participate. Although RPGs, MMOs and MMORPGs offer “everyone,” as Castronova claims, the opportunity to find “the best possible place to be,” there are others—the majority of humanity, in fact—who do not have a choice in the matter. That is, the place where they find themselves is not something that they actively select or have the ability to change. The decision to migrate to a virtual world or not, which is often presented as if it were simply a matter of personal preference, is a privilege that only a small percentage of the world’s people get to consider. As Olu Oguibe (1995, 3) describes it, “despite our enthusiastic efforts to redefine reality, to push the frontiers of experience and existence to the very limits, to overcome our own corporeality, to institute a brave new world of connectivities and digital communities, nature and its structures and demands still constitute the concrete contours of reality for the majority of humanity.” Access to computer technology and the opportunity to experience the new worlds and open vistas of an MMO or MMORPG is something that is available to only a small fraction of the world’s population. The majority of humanity, as Oguibe points out, does not even have the luxury to question or contemplate the issue. Consequently, these statements about migration and individual choice can only be made from a position of relative privilege that remains effectively blind to the fact that others—most others—do not even have the option to participate in such a discussion. “Although this virtual exclusion is admittedly bloodless and seemingly sanitized of the stigma of colonial conquest, it is no less problematic or hegemonic” (Gunkel 2001, 45). For the victims of colonial conquest, then, the virtual world presents ­something of a double whammy. Not only do the events of new world conquest and frontier settlement conjure up less than pleasant memories for indigenous and aboriginal peoples, but many of these populations are currently situated on the “information have-nots” side of the digital divide. To put it in rather blunt terms, the message

is this: “Listen, we understand that what we thought to be a new world and frontier didn’t go so well for you folks, and we really regret that whole genocide thing. That was clearly a mistake, but we can just forget about all that. This time, we’re going to get it right, because this time we have excluded you people from the very beginning.”

Truth and Consequences

Terminological Troubles Using the terms “new world” and “frontier” to characterize the virtual worlds produced by various forms of computer simulation clearly have a way of articulating what is really interesting and compelling about these technologies. By using this terminology, one can immediately and intuitively perceive why so many developers, players, and academics understand virtual worlds as much more than fun and games. When described in terms of “new worlds” or “new frontiers,” RPGs, MMOs, MMORPGs, and nongaming social worlds like Second Life are “framed,” to use George Lakoff’s (2002, 37) word, as vast new territories that are open to exploration, settlement, and exploitation. As John Perry Barlow, founding father of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, described back in 1990, “Columbus was probably the last person to behold so much usable and unclaimed real estate (unreal estate).” Understood in this way, MMOs, MMORPGs, and other forms of computer-generated virtual worlds are not just another network application or a new form of entertainment but are, as Castronova (2005), Taylor (2006), Kelly 2 (2004), and many others argue, an important sociocultural development that needs to be taken seriously. These synthetic new worlds, like the New World of the Americas and the frontier of the American West, offer economic and social opportunities, provide a location for innovative and unheard of adventures, and even support grand utopian experiments and new forms of community. This is understandably hard to resist, and it is difficult to fault the players, developers, and scholars who leverage this powerful rhetoric and historical precedent. At the same time, however, the “new world” and “frontier” have what Sardar calls a “darker side,” specifically the forgetting of history, the imposition of colonial power, the exercise of ethnocentrism, and the unfortunate exclusion of others. Colonization, violent conquest, and bloody genocide necessarily haunt the

53

Terra Nova 2.0

When the history of the twenty-first century comes to be written, it is possible that the first decade of the new millennium will be remembered alongside the years 1492, the year of Columbus’s discovery of the New World; and 1894, the year Frederick Jackson Turner introduced the frontier hypothesis. This is because the 2000s have already been promoted as the decade in which new worlds were discovered, and a brand-new frontier was first opened to migration, exploitation, and settlement. Although this account sounds promising, it has, as we have seen, had a number of important consequences.

54

Gaming the System

use of this terminology and mitigate against its effectiveness and significance. To make matters worse, the current publications, marketing literature, and academic studies surrounding these technologies willfully ignore, unconsciously suppress, or conveniently forget these important complications, and they do so despite the fact that a good number of articles and books were published on this exact subject over two decades ago. Consequently, the current crop of texts addressing and promoting virtual worlds not only perform a highly selective and arguably uninformed reading of history, but also participate in and even perpetrate the very problems they exclude and leave unarticulated.

Words Matter When all is said and done, the problems that have been identified inevitably have to do with language. That is, the critical issue concerns not computer games or virtual worlds, per se, but the words that have, for better or worse, been selected by game developers, promoters, players, and academics to describe, characterize, and frame this technology in contemporary discussions, marketing campaigns, and debates. The problem, then, is not necessarily with virtual worlds in general or with any particular RPG, MMO, or MMORPG, but rather with the use and circulation of the terms “new world” and “new frontier.” These words, however, are not immaterial. As I have previously argued, “the words that are employed to describe a technological innovation are never mere reports of the state-of-the-art but constitute sites for the production and struggle over significance” (Gunkel 2001, 50), which is another way of saying something like “the limits of my language mean the limits of my [virtual] world” (Wittgenstein 1995, 149). Consequently, what these virtual worlds are and, perhaps more importantly, what we understand them to be, is as much a result of computer programming and game design practices as it is a product of the discursive decisions that have been made by game developers, marketing firms, journalists, gamers, scholars, educators, bloggers, politicians, and so on. Addressing this difficulty, however, is not simply a matter of finding and substituting a better and less controversial terminology. Whether we call these things new worlds, new frontiers, games, parallel universes, synthetic worlds, or something else, we inevitably inherit etymological baggage that we do not necessarily control or even fully comprehend. The goal, then, is not to identify some pure linguistic signifiers that would be unaffected by these complications and issues. Any language is already shaped by the sediment of its own culture and history. This is simultaneously the source of its explanatory power and a significant liability. The best we can do—the best we can ever do—is to remain critically aware of this fact and to understand how the very words we employ to describe technology already shape, influence, and construct what it is we think we are merely describing. This is, as James Carey (1992, 29) explained it, the “dual capacity of symbolic forms: as ‘symbols of ’ they present reality; as

‘symbols for’ they create the very reality they present.” Consequently, the critical issue is to learn to deploy language self-reflectively, knowing how the very words we use to characterize a technological innovation are themselves part of an ongoing struggle over the way we understand the technology and frame its significance.

Critical Recoil 55

Terra Nova 2.0

There is a way that all of this facilitates opportunities for some critical selfreflection on the current state of game studies, the account of its early development, and its future direction. In the inaugural issue of the journal Game Studies, for example, Espen Aarseth (2001) considered the current state of computer game studies and argued in favor of a new and distinct academic discipline to address it. According to his account, computer games constitute a new and uncharted field of investigation that is (like all previous uncharted territory) exposed to the pressures of colonization. “The greatest challenge to computer game studies will no doubt come from within the academic world. Making room for a new field usually means reducing the resources of the existing ones, and the existing fields will also often respond by trying to contain the new area as a subfield. Games are not a kind of cinema, or literature, but colonizing attempts from both these fields have already happened, and no doubt will happen again” (Aarseth 2001, 2). For Aarseth, and for others who follow his lead (Douglas 2002; Eskelinen 2001; Eskelinen 2004; Pearce 2004), the nascent field of game studies is rhetorically situated as a virgin territory that has endured and will need to struggle against the colonizing forces of the established, old world disciplines.10 For this reason, his account of scholarly engagement in this new field deploys many of the discursive tropes that are constitutive of and operative in the narratives of new world exploration and conquest. “We all enter this field from somewhere else, from anthropology, sociology, narratology, semiotics, film studies, etc., and the political and ideological baggage we bring from our old field inevitably determines and motivates our approaches. And even more importantly, do we stay or do we go back? Do we want a separate field named computer game studies, or do we want to claim the field for our old discipline?” (Aarseth 2001, 3; emphasis in the original). In this way, Aarseth situates scholars of computer games in the position of new-world explorers. No one, he argues, is indigenous to this new land; we all come from somewhere else. In coming from these other places, we all carry a certain amount of baggage—assumptions, methods, and practices that come to be imposed on this new territory in order to make sense of and domesticate it. And like all new world explorers and adventurers, the big question, the question that really matters for each of us, is whether to make our home in this new world or to claim it for our homeland. Elsewhere, Aarseth (2004, 45) reiterates this claim, although in this context he leverages frontier imagery: “The great stake-claiming race is on, and academics

56

Gaming the System

from neighboring fields, such as literature and film studies, are eagerly grasping ‘the chance to begin again, in a golden land of opportunity and adventure’ (to quote from the ad in Blade Runner). As with any land rush, the respect for local culture and history is minimal, while the belief in one’s own tradition, tools and competence is unfailing. Computer game studies is virgin soil, ready to be plotted and plowed by the machineries of cultural and textual studies.” Clearly this language and these metaphors are persuasive, seductive, and powerful. At the same time, however, they deploy the problematic mythology and ideology that we identified and critiqued in the discourse of computer games in general and the RPG, MMO, and MMORPG in particular. Consequently, the problem is not whether—and to what extent—other disciplines might come to “colonize” computer games and game studies or whether we should resist the onslaught and support what Celia Pearce (2004, 1), who considers herself an “‘indigenous’ game person,” calls the “further development of an indigenous theory.” The problem is that we have already defined and articulated the main problem for game studies in terms that are themselves already questionable and problematic.

Terminal Effects In the end, one could, with some justification, end by asking the obvious question, “So what’s your solution?” Or, as Neil Postman (1993, 181) puts it, “anyone who practices the act of cultural criticism must endure being asked, What is the solution to the problems you describe?” This question, although entirely understandable and seemingly informed by good “common sense,” is guided by a rather limited understanding of the role, function, and objective of critique—an understanding of instrumental rationality that, like the deployment of the New World and frontier metaphors, might be seen as particularly American given the legacy of Pragmatism. In colloquial usage, the word “critique” is usually understood as the process of identifying problems and imperfections that then require some kind of reparation. This is the way that Postman understands and deploys “critique” in this quotation from his book Technopoly. But there is, as we have already seen in the introduction, a more precise and nuanced definition of the practice that is rooted in the tradition of critical philosophy. The project of critique, as Barbara Johnson (1981, xv) reminds us, does not simply discern problems in order to fix them. There is more to it; it is about gaming the system. Critique, therefore, seeks to identify and expose a particular system’s fundamental operations and conditions of possibility, demonstrating how what initially appears to be beyond question and entirely obvious does, in fact, possess a complex history that not only influences what proceeds from it but is itself often not recognized as such. This is the case with the terms “new world” and “frontier.” Although the use of this rather powerful terminology seems innocent enough, it proceeds from and entails a rich and equally problematic history. This history not only has a considerable cost; it also entails a forgetting of the past that effectively effaces and blinds us to its influence. The objective of the critique, therefore, is to distinguish and to expose this particular structure, its operations, and its implications. And it is important to note that we do so not because we oppose virtual worlds and

MMORPGs, their current use and future development, or the important research that has been undertaken thus far. The point, rather, is that the current excitement about these “new worlds” and “new frontiers” needs to be tempered by an understanding of the history, logics, and ideologies that have been mobilized in the process of deploying this very terminology.

57

Notes

Is Second Life a MMORPG? Yes and no. While the Second Life interface and display are similar to most popular massively multiplayer online role playing games (or MMORPGs), there are two key, unique differences: (1) Creativity: Second Life provides near unlimited freedom to its Residents. This world really is whatever you make it, and your experience is what you want out of it. If you want to hang out with your friends in a garden or nightclub, you can. If you want to go shopping or fight dragons, you can. If you want to start a business, create a game or build a skyscraper you can. It’s up to you. (2) Ownership: Instead of paying a monthly subscription fee, Residents can obtain their first Basic account for FREE. Additional Basic accounts cost a one-time flat fee of just $9.95. If you choose to get land to live, work and build on, you pay a monthly lease fee based on the amount of land you have. You also own anything you create—Residents retain IP rights over their in-world creations.

According to the official answer provided by Linden Lab, Second Life is like any other MMO or MMORPG insofar as it employs a similar avatar-based user interface and semi-immersive threedimensional display. It is different to the extent that the online, persistent virtual environment that

Terra Nova 2.0

1. Here is how Au (2008, xvi–xvii) explained his unique role and position: “In the spring of 2003, Linden Lab, the creators of Second Life, offered me the oddest assignment in all my years as a freelance writer. . . . They didn’t want me to write about their world so much as to write within it, as a journalist—an embedded journalist, as it were. . . . So Linden Lab contracted me to cover this place, my role a cross between historian, ethnographer, and sole reporter of a frontier-town newspaper. And in my capacity as ‘Hamlet Linden’—my alter ego’s chosen name—I began reporting inside Second Life, for a blog I dubbed New World Notes.” 2. The extent to which the concept of the frontier remains a distinctly “American” idea and national ideology can be gauged by looking at developments in other parts of the European “New World,” especially South America. “Brazilian scholars,” as Hal Langfur (2014, 843) argues, “often rejected the frontier as an analytical concept because of perceived excesses in its application to U.S. history.” In its place, they have utilized two terms that provide accounts of Brazilian colonial history with a distinctly different characterization: bandeira and the sertão. “The first of these terms” Langfur explains, “refers to Portuguese expeditions into the South American interior; the second, to the interior itself.” Consequently, as Langfur concludes, “interest in frontier history as an explanation for Brazilian national development certainly never enjoyed the status it did in the USA, where westward-advancing pioneers attained their historiographical apotheosis. In the USA, the frontier became a paradigm. In Brazil, it conjured the absence of a paradigm, a wary and strictly qualified interest in the idea at best. Leading historians argued that the concept had little to do with Brazil, shedding little light on its historical trajectory” (Langfur 2014, 844). 3. Technically speaking, Second Life is not exactly a MMORPG; then again it is not something entirely different. The FAQ on Linden Lab’s (2008) website explains this ambivalent position in the following way:

58

Gaming the System

is Second Life is entirely designed, built, and even owned by its residents. What is important to note in this response is the fact that Linden Lab differentiates Second Life from other MMORPGs in terms of its unique administrative structure. The company does not draw the line by quibbling over what is and what is not a game. In fact, the same FAQ makes it clear that Second Life incorporates gaming and serves as a common platform for all kinds of games—“first-person shooters, strategy games, puzzle and adventure games, even board, and puzzle games” (Linden Lab, 2008). Despite this clarification, the refrain “Second Life is not a game” has been mobilized in many publications (Carr and Pond 2007; Kirkpatrick 2007). As Sal Humphreys (2006, 82) points out, Second Life is a persistent world; but it is not a game precisely because it “lacks the goals and built-in rewards and rules of a game.” These attempts at differentiation are not limited to the popular and scholarly press, it is even justified by Philip Rosedale, the CEO of Linden Lab and “founding father” of Second Life. “I’m not building a game,” Rosedale told Wired magazine’s Daniel Terdiman in 2004. “I’m building a new country” (Terdiman 2004, 2). This “nation building” effort has important social/political consequences that will be taken up and fully investigated in chapter 3. Though this is not the appropriate place to engage in the debate over the essential characteristics of what is or is not a game (for more on this debate, see Harrigan and Wardrip-Fruin 2007), we can and should note two aspects of this discussion that are pertinent to the matter at hand. First, whether Second Life is or is not a MMORPG is something that remains essentially undecided, and this undecidability is further complicated by the fact that there are significant inconsistencies in the official story. Depending on how you look at it and who provides the explanation, Second Life both is and is not a MMORPG. Second, and more importantly, when a distinction is advanced, the leadership at Linden Lab has explained the difference by mobilizing the figure and rhetoric of terra nova. In doing so, however, one does not so much distinguish Second Life from other MMORPGs as s/he grounds their point of contact in this common and (as we have seen) problematic ideology. 4. At one time, the population of Second Life was reported to have been in excess of 1.1 million. Current population statics indicate an active user base of 900,000 (Robertson 2016). 5. It should not be forgotten that this particular formulation was also gendered. For this reason, the logic and rhetoric of new world exploration and frontier expansion often exhibits complex patterns of gender bias and inequality. Nora Jaffary (2007, 8) explains, “In the past 15 years, national and regional histories of the Americas in the era of colonization have increasingly incorporated gender analysis, fulfilling in this intriguing context Joan Scott’s call for a history of how ‘politics constructs gender and gender constructs politics.’” As evidence of this development, Jaffary (2007, 8–9) provides a litany of recent scholarship, which includes, among other works, Ann Twinam’s (1999) investigation of the gendered nature of social status as it comes to be articulated in the Spanish colonies of Central and South America, Kathleen Brown’s (1996) examination of the construction of political authority in colonial Virginia by the deliberate manipulation of racial and sexual identities, and Karen Anderson’s (1991) considerations of indigenous women’s subjugation to French men through marriage contracts and, by extension, the subjugation of the territory of North America to the authority of the French crown. Although it is beyond the scope of the current investigation, it would be both interesting and useful to examine the ways in which these gendered constructions influence and become expressed in the new worlds and frontiers of computer games, MMORPGs, and other forms of semi-immersive virtual environments. By way of anticipating this analysis, we can note two points of contact. First, the new world of cyberspace is, from the moment of its introduction, already gendered. According to William Gibson, who coined the neologism in his 1984 cyberpunk novel Neuromancer, cyberspace is identified as “the matrix,” a term that not only has a nominal association with mathematics but also anticipates the popular vision of immersive virtual reality as exhibited by the Wachowskis’ Matrix trilogy. “Matrix” is a Latin word that signifies “womb.” Consequently, “the fictional cyberspace presented in Gibson’s Neuromancer is already gendered female. Through this engendering, the novel is presented and functions according to traditional gender stereotypes and biases. Cyberspace, arguably the main female character in the novel, remains for all intents and purposes passive, formless, and receptive, while Case, the cowboy hotshot, is presented as active and is primarily defined by his penetrations into the matrix” (Gunkel 2001, 164–165).

59

Terra Nova 2.0

Second, similar gender constructions are also exposed and examined in many of the initial studies of computer graphics practices and gaming. According to Simon Penny (1995, 231), for example, “computer-graphics production—as seen in commercial cinema, video games, theme park rides, and military simulations—is dominated by a late adolescent Western male psyche and world view.” For this reason, the place of female characters within these virtual worlds is often informed by and formed according to gender stereotypes. According to Eugene Provenzo’s (1999, 100) analysis of Nintendo, female characters are all too often “cast as individuals who are acted upon rather than as initiators of action.” And Shoshana Magnet (2006, 146) traces how these particular gender constructions connect up with the colonial history of the United States, demonstrating the way that players of the video game Tropico are interpellated as heterosexual male colonizers. Clearly much more can and should be said about the gendering of game environments, gameplay, and gamer demographics. I simply want to point out that, insofar as MMORPGs are already wired into the rhetoric and logic of colonial and frontier (mis)adventures, a great deal can be learned from looking at the way gender was constructed and mobilized in the histories and mythologies of the European encounter with the new world of North and South America and the westward expansion of the United States. 6. According to Julian Kücklich, understanding computer games as “new worlds” is something that has a distinct lineage, history, and origin. “This analogy of the computer game as a world to be explored,” Kücklich (2003, 1) explains, “can be traced back to Mary Fuller’s and Henry Jenkin’s essay ‘Nintendo® and New World Travel Writing’ (1995) and even further to Marie-Laure Ryan’s 1991 book Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory. Only in the last two years, however, has it become a widely accepted paradigm. While this approach does not rule out literary ambitions for computer games, it shifts the focus from the temporal sequence of individual events to the spatial organization of the game.” For Kücklich, whose essay is concerned with “the literary context of computer games” (Kücklich 2003, 1), the scholarly work of Fuller and Jenkins and Ryan marks a significant shift in focus and approach. They not only introduce the “new world paradigm” but, as a consequence, significantly alter the direction of and approach to game studies. Formulated in this way, Kücklich attributes causality to these two scholarly publications. The situation, however, is more complex. As Stefen Helmreich (2000) points out in a chapter aptly titled “The Word for World is Computer,” the understanding of computers and computer simulated environments as “worlds” has a considerably longer history and predates the two texts Kücklich identifies as the pivotal turning point. For this reason, Fuller and Jenkins (1995), do not so much invent or synthesize the “new world paradigm.” Their essay simply endeavors to identify its presence in the design and operations of a particular brand of computer game and to trace the effect of this discursive construction on our understanding. Consequently, Fuller and Jenkins’s essay is not the origin or efficient cause of the shift in focus. It merely identifies and investigates something that is always and already at work within the history of computing, the design of computer games, the marketing discourse of game developers and manufacturers, and the experiences and descriptions offered by players. Perhaps a more effective approach to addressing these questions concerning origin, history, and lineage would be to look at differences in the rhetoric of computer games across cultures. MMORPGs, for instance, first became popular in southeast Asia, specifically South Korea. Did South Korean game developers, players, and critics conceptualize early MMORPGs, like Lineage I and II and Legend of Mir, as “new worlds” and “frontiers”? Or is the “new world paradigm,” to redeploy Kücklich’s phrase, something that comes into play only after MMORPGs become popular in Europe and North America? Although this kind of cross-cultural comparison is beyond the scope of the current examination, such an investigation would not only provide interesting points of comparison but would, insofar as the Korean peninsula has had an entirely different and unfortunate experience with the exercise of colonial power, provide another way to examine and track the interaction of games and culture. A good place to begin this investigation would be Dal Yong Jin and Florence Chee’s “Age of New Media Empires: A Critical Interpretation of the Korean Online Game Industry” (2008) and Dal Yong Jin’s Korea’s Online Gaming Empire (2010). 7. The neologism “infosphere” has been put back in circulation by way of the work of Luciano Floridi (see Floridi 1999b; Floridi 2013, 2014). Floridi, who claims to have coined the neologism in

60

Gaming the System

1999, does not reference or otherwise appear to recognize the fact that Vlahos’s had already introduced and used the term (albeit in a more restricted sense) one year earlier: “Infosphere is a neologism I coined some years ago (Floridi 1999b) on the basis of ‘biosphere,’ a term referring to that limited region on our planet that supports life. As will become clearer in the course this book, it is a concept that is quickly evolving. Minimally it denotes the whole informational environment constituted by all informational entities (thus including information agents as well), their properties, interactions, processes, and mutual relations. It is an environment comparable to, but different from, cyberspace, which is only one of its sub-regions, as it were, since it also includes offline and analogue spaces of information” (Floridi 2013, 6). 8. One possible exception to this would have been Cosmic Origin’s Frontier 1859. Although never completed or released, the game’s pre-release marketing appears to have been sensitive to the complexities of frontier migration: “Two worlds collide in the struggle to survive—From the perspective of hope, Emigrants imagined the Frontier as a place to begin a new life. From the perspective of home, Native Americans were here first. Wrong or right, the decisions people made who lived on the Frontier helped them survive the hardships of life. In that process, two lifestyles became extinct, the way of the Native American Indian, and the way of the Wild Frontier” (Cosmic Origin, 2007). 9. This point is reiterated in Matt Peckham’s review of Castronova’s Exodus to the Virtual World (2007), which was published by PCWorld.com on December 11, 2007. According to Peckham’s (2007) reading, Castronova’s second book forecasts the general effect of wide-spread MMORPG usage by drawing direct parallels between the current “exodus into cyberspace” and the relocation of thousands of British citizens to the new world of North America in the seventeenth century. For Peckham, however, this comparison is spurious for two reasons. First, the emigration of the early British colonists was motivated by political and religious oppression and was, therefore, distinctly different from that of the average MMORPG user: “The people leaving Britain for a new life in North America were doing so for much more radical reasons than, say, the average real-life obese or socially maladjusted user who turns to Second Life because of social exclusion or physical insecurity” (Peckham 2007, 1). Second, Castronova’s rather sanguine account of North American colonization is selective and fails to recognize the plight of the indigenous population, those individuals and communities who were displaced or eradicated by this movement: “Moreover, what of the indigenous Americans left to the margin of that example, whose world—to extend and invert Castronova’s analogy—was in fact gradually subsumed by the colonial influx? Imagine a powerful, relentless, culturally alien wave slowly and inexorably reconstituting the fabric of your ‘reality,’ changing it to the point of near-eradication. Today, only the most fleeting remnants of that ‘reality’ continue in the traditions of atavistic practitioners on pockets of federally reserved land. Nothing like those indigenous peoples exists in today’s online simulations—there’s simply no parallel” (Peckham 2007, 1). 10. Extending this discursive formation, Geoffrey Rockwell and Stéfan Sinclair (2016) set out to examine and evaluate Aarseth’s claim that game studies is in danger of being colonized by outsiders, and their critical analysis draws on and utilizes the same terminology. They begin by “generating an initial cast of pioneers, colonizers, designers, and players important to Game Studies” (Rockwell and Sinclair 2016, 141) and then conclude with the following: In this chapter we have traced some aspects of the theme of colonization and its players through the evolving civilization of Game Studies, but we believe that is what makes Game Studies so vibrant: there are issues at stake, and there is drama among the players. All of it is there in the record, especially at the start of the game. We could be accused of overusing the game trope in this chapter, of letting gaming colonize analysis, but we do not believe text analysis stands outside interpretation, judging a phenomenon from some objective stance. Text analysis is a way of replaying text; it is a way of rereading through playful exploration. We could be accused of bringing foreign methods—text analysis—to gaming, or of being carpetbaggers, hustling in the new world of games. Although we ­embrace serious play as part of the scholarly research cycle, we are not playing games here. (Rockwell and Sinclair 2016, 148)

chapter two

THE REAL PROBLEM

virtual worlds are inhabited, but they are not occupied by us, per se; they are inhabited by avatars. The word “avatar,” which is of Sanskrit origin and denotes the incarnation or physical embodiment of a divinity, has been utilized at least since Neil Stephenson’s influential cyberpunk novel Snow Crash (2000) and the “many-player online virtual environment” of LucasFilms Habitat (Morningstar and Farmer 1991, 274), to designate the virtual representative of a user in an interactive social environment like text-based MUDs, graphical MMORPGs, nongaming 3D immersive environments like Second Life and Sims, and social networks like Facebook.1 As Mark Stephen Meadows (2008, 23) succinctly describes it, “At its core, an avatar is a simple thing. . . . It is an interactive, social representation of a user.” As is abundantly clear from the technical, popular, and critical literature on the subject, what makes the avatar remarkable is that users have the ability to manipulate its appearance, attributes, and characteristics, either creating it in their own image or engaging in imaginative and often fanciful constructions. “For some players,” Nick Yee (2008) points out, “the avatar becomes a purposeful projection or idealization of their own identity, while for others, the avatar is an experiment with new identities.” As a result of this, the avatar, Felix Schröter (2016, 30) explains, has been and remains a highly important subject for both scholars and practitioners and the focal point of “some of the most heated debates about video games.”

The Question Concerning the Avatar Critical responses to the avatar have, as one might anticipate, generally pulled in two different and apparently opposed directions, producing another one of those conceptual oppositions or dichotomies that has become definitive of debates in the field. On the one hand, the ability to manipulate avatar characteristics is celebrated as a means by which to liberate oneself from the unfortunate accidents imposed by real physical bodies situated in real space and time. Indicative of this kind of enthusiastic response is Mark Dery’s (1994, 3) introduction to Flame Wars, one of the first critical anthologies addressing the opportunities and challenges 61

62

Gaming the System

of computer-mediated communication: “The upside of incorporeal interaction: a technologically enabled, postmulticultural vision of identity disengaged from gender, ethnicity, and other problematic constructions. On line [sic], users can float free of biological and sociocultural determinants.” A similar sentiment is expressed by Castronova (2005, 25–26): “Synthetic worlds may allow us to experience human social life in an environment in which many characteristics of the body are no longer fixed endowments but have become chosen attributes. People entering a synthetic world can have, in principle, any kind of body they desire. At a stroke, this feature of synthetic worlds removes from the social calculus all the unfortunate effects that derive from the body. Imagine a world in which all the aspects of our physical appearance were under our control, so that all variations in thin, heavy, tall, small, dark, and light were all voluntary.” On the other hand, critics of these “virtual incorporations” and “designer bodies” point out how this activity not only neglects the limitations and exigencies of real physical bodies but reproduces, as Sandy Stone (1991) and others have argued, some of the worst forms of Cartesian thinking. “By virtue of being physically disembodied from the creator,” Beth Simone Noveck (2006, 269–270) argues, “avatars in the theater of the game space may act in antisocial and even pathological ways—ways in which the ‘real’ person never would—shooting, maiming, and killing in brutal fashion.” Additionally, and perhaps worse, researchers like Lisa Nakamura (1995, 2002), Jennifer Gonzales (2000), and Castronova (2003a) have demonstrated how avatar identity—both the options made available to users in the game and the way users have manipulated these affordances—often reproduce, reinforce, and trade on conventional and highly problematic stereotypes of race, ethnicity, and gender. By means of this rather disturbing form of “identity tourism,” as Nakamura (2002) calls it, many users are able to “use race and gender as amusing prostheses to be donned and shed without ‘real life’ consequences” (13–14).

Challenging the Rules of the Game As long as critical inquiry remains defined by the terms and conditions of this debate, very little will change. Investigators will continue to deploy and entertain what is by now easily recognizable arguments, somewhat predictable evidence, and, in the final analysis, unresolved controversies. For this reason, the following undertakes another approach and method of analysis. It is important to note that this alternative does not simply dismiss the controversy concerning avatar identity and the kind of critical work that has been pursued and published in this area; rather, it recontextualizes and reconsiders it from an altogether different perspective. Instead of adhering to and operating within the terms stipulated by the current debate, we can also focus on what both sides already agree on and hold in common. Such an investigation would not target the differences between the enthusiastic supporters of creative role playing and selfreengineering, or the critics of virtual violence, antisocial behavior, and identity

Beginning at the Beginning Let’s begin at the beginning—at that point when the figure of the avatar is first recognized as a significant issue. Although there is some debate about the exact point of entry, one text that has been routinely credited as the source is Sandy Stone’s “Will the Real Body Please Stand Up?” This essay, which was initially presented at the First International Conference on Cyberspace (University of Texas at Austin, May 4–5, 1990) and subsequently published in Cyberspace: First Steps (Benedikt 1991), investigated the new opportunities and challenges introduced by the nascent virtual communities that had developed in bulletin board systems (BBS) and first-generation computer-conferencing services like CompuServe.3 In the course of her analysis, Stone (1991, 82) introduces readers to Julie, “a person on a computer conference in New York in 1985.” Julie, as Stone describes her, was a severely disabled woman who compensated for her physical limitations by engaging in rather intimate conversations with other people online. She was a gregarious woman who, despite being trapped in a ruined physical body, was able to carry on a full and very active social life in cyberspace. The only problem, as Stone eventually points out, was Julie did not really exist. She was, in fact, the avatar of a rather shy and introverted middle-aged male psychiatrist who decided to experiment with an online identity and what Stone (1991, 84) called “computer cross-dressing.”

63

The Real Problem

tourism, but rather the shared values and assumptions that they must endorse, whether conscious of it or not, in order to engage each other and enter into conversation in the first place. Despite their differing interpretations, both sides deploy and leverage a particular understanding of the real. In fact, these discussions and debates about avatars and virtual worlds throw around the words “real” and “reality” with relative ease. They not only distinguish the endlessly reconfigurable, designer bodies of avatars from the real person who stands behind and manipulates its digital strings; but when push comes to shove—when things in the virtual environment get confused or exceedingly complicated—advocates and critics alike often appeal to the relatively safe and well-defined world of what is now called (in a rather curious) discursive gesture “real reality” (Borgmann 1999, 256; Ravetz 2005, 113; Søraker 2011, 45). Consequently, what is needed is an examination of the common understanding of the “real” that has been, often quite unconsciously and without explicit identification, operationalized in these various discussions and disputes.2 It is important to note that the objective of such an investigation is not to engage in mere philosophical speculation about the nature of reality, although some engagement with the history of metaphysics will be necessary and unavoidable. The goal, rather, is to get real about computer-generated experiences and personal identities, providing this relatively new area of study with a more sophisticated and nuanced understanding of some of its own key terms and fundamental concepts.

64

Gaming the System

The case of Julie, therefore, was not just one of the earliest-recorded accounts of an avatar identity crisis but introduced what is widely considered to be one of the principal issues concerning online social interaction—the difference between an avatar’s appearance and the true identity of the real person behind the scene or screen. The full impact of this problem is perhaps best articulated by Kim Randall (aka Sadie Peppita) on a blog, which documents her experiences in Second Life. “How does one know,” Randall (2008) inquires, “what is truth and reality when dealing, playing and working in a virtual world? The reason I am writing this is due to the fact that at some point we all question someone’s honesty when in all reality you cannot see the person, only the avatar of someone you may talk to or work with in a virtual world.” Randall’s inquiry is direct, intuitive, and seemingly very simple. Responding to it, however, will entail an involvement with a whole lot of metaphysics. Rather than engage this material directly, we can get at it by following the trail of Stone’s evocative title.

Will the Real Body Please Stand Up? This title, although not explicitly identified as such within the space of Stone’s essay, is derived from and alludes to a popular television game show from the latter half of the twentieth century. The show To Tell the Truth was created by Bob Stewart, produced by the highly successful production team of Mark Goodson and Bill Todman (arguably the Rodgers and Hammerstein of the television game show industry), and ran intermittently on several US television networks since its premier in the mid-1950s. To Tell the Truth was a panel show, which, like its immediate precursor, What’s My Line (1950–1967), featured a panel of four celebrities, mainly “television personalities” like Nipsey Russell, Betty White, Gene Rayburn, and Kitty Carlisle.4 The panelists, who sat side by side behind a long desk, were confronted with a group of three individuals, or what the program’s host and referee called a “team of challengers.” Each member of this trio claimed to be a particular individual who had some unusual background, notable life experience, or unique occupation. The celebrity panel was charged with interrogating the three challengers and deciding, based on the responses to their questions, which one of the three was actually the person she or he purported to be—who, in effect, was telling the truth. In this exchange, two of the challengers engaged in deliberate deception, answering the questions of the celebrity panel by pretending to be someone they were not, while the remaining challenger told the truth. The “moment of truth” came at the game’s conclusion, when the program’s host asked the pivotal question, “Will the real [insert name of the person] please stand up?” at which time, one of the three challengers stood. In doing so, this one individual revealed him- or herself as the real thing and exposed, by comparison, the other two to be false representations and imposters. Although ostensibly a simple form of entertainment designed, like most programs in American broadcast television, to deliver an audience to product advertisers, To Tell the Truth is based on and stages some of the fundamental concerns of

Playing with Platonism This is, as any student of philosophy will immediately recognize, the basic configuration usually attributed to Platonic metaphysics. For mainstream Platonism, the real is situated outside of and beyond phenomenal reality. That is, the real things are located in the realm of supersensible ideas and what is perceived by embodied and finite human beings are derived and somewhat deficient apparitions.5 This “doctrine of the forms,” as it eventually comes to be called, is evident, in various forms, throughout the Platonic corpus. It appears, for instance, in the final book of The Republic, where Socrates distinguishes between the unique idea of something and its multifarious particular appearances: “‘Shall we, then, start the inquiry at this point by our customary procedure? We are in the habit, I take it, of positing a single idea or form in the case of the various multiplicities to which we give the same name. Do you not understand?’ ‘I do.’ ‘In the present case, then, let us take any multiplicity you please; for example, there are many couches and tables.’ ‘Of course.’ ‘But these utensils imply, I suppose, only two ideas or forms, one of a couch and one of a table’” (Plato 1987, 596a, b). According to the exchange that is developed and recounted in this dialogue, the real thing—the real couch in this particular case—is the unique idea that exists outside of and beyond what would be called phenomenal reality, while the various objects—the different instances

65

The Real Problem

Western metaphysics. First, the program differentiates and distinguishes between the real thing and its phenomenal appearances. According to the program’s structure, the real thing is not only hidden by the various apparitions that are presented to the panel but is also situated just below, behind, or outside the surface of these apparitions (the spatial metaphors can be manipulated in a number of different ways). Consequently, there is a real thing. It is, however, hidden or concealed by various competing and somewhat unreliable appearances. Second, in the face of these different apparitions, the panelists attempt to ascertain what is real by interrogating the appearances and looking for significant inconsistencies, incongruities, and even betrayals within phenomenal reality. The panelists, therefore, carefully scrutinize the appearances in order to determine, by a kind of process of elimination, what is real and what is not. Third, the effectiveness of this particular undertaking can be evaluated by comparing each panelist’s final judgment to the real thing. This means that the panelists will, at some point in the program, have access to the real itself—as itself, and not as a mere appearance. At some point, then, namely at the end of the program, the real thing can be made to stand up and to show itself as itself, so that the panelists may have direct-and-unmitigated access to it. Finally, once the real thing is revealed, the four panelists (and the viewing audience) will know which appearances were truthful and which were false. They will come to perceive, by a kind of retrospective comparison, who among the challengers had been telling the truth and who was lying; who among the four panelists judged correctly and who did not; and most importantly what is real and what is merely an illusory deception and fiction.

of couches, that is, red couches, blue couches, small couches, large couches— that we encounter here and there through the mediation of our senses are merely derived and secondary apparitions.

Epistemological Games

66

Gaming the System

This distinction between the eternal and unchanging form of the real and its various sensible apparitions, however, introduces an epistemological problem: namely, how and where does one gain access to the real as such so that she or he is able to judge the adequacy of a particular appearance to the real thing it emulates? Unlike To Tell the Truth, where the revelation of the real takes place at the end of the program, Plato’s Socrates situates access at the beginning, or, more precisely, prior to and outside of the space and time of lived experience. “For a human being,” Plato (1982) has Socrates say in the Phaedrus, “must understand a general idea formed by collecting into a unity by means of reason the many perceptions of the senses; and this is a recollection of those real things which our soul once beheld, when it journeyed with a god and, lifting its vision above the things which we now say exist, rose up to real being” (249b, c). Platonic metaphysics, therefore, seems to invert the structure of the game, situating the revelation of the real at the beginning and not the end of the program. For this reason, Platonism is actually more in-line with What’s My Line, Goodson and Todman’s initial panel show and the precursor to To Tell the Truth. In What’s My Line, four panelists interrogated one challenger in an attempt to ascertain this particular individual’s occupation or line of work (Fig. 2.1). Although the true identity of the challenger was concealed from the celebrity panel, it was revealed to both the studio and television audience prior to the start of gameplay. In this way, the studio audience and television viewer were given privileged access to the real, while the panel was restricted from knowing such information. This epistemological difference created a kind of dramatic tension that was undeniably entertaining. Like an omniscient being, the audience knew the truth of all things and watched the mere mortal panel try to figure out the truth from their messy involvement in and limitation to particular apparitions. Although Goodson and Todman were most likely unaware of the influence, their game shows were thoroughly informed by and functioned according to the protocols of Platonism. This Platonic structure, although well over 2400 years old, also informs and is operative in recent innovations in information and communication technology (ICT). The connection was explicitly identified by Michael Heim (1993, 89), the self-proclaimed metaphysician of virtual reality (VR), who argued that “cyberspace is Platonism as a working product.” Heim’s statement is not only supported by research and development in data visualization systems like the Electronic Visualization Laboratory’s (EVL) virtual reality theatre, which was named CAVE in a very conscious reference to and deliberate evocation of the Platonic allegory situated at the center of the Republic (Cruz-Neira et al. 1994), but also in the design and operation of more widely accessible and commercially

67

The Real Problem

Figure 2.1. The original celebrity panel for What’s My Line? (1952). Public domain image provided by Wikipedia. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/ File:Whats_My_Line _original_television_panel_1952.JPG

available forms of VR technology—what Castronova (2005) has called “practical virtual reality” (7) or “game-based VR” (286).6 In these cases, the Platonic influence is especially evident with avatars and the issue of identity.

Ontological Difference We commonly distinguish the appearances of avatars that populate the computergenerated environment of a virtual world from the true identity of the real user. An avatar, as users, developers, and researchers recognize, are “representational proxies that may or may not reflect the physical attributes of their controllers” (Lastowka & Hunter 2006, 15). There is then, as Thomas Boellstorff (2008, 120) describes it, a “gap between virtual and actual self” and “a broadly shared cultural assumption that virtual selfhood is not identical to actual selfhood” (119). This “broadly shared cultural assumption” is visually exhibited in Robbie Cooper’s photography. “Over the course of 3 years,” as Dora Moutot (2014) explains in an article for The Other, “Robbie Cooper travelled the world in order to meet MMORPG players. From the United States to Asia and Europe, he photographed them in real life. He then had the brilliant idea to juxtapose these photographs alongside portraits of their virtual avatars in a book entitled Alter Ego: Avatars and Their Creators, published in 2007. The images of the avatar and the person in the flesh mirror each other as if in

68

Gaming the System Figure 2.2. Screenshot of Dora Moutot’s review article profiling the work of Robbie Cooper and published on the aptly titled website The Other: Home of Subcultures and Style Documentary (2014), http://www.the-other.info/2014/avatar-alter-ego. Photograph from Robbie Cooper’s Alter Ego: Avatars and Their Creators (Chris Boot, 2007). Used with permission of the artist

a dialogue” (Fig. 2.2). Although this differentiation between what Boellstorff has called “actual selfhood” and “virtual selfhood” is entirely in-line with the formal structure of Platonism, it is important to note that there is something of a revision of the original material. For mainstream Platonism, the real thing was determined to be the supersensible ideas, and what confronted finite and embodied human beings through the means of the senses was considered an insubstantial apparition and shadowy representation. For virtual world researchers and gamers, however, the terms of this arrangement appear to be inverted. The real things are, following post-enlightenment innovations in epistemology and the empirical methodology patronized by modern science, assumed to be the physical world and the actual objects and people inhabiting it. The appearances, by contrast, are the insubstantial and manifold representations of these things, which are projected onto and simulated in the computer-generated environment. In order for this “ontological difference,” as philosophers call it, to become manifest or show itself as such, one would need access not just to the appearance of something but to the real thing as it is in itself. In other words, the appearance is only able to be recognized as such and to show itself as an appearance on the basis

Means of Access Access to this “real thing” can be, as the game shows of Goodson and Todman demonstrate, provided in one of two ways. On the one hand, the real may be revealed a priori, as is the case with What’s My Line. In this situation, the real thing will have been available prior to and in advance of the subsequent involvement with its various appearances. In other words, one first has access to the real thing as it really is and then deals with the way that thing comes to be represented in various particular instances and circumstances. This approach can be seen, for example, with social networking applications like Facebook. Since users of these communication technologies, as Nakamura (2007, 49) points out, “already know the identities of their interlocutors,” they are able to evaluate whether their friend’s avatar, or what Facebook calls a “profile,” is an accurate portrayal of the real person or not. Facebook, for its part, not only sanctions this procedure but also codifies it as part of their operating conditions and terms of service (see chapter 3 for more on this subject). When individuals create a Facebook account, they not only agree “to provide their real names and information” (i.e., email address, date of birth, and gender) (Facebook 2015a) but consent to what amounts to a strictly enforced 1:1 correspondence between avatar and real user by agreeing to a list of ten stipulations that include the following: • You will not provide any false personal information on Facebook or create an account for anyone other than yourself without permission. • You will not create more than one personal account. • If we disable your account, you will not create another one without our permission. • You will not transfer your account (including any Page or application you administer) to anyone without first getting our written permission. (Facebook 2015a)

69

The Real Problem

of some knowledge of the real thing. Although this sounds a bit abstract, it can be easily explicated, as Slavoj Žižek (2002) has so often demonstrated in his own work, by way of a joke. In a now well-known and often reproduced New Yorker cartoon by Peter Steiner (1993, 61), two dogs sit in front of an internet-connected PC. The one operating the computer says to his companion, “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” The cartoon has often been employed to illustrate both the opportunities and challenges of identity in computer-mediated communication (see Turkle 1995, 12). As Richard Holeton (1998, 111) interprets it, “the cartoon makes fun of the anonymity of network communications by showing a dog online, presumably fooling some credulous humans about its true identity.” The cartoon, however, is only comical on the basis of a crucial and necessary piece of information: we see that it is really a dog behind the computer screen and keyboard. Without access to this information, the cartoon would not work; it would not make sense. In this case, then, the true identity of the one who is speaking, as Socrates (Plato 1982, 275c) would put it, definitely matters and needs to be revealed as such.

70

Gaming the System

Despite—or perhaps better stated, because of—these stipulations, Facebook estimates that it has somewhere in the range of 67.65 to 137.76 million “fake profiles” (Protalinski 2014), which the company has classified as falling into one of three categories: (1) “duplicate” accounts (52.89 to 97.17 million), (2) “misclassified” accounts (9.84 to 25.83 million) and (3) “undesirable” accounts (4.92 to 14.76 million) (Protalinski 2014). These “fake profiles,” it should be noted, can only be classified as “fake” based on the prior determination of an assumed truth condition, which is stipulated in Facebook’s terms of service.7 Other online virtual worlds, whether an MMO or nongaming social spaces like Second Life and Sims, do not necessarily encounter this problem insofar as the items that are expressly prohibited by Facebook, are either actively encouraged or at least not explicitly prohibited.8 In fact, the only restriction concerning avatar identity provided by Blizzard Entertainment (2012), distributor of World of Warcraft; Electronic Arts (2016), distributor of The Sims; and Linden Lab (2015), distributor of Second Life, is that users will not “impersonate another person” (Electronic Arts 2016). Whereas Facebook supports and stipulates strict 1:1 correspondence between user and avatar such that an online avatar (or “profile” in Facebook’s parlance) can reasonably (somewhere in the range of 88.8 percent to 94.5 percent of the time) be assumed to be the true delegate and accurate representative of a real person, these other organizations only restrict the negative condition where a user would exploit this assumed relationship in order to falsely impersonate a real person though the medium of the avatar. Facebook’s terms, therefore, require—in advance of using the service—that the avatar be a reasonably accurate representation of a real person, while other virtual worlds simply stipulate that the avatar should at least not be the representation of someone who the real user is not. On the other hand, immediate access to the real can be situated a posteriori, as is demonstrated in To Tell the Truth. In this circumstance, the real is made available and exposed as such only after a considerable engagement with appearances. This is the experience that is commonly reported by users who initiate contact with each other online, either by way of simple textual exchanges in chat or email or through the means of avatar proxies in MUDs, MMOs, or other online social environments, and then endeavor to meet each other face to face (F2F) in real life (RL). The outcome of such RL meetings is either pleasantly surprising, as one comes to realize that the real person is pretty much what one had expected, or terribly disturbing, as it becomes clear that the real person is nothing like he or she pretended to be. The former is not only evident in the marketing campaigns of next-gen computer-dating applications like eHarmony, Match.com, OkCupid, and Tinder, but it has also been featured in news reports about real-world couples who began dating in MMORPGs and MMOs. In April of 2011, the New York Times ran a story recounting the experiences of a number of World of Warcraft players who first met each other online as avatars and then later married in real life. One couple featured in the story was Hannah and Pete Romero, aka Cosomina and Dreadmex.

71

The Real Problem

The two initially met and began dating as avatars in Warcraft. Several months later, “the woman who created Cosomina flew to Los Angeles to meet Pete Romero, the man behind Dreadmex. Like many people who meet on the internet, she momentarily panicked. ‘That little voice in my head is like[,] Are you crazy?’ she said. But there was no need to worry. The couple spent the weekend eating, perusing vinyl records, walking on the beach. A year later, on March 27, 2010, they married” (Rosenbloom 2011). The latter has gained considerable popularity in press coverage concerning online deception—or what is colloquially known as “catfishing”—and is probably best illustrated in the Manti Te’o Girlfriend hoax from 2012–2013. During this period of time, Manti Te’o was a celebrated all-American linebacker for the University of Notre Dame football team. In the fall of 2012, reporters learned that Te’o’s girlfriend, Stanford University student Lennay Kekua, had recently died after an unsuccessful battle with leukemia. Despite this devastating loss (one that was compounded by the fact that Te’o had, on the same day, in fact, also lost his grandmother), Te’o remained committed to his team, did not miss a single football game, and went on to a very successful season with Notre Dame—so much so that he was a strong contender for the Heisman Trophy. Reporters were naturally drawn to this story of self-sacrifice and personal strength in the face of what appeared to be a devastating tragedy. It was (or so it appeared to be) the perfect human interest piece for sports journalists, and it quickly caught the attention of the entire nation becoming what was being called “the most heartbreaking and inspirational story of the college football season” (Zeman 2013). But all that abruptly changed on January 11, 2013, when a blog post at Deadspin (Burke and Dickey 2013) revealed that the girlfriend was fake. The “woman” who Te’o thought was his girlfriend was actually an online fiction created by another man, Ronaiah Tuiasosopo. In interviews following this shocking revelation, Te’o insisted that he was the victim of a cruel hoax and was never aware that his long-distance relationship had not been with a real girl. Tuiasosopo, for his part, eventually came clean—on the popular TV talk show Dr. Phil—and confessed to having been the real person behind the virtual girlfriend or “sockpuppet,” a term that names avatars created and used for the sole purpose of deception (Seife 2014a, 45). This is why the Manti Te’o story is both dramatic and shocking—he, along with many reporters and the public who read about and sympathized with Te’o’s heartbreaking story—only learned the truth of the matter after having invested considerable time, interest, and effort in the virtual relationship. (This revelation becomes even more “shocking” when the real “person” behind the avatar is not a person at all, but a bot. See chapter 4 for more information.) Whether access is provided a priori, as in the fairy-tale love story of Hannah and Pete Romero, or a posteriori, as in the case of the Manti Te’o girlfriend hoax, knowledge of the real as it is in itself is essential for distinguishing and evaluating avatar identity. Doing so, however, can lead to some rather complicated and potentially comical accounts, as is demonstrated in James Wagner Au’s The Making of

72

Gaming the System

Second Life (2008, 80): “So there’s this man who’s male in real life but a woman in Second Life (even though in real life he’s into women), and then there’s this other man who’s also heterosexual in real life whose avatar in Second Life was male for awhile [sic], but then he decided to be a woman instead, and then, guess what: These two straight guys met in Second Life and fell in love, and so now they’re married there.” This explanation and its potentially comical effect (much like the Steiner cartoon from the New Yorker), is only possible if one is familiar with and has access to both the avatars and the real people who created and control them. In virtual worlds research, this is what Tom Boellstorff (2010, 129) calls the “virtual/actual interfaces” method: “Since work in this genre emphasizes relationships between virtual-world and actual-world selfhood and sociality, a logical methodological outcome is that researchers often strive to interview the same persons in the actual world as they encounter in a virtual world or worlds.” And it is this essentially Platonistic approach to things that is mobilized and exemplified in the pioneering work of Sherry Turkle (1995, 324): “I have chosen not to report on my own findings unless I have met the internet user in person rather than simply in persona. I made this decision because of the focus of my research: how experiences in virtual reality affect real life and, more generally, on the relationship between the virtual and the real. In this way, my work on cyberspace to this point is conservative because of its distinctly real-life bias. Researchers with different interests and theoretical perspectives will surely think about this decision differently.” Formulated in this fashion, Turkle’s research is situated squarely within the theoretical paradigm of Platonism. But, to her credit, she recognizes that this particular approach to things, although useful for her own work, is not the only or even the best way to proceed.

Critical Complications The traditional Platonic distinction between the real thing and its multifaceted appearances is clearly an effective, useful method for negotiating, as Turkle (1995) calls it, “identity in the age of the Internet.” As long as our examinations conform to the terms and conditions of this arrangement, we already know what debates are possible, what questions should be asked, what evidence should be sought, and what answers will ultimately count as appropriate. Despite its success, however, this essentially Platonic structure is not beyond critique, and there are, it turns out, good reasons to remain skeptical of Platonism and the precedent it imposes on our thinking. Such critical perspective has been advanced by Immanuel Kant, the progenitor of “critical philosophy” and the individual who, according to Žižek (2001, 160; 2004, 45), occupies a unique pivotal position in the history of Western thought.

Kant and the Avatar Following the Platonic precedent, Kant differentiates between the object as it appears to us—finite and embodied human beings—through the mediation of our senses and the thing as it really is in itself. “What we have meant to say,” Kant

73

The Real Problem

(1965, A 42/B 59) writes in the opening salvo of the Critique of Pure Reason, “is that all our intuition is nothing but the representation of appearance; that the things which we intuit are not in themselves what we intuit them as being, nor their relations so constituted in themselves as they appear to us.” This differentiation installs a fundamental and irreconcilable split whereby “the object is to be taken in a twofold sense, namely as appearance and as thing in itself ” (Kant 1965, B xxvii; emphasis in the original). Human beings are restricted to the former, while the latter remains, for us at least, forever unapproachable: “What objects may be in themselves, and apart from all this receptivity of our sensibility, remains completely unknown to us. We know nothing but our mode of perceiving them— a mode, which is peculiar to us, and not necessarily shared in by every being, though, certainly by every human being” (Kant 1965, A 42/B 59). Despite the complete and absolute inaccessibility of the thing itself, Kant still “believes” in its existence. “But our further contention must also be duly borne in mind, namely that though we cannot know these objects as things in themselves, we must yet be in a position at least to think them as things in themselves; otherwise we should be landed in the absurd conclusion that there can be appearances without anything that appears” (Kant, 1965, B xxvi). Consequently, Kant redeploys the Platonic distinction between the real thing and its appearances, adding the further qualification that access to the real thing is, if we are absolutely careful in defining the proper use and limits of our reason, forever restricted and beyond us.9 It follows from this that if Kant’s critical insight had been employed in the design of To Tell the Truth, the game show would have been pretty much the same with one crucial difference.10 There would, of course, be the celebrity panel who would seek to know the truth through interrogation and the three challengers who would present this panel with various and competing appearances. At the moment of truth, however, the final gesture would be truncated. When the host asks the question, “Will the real [insert name] please stand up?” no one would respond; none of the challengers would stand and be recognized as the real thing or what Kant calls, in his native tongue, das Ding an sich. Instead, the panel and the audience would be confronted with the fact that finite human beings are unable to know the thing as it truly is in itself. This does not mean, however, that there is no real thing. He or she or it would, in fact, exist, and Kant would be the first to insist on it. He would, however, be just as strict on insisting that this real thing, whatever it really is, cannot be made to appear before us in phenomenal reality under the revealing lights of the television studio. It—whatever it is—remains forever off screen, perhaps just outside the frame of televisual phenomena, behind the curtain of the studio set or held in the green room just down the hall. The Kantian version of the game, therefore, would probably end with a distinctly Kantian admonishment. Something like, “Remember folks, what you see here is all you get. Going further would be a violation of the proper use of our reason. Good night, and see you next week.” Although perfectly consistent with the stipulations of the Critique of Pure Reason, such a program would not last very long, mainly because we would

74

Gaming the System

not get the final revelation and pay-off. We would, in effect, be forever denied and barred from the “the money shot” that provides the sequence of events with dramatic closure. This reconfiguration of things provides for a much more attentive consideration of avatar identity and virtual world social interaction. Although it is commonly understood that an avatar often exhibits characteristics that may not be anything like the real person who created and controls it, direct and unmediated access to the real person behind the avatar is, in many cases, impractical and effectively inaccessible. “We can’t,” Seife (2014b) writes, “physically meet most of the people we interact with on the internet.” This does not mean, however, that there is no real human user behind the avatar; it just means that one’s access to this real thing is itself something that may not ever be realized or ascertained as such. As one participant in Boellstorff’s (2008, 130) empirical study of role-playing games aptly described it, “you never really know who is on the other side of the mask.”11 Furthermore, this inability to know who or what is behind the avatar is not necessarily a deficiency. It is, in some cases, the condition of possibility for online social interaction, as Turkle (2011, 159) explains by way of an interview subject she calls “Pete,” an active participant in Second Life: Pete has created an avatar, a buff and handsome young man named Rolo. As Rolo, Pete has courted a female avatar named Jade, a slip of a girl, a pixie with short, spiky blonde hair. As Rolo, he “married” Jade in an elaborate Second Life ceremony more than a year before, surrounded by their virtual best friends. Pete has never met the woman behind the avatar Jade and does not wish to. (It is possible, of course, that the human being behind Jade is a man. Pete understands this but says, “I don’t want to go there.”) Pete describes Jade as intelligent, passionate, and easy to talk to.

Recognizing this critical difference and distinguishing what appears online in the form of an avatar from the true identity of the real person behind the screen or scene has been key to formulating what has become a kind of basic statement of internet folk wisdom: “On the internet, some things are not what they seem to be.” Kant, therefore, appears to understand the actual predicament and nuances of the avatar much better than his Platonic predecessor, and this is borne out in documented accounts of online identity crisis.

By Way of Example In January of 1996 (ancient history in terms of internet time), Wired magazine published a rather surprising interview with their self-proclaimed “patron saint,” Marshall McLuhan.12 The interview was surprising because, at the time it was conducted, McLuhan had been deceased for over a decade. Here’s how it happened, as explained in the article’s introduction: “About a year ago, someone calling himself Marshall McLuhan began posting anonymously on a popular mailing list called Zone ([email protected]). Gary Wolf began a correspondence with the poster via a chain of anonymous remailers” (Wolf 1996, 1). So, with whom or with what

75

The Real Problem

was Wolf interacting? Was this “virtual McLuhan” actually the ghost of Marshall McLuhan (although this sounds rather preposterous, media have always been the realm of ghosts, see Bennington 1993, 347; Kittler 1999; Ronell 1989), an imposter engaging in a little role-playing, or an automated chatterbot programmed with, as Wolf (1996, 1) described it, “an eerie command of McLuhan’s life and inimitable perspective”? Technically, there is no way to answer this question. The interviewer was limited to what had appeared online and, because the exchange took place through the instrumentality of anonymous remailers, was unable to get behind the screen to ascertain the real thing as such. In the face of this dilemma, Wired did something that was, from the perspective of accepted journalistic practices, either “embarrassingly wrongheaded and pretentious” (Morrison 2006, 5) or incredibly innovative and inventive. Instead of writing off the whole affair as ultimately unverifiable, the editors decided, following the Kantian precedent, to publish the interview as is, leaving the question about the true status of the real thing-in-itself open-ended and unresolved. In other words, Wired took the avatar of “Marshall McLuhan” at what Turkle (1995, 103) calls “interface value.”13 A second example can be found in the case of Julie, with which our analysis began. If we consider the structural composition of Stone’s original article and her subsequent and expanded treatment that is developed in the essay “In Novel Conditions: The Cross Dressing Psychiatrist” (1995), it is evident that Julie’s true identity was not ascertained by gaining access to the real person behind the avatar. Neither Stone nor the other users of the CompuServe system had ever met the real male psychiatrist who created and controlled this avatar. Instead, Julie’s identity began to unravel due to the rather slow accumulation, within the space of the virtual environment, of obvious inconsistencies and seemingly irreconcilable contradictions. The avatar of Julie, therefore, eventually betrayed itself as nothing more than a mere appearance by getting tripped up in the material of its own apparition. And at some point the real person behind Julie, an individual Stone (1995, 69) identifies as “Sanford Lewin,” decided to end the charade and reveal himself as such. In providing this revelation, which it should be noted occurred within the space and time of the computer conference, Lewin finally unmasked Julie as a construct and came out to her online friends as a cross-dressing psychiatrist. But here is where things get exceedingly complicated, because this seemingly fantastic tale is itself something of a fabrication. As Stone (1995) later noted, her account of the Julie incident was based on an earlier publication, Lindsy Van Gelder’s “The Strange Case of the Electronic Woman,” which was first published in Ms. magazine in 1985. In retelling the story, Stone had not only taken some liberties with the narrative but even altered the names of the participants. “When I first wrote up my version of the incident,” Stone (1995, 191) explained, “I used a pseudonym for the psychiatrist, and although Van Gelder used his ‘real’ (legal) name, I have retained the pseudonym in this version because my treatment of him is quasifictional.” So, even in Stone’s text, at the point at which the real person behind Julie (which it turns out was also a

76

Gaming the System

pseudonym—the name reported in the original Van Gelder article was “Joan Sue Green”) would be identified, we do not get the real thing as it is in itself; we get another fabrication and apparition. The thing-in-itself, therefore, appears to be both logically necessary but fundamentally inaccessible and endlessly deferred. And this is, as Adrian Johnston (2008, 17) points out by way of F. H. Jacobi, precisely the critical problem with Kant’s critical philosophy: “without presuming the existence of the thing-in-itself, one cannot enter into the enclosure of the first Critique, but that, through this same presupposition of the thing-in-itself, one always already violates the strict epistemological boundaries/limits of Kant’s philosophy.”

Kant and Game Studies In the field of game studies, this lesson has influenced and been codified in the formulation of ethnographic research methods for conducting fieldwork in online virtual worlds. In their widely cited handbook on the subject, Tom Boellstorff, Bonnie Nardi, Celia Pearce, and T. L. Taylor (2012, 100) offer a number of strategies for conducting successful interviews with avatars, and the first (and possibly most important) issue regards the identity of the “person” who is being interviewed: “The concern is not who they are in the physical world or how we can validate what they are saying . . . questions of truth or veracity show up online and offline; it is often not possible to verify informant claims, nor is it typically necessary to do so, since we are interested in cultural meanings and practices.” Because ethnographic research in and about virtual worlds is concerned with studying i­ n-world social interactions and behaviors, the true identity of the real person behind the avatar—“who they are in the physical world”—is something that is immaterial to the investigation. What really matters is what appears in the space and time of the virtual world and what happens there. “We must,” the quartet continues, “take seriously the social reality of virtual environments and not treat avatar interaction as inauthentic, valid only if always corroborated with interaction in the physical world” (Boellstorff et al. 2012, 94). Or as originally formulated by Luciano Paccagnella way back in 1997 (at least a decade before this kind of effort was widely recognized as a legitimate form of academic research), “in a perspective of ethnographic research on virtual communities the on-line world has its own dignity: after all, from a phenomenological standpoint, SweetBabe [the name of an avatar] and her social world are for us much more real than this supposed Mary [the name of the real user] about whom we actually know absolutely nothing.” Despite this important insight, it remains necessary to recognize that behind the avatar, even if it is never actually accessed as such in itself, there is (or, stated more precisely, “one should always assume that there is in fact”) a real person. “It is quite possible,” Boellstorff et al. (2012, 130) write, “to overlook the fact that avatars are under the agency of real people with feelings and rights. We have seen inexperienced researchers conducting research in virtual worlds without the permission of participants, publicly blogging research results using real avatar names,

and conducting ‘experiments’ through deceptive practices.” Consequently, even if we take avatar interaction in the game as real and authentic and deal with the avatar at “interface value” (Turkle 1995, 103) or what Beollstorff (2010, 130) describes as “in its own terms,” researchers are still reminded to take care to respect the real person who is behind the avatar, even if, and especially because, they remain hidden from direct view. All of this, whether one explicitly recognizes it as such or not (and Boellstorff and company do not), is informed and directed by Kant’s critical approach to things. Kant’s critical perspective, although providing for a more nuanced understanding of the situation, is not immune to critique. G. W. F. Hegel, for example, finds Kant’s arguments to be unsatisfactory, but not for the obvious reasons. What Hegel objects to is not the characteristic Kantian modesty—that is, the Prussian philosopher’s seemingly stubborn insistence on the fundamental limitations of human knowledge and its absolute inability to achieve access to the thing-in-itself in its unclothed nakedness. Instead, Hegel criticizes Kant for pulling punches and for not taking his own innovations and insights far enough. “It is Kant,” Žižek (2006, 27) writes, “who goes only halfway in his destruction of metaphysics, still maintaining the reference to the Thing-in-itself as the externally inaccessible entity; Hegel is merely a radicalized Kant, who takes the step from negative access to the Absolute to the Absolute itself as negativity.” According to Žižek’s reading, what Hegel finds unsatisfactory is the fact that the Kantian critical revolution remains—despite and in the face of Kant’s own explicit claims—incomplete and unfulfilled.14 He only goes halfway, providing us with half a philosophical revolution. For Kant, the thing-in-itself, although forever inaccessible to finite human beings, is still thought of as a positive, substantive thing: “Kant still presupposes that the Thing-in-itself exists as something positively given beyond the field of representation” (Žižek 1989, 205). Hegel finds this both incomplete and inconsistent. He therefore takes up and pushes the Kantian insight further: The Thing-in-itself expresses the object when we leave out of sight all that consciousness makes of it, all its determinate feelings and thoughts. It is easy to see what is left—utter abstraction, total emptiness, only described still as a beyond—the negative of every representation, feeling, and determination. Nor does it require much reflection to see that this caput mortuum is still only a product of thought . . . that it is the work of the empty I, which makes an object out of this empty self-identity of its own. . . . Hence one can only read with wonder the perpetual remark that we do not know the Thing-in-itself. On the contrary there is nothing we can know so easily. (Hegel 1987, 72)

Hegel, therefore, criticizes Kant not for insisting on the necessarily limited capacity of human knowledge or the fundamental inaccessibility of the thing-in-itself, but for wrongly presupposing that the thing-in-itself is some positive, substantive thing and for missing the fact that this thing is itself “nothing but the inherent

The Real Problem

The Parallax View

77

limitation of the intuited phenomena” (Žižek 1993, 39). Žižek continues, “Where Kant thinks that he is still dealing only with a negative presentation of the Thing, we are already in the midst of the Thing-in-itself—for this Thing-in-itself is nothing but this radical negativity. In other words—in a somewhat overused Hegelian speculative twist—the negative experience of the Thing must change into the experience of the Thing-in-itself as radical negativity” (1989, 205–206; emphasis in the original). 78

Rethinking the Real

Gaming the System

This Hegelian elaboration results in a much more complicated concept of the real, and Žižek finds Jacques Lacan to be the one thinker who gives it adequate articulation. On Žižek’s reading, the Lacanian real is anything but simple and, beginning with Žižek’s earliest works, characterized as consisting of two seemingly incompatible aspects. In The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989, 169), Žižek’s first book in English, the Real (which Žižek almost always distinguishes with a capital letter R) is described as “simultaneously both the hard, impenetrable kernel resisting symbolization and a pure chimerical entity which has in itself no ontological consistency.” A similar explanation is provided in Tarrying with the Negative, which appeared four years later: “A certain fundamental ambiguity pertains to the notion of the Real in Lacan: the Real designates a substantial hard kernel that precedes and resists symbolization and, simultaneously, it designates the left-over, which is posited or produced by symbolization itself ” (Žižek 1993, 36). Žižek’s ontology of the Real, therefore, appears to oscillate between “the (Kantian) Realas-presupposed (présupposé) and the (Hegelian) Real-as-posed (posé)” (Johnston 2008, 146). “Oscillation” is an appropriate term in this context insofar as it denotes a continual shifting back and forth. For Žižek, then, it is not a matter of sequential progress, moving, for instance, from the Kantian perspective to the Hegelian. Neither is it a matter of choosing sides, deciding, for example, to back one team in opposition to the other. Neither is this all a result of sloppy or inaccurate thinking on Žižek’s part—what one might be tempted to identify as an inability to decide one way or the other. Instead it is a matter of perspective, the ability to see both sides simultaneously. “The Real,” Žižek (2003, 77) argues, “is simultaneously the Thing to which direct access is not possible and the obstacle that prevents this direct access; the Thing that eludes our grasp and the distorting screen that makes us miss the Thing. More precisely, the Real is ultimately the very shift of perspective from the first standpoint to the second” (emphasis in the original). From one angle, the Real is perceived as the Thing to which direct access is not possible— a kind of Kantian thing-in-itself. “On a second approach, however, we should merely take note of how this radical antinomy that seems to preclude our access to the Thing is already the Thing itself ” (Žižek 2003, 77). For Žižek then, the Real is “parallactic.” “Parallax” is the term Žižek deploys (in something of an appropriation and repurposing of the word’s standard

Remaking the Game This changes not so much the structure, but rather the outcome of the metaphysical game. In what would be a Žižekian remake of To Tell the Truth, for example, things would begin and proceed with little-or-no significant alteration. A celebrity panel would confront and interrogate three challengers, all of whom would make competing claims to be the real thing. The truth of the matter would, as in the original Goodson and Todman production, be withheld. And because of this, the panel would only be able to gain access to the real through an engagement with the manifold and often conflicting appearances provided by the three challengers. The real difference would be evident at the game’s end, when the real thing is asked to stand and reveal itself as such. Here, as in the Kantian version, we do not get the naïve gratification of the real making a final and revealing appearance in phenomenal reality. As with the Kantian conclusion, no one stands up. The difference—the “minimal difference,” as Žižek often calls it— comes immediately after or alongside this apparent failure or lack of resolution. The Žižekian game, unlike the Kantian version, would not conclude with

79

The Real Problem

connotation) to name an irreducible difference in perspective that is not programmed for nor determined to result in some kind of final mediation or dialectical resolution. “The two perspectives,” Žižek (2006, 129) writes in the book aptly titled The Parallax View, “are irretrievably out of sync, so that there is no neutral language to translate one into the other, even less to posit one as the ‘truth’ of the other. All we can ultimately do in today’s condition is to remain faithful to this split as such, to record it.” Take, for instance, the physical properties of light, which Žižek (2006, 7) offers as one mode of parallax in modern theory. In physics, light sometimes appears and behaves as a wave; in other circumstances, it seems to be and functions like a particle. The truth of the matter does not reside on one side or the other of this antinomy. It is not the case that light really is a wave but appears, at various times and in certain situations, to be a particle or vice versa. It is also not the case that the true reality of light, that is, the thing-in-itself (to use that distinctly Kantian terminology) is the way light actually is apart from these two different theories by which we (finite, limited, and embodied human beings) conceive of and understand the phenomena of light. Neither is the truth to be found in some third—and perhaps as yet unnamed—term that would, following that rather ham-fisted caricature of Hegelian dialectics, mediate the binary opposition of thesis and antithesis through a culminating synthesis. Instead, and this is Žižek’s point, the truth of the matter emerges only in the shift of perspective from the one to the other. “This means,” Žižek (2006, 26) writes, “that, ultimately, the status of the Real [e.g., real light] is purely parallactic and, as such, nonsubstantial: it has no substantial density in itself, it is just a gap between two points of perspective, perceptible only in the shift from the one to the other.”

80

Gaming the System

a rather-unsatisfactory and somewhat-disappointing admonishment. In order for the game’s ending to be construed in this way, like Kant, we would need to presuppose and place value in the positive existence of the thing itself. We would still need to believe and have faith in the thing-in-itself. Žižek’s version, however, would insists on “tarrying with the negative” (1993), with the fact that this apparent lack of resolution is itself a resolution. Consequently, the lack of a final, absolute revelation of the thing itself, is itself revealing. Through it, we come to see that the so-called real thing, which had been presupposed from the very beginning of the program and that had directed its very movement, is a kind of presupposed or posited fiction. “This unique procedure,” Žižek (2008a, xxxv) writes in a passage that appears to address itself to the operations of the game show, “is the opposite of the standard revelation of the illusory status of (what we previously misperceived as) part of reality: what is thereby asserted is rather, in a paradoxical tautological move, the illusory status of the illusion itself—the illusion that there is some suprasensible noumenal Entity is shown precisely to be an ‘illusion’, a fleeting apparition” (emphasis in the original). Thus, what is revealed in the Žižekian remake of the game (or, perhaps stated more accurately, this imaginary remaking of the game) is not a real thing standing above, behind, or outside of the play of appearances and therefore comprehending everything. What is revealed is that this very expectation—an expectation that has been inherited from Plato and that has, since that time, held an important and controlling interest in Western intellectual history—is itself a metaphysical fantasy and fabrication.

The Virtuality of the Real This way of thinking obviously changes the way we approach and understand online social interaction, the question of avatar identity, and especially the relationship that has customarily been situated between the so-called “real world” and its apparitional others. The real thing in computer-generated, and computermediated experience has been (following the long tradition and standard protocols of Platonism) the presumed hard kernel that both resists and exists outside of the seemingly endless circulation of virtual images, digital apparitions, and mediated representations. This is, as we have seen, a deep-seated assumption informing both the rhetoric and logic of virtual worlds in general and computer-mediated social interaction, in particular. Avatars, for instance, are assumed to be the virtual proxy and delegate of a real person (Little 1999; Apter 2008) who sits behind the screen and controls the apparent action. “While the more fundamental personality of the real person is still driving in the background,” Boellstorff (2008, 132) writes, “it’s filtered through a different surface persona.” The real thing is, therefore, assumed to be the actual person who exists outside the virtual environment and substantiates the apparent vicissitudes of identity that are represented by different avatar configurations.

81

The Real Problem

At the same time, however, this apparently fundamental and substantial thing, if we are absolutely strict in our understanding of the situation and its proper epistemological restrictions, turns out to be entirely virtual. That is, the presumed “real person” is, as Žižek argues, a retroactively reconstructed virtuality that is fashioned out of what was thought to be derivative and subsequent appearances. Consequently, when the decisive question—“Will the real body please stand up?”—is asked, what we get is not necessarily what was expected or even wanted. What comes to be revealed is neither the thing-in-itself available to us, as Plato’s Socrates assumes—in some unmitigated immediacy—nor the Kantianbrand disappointment that is experienced in the face of a fundamental inability to expose the real as such. Instead, what is revealed is the lack of this kind of revelation and the way such expectations and assumptions are always and already misguided and fantastic. For this reason, “the Real is,” as Žižek (2008a, xxvii) points out, “the appearance as appearance; it not only appears within appearances, it also is nothing but its own appearance—it is simply a certain grimace of reality, a certain imperceptible, unfathomable, ultimately illusory feature that accounts for the absolute difference within identity. This Real is not the inaccessible beyond of phenomena, simply their doubling, the gap between two inconsistent phenomena, a perspective shift.” Understood in this way, the avatars that are encountered within the virtual world are not, as it is so often assumed, the representatives and delegates of some independent and preexisting real thing. The order of precedence must be reversed. “The multiple perspectival inconsistencies between phenomena,” as Žižek (2008a, xxix–xxx) puts it, “are not an effect of the impact of the transcendental Thing— on the contrary, the Thing is nothing but the ontologization of the inconsistency between phenomena.” In other words, the “real Thing” that we assume stands behind the avatar and communicates with us through the instrumentality of the digital proxy is something that is “retroactively (presup)posited” (2008a, 209); it is an effect derived from the online interaction that is subsequently posited and presupposed as its origin and cause. This is precisely what is documented in Stone’s seminal “boundary story.” “Sanford Lewin,” as Stone (1991) pointed out, was not a real person, strictly speaking. He was the ontologization of inconsistencies that began to appear within the fabric of the virtual environment and the account that Stone herself provided about this event. For this reason, if we could ever peek behind the scenes or the screen, what we would encounter is not the real thing with its pants down. We would discover, as Žižek (2008a, liv) writes with reference to a passage from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, “only what we put there.” Perhaps the best and most obvious illustration of this comes not from the field of information technology but from the recent global financial crisis of 2008. The value of our money, say a single US dollar, resides not in the ink and paper of the note that is carried in our wallets and purses. The note is just a proxy or delegate— a virtual stand-in for some real thing. The real value of our money is, so it has been

assumed, established by and resides in the global financial markets. What the collapse of these markets demonstrated, then, is that this presumed real thing is itself something entirely apparitional and constitutes what is, quite literally in this case, a virtual reality. In late 2008, if you asked the question “will the real money pleases stand up?” what was revealed was not the real thing in itself. What was revealed was the always-and-already illusory status of our very real investment in this particular understanding and conceptualization of the real. 82

Gaming the System

Keeping it Real On the morning of April 9, 2008, I (or, perhaps stated more accurately, one of my avatars) was spending time on the Northern Illinois University island in Second Life. While wandering around the computer-simulated buildings and meticulously reproduced landscape of our virtual campus (Fig. 2.3), I noticed two other avatars playing in the sandbox and discussing the features of a rather large ­automobile-like object. Since they were conversing in Polish, I approached and greeted them with the standard casual greeting: Cześć, jak się masz?, which is something like the English “Hey, how’s it going?” or the even more colloquial “Wha’sup?” In response to this, one of the avatars turned and, in a curious and telling mashup of Polish and English, said to me, “Cześć, keeping it real.” This reply requires at least two comments. First, the American slang “keeping it real” connotes authenticity and the lack of any form of artifice. As a linguistic token, however, the phrase must, it seems, be delivered in its assumed original form— that is, in English and not translated into another language like Polish. This has been done, it appears, in order to deliver this statement about authenticity with a certain authenticity. In other words, what is conveyed by the phrase “keeping it real” would not be truly real unless it was delivered in a way that was authentic and was itself “keeping it real.” In providing his response in English, therefore, the avatar was “keeping it real” in both word and deed. But—and this is the second point—what would it mean for an avatar to be “keeping it real?” What does “keeping it real” mean when spoken or displayed by a virtual construct in an artificial, computer-generated environment like Second Life? Is this ironic? Is it a contradiction? Or is it one of those unfortunate moments when, as ­comedian Dave Chappell has described it, “keeping it real goes wrong”? Everything, it turns out, depends on this issue. Let me, therefore, conclude by noting three consequences of “keeping it real” in computer-generated virtual worlds.

Real Differences Everything depends on how we define and operationalize the concept of the real. Even though MMORPGs, social networks, and other forms of avatar-based CMC are often considered to be merely a matter of entertainment, they are involved,

83

The Real Problem

Figure 2.3. Screenshot of the main building (a virtual recreation of Northern Illinois University’s Altgeld Hall) on Glidden, the NIU Island in Second Life. Virtual construction and image by Aline Click. Image used with permission

whether we ever recognized it as such or not, in serious debates about and meditations on fundamental aspects of metaphysics. And in these situations, there appears to be—as there are in many aspects of computing—a default setting. This default is programmed and controlled by Platonism, which institutes a conceptual distinction between the real thing and its phenomenal appearances. In computermediated interaction, like online role-playing games and other kinds of virtual worlds, this Platonic tradition is particularly manifest in the discussions and debates surrounding avatar identity and the seemingly indisputable fact that what appears in the space of the virtual world are manipulated representations of real human users, who may themselves be entirely different from how they appear in the computer-generated environment. As long as our research endeavors remain within and proceed according to this Platonic understanding—which, as a default setting, is often operative without having to select or specify it—we already know what questions matter, what evidence will count as appropriate, and what outcomes will be acceptable. This rather comfortable and well-established theoretical position, however, comes to be disturbed by the critical interventions of Kant, who it appears, is much more perceptive about the facts on the ground. Kant reaffirms the Platonic distinction between the real thing as it is in itself and its various mediated

84

Gaming the System Figure 2.4. Immanuel Kant Avatar for Facebook. Image by David J. Gunkel (2011)

apparitions that appear within phenomenal reality. But unlike the Platonist, Kant harbors considerable doubt as to whether this real thing is ever accessible as it truly is in itself (Fig. 2.4). This does not mean, however, that Kant simply denies the existence of real things; he is just agnostic about it. That is, he sticks to his methodological guns and stubbornly refuses to admit knowing anything about something that remains, by definition, fundamentally inaccessible and out of reach. On the Kantian account, therefore, it is believed that there is a real person behind the avatar, but because these online applications now have a global reach, it seems rather improbable that one would ever have unmitigated access to the real person behind the screen or scene.15 Žižek, who finds this Kantian innovation to be a crucial turning point, take things one step further. Following the Hegelian critique of Kant’s critical philosophy, Žižek transforms the Kantian negative experience of the thing-in-itself into the experience of the thing-in-itself as radical negativity. For Žižek, then, the real is already a virtual construct, and the difference between the real and the virtual turns out to be much more complicated and interesting than Plato

Reformulating Truth In the face of these three different theories of the real, one might understandably ask which of these is true. Or, to put it in the parlance of the game show, one could ask of the three contestants, will the real “real” please stand up? This inquiry, although informed by what appears to be good common sense, is already a loaded question insofar as it employs and relies on the very thing that is asked about. As Martin Heidegger (1962, 257) reminds us, “There are three theses which characterize the way in which the essence of truth has been traditionally taken and the way it is supposed to have been first defined: (1) that the ‘locus’ of truth is the statement (judgment); (2) that the essence of truth lies in the ‘agreement’ of the judgment with its object; (3) that Aristotle, the father of logic, not only has assigned truth to the judgment as its primordial locus but has set going the definition of ‘truth’ as ‘agreement.’” According to this characterization, truth is not something that resides in objects but is located in statements about objects. In other words, truth is not “out there” to be discovered in things but is essentially a relative concept. It subsists in the agreement or correspondence between a statement about something, what is commonly called a “judgment,” and the real thing about which the statement is made. Heidegger (1962, 260) illustrates this with a simple example: “Let us suppose that someone with his back turned to the wall makes the true statement that ‘the picture on the wall is hanging askew.’ This statement demonstrates itself when the man who makes it, turns around and perceives the picture hanging askew on the wall.” The truth of the statement, “the picture is hanging askew,” is evaluated by “turning around” and comparing the content of the statement to the real object. If the statement agrees with or corresponds to the real thing, then it is true; if not, it is false. According to Heidegger’s analysis (1962, 184), this particular understanding of truth—truth as agreement or correspondence—dominates “the history of Western humanity”

85

The Real Problem

would have led us to believe. Consequently, “it is not,” as Boellstorff (2008, 5) concludes, “that virtual worlds borrowed assumptions from real life: virtual worlds show us how, under our very noses, our ‘real’ lives have been ‘virtual’ all along.” This conclusion entails and mobilizes a more nuanced and sophisticated conceptualization of the relationship between “the real” and “the virtual,” like that initially proposed and developed in the work of Gilles Deleuze, who Žižek (2004, 3) has called “the philosopher of the Virtual.” Although the terms “real” and “virtual” have been typically situated and employed as conceptual opposites, Deleuze suggests that it is, in fact, otherwise: “the virtual is not opposed to the real; it possesses a full reality by itself ” (Deleuze 1994, 211). It is for this reason that Žižek (2004, 3) distinguishes between “Virtual Reality,” which he calls “a miserable idea” insofar as it simply “imitates reality,” and Deleuze’s “reality of the Virtual,” which “stands for the reality of the Virtual as such, for its real effects and consequences.”

and can therefore be found throughout the Western philosophical and scientific traditions.16 Žižek’s understanding of the real complicates this formulation. Since the real cannot ever be presented to us as such, truth cannot be evaluated by comparing a statement made about something to the real thing. Truth, therefore, can longer be conceptualized and evaluated as simple, linear correspondence. Žižek (2003, 79) writes, 86

Gaming the System

The “truth” is not the “real” state of things, that is, the “direct” view of the object without perspectival distortion, but the very Real of the antagonism that causes perspectival distortion. The site of truth is not the way “things really are in themselves,” beyond their perspectival distortions, but the very gap, passage, that separates one perspective from another, the gap that makes the two perspectives radically incommensurable. . . . There is a truth; everything is not relative—but this truth is the truth of the perspectival distortion as such, not the truth distorted by the partial view of a one-sided perspective.

According to Žižek, then, truth no longer resides in correspondence, nor can it be evaluated by measuring the adequacy of a statement about something to the real thing itself. On his account, this kind of basic one-to-one correspondence, which is the standard operating presumption of both To Tell the Truth and What’s My Line, has been and remains a mere metaphysical game. Instead, truth, according to Žižek’s reconceptualization of the real, must be characterized according to what Hegel calls “speculative reason.” For Žižek in particular, this means explicitly recognizing the way what comes to be enunciated is always and already conditioned by the situation or place of enunciation. “At the level of positive knowledge,” Žižek (2008b, 3) writes, “it is, of course, never possible to (be sure that we have) attain(ed) the truth—one can only endlessly approach it, because language is ultimately self-referential, there is no way to draw a definitive line of separation between sophism, sophistic exercises, and Truth itself (this is Plato’s problem). Lacan’s wager is here the Pascalean one: the wager of Truth. But how? Not by running after ‘objective’ truth, but by holding onto the truth about the position from which one speaks.” The strategic advantage of this particular approach, then, is not that it provides one with privileged and immediate access to the object in its raw or naked state but that it continually conceptualizes the place from which one claims to know anything and submits to investigation the particular position that is occupied by any epistemological claim whatsoever.

Real Theory Finally, what this means for the study of avatars and virtual worlds is an end to a certain brand of theoretical naivety. The choice of theory, especially a theory of the real, which is always at play and operationalized in consideration of virtual worlds and online social interactions, is never certain and is always open to considerable variation and debate. But the choice is always a choice (even in those circumstances where one operates according to the default setting and is not conscious of

87

The Real Problem

having made a decision), and it needs to be explicitly understood and articulated as such. This is necessary, because a decision concerning theory already and in advance determines the kinds of questions one asks, the evidence she or he believe will count as appropriate, and the range of solutions that are recognized as possible. The English word “theory,” as we are often reminded, is derived from the ancient Greek verb θεωρεῖν (theorein), which denotes the act of seeing or vision. A theory, therefore, like the frame of a camera, always enables something to be seen by including it within the field of vision, but it also and necessarily excludes other things outside the edge of its frame. We can, for instance, justifiably employ the default Platonic conceptualization, and it will, in many circumstances, prove to be entirely serviceable. This is, for example, the current situation in many of the discussions of avatar identity, where researchers affirm (with little or no critical hesitation) the fact that “users can,” as Taylor (2006, 95) describes it, “construct identities that may or may not correlate to their offline persona.” This ability to manipulate and reconfigure one’s identity has been, as we have seen, either celebrated as a significant advantage and gain for the real people who use the technology, or it is criticized for the way it facilitates deception, antisocial behavior, and problematic forms of identity tourism. What the two sides of this debate share, despite their many differences, is an underlying belief in and dedication to the real, specifically, the real person who, it is assumed, exists behind the avatar in the so-called “real world.” As Stone (1991, 111) emphatically reminds us, “no matter how virtual the subject may become, there is always a body attached.” This essentially Platonic arrangement, even though it is put in question and significantly complicated by both the Kantian critical perspective and Žižek’s recent innovations in the ontology of the real, works in this admittedly limited context. Like Newtonian physics, which, although superseded by Einstein’s work in relativity, is still entirely serviceable for calculating load and stress in structural engineering, there are some areas in which the Platonic theory of the real is entirely appropriate and applicable. Its employment, however, must be understood to be limited to a highly constrained context and not something that can be, on the basis of this particular success, generalized beyond this specific situation to cover each and every circumstance. Consequently, we must explicitly recognize that this particular application of theory, like the choice of any tool or instrument, cannot be unconsciously accepted as merely given, somehow natural, and beyond critical self-reflection. In other words, we need to understand, as Žižek puts it, how the position of enunciation already influences and informs what comes to be enunciated. What the Žižekian perspective provides, therefore, is not the one true understanding of the real, but a conceptualization of the real that realizes that the real is itself something which is open to considerable variability, ideological pressures, and some messy theoretical negotiations. The real problem, then, is not that investigators of computer-mediated social interaction, online games, and virtual worlds have used one theory of the real or another. The problem is that researchers

have more often than not utilized theory without explicitly recognizing which one or considering why one comes to be employed as opposed to another. For this reason, the real problem with virtual environments, avatar identity, and online social interaction is not, as it is so often assumed, a matter of our understanding or misunderstanding of the virtual. The real problem has to do with the real.

88

Notes

Gaming the System

1. Although it is now the most common and widely accepted term, “avatar” is not the only name for these user proxies. In the early days of CompuServe’s online chat service, for instance, users selected and were identified by a “handle,” which is a moniker derived from CB radio. Internet Relay Chat (IRC), one of the early application protocols for the nascent internet, employed the term “nick,” which was short for nickname. And the various text-based virtual worlds of MUDs and MOOs employed a variety of terms derived mainly from the tabletop RPGs on which they were modeled. This includes “player,” “character,” and “persona.” Facebook employs the term “profile” for its users and has repurposed the word “avatar” to refer to a cartoon representation of oneself on the Facebook profile page. Despite this official differentiation, however, researchers have often employed the term “avatar” to refer to what Facebook calls the “user profile” (Korpijaakko 2015, 42). 2. This “real problem” is something that is also recognized, or one might say “independently verified,” by Johnny Hartz Søraker (2011, 45): “As if referring to virtual entities is not difficult enough, the seemingly vanishing line between real and virtual prompts us to be precise about what is ‘real’ as well.” 3. Another version of the essay was included in Stone (1995) under a different title, “In Novel Conditions: The Cross-Dressing Psychiatrist.” 4. For more on both To Tell the Truth and What’s My Line, see what is arguably the definitive resource for information regarding popular culture and related phenomena, Wikipedia: http:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Tell_the_Truth. Various video clips of both game shows can be viewed at YouTube.com, for example, Theodore Geisel’s (aka Dr. Suess’s) appearance on To Tell the Truth, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXR-DKjZKKk, and Salvador Dali’s participation as a contestant on What’s My Line, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXT2E9Ccc8A. 5. The characteristic distrust of sensation that is evident in Platonism is not Plato’s innovation; it is informed by—and the product of—a general attitude that was rather pervasive throughout ancient Greece. “There was,” as Debra Hawhee (2004, 173) points out, “among the poets and philosophers of ancient Greece a general distrust of sensation, for the eyes and ears as bodily instruments were thought to be inherently deceptive, never reaching the truth, aletheia.” 6. The “Allegory of the Cave,” which is recounted at the beginning of book VII of the Republic, describes a kind of Platonic virtual world. The mise-en-scène, as it is described by Socrates, consists of a subterranean cavern inhabited by men who are confined to sit before a large wall upon which are projected shadow images. The cave dwellers have been chained in place since childhood and are unable to see anything other than these artificial projections, which constitute the only reality that is possible for them to know. Consequently, they operate as if everything that appears on the wall before them (arguably the prototype of the motion picture screen or computer monitor) is, in fact, real. They bestow names on the different shadows, devise clever methods to predict their sequences and behaviors, and hand out awards to each other for demonstrated proficiency in knowing such things (Plato 1987, 515a, b). At the crucial turning point in the story, one of the captives is released. He is unbound by some ambiguous but external action and compelled to look at the source of the shadows—small figures or puppets paraded in front of a large fire. Although standing up for the first

Object-oriented ontology is not interested in Kant’s specific epistemology per se, but with the form of the Copernican Revolution as it has persisted and undergone variations since the 18th century. For, in effect, the Copernican Revolution will reduce philosophical investigation to the interrogation of a single relation: the human-world gap. And indeed, in the reduction of philosophy to the interrogation of this single relation or gap, not only will there be excessive focus on how humans relate to the world to the detriment of anything else, but this interrogation will be profoundly asymmetrical. For the world or the object related to through the agency of the ­human will become a mere prop or vehicle for human cognition, language, and intentions without contributing anything of its own. The Copernican spirit will thus consist in an anthropocentric unilateralization of the human-world relation to the detriment of the world. (Bryant 2011a, 1; emphasis in the original)

What OOO advocates in response to this predicament is an ontology that acknowledges and respects the surplus of being that always and already withdraws from and remains in excess of human sensibility or cognition. As Harman (2002, 125–126) explains, “When I encounter an object, I reduce its being to a small set of features out of all its grand, dark abundance—whether

89

The Real Problem

time and looking at the light that provides the illumination for the shadow images is initially painful and disorienting, the prisoner eventually comes to understand “that what he had seen before was all a cheat and an illusion” (Plato 1987, 515d). 7. For a more thorough investigation of the history, significance, and consequences of “fake profiles,” see Heloisa Prates Pereira’s A Sedução do Falso: Emergência e Significação de Falsos Perfis nos Websites de Redes Sociais (2014). 8. “The majority of existing virtual worlds,” as Boellstorff (2010, 128) points out, “require that participants have accounts in which their online identity differs from their actual-world identity. . . . However, it is not a definitional precondition of virtual worlds that they be built around anonymity. One could imagine a virtual world that encouraged or required participants to use their actualworld names inworld, along the lines of social net-working websites like Facebook.” Although one could easily imagine such a virtual world, there are very few that have actually stipulated and sought to enforce the same kind of 1:1 correspondence that is required by Facebook. To make things more complicated (or interesting) this very difference, as Turkle (2011, 153) insightfully points out, has itself become increasingly difficult to distinguish and differentiate: “When part of your life is lived in virtual places—it can be Second Life, a computer game, a social networking site—a vexed relationship develops between what is true and what is ‘true here,’ true in simulation. In games where we expect to play an avatar, we end up being ourselves in the most revealing ways; on social networking sites such as Facebook, we think we will be presenting ourselves, but our profile ends up as somebody else—often a fantasy of who we want to be. Distinctions blur.” 9. This critical insight has recently been revised and reactivated in Object Oriented Ontology (OOO), a philosophical perspective introduced by Graham Harman (2002), identified by Levi Bryant (2011a), and imported into game studies by way of Ian Bogost (2012). Following the critical innovation of Kant’s “Copernican Revolution,” OOO recognizes and affirms that there is an important difference between the way objects appear in relation to us, through the instrumentality of human subjective experience, and how things really are in themselves. For Kant, this epistemological fact is the condition for possibility of any experience whatsoever. The advocates of OOO, however, find this “human-world gap,” as Bryant (2011b, 279) calls it, to be a deleterious constraint and the unfortunate byproduct of a deep-seated and largely unchallenged anthropocentrism. “We’ve been living in a tiny prison of our own devising,” Bogost (2012, 3) writes, “one in which all that concerns us are the fleshy beings that are our kindred and the stuffs with which we stuff ourselves. Culture, cuisine, experience, expression, politics, polemic: all existence is drawn through the sieve of humanity, the rich world of things discarded like chaff so thoroughly, so immediately, so efficiently that we don’t even notice.” To be fair, OOO does not pin this on Kant, per se, but on the Kantian legacy as it has been deployed and developed in philosophical modernism and postmodernism:

90

Gaming the System

these features be theoretically observed or practically used. In both cases, my encounter with the object is relational, and does not touch what is independently substantial in the thing.” OOO, therefore, asks and portends to address “what’s it like to be a thing?” (Bogost 2012, 10) and, in the process, advocates for a “flat ontology,” where “all entities are on equal ontological footing and that no entity, whether artificial or natural, symbolic or physical, possesses greater ontological dignity than other objects” (Bryant 2011b, 246). The relative success of this effort remains debatable, with advocates heralding a “new metaphysics” that can effectively circumvent the seemingly endless and irresolvable debates in modern philosophy between epistemological realism and antirealism and critics complaining that what OOO actually does is little more than reinstitute a somewhat naïve “premodern ontology which describes the ‘inner life’ of things” (Žižek 2016, 55). For our purposes, what is important is not this philosophical debate as such, but the fact that both the standard version of Kantian philosophy and the critical rejoinder that has been advanced by OOO identify and seek to redress a fundamental split in the nature of things—how they really are in themselves versus how they appear to be. 10. This would not be the first time that Kant has become involved (fictionally, at least) with American television game shows. His name and moral authority are also invoked in the Robert Redford film Quiz Show (1994), which dramatizes the events surrounding the quiz show scandal of the mid-1950s. At a crucial moment in the film’s narrative, the protagonist, Charles Van Dorn (Ralph Fiennes), is presented with a compelling but morally questionable opportunity by the show’s producers. They propose that Van Dorn be given the correct answers to the quiz show questions in advance of the game in an attempt to better manipulate its presentation and outcome. Van Dorn, who is visibly concerned about the ethical implications of such a proposal, does not immediately respond. When asked the reason for his hesitation, he replies: “I was just wondering what Kant would think of all this.” To which one of the hopelessly uninformed producers says, “I don’t think he’d have a problem with it, do you?” 11. The association of the avatar with “mask” is something that has been taken up and critically investigated by Dieter Mersch in the essay “Countance—Mask—Avatar: The ‘Face’ and the Technical Artifact” (2016). 12. From its first issue, published in the spring of 1993, Wired had listed Marshall McLuhan as “patron saint” in the magazine’s masthead. The practice quietly ceased somewhere in the mid-2000s. 13. This term first appears in Turkle (1995). It recurs in many of her published writings, including the 2011 book Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. 14. What is presented in this section is admittedly “Žižek’s reading” of Hegel. The question that remains, then, is how accurate and attentive is this particular interpretation? How faithful are Žižek representations and characterizations in comparison to the thing we call and would recognize as being Hegel? Are what Žižek says and writes about Hegel and Hegelianism valid, truthful, and credible, or do they show evidence of imprecise representations, deficient mischaracterizations, or perhaps even deliberate perversions? In order to respond to these questions, we appear to need access to Hegel—not just this or that particular representation of Hegel but the real thing. In the parlance of the game show utilized in this analysis, we seem to need “the real Hegel” to stand up so that he can be recognized as such and we can, by comparison, evaluate Žižek’s representations to be either accurate or flawed. In fact, we are in no position either to credit Žižek for getting it right or to criticize him for screwing it up without some form of appeal to this real thing that would anchor, substantiate, and authorize such a judgment. The problem, of course, is that this “real Hegel”—either the author himself, who died in November 1831, or what this author really thought and meant to say by way of his published texts—is something that remains always and already inaccessible and out of reach. This is, of course, Kant’s point: all we ever have access to are the various appearances that occur in phenomenal reality and the real thing, whatever that might be, is something that remains forever, at least for us, restricted, withdrawn, and unknown. “We know,” as Roland Barthes (1978, 146) writes in a passage that appears to be indebted to this Kantian insight, “that a text does not consist of a line of words, releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message’ of the Author-God), but

91

The Real Problem

is a space of many dimensions, in which are wedded and contested various kinds of writing, no one of which is original.” Žižek, as we will see in this section, is not entirely satisfied with this outcome and, therefore, endeavors to takes things one step further by mobilizing the insights of Hegel. But in doing so, he cannot help but get tangled up in the very problem that is addressed. For more on this issue, see “Žižek and the Real Hegel” (Gunkel, 2008). 15. This “article of faith” will be challenged from another perspective in the final chapter’s consideration of nonplayer characters and bots. 16. According to Heidegger, this particular understanding of truth—truth as agreement or correspondence—can be found in many of the seminal works of the Western philosophical tradition. It is, for example, evident in the scholastic definition of truth as adaequatio intellectus et rei, the adequation of thought to things (Heidegger 1962, 257); René Descartes’s (1991, 139) claim that “the word ‘truth,’ in the strict sense, denotes the conformity of thought with its object”; and Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1965, 97), which grants, without any critical hesitation whatsoever (a somewhat ironic gesture in a text that is all about “critique”), that truth is “the agreement of knowledge with its object.” In the text of Being and Time, Heidegger (1962, 257) traces this concept to an assertion made in Aristotle’s De Interpretatione: “the soul’s ‘experiences,’ its νοηματα (‘representations’), are likenings of things.” Elsewhere, namely in the essay “Plato’s Doctrine of Truth,” Heidegger demonstrates how this concept originates with Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” where truth is characterized as όρθότης (Heidegger 1978, 231)—the “correctness” of representation to the thing that is being represented. For a more thorough and detailed examination of “the correspondence theory of truth” and its significance for media and media studies, see Gunkel (2011) and Gunkel and Taylor (2014).

chapter three

SOCIAL CONTRACT 2.0

games have rules, and virtual worlds are no exception. although often situated and framed as a kind of lawless new frontier, it does not take long for various forms of governance to appear and begin to take hold. This is not just playing with politics; strictly speaking, it is political work. This chapter advances the thesis that the most influential and important political documents of the twenty-first century are not necessarily the constitutions and charters written for new or reconfigured nation states, but rather the often-overlooked Terms of Service agreements (ToS), or End User License Agreements (EULA), that one must sign (or, more precisely, click “agree” upon) in order to participate in online social interactions facilitated by MMOs like World of Warcraft, online virtual worlds like Second Life, and social networking applications like Facebook. These agreements, which constitute the principal governing documents of online social involvement (Grimes, Jaeger, and Fleischmann 2008; Fairfield 2008), constitute a kind of postmodern, post-nation-state social contract. As L. Downs (2009, 22) accurately describes it, “terms of service, privacy policies, license agreements, and other legal documents are the governing instruments of digital life. They are its Magna Carta, its Constitution, and its Universal Declaration of Human Rights.” These documents, therefore, not only articulate, structure, and regulate the kind of social interactions and political opportunities that are available within virtual worlds; they also determine what forms of social activity and affiliation are considered to be appropriate, acceptable, and even possible. The examination will be divided into three parts. The first situates these contractual agreements within the history and lineage of modern political thought and, specifically, social contract theory. The second pursues a critical reading of the terms regulating Facebook, a social network and social gaming platform with a population of active users that now exceeds China, making it the most populous polity on planet Earth (Stenovec 2015). The final section extrapolates the broader social and political consequences of these agreements, arguing that informed users not only need to read these documents carefully but should also recognize the way these seemingly unimportant texts define and delimit the very conditions of (im) possibility for social involvement and interaction in the twenty-first century. 92

Social Contract Theory

The Virtual State of Nature Social contract theory posits an original, presocial condition that is initially called by Thomas Hobbes (2008, 84) “the natural condition of mankind” but commonly referred to as “the state of nature” (Locke 1821, 189; Rousseau 1893, 19). This “original position,” as John Rawls (2003, 102) calls it, was not, as many commentators have pointed out (Priest 1990, 112; Williams 2005, 28; Zagorin 2009, 45), understood to be an actual point in time situated at the dawn of human history. It was, in other words, not offered or intended to be taken as an anthropological fact, but rather was a hypothetical premise derived by abstraction from the social reality in which human beings always and already find themselves. The concept of the “state of nature,” as Rousseau (2004, 16) pointed out, “must not be considered as historical truths, but only as mere conditional and hypothetical reasonings, rather calculated to explain the nature of things, than to ascertain their actual origin.” For this reason, the “state of nature” is what Žižek (2008, 209) calls “(presup)­posited”; it is the supposed initial condition that comes to be posited as the origin of that from which it has been subsequently derived. This means, then, that the state of nature is a “virtual reality”—something that is, as Michael Heim (199, 1093) characterizes it, “real in effect but not in fact.” In terms of the internet in general and virtual worlds in particular, this virtual state of nature was actualized and made operational in text-based applications like LambdaMOO. In fact, it could be argued that the “state of nature,” as a virtual reality, could only have been actualized and modeled in a virtual environment. LambdaMOO was (and still is) an internet-accessible, virtual world founded in

93

Social Contract 2.0

The term “social contract” refers to a theoretical device of political philosophy. Although the concept it names has arguably been in circulation since the time of Plato’s Crito in one form or another, the “social contract” is a distinctly modern European innovation and a product of the Enlightenment. According to ­Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Du contrat social ou Principes du droit politique, first published in 1762, the social contract explains the origin and legitimacy of governance: “To find a form of association which shall defend and protect with the public force the person and property of each associate and by means of which each uniting with all shall obey however only himself and remain as free as before. Such is the fundamental problem of which the Social Contract gives the solution” (Rousseau 1893, 20). In addition to Rousseau, the two other thinkers commonly associated with this concept are the Englishmen Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, who represent what are now considered to be the opposing versions of classic social contract theory. For this reason, “social contract” names not one homogeneous theoretical position but a “variety of traditions” (Boucher and Kelly 1994, 2), or variations on a theme. Despite the fact that each version or iteration has its own distinct qualities and aspects, there are several consistent and common elements.

94

Gaming the System Figure 3.1. Screenshot of the LambdaMOO map. telnet://lambda.moo.mud.org 8888

October 1990 by Pavel Curtis of Xerox PARC. It is one of those first-generation, online social applications that employed text-based descriptions and keyboard commands along with a synchronous chat-communications channel to create the experience of a common virtual environment where users could interact with each other and the computer-generated world (Fig. 3.1). “To be more precise about it,” the journalist Julian Dibbell (1993, 14) writes, “LambdaMOO was a MUD. Or to be yet more precise, it was a subspecies of MUD known as a MOO, which is short for ‘MUD, Object-Oriented.’ All of which means that it was a kind of database especially designed to give users the vivid impression of moving through a physical space that, in reality, exists only as words filed away on a hard drive.” In terms of governance, LambdaMOO was initially an oligarchy or more precisely what Eric Roberts (2005) calls a “Wizardocracy.” That is, the social world of LambdaMOO was originally organized, overseen, and policed by a group of selfappointed managers, or what Curtis called wizards. “The wizards were,” as Jennifer Mnookin (1996, 1) describes it, “benevolent dictators. They set the rules of conduct within the MOO; they decided when to increase a player’s quota (the quantity of disk space reserved for objects and spaces of her creation); they attempted to resolve disputes among players. Occasionally the ‘wizocracy’ [sic] meted out punishment, the most extreme form of which was to ‘recycle’ (destroy) a player for incorrigibly antisocial behavior.” The use of the term “wizard” in this context, although somewhat unfamiliar to users of contemporary MMOs or MMORPGs, was a consequence of the historical lineage of the MUD, which was initially developed as a

computerized emulation of the table-top RPGs that were popular in Europe and North America in the 1970s, especially Dungeons and Dragons (see the introduction for a more complete consideration of this history). Although LambdaMOO began, like many MUDs and MOOs before and after it, with an authoritarian regime, a deliberate decision was made to turn over governance of this virtual world to its occupants and users. As Dibbell (1993, 19) explained:

In terms of social contract theory, the ruling elite decided to extract themselves from the social order and plunge LambdaMOO into a virtual state of nature.1 Or as Curtis (1992, 1) described it in the LTAND document, “So, as the last social decision we make for you, and whether or not you independent adults wish it, the wizards are pulling out of the discipline/manners/arbitration business; we’re handing the burden and freedom of that role to the society at large.”

The Contractual Origins of Governance Social contract theory proposes that social order arises from the state of nature as an agreement or contract between individuals. The underlying reason and motivation for this development, however, varies among the different advocates of contractarianism. For Hobbes, who presumed that the state of nature could not have been otherwise than a perpetual “condition of war of every one against every one” (Hobbes 2008, 89), the original agreement was sought in order to mitigate exposure to violence. According to Hobbes’s argument, social aggregates coalesce when naturally solitary and self-interested individuals reasonably decided to cede some rights—namely the right to kill the other—if the other agrees to do likewise. This “mutual transferring of rights,” as Hobbes (2008, 91) described it, “is that which men call contract.” Locke provides an entirely different interpretation of things. For Locke, the “natural condition of mankind” was not assumed to be a violent battle ground of everyone against everyone else. Locke (1821, §6, 191) argued that, “The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges every one: and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions.” Because of this fundamental difference in the assumed original condition and circumstance, Locke provides an entirely different account of the origin and purpose

95

Social Contract 2.0

The wizards of LambdaMOO, after years of adjudicating all manner of interplayer disputes with little to show for it but their own weariness and the smoldering resentment of the general populace, had decided they’d had enough of the social sphere. And so . . . the archwizard Haakon (known in RL as Pavel Curtis, Xerox researcher and LambdaMOO’s principal architect) formalized this decision in a document called “LambdaMOO Takes a New Direction” [LTAND] which he placed in the living room for all to see. In it, Haakon announced that the wizards from that day forth were pure technicians. From then on, they would make no decisions affecting the social life of the MOO, but only implement whatever decisions the community as a whole directed them to.

96

Gaming the System

of the social contract. For Locke, human beings come to associate with each other not for the purpose of mutual protection, but in an effort to ensure the continued enjoyment of these natural rights and to manage any conflict between individuals that might arise from the free exercise thereof. “If man in the state of nature be so free, as has been said; if he be absolute lord of his own person and possessions, equal to the greatest, and subject to nobody, why will he part with his freedom? Why will he give up this empire, and subject himself to the dominion and control of any other power? To which it is obvious to answer, that though in the state of nature he hath such a right, yet the enjoyment of it is very uncertain, and constantly exposed to the invasion of others” (Locke 1821, §123, 294–295). Consequently, people come together and agree to live under some form of mutual compact in an effort either to protect themselves from harm or to ensure the continued free exercise of their will. The Hobbesian version, which is articulated and advanced in Leviathan, is clearly evident in the development of governance in the virtual world of LambdaMOO. When the wizards turned over LambdaMOO to its inhabitants, instituting a virtual state of nature, Curtis (1992) announced the change with considerable optimism. “I think,” he wrote at the end of the LTAND document, “we’re going to have a lot of fun, here :-).” What resulted from this decision, however, was anything but “fun.” Four months after the wizards abdicated, the citizens of LambdaMOO were confronted with a crisis now known as “The Rape in Cyberspace.” A user (or perhaps users) under the pseudonym Mr. Bungle used a little-known feature in the LambdaMOO software application, called Voodoo Doll, to take control of the avatars of other players, attributing actions to these characters that their users did not intend or actually initiate. This loss of control over one’s own avatar—arguable a form of personal property, if not the personal proper—was perceived, by members of the LambdaMOO community, to be a violent violation and was called “rape” by those individuals directly involved in the incident. Whether the use of this term was appropriate is something that is open to considerable debate (see Dibbell 1996, MacKinnon 1997, MacKinnon 2005). What is not disputed, however, is the effect this event had on the virtual world of LambdaMOO. “Faced with the task of inventing its own self-governance from scratch,” Dibbell (1993, 19) reports, “the LambdaMOO population had so far done what any other loose, amorphous agglomeration of individuals would have done: they’d let it slide. But now the task took on new urgency. . . . And thus, as if against its will, the question of what to do about Mr. Bungle began to shape itself into a sort of referendum on the political future of the MOO.” The outcome of these debates, discussions, and protestations issued by the users of LambdaMOO resulted in the publication of a second influential document: “LambdaMOO Takes Another Direction” (LTAD). As Curtis (1993) explained: On December 9, 1992, Haakon posted “LambdaMOO Takes A New Direction” (LTAND). Its intent was to relieve the wizards of the responsibility for making social decisions, and to shift that burden onto the players themselves. It indicated

that the wizards would thenceforth refrain from making social decisions, and serve the MOO only as technicians. Over the course of the past three and a half years, it has become obvious that this was an impossible ideal: The line between “technical” and “social” is not a clear one, and never can be. The harassment that ensues each time we fail to achieve the impossible is more than we are now willing to bear.

The Ontological Status of the Social Contract There is some debate concerning the ontological status of the social contract. As George MacDonald Ross (2009, 117) argues, “Hobbes talks as if there were a time in history when people got together and contracted to leave the state of nature and form a civil society. But as we have already seen, he doubted whether there is actually a pure state of nature, in which case it is doubtful whether people in a state of nature ever got together in order to democratically set up a civil society.” For this reason, Hobbes’s view of the “original covenant” is often interpreted and understood to be a hypothetical idea. “His social contract,” as John Rawls (2007, 30) explains, “is best viewed not as explaining the origin of the Leviathan and how it came to be, but rather as an attempt to give ‘philosophical knowledge’ of the Leviathan so that we can better understand our political obligations and the

97

Social Contract 2.0

As Hobbes had theorized, the virtual state of nature, although offering unfettered freedom and opportunity, turned into a violent “war against all,” and the occupants of the MOO quickly sought protection from such violence by submitting to the authority and control of a Leviathan, in this case the wizards. If the experience of LambdaMOO lends empirical evidence to support Hobbes’s version of social contract theory, the web 2.0 application of Facebook can be conceptualized in terms that follow Locke’s alternative formulation.2 Although he is no social contract theorist, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg offered what is arguably a Lockean explanation for Facebook’s modus operandi. As Zuckerberg told David Kirkpatrick in a 2004 interview, “We always thought that people would share more if we didn’t let them do whatever they wanted, because it gave them some order” (MacKinnon 2012, 155). According to Zuckerberg’s explanation, people decide to participate in the social network not because Facebook lets them do whatever they want, ostensibly indulging in an unrestrained exercise of freedom that could only be found in the “state of nature.” Instead, people agree to subject themselves to the social order imposed by Facebook because the organization imposes some structure on the terms and conditions of the interaction that would, theoretically, make them feel more comfortable in the free exercise of sharing information with each other. In other words, the freedom to share information is not free insofar as people perceive there to be considerable risks to and liabilities for engaging in such activity. Facebook offers various protections that ensure the free exercise of this kind of information-sharing while minimizing exposure to risk. As if to prove Locke correct, users agree to submit to the governance of Facebook because the organization provide them with some order and security.

98

Gaming the System

reasons for supporting an effective Sovereign when such a Sovereign exists.” In the case of Locke, however, the contract was often assumed to be and presented as an actual occurrence taking place either through explicit agreements between parties or, when such explicit agreement was not possible or was lacking, though something Locke calls “tacit consent.” “No body [sic] doubts,” Locke (1821, §119, 291) writes, “but an express consent of any man entering into any society makes him a perfect member of that society, a subject of that government. The difficulty is, what ought to be looked upon as a tacit consent, and how far it binds. . . . And to this I say, that every man, that hath any possessions, or enjoyment, of any part of the dominions of any government, doth thereby give his tacit consent, and is as far forth obliged to obedience to that laws of that government.” The concept of “tacit consent” especially applies in the case of subsequent generations that are not necessarily in a position to willfully enter into the fundamental agreements that structure the social order into which they have been born. The development of governance in LambdaMOO appears to illustrate, if not prove this thesis. Shortly after the “wizardly coup d’etat,” as Curtis (2002, 41) later called it, some members of the LambdaMOO community challenged the legality of the LTAD decree. The challenge was, following the established protocols for petitioning, formulated as a ballot initiative and communicated to players for their vote on May 25, 1994: “Message 300 on *News, known as LTAD, was a declaration by the wizards saying that they would be able to make social decisions. This statement violates the earlier wizardly declaration, known as LTAND, that wizards would make no social decisions. This makes LTAD illegal. This ballot is an attempt to determine the legal and social standing of LTAD. The passage of this ballot additionally indicates: The LTAD declaration is legal. The population has shown its confidence in the Wizards. The population has shown its consent to LTAD” (Curtis 1993). The ballot passed with 321 members voting in favor, 111 against, and 272 abstaining. With this vote, then, LambdaMOO was legitimately reorganized as a kind of benevolent dictatorship. The majority of participants agreed that the LTAD declaration was, in fact, legal; expressed their confidence in the decisionmaking and leadership of the wizards; and consented to the stipulations articulated in the LTAD document. These stipulations, however, were never codified in the form of an explicit contractual statement, charter, or terms-of-use agreement. The social structure and expected norms of behavior for users were communicated to newcomers either through word of mouth or via a library of documents contained in LambdaMOO’s help archive. Although new users are directed to consult these resources, especially the “manners” file, there is no actual “social contract” that users must explicitly agree to in order to participate in the LambdaMOO community. For MMOs, MMORPGs, social networks, and other virtual worlds, the “social compact” is an actual contractual agreement 3 that is identified by a number of different names—for example, End User License Agreement (EULA), Terms of Service (ToS), or Terms of Use (ToU)4—and often supported by and referring to

Terms and Conditions Whatever the exact stipulations of an individual agreement, these documents, as both journalists (Dibbell 2003) and legal scholars (Reuveni 2007, 278; Halbert

99

Social Contract 2.0

other documents and riders, like a Code of Conduct (CoC) or privacy s­ tatement. Second Life, for example, operates with a ToS that is supported by sixteen other policy documents, for example, the Linden Lab Privacy Policy, Community Standards, and Gambling Policy. As Linden Lab (2015) explains in the ToS document itself, these other policy statements “are incorporated by reference in and made part of this Agreement, and provide Additional Terms, conditions and guidelines regarding the Service.” By contrast, the ToS for The Sims references a separate privacy document, which describes in considerable detail the kind of user data that is collected by Electronic Arts; how the organization assembles, stores, and makes use of this information internally; and when, why, and how it may share this data with outside third parties. These contractual agreements, therefore, are designed to “deal with almost every aspect of the relationship between a user and a platform provider” and typically consist of a series of clauses addressing the following kinds of items: “property and intellectual property rights, liability, dispute resolution, applicable law and termination” (Barker 2012, 5). Within these common thematic features, however, there can be considerable variability depending on the specific virtual world and its design. Blizzard Entertainment’s ToU (2012) for World of Warcraft, for instance, stipulates that “all rights and title in the game,” including user-generated content (i.e., “any user accounts, titles, computer code, themes, objects, characters, character names, stories, dialogue, catch phrases, locations, concepts, artwork, animations, sounds, musical compositions, audio-visual effects, methods of operation, moral rights, any related documentation, ‘applets,’ transcripts of the chat rooms, character profile information, recordings of games”) belongs to and remains the sole property of Blizzard or its licensors without restriction or limitation. Electronic Arts’ ToS (2016) for The Sims stipulates that users grant the corporation “a non-­exclusive, perpetual, transferable, worldwide, sublicensable license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works, publicly perform, publicly display or otherwise transmit and communicate the UGC [user generated content], or any portion thereof, in any manner or form and in any medium or forum, whether now known or hereafter devised, without notice, payment or attribution of any kind to you or any third party.” And Linden Lab’s ToS (2015) for Second Life, a virtual world built and developed by its users, provides for what could be called a more equitable sharing of property rights for user-generated content. Similar differences are evident with economic transactions with some providers, such as EverQuest and World of Warcraft, strictly prohibiting the selling of user accounts, the transfer of avatars and virtual objects, or the buying and selling of in-game currencies, while others not only tolerate such economic activity but even encourage the development of a well-regulated market, like Linden Lab’s Lindex.

100

Gaming the System

2009, 3) recognize, constitute “a virtual social contract regulating the rights and obligations of the players and the developers” (Volanis 2007, 333). “The MMORPG,” as Jeremy Phillips (2006) argues, “is a consensual creation. No one is forced to play it and all who choose to do so, do so on the terms that they have themselves accepted. In this sense the MMORPG is the test-bed for social contract theory that nineteenth- and twentieth-century political philosophers must have yearned for.” And from the perspective of social contract theory, these arrangements have a distinctly Hobbesian look and feel. First, the agreements are “top-down and authoritarian” (Halbert 2009). In issuing a ToS, ToU, or EULA, the corporation reserves for itself the exclusive right to dictate terms, and it does so, not surprisingly, in a way that tends to favor the organization and its interests. As Sal Humphreys (2009) points out in his critical reading of the EverQuest EULA, “It is a manifestly one-sided contract which works in favor of the publisher and to the detriment of the players.” This produces not an open public space, as some users have mistakenly assumed (Ruch 2009), but a closed, proprietary environment that is under the sole authority and regulation of a private corporation.5 It is a kind of “company town” (Jenkins 2004; Zack 2007). The provisions listed in the ToS for Second Life, for example, suggest that Linden Lab “can seize any virtual assets acquired by Second Life residents and may expel anyone, for any reason, at any time—essentially take one’s virtual property without compensation or due process of law” (Zach 2007, 240). Although there remains considerable debate in the scholarly literature concerning the rights of virtual world residents, the EULA/ToS stipulates that everything “exists purely at the whim of virtual world proprietors” (Zach 2007, 245). Second, and following from this, users have little choice but to consent and submit to the authority and rule imposed by the sovereign organization. The EULA/ToS is formulated as a nonnegotiable contract of adhesion (Barker 2012, 5), meaning that the EULA/ToS is offered on a “take-it-or-leave-it-basis” such that users can either accept the terms of the agreement as written or not (Bragg v. Linden Research 2007).6 The standard EULA/ToS document provides only one of two possible options: “I agree” or “Cancel.” For this reason, the relationship between the two parties to the contract is asymmetrical and not open to individual negotiations. Although this has been the source of considerable criticism of the EULA/ToS from the perspective of contract law (Jankowich 2006; Fairfield 2008), it is entirely consistent with social contract theory, especially in its more authoritarian Hobbesian configuration. Without explicitly mentioning it by name, Richard Bartle’s (2004, 23) characterization of the “game conceit” puts social contract theory into play: “When people play games, they agree to abide temporarily by a set of rules which limits their behavior (i.e., restricts their freedom), in exchange for which they gain whatever benefits the game offers. Game theorists refer to the boundary that separates the game world from the nongame world as the magic circle, from an early description of play-spaces by Johan

By placing an order via this Web site on the first day of the fourth month of the year 2010 Anno Domini, you agree to grant Us a non-transferable option to claim, for now and forever more, your immortal soul. Should We wish to exercise this option, you agree to surrender your immortal soul, and any claim you may have on it, within 5 (five) working days of receiving written notification from gamestation.co.uk or one of its duly authorised minions. We reserve the right to serve such notice in 6 (six) foot high letters of fire, however we can accept no liability for any loss or damage caused by such an act. If you a) do not believe you have an immortal soul, b) have already given it to another party, or c) do not wish to grant Us such a license, please click the link below to nullify this sub-clause and proceed with your transaction. (GameStation quoted in Doctorow 2010, 1)

Seventy-five hundred users of GameStation either agreed to the defaulted optin for this stipulation or just did not bother to read the document. As Cory Doctorow (2010, 1) characterized it, “I’m guessing that a small minority of the customers didn’t check the box because they knew it was all a gag, but I believe the majority didn’t check it off because they didn’t read the agreement. No one reads the agreements.” In an effort to test this apparently ubiquitous but anecdotal insight, Jonathan A. Obar and Anne Oeldorf-Hirsch (2016) designed and executed an experimental study of ToS reading behaviors. Findings from their empirical examination of 543 test subjects indicate that 74 percent of users simply skipped the privacy policy document that was included as part of the tested ToS and that 98 percent of participants missed intentionally disturbing “gotcha clauses” in the ToS concerning the sharing of personal information with the NSA and a requirement that users provide their first-born child as payment for the service.9 Finally, the sovereign organization typically grants to itself the sole authority to make changes to the governing documents and can do so at its pleasure without prior notification or review. Consider two representative examples, the first from

101

Social Contract 2.0

Huizinga. Virtual worlds are not games, but they use the game conceit—that some freedoms must be willingly given up for a time in order that new freedoms can be experienced during that time.” Third, these documents are often long and, some have argued, deliberately opaque and confusing, producing what Justin Grimes, Paul Jaeger, and Kenneth Fleischmann (2008, 1) have called an “obfuscatocracy”—that is, “a system that is governed by way of obfuscated code.”7 Despite this (or perhaps because of it), users are obligated to consent to the stipulations listed in the document whether they have actually read and understood them or not. Available evidence—both anecdotal and empirical—suggests that users either do not read the agreements at all or quickly skim the documents without necessarily recognizing or understanding the contractual stipulations contained therein.8 In a revealing but arguably less-than-scientific April fool’s prank from 2010, GameStation altered its EULA to include the following clause concerning the user’s immortal soul:

Blizzard Entertainment’s ToU for World of Warcraft and the second from the ToS for Second Life:

102

Gaming the System

Blizzard reserves the right, at its sole and absolute discretion, to change, modify, add to, supplement or delete, at any time, any of the terms and conditions of this Agreement, any feature of the Game or the Service, hours of availability, content, data, software or equipment needed to access the Game or the Service, effective with or without prior notice; provided, however, that material changes to this Terms of Use Agreement will not be applied retroactively. If any future changes to this Agreement are unacceptable to you or cause you to no longer be in compliance with this Agreement, you must terminate, and immediately stop using, the Game. Your continued use of the Game following any revision to this Agreement constitutes your complete and irrevocable acceptance of any and all such changes. (Blizzard Entertainment 2012) Linden Lab reserves the right to modify this Agreement and any Additional Terms, at any time without prior notice (“Updated Terms”). You agree that we may notify you of the Updated Terms by posting them on the Service, and that your use of the Service after we post the Updated Terms (or engaging in other such conduct as we may reasonably specify) constitutes your agreement to the Updated Terms. Therefore, you should review this Agreement and any Additional Terms on a regular and frequent basis. (Linden Lab 2015)

In both cases, not only does the sovereign organization “reserve the right to make changes” or “to modify the agreement,” but the continued use of the service constitutes the user’s tacit consent to the alteration. If users do not consent to a change, the only redress available (the only stipulated recourse) is to discontinue the use of the service. Additionally, responsibility for keeping track of changes to the EULA/ToS is assigned to users, who are notified that they should review the agreement on a frequent basis, but there are no requirements for or affordances made to archive previous versions in order to facilitate and support this effort.10 In effect, the rule imposed by the sovereign through the instrumentality of the EULA/ToS is absolute, the terms of the document are able to be altered at any time according to his or her whim, and the user has no choice but to agree to the stipulations as written or simply not participate.

The Facebook Nation When it comes to the social order and the various contractual documents governing that arrangement, Facebook appears to be at the cutting edge of innovation. Initially, Facebook instituted and operated with a rather traditional ToS document that articulated the terms and conditions of the relationship between the provider of the service and its users. This standard practice was, in Facebook’s case, eventually found to be woefully inadequate. In a blog post from February 26, 2009, Mark Zuckerberg wrote, “Our main goal at Facebook is to help make the world more open and transparent. We believe that if we want to lead the world in this direction, then we must set an example by running our service in this way. We sat down to work on documents that could be the foundation of this and we came to an interesting realization—that the conventional business practices around a Terms of Use [ToU] document are just too

103

Social Contract 2.0 Figure 3.2. Screenshot of Facebook’s “Create a New Account” page, which includes the “fine print” stipulating acceptance of the Terms of Service and Data Use Policy. http://facebook.com

restrictive to achieve these goals” (1). In Zuckerberg’s estimations, Facebook could no longer operate with a traditional ToU because that kind of legal agreement was too restrictive and at odds with Facebook’s main objective to create a more open and transparent world.11 In place of the traditional ToU agreement, Facebook’s CEO announced two innovative governing documents. As Zuckerberg (2009, 1) explained to users, “The first is the Facebook Principles, which defines your rights and will serve as the guiding framework behind any policy we’ll consider—or the reason we won’t consider others. The second document is the Statement of Rights and Responsibilities, which will replace the existing Terms of Use.” These two documents currently comprise Facebook’s terms, and users are required to consent to their stipulations. “By clicking Create Account,” the Facebook login/default page indicates, “you agree to our Terms and that you have read our Data Policy, including our Cookie Use” (Fig. 3.2). The link on the word “Terms” leads directly to the Statement of Rights and Responsibilities document, which begins with the following preamble: “This Statement of Rights and Responsibilities (Statement) derives from the Facebook Principles, and governs our relationship with users and others who interact with Facebook. By using or accessing Facebook, you agree to this Statement” (Facebook Statement of Rights and Responsibilities 2015). This declaration clearly situates the Statement of Rights and Responsibilities document as a contractual agreement between Facebook and its users, or more

104

Gaming the System

precisely, between users of Facebook and one of two versions of its official and legally recognized corporate identities: “If you are a resident of or have your principal place of business in the US or Canada, this Statement is an agreement between you and Facebook, Inc. Otherwise, this Statement is an agreement between you and Facebook Ireland Limited. References to ‘us,’ ‘we,’ and ‘our’ mean either Facebook, Inc. or Facebook Ireland Limited, as appropriate” (Facebook Statement of Rights and Responsibilities 2015). Consequently, Facebook’s Statement of Rights and Responsibilities is positioned and operationalized as an explicit contract between the corporation and its users, and, insofar as Facebook’s basic service is social networking and interaction, such an agreement is quite literally a “social contract.” Additionally, the terms stipulated in the document apply to users of Facebook and are considered binding whether one reads and understands the document or not. This means that users of this particular social network either consent to Facebook’s terms though explicit agreement or, more often than not, provide “tacit consent” insofar as they employ and enjoy the opportunities provided by the social networking service. To paraphrase Locke, Facebook basically asserts that every person, who hath any possessions or enjoyment of any part of the dominions of Facebook, doth thereby give his or her tacit consent, and is as far forth obliged to obedience to Facebook’s terms (Fig. 3.3). As explained in its first sentence, Facebook’s Statement of Rights and Responsibilities derives from and is legitimated by another document, the Facebook Principles. If the Statement of Rights and Responsibilities articulates the exact terms and conditions of Facebook’s agreement with its users—what had previously been called the Terms of Use—this other document provides a declaration of the organization’s underlying values, modus operandi, and raison d’être. “We are,” the Facebook Principles declares in the authoritative voice of the first person plural, “building Facebook to make the world more open and transparent, which we believe will create greater understanding and connection. Facebook promotes openness and transparency by giving individuals greater power to share and connect, and certain principles guide Facebook in pursuing these goals. Achieving these principles should be constrained only by limitations of law, technology, and evolving social norms. We therefore establish these Principles as the foundation of the rights and responsibilities of those within the Facebook Service” (Facebook Principles 2015). This declaration and the ten principles that follow it constitute a remarkable innovation in governance that is unique to Facebook. It is not common practice for online service providers to explicate how the organization defines and understands the rights and responsibilities of its users. Most EULA’s and ToS agreements, like those provided by Blizzard Entertainment, Electronic Arts, Linden Lab, and more, are limited to legal statements stipulating user obligations, liabilities, proper conduct, admonitions, disclaimers, and warrantees. The “rights and responsibilities of those within the service” are not typically recognized as a legitimate matter of concern. For this reason, the Facebook Principles read more like a founding political document, that is, the Bill of Rights or the Déclaration des droits

105

Social Contract 2.0

Figure 3.3. John Locke’s Facebook Profile. Image by David J. Gunkel (2011)

de l’Homme et du Citoyen, than it does a standard EULA, ToS, or ToU document. If the contractual language of the standard agreement reminds us that these social environments “are proprietary and the political structures creating these worlds were not designed to be democratic,” as Deborah Halbert (2009) points out, then the Facebook Principles document confronts and challenges this common expectation by introducing what appears to be innovative democratic reforms. Although it would be worth the effort to investigate each principle, its operative assumptions, and consequences in detail, in the interest of time, let me examine three elements that comprise what could arguably be called the underlying social and political doctrine of the commonwealth called Facebook.

Facebook Principles The majority of the ten principles—the first seven, in fact—articulate the rights of people. In fact, in terms of grammatical and logical construction, these seven principles begin with and identify “people” or “person” as the subject of the sentence and deploy the verbal imperative “should.” According to Facebook, people should (1) have the freedom to connect and share information with others, (2) own the information they provide and have the ability to control this information, (3) have

106

Gaming the System

the freedom to access information made available to them, (4) have the right to equal treatment and a belief in the fundamental equity of all persons, (5) have the freedom to build trust and reputation through personal identity and interaction with others, (6) have the inherent right to communicate and access to the means of communication, and (7) be able to use Facebook irrespective of individual commitment or level of contribution. Although this list sounds rather impressive and seems to afford users of Facebook a wide range of rights and freedoms, its approach is noteworthy and will require considerable explanation. First, the subject of the document is explicitly political. The Facebook Principles, unlike the standard EULA or ToU, does not address itself to “users,” “player,” “participants,” or “customers.” Instead, it concerns the “people.” In addressing this particular subject, Facebook establishes and recognizes a collectivity called “the people,” which comprises the principle subject of modern political discourse (Canovan 2005). For this reason, the subject of the Facebook Principles, both in terms of the subject matter addressed by the text and the subject who is addressed, is deliberately political. In addressing the rights of people, Facebook interpellates (Althusser 2008) a political subject. Additionally, Facebook operationalizes the terms “people” and “person” in a way that is rather broad and consistent with contemporary practices: “Every Person—whether individual, advertiser, developer, organization, or other entity—should have representation and access to distribution and information within the Facebook Service, regardless of the Person’s primary activity” (Facebook Principles 2015). As far as Facebook is concerned, “person” names not just individual human users of the service but application developers like Zynga, the company that created Farmville; corporations, schools, and nonprofit organizations who use the service and maintain their own Facebook presence; and advertisers. This characterization is entirely consistent with modern legal practice. In the United States (2011), for instance, it is explicitly stipulated by federal law: “In determining the meaning of any Act of Congress, unless the context indicates otherwise—the words ‘person’ and ‘whoever’ include corporations, companies, associations, firms, partnerships, societies, and joint stock companies, as well as individuals” (1 USC Section 1). Despite the fact that there remains considerable popular debate, especially in North America, over the legitimacy of extending the term “person” to corporations and other collectives (see, for example, the rather heated discussions following the US Supreme Court’s 2011 decision in the case Citizen’s United v. Federal Election Commission), doing so has been standard operating procedure for modern political institutions since at least the mid-nineteenth century, and Facebook merely follows suit. Second, the subject of the Facebook Principles document, namely the ­people, is subject to the statement. In articulating and defining the rights of people, Facebook assumes for itself the right to grant rights to others. In doing so, it already occupies a unique position in the social order, giving itself the power to define and ensure for the people what is thereby recognized as their rights. In this case, then, political authority is not vested in the people who grant themselves rights; neither is the

107

Social Contract 2.0

rhetoric of Facebook Principles constructed such that the granting power occupies a place that is equal to or on par with that of the people. Because of the way the document is positioned and functions, Facebook and “the people” occupy different places in the political hierarchy. Consequently, the subject addressed by Facebook’s ten principles is also thereby subjected to and made a subject of Facebook. This is precisely the way the sovereign of the commonwealth comes to consolidate political power in Hobbes’s social contract theory. For Hobbes, the original covenant involved two fundamental gestures. On the one hand, individuals agreed to cooperate with each other by collectively and reciprocally renouncing some of the rights they had against one another in the state of nature. On the other hand, they cede to some individual or assembly of people the authority and power to enforce this covenant—or, as Hobbes (2008, 94) describes it, “a common power set over them both, with right and force sufficient to compel performance.” This sovereign power was, according to Hobbes’s argument, absolute and not a party to or participant in the social order it would oversee and administer: “The sovereign of a Commonwealth, be it an assembly or one man, is not subject to the civil laws. For having power to make and repeal laws, he may, when he pleaseth, free himself from that subjection by repealing those laws that trouble him, and making of new . . . therefore he that is bound to himself only is not bound” (2008, 183). It is for this reason that Hobbes titles his treatise Leviathan, making nominal reference to that figure of absolute authority presented in the Hebrew scriptures (Hobbes 2008, 218). In explicitly granting and seeking to protect the rights of the people, Facebook takes up and occupies the position of Hobbes’s Leviathan, and the people agree to associate under the rule of this sovereign power who, precisely because it occupies a position outside the rule it establishes and oversees, is able to grant, ensure, and protect their rights.12 Two of the remaining three principles (numbers eight and nine) address issues having to do with Facebook’s social operations and governance. The eighth principle addresses what Facebook calls “common welfare”: “The rights and responsibilities of Facebook and the People that use it should be described in a Statement of Rights and Responsibilities, which should not be inconsistent with these Principles” (Facebook Principles 2015). This principle, then, establishes and legitimates the Statement of Rights and Responsibilities document, which should describe the rights and responsibilities of both parties to the social contract, namely Facebook and the people who use it. This other document, which is understandably longer and more detailed than the Facebook Principles, is divided into eighteen articles that address privacy, intellectual property rights, safety, security, and protection of the rights of others; special provisions applicable to developers, users located outside the jurisdiction of the United States, and advertisers; and administrative procedures for amending the document and terminating the contractual relationship, methods for resolving disputes between parties to the contract, and an explanation of terms used throughout the document. For the most part, the specific rights and responsibilities articulated in this text are consistent with and follow the Facebook Principles document. What is remarkable about the

Statement of Rights and Responsibilities, however, are those articles that explicitly address personal property and privacy.

Personal Property and Privacy

108

Gaming the System

Property rights are a pivotal component of Locke’s social contract theory. According to Locke (1821, §124, 294), governments form primarily to ensure and protect the right of property. “The great and chief end therefore of men’s uniting into commonwealths and putting themselves under government is the preservation of their property.” Facebook also recognizes the importance of property rights: “You own all of the content and information you post on Facebook, and you can control how it is shared” (Facebook Statement of Rights and Responsibilities 2015). This statement, however, is qualified by a few additional stipulations: “For content that is covered by intellectual property rights, like photos and videos (IP content), you specifically give us the following permission, subject to your privacy and application settings: you grant us a nonexclusive, transferable, sublicensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook (IP License). This IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it” (Facebook Statement of Rights and Responsibilities 2015). Every word of this caveat is important and informative. Although users are assured of their property rights, they agree (whether explicitly or through tacit consent) to grant Facebook a rather liberal license to use their intellectual property as the organization sees fit. This license is determined to be nonexclusive and royalty-free, meaning that there are no restrictions or limitations imposed on Facebook with regards to how this material may be used and that people should neither expect nor will they receive any compensation or payment for such use. The agreement is further characterized as transferable and sub-licensable, which means that Facebook can, at its discretion, not only extend this license to others, but may also, if they decide to do so, initiate and grant subsequent licenses for the use of this material by other entities. Finally, all of this is said to apply not just in the country of origin or use, but anywhere and everywhere across the globe. Consequently, the license people agree to extend to Facebook concerning the use of their intellectual property is absolute, universal, and all-inclusive. Although Facebook officially recognizes the IP rights of the people and provides them with various technological mechanisms to exercise a modicum of control over how this information is displayed to and accessed by others, the licensing agreement grants the organization virtually unlimited access to and use of personal information and property. As Hobbes (2008, 140) had succinctly explained, “the master of the servant is master also of all he hath, and may exact the use thereof; that is to say, of his goods, of his labor, of his servants, and of his children, as often as he shall think fit” (Fig. 3.4). Furthermore, this arrangement, whereby Facebook has a right to the user’s property or “all he hath,” is considered to be in full force and effect as

109

Social Contract 2.0

Figure 3.4. Thomas Hobbes’s Facebook Profile. Image by David J. Gunkel (2011)

long as one maintains his or her Facebook account. This means that the IP license, which is initiated at the time an individual or organization creates an account with Facebook, will remain active and applicable to all content even if that individual or organization, for whatever reason, only uses the service occasionally or no longer uses it all. The license terminates only when one actively removes content or deactivates the account. Related to the issue of personal and intellectual property is the right of privacy. The importance of this, for both Facebook and its users, is evident by the fact that privacy is the first article listed in the Statement of Rights and Responsibilities, and it is dealt with in considerable detail in a separate policy statement that is directly referenced by way of an embedded hypertext link. This policy, which adds a third document to Facebook’s terms, is called the Data Policy (2016), and it is longer than either the Facebook Principles or the Statement of Rights and Responsibilities documents. In terms of content, this policy addresses eight items

concerning personal data, its use by Facebook, and stipulations regarding basic operations and user notification and inquiry:

110

Gaming the System

• • • • • • • •

What kinds of information do we collect? How do we use this information? How is this information shared? How can I manage or delete information about me? How do we respond to legal requests or prevent harm? How our global services operate. How will we notify you of changes to this policy? How to contact Facebook with questions.

Rather than analyze this document item by item, we can take note of two i­ mportant general aspects. First, the information users supply to Facebook involves the obvious identifying items like name, email address, and date of birth, but it also includes any and all information that is generated in the process of interacting with Facebook, its users, or its applications. This covers the expected things like looking at another person’s profile, sending a message, or posting an image on your wall, but it also includes other, less obvious kinds of data like the identifying IP number of the user’s internet connection, a history list of other pages visited on the internet while logged into Facebook, and current geographical location. This information is collected and stored by Facebook in order to provide and support its service: “We are able to deliver our Services, personalize content, and make suggestions for you by using this information to understand how you use and interact with our Services and the people or things you’re connected to and interested in on and off our Services” (Facebook Data Policy 2016). In other words, in order for Facebook to provide a personalized experience and support many of its popular features, the organization must, it is argued, collect personal information and maintain a substantial data profile for each individual. Users agree to and tacitly endorse this practice at the time of sign-up, even if they have never actually read the Data Policy. Consequently, the people of Facebook are not only exposed to what is arguably the ever-present and watchful eyes of “Big Brother,” but they willfully consent to this practice for the sake of various services and personalized conveniences. Second, Facebook reserves the right to share user data with law enforcement agencies in the process of complying with the law or in order to protect its own interests. We may access, preserve and share your information in response to a legal request (like a search warrant, court order or subpoena) if we have a good faith belief that the law requires us to do so. This may include responding to legal requests from jurisdictions outside of the United States where we have a good faith belief that the response is required by law in that jurisdiction, affects users in that jurisdiction, and is consistent with internationally recognized standards. We may also access, preserve and share information when we have a good faith belief it is necessary to:

detect, prevent and address fraud and other illegal activity; to protect ourselves, you and others, including as part of investigations; or to prevent death or imminent bodily harm. (Facebook Data Policy 2016)

Innovations in Governance As if to respond to potential criticisms of this absolute authority, the ninth principle asserts the value and importance of transparency in the political process and the exercise of sovereign power: “Transparent Process—Facebook should publicly make available information about its purpose, plans, policies, and operations. Facebook should have a town hall process of notice and comment and a system of voting to encourage input and discourse on amendments to these Principles or to the Rights and Responsibilities” (Facebook Principles 2015). This is as close as Facebook comes to articulating its particular form of social organization and governance. As a privately held corporation, Facebook is arguably an autocracy or dictatorship, and its social and political structure comprises what Jenkins (2004) calls “a company town.” But, as this statement makes clear, Facebook declares

111

Social Contract 2.0

What is interesting about this clause is that in the interest of global participation and interaction, Facebook explicitly agrees to comply with law enforcement both in the United States and elsewhere. This has at least two related consequences. On the one hand, it exposes all users to surveillance by US law enforcement, not because Facebook’s policy is weak, but because the standard for obtaining legal warrants and subpoenas are so low within US Federal law. As Junichi P. Semitsu (2011, 1) argues, “every single one of Facebook’s 133 million active users in the United States lack a reasonable expectation of privacy from government surveillance of virtually all of their online activity.”13 Furthermore, this surveillance is not limited to US citizens; it extends to non-US users insofar as the Statement of Rights and Responsibilities stipulates, under item sixteen “Special Provisions Applicable to Users Outside the United States,” that users “consent to having your personal data transferred to and processed in the United States” (Facebook Statement of Rights and Responsibilities 2015). On the other hand, this policy supports and has been used to justify Facebook’s cooperation with national governments. Israeli authorities, for example, obtained access to Facebook data that they then used to compile a black list of pro-Palestinian protesters (Protalinski 2011, 1) in order to restrict their access to travel. And the content and IP numbers of Kurdish activists have been blocked presumably at the request of the Turkish government (Resneck 2013) (Fig. 3.5). Although Facebook presents itself as “creating a world that is more open and transparent,” it also works with and supports the surveillance operations and hegemony of real-world governments. And these actions, as stipulated in the Statement of Rights and Responsibilities document, take place entirely at the discretion of the sovereign power, which, consistent with Hobbesian social contract theory, is responsible to no one.

112

Gaming the System Figure 3.5. Screenshot of Yeni Özgür Politika’s tweet from 22 August 2013. Translation: “Petition against Facebook’s censorship rush to shut down Kurdish pages: change.org/en-GB /petition . . . / Facebook’s discrimination against Kurds! / Kurdish pages are shut down one by one!” (Translation provided by Can Bilgili). https://twitter.com/y_ozgurpolitika

itself to be something of a benevolent dictatorship. This means that the ruling elite of Facebook, the sovereign power of the commonwealth, recognize the importance of communicating the organization’s purpose, plans, policies, and mode of operations. Evidence of this effort is already apparent in the very documents under consideration: the Facebook Principles document articulates Facebook’s purpose and plans and the Statement of Rights and Responsibilities and the Data Policy detail its procedures and operations. Furthermore, at least in terms of what is stipulated by the ninth principle, Facebook does not understand the social relationship to be asymmetrical. Although currently run by a small, exclusive group of individuals, in principle, at least, Facebook recognizes the importance of commentary and need for input from its constituents. The exact terms of this arrangement are given detailed treatment in the amendments section of the Statement of Rights and Responsibilities document. There are, however, considerable differences in this clause from one version of the document to another. Beginning in February 2009, Facebook stipulated that any changes to the governing documents would be dependent on prior notification of the change and the opportunity for users to post comments. The comments feature was given

added weight through the institution of a quasi-democratic process that granted users the right to vote on proposed changes with the results of the vote being recognized as binding on the corporation: 13. Amendments

Although Facebook, as the sovereign power and sole authority over the social network, may make whatever changes it wants to its governing documents on its own initiative, it stipulates that all potential changes will be announced via official notification and offered to the community for comment. This procedure was unique to Facebook. By comparison, other online service providers and virtual worlds administrators typically state that the organization may make changes to the EULA or ToS “with or without notice” and do not include any consideration or mechanism for user commentary. Furthermore, if a proposed change receives more than seven thousand user comments, Facebook agreed to put the proposal to a vote and would consider participation by 30 percent of all active registered users (which a conservative estimate puts at 425 million in the spring of 2012) to be binding. The terms of this “transparent process,” which are, it should be noted, similar to those instituted by LambdaMOO almost two decades ago, were partially developed in the process of responding to a controversy that arose after Facebook attempted to make unilateral changes to its original Terms of Use policy in February 2009. The alteration was immediately flagged by Chris Walters (2009) of The Consumerist, who noticed that the new agreement extended Facebook’s IP license, effectively granting the organization the right to use an individual’s personal data in perpetuity. Users of Facebook complained and eventually pressured the corporation’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, to retract the alteration and revert to the previous policy. In fact, the Facebook Principles and the Statement of Rights and Responsibilities documents both derive from this event, and Facebook’s efforts “to develop new policies that will govern our system from the ground up in an open and transparent way” (Zuckerberg 2009, 1).

113

Social Contract 2.0

1. We can change this Statement if we provide you notice (by posting the change on the Facebook Site Governance Page) and an opportunity to comment. 2. For changes to sections 7, 8, 9, and 11 (sections relating to payments, application developers, website operators, and advertisers), we will give you a minimum of three days notice. For all other changes we will give you a minimum of seven days notice. All such comments must be made on the Facebook Site Governance Page. 3. If more than 7,000 users comment on the proposed change, we will also give you the opportunity to participate in a vote in which you will be provided alternatives. The vote shall be binding on us if more than 30% of all active registered users as of the date of the notice vote. 4. We can make changes for legal or administrative reasons, or to correct an inaccurate statement, upon notice without opportunity to comment. (Facebook Statement of Rights and Responsibilities 2011)

114

Gaming the System

Although this innovation sounds promising, the vote provision has only been triggered three times since coming online in 2009. “In fact,” as Wired magazine reports, “for a three-year period [2009–2012], no policy changes even got the several thousand comments needed to trigger a vote” (Tate 2012, 1). This finally changed in 2012, when a group called our-policy.org triggered the first Facebook vote by obtaining over seven thousand comments. But with a voter turn-out of just 342,632 people—nowhere near the 30 percent necessary for the vote to be considered binding—the effort was unsuccessful. Similar outcomes occurred with the second vote in June 2012 and the third and final vote in December 2012, which concerned the future of the voting provision itself. As Facebook admitted to its users, “many of you agreed that Facebook has outgrown the current system, which is no longer the most effective way to help people engage in our site governance process” (Stern 2012). In an effort to remediate the problem, Facebook proposed an end to the voting provision. Once again, turnout by the electorate was disappointing. Although 87 percent of the 667,000 individuals participating in the vote opposed Facebook’s proposed alteration (Tate 2012), this number amounted to “less than [one-tenth] of 1 percent of the social network’s 1 billion-person user base and a far cry from the [30 percent] response that Facebook requires to make a vote count” (Ingram 2012). As a result, Facebook’s short foray into democracy, or what Anna Nacher (2010, 15) has perhaps more precisely termed “quasi-­democracy,” ended with the publication of a modified version of the Amendment’s clause of the Statement of Rights and Responsibilities document. 13. Amendments 1. We’ll notify you before we make changes to these terms and give you the opportunity to review and comment on the revised terms before continuing to use our Services. 2. If we make changes to policies, guidelines or other terms referenced in or incorporated by this Statement, we may provide notice on the Site Governance Page. 3. Your continued use of the Facebook Services, following notice of the changes to our terms, policies or guidelines, constitutes your acceptance of our amended terms, policies or guidelines. (Facebook Statement of Rights and Responsibilities 2015)

The revision reverts to something that now reads like a standard EULA/ToS. For this reason, the update to the Statement of Rights and Responsibilities document now appears to be inconsistent with the ninth principle, which remains committed to a higher level of user involvement and participation. Despite the organization’s principled statement to foster and support a transparent process, it is clear—especially in the wake of the recent modifications to the amendments section of the Statement of Rights and Responsibilities ­document— that Facebook is and intends to remains an authoritarian dictatorship. It is arguably a benevolent dictatorship, where the ruling elite has, in principle, at least, pledged itself to transparency and popular participation. But it is a dictatorship

New World Redux The tenth and final principle concerns Facebook’s main objective and raison d’être: “One World—The Facebook Service should transcend geographic and national boundaries and be available to everyone in the world.” This principle is interesting for at least two reasons. First, it indicates Facebook’s desire to create a truly i­ nternational and cosmopolitan assemblage—a kind of postmodern, postnation-state commonwealth that exists and functions beyond the limitations of physical geography and arbitrary political boundaries.14 This “one world,” as Facebook calls it, is undeniably utopian.15 If the mythic origins of the separation and global dispersion of human beings is narrated by the Judeo-Christian fable of the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11:1–9), Facebook situates itself as the means for redressing these differences and achieving global reunification. Although the dream of a post-Babelian, global polity has been operative in the rhetoric of the internet since its modest beginnings (see Gunkel 1999, 2001), Facebook dedicates itself to making this dream a reality.16 And the current demographic data is undeniably impressive. At an estimated 1.86 billion active users worldwide, Facebook can now be considered the largest “nation” by population on the planet earth (Stenovec 2015). For this reason, Facebook provides proof of concept for J. C. R. Licklider and Robert W. Taylor’s (1968, 38) prediction that the future of human social interaction will belong to “communities not of common location, but of

115

Social Contract 2.0

nevertheless. Even though the people had, according to the organization’s own 2009 modifications, the right to comment and vote on changes, the initiation of a change, any alternatives that might come to be formulated, and the conditions of voting were all under the control and regulation of the sovereign and “played out within the borders of Facebook” (Nacher 2010, 16). Additionally, the number of comments required to trigger a vote appears to have been unrealistically high, and the number of votes needed to render a binding resolution was virtually impossible to achieve. As reported by Bloomburg, the necessary 30 percent of the site’s users amounts to about 300 million people (assuming the 2012 demographics); “by way of comparison, that’s about three times as many people as voted in the recent U.S. federal election” (Ingram 2012). Consequently, instead of providing a truly transparent democratic process, Facebook had instituted and experimented with what Joseph Bonneau calls “democracy theatre.” As Bonneau (2009, 1) explains, “It seems the goal is not to actually turn governance over to users, but to use the appearance of democracy and user involvement to ward off future criticism. Our term [“democracy theatre”] may be new, but this trick is not, it has been used by autocratic regimes around the world for decades.” And as of 2012, even the theatrics of democracy had been rolled back. Although Facebook’s terms, as they are presented and codified in these three documents, are in many ways an improvement over the highly restricted EULA and ToS typically found throughout the universe of virtual worlds, the governing structure these documents institute and support is merely a difference in degree and not a difference in kind.

116

Gaming the System

common interest” perhaps better than any other previous or current technological application. Second, this utopian vision of “one world” is complicated not only by the material conditions of the majority of human beings but by the experience of history. On the one hand, Facebook’s “one world” is made possible and facilitated by a particular assemblage of technologies—for example, the internet, local access points or point of presence (POP), electrical power, and information processing devices, like computers, smart phones, and tablets. Despite the imperative form of the statement, namely that Facebook should be available to everyone in the world, it is, in fact, only available to a small fraction of the world’s population, specifically those individuals who have the means to gain access to and use these particular technologies. Unfortunately, the majority of the world’s population falls on the “have-nots” side of the digital divide and therefore are already excluded from participation in this fantastic global commonwealth (Gunkel 2007a). Consequently, despite its lofty principles and pretensions, Facebook’s “one world” is an elite gated community that already excludes a significant portion of the world’s population. On the other hand, these exclusive utopian and cosmopolitan pretensions are really nothing new. We have, in fact, entertained similar promises for each new generation of internet applications and with almost every form of innovation in telecommunications technology—telegraph, radio, television, and so on. Radio, for example, was also introduced and promoted with a rhetoric that promised transnational participation and universal understanding (Spinelli 1996), and the technology of broadcast television was heralded by Marshall McLuhan (1995, 5) as the harbinger of the “global village.” Consequently, one has good reasons to remain cautious and skeptical of these fantastic proclamations. If earlier innovations in information and communication technology, such as radio or television, failed to deliver on their initial promises for global involvement and cooperation and became just another means for delivering customers to service providers and product advertisers, we should hold open the possibility that Facebook, despite its lofty rhetoric and utopian ideals, is simply more of the same. As Simon Penny (1994, 247) has persuasively argued, “We have no reason to delude ourselves that any new technology, as such, promises any sort of socio-cultural liberation. History is against us here. We must assume that the forces of corporate consumerism will attempt to fully capitalize on the phenomenon in terms of financial profit, and that the potential for surveillance and control will be utilized by corporate and state instrumentalities.”

Of the Social Contract 2.0 Let me conclude by noting three consequences of the foregoing, all of which can be articulated using a kind of shorthand notation derived from symbolic logic.

∀(ToS ∈ VirtualWorld) ∈ SocialContract All instances of ToS, which would include a wide range of contractual documents like Terms of Service, Terms of Use, and End User License Agreements within the

(ToS & !UserKnowledge) = Problems ToS, coupled with a lack of user knowledge, has the potential to result in ­problems for both the user and the virtual world. Despite the fact that these governing documents prescribe and regulate the rights and responsibilities of users, dictating the terms and conditions of online social interaction and affiliation, many of us—even those who would self-identify as politically active and attentive to the mechanisms of social and political power—either ignore these texts as unimportant or dismiss them as a kind of “legalese” necessary to obtain access but not very interesting in their own right or worth serious consideration. As Jonathan Obar and Anne Oeldorf-Hirsch (2016) describe it, “the biggest lie on the internet” is and remains “I have read and understood the terms of service.” This negligence is problematic for at least two reasons. First, on the face of things, virtual worlds like LambdaMOO, Second Life, or Facebook appear to be rather well-designed technological conveniences, allowing users to connect with each other, to share ideas and experiences, and even to participate in important social and political actions. The contractual agreements these organizations have with their users, however, also grant the organizations

117

Social Contract 2.0

set of virtual worlds (defined broadly and including simple text-based chatrooms and MOOs, graphical MMO’s and MMORPGs, and social networks), constitute a form of social contract. Or, to put it more directly, the ToS of a virtual world can be properly understood as a social contract. These documents, which, in the case of Facebook, for example, involve and apply to an estimated 1.86 billion users worldwide, represent a privatization of the political as individuals now form social affiliations under the sovereignty not of national governments located in geographically defined regions but multinational corporations that form and operate in excess of terrestrial boundaries. If declarations, constitutions, and national charters were the standard governing documents of the modern era, organizing and legitimizing the nation state as we know it, then it is the EULA, ToS, and related policy statements that arguably occupy a similar position in the postmodern era, articulating the foundation of social and political affiliations for a postnation-state, multinational polity. These agreements constitute the next iteration of what political philosophers, beginning at least with Hobbes, have referred to as the “social contract,” or what could be called “Social Contract 2.0,” following a nominal procedure that is now commonplace in the IT industry. This means, then, that the most influential and compelling political documents of the early twenty-first century might not be found in the democratic constitutions written for the newly reconfigured nation-states of Afghanistan and Iraq, the manifestos and agreements developed in the wake of the “Arab Spring,” or even influential transnational treaties like that of the European Union. Rather, it is likely that some of the most important political documents of this epoch are being written, published, and prototyped in the ToS agreements, ToU service contracts, EULAs, or other governing statements that organize and regulate online social networks and virtual worlds.

118

Gaming the System

a wide range of powers that include things like a virtually unrestricted license to employ user information in whatever way they see fit, the right to change the terms of the relationship with little or no user involvement, and, in the case of Facebook, at least, the right to pass personal data and records to law enforcement agencies both in the United States and elsewhere. Although promoting what are arguably utopian visions of alternative realities—new worlds where users can reinvent themselves and pursue virtually unlimited opportunities that exceed both corporeal and geographical boundaries—these virtual worlds are also designed for and serve the interests of multinational corporations and modern social institutions by enforcing contracts that sanction data collection from their constituents, facilitate the tracking and surveillance of user activities, and authorize widespread information sharing with both corporate and state actors. Users of these virtual worlds, therefore, need to know not only what opportunities can be obtained by clicking “agree” and entering into contractual agreements with these service providers, but also what is potentially traded away, compromised, or exposed in the process of agreeing to their terms. Second, what can now in retrospect be called “Social Contract 1.0,” namely the various political documents and agreements that had organized and structured modern political institutions, often have been negotiated, executed, and decided such that subsequent generations only have the opportunity to agree to the contract through what Locke called “tacit consent.” Social Contract 2.0, by contrast, not only affords but actually requires each and every member of these postmodern virtual communities to make a definitive decision concerning the terms of the social relationship. If the social compact of the modern nation state often remained what Hobbes called “implicit,” Social Contract 2.0 is explicit—every participant has the opportunity and the obligation to agree to the terms of the contract or not. Although critics lament that this choice is highly restrictive and not even close to approaching what one would typically expect from a standard contractual agreement (Fairfield 2008), each user has a singular opportunity to decide whether to submit to the stipulated terms or not. Additionally because each EULA or ToS agreement is unique, there is a wide variety of different and competing versions currently available and in circulation. As Dibbell (2003) explains: “Contract law gives us the EULA, and the EULA gives us alternatives. Properly enforced, the EULA makes each virtual world its own parallel legal universe, immunized as much as it can be from the inability of existing law to reckon with its strangenesses and possibilities. The EULA gives us the restrictive legal regime that is Dark Age of Camelot, with its proscriptions against eBaying and its standard clauses demanding copyright to everything you say or do within its bounds. But the EULA just as easily gives us the radically open alternate reality of an online world like Second Life, where selling virtual items and virtual real estate is encouraged and all intellectual property rights remain in the hands of the players” (1). In order to take advantage of the different opportunities that are available both within a particular virtual world and across different kinds of worlds, users not only need to make an

informed decision about their own participation and involvement but also need to know the exact terms and conditions of what is to be decided and what it is they consent to by agreeing to these contractual stipulations.17

(ToS & UserKnowledge) → Δp

119

Social Contract 2.0

If ToS is conjoined with informed, knowledgeable users, this can result in political change (represented here by the standard mathematical symbol for change, the Greek letter delta). Being critical of a terms of service agreement or any of the other documents governing operations in a virtual world does not mean or entail that one simply opt-out. It would be naïve to expect that any social organization, whether in the so-called “real world” or in a virtual world, will be able to get everything correct right from the beginning. And there may remain, as is clearly the case with Facebook’s Statement of Rights and Responsibilities, one or more aspects of the contractual agreement that give users legitimate reasons to be hesitant, cautious, or concerned. Deciding not to participate or opting out of the social contract is clearly one way to avoid or even dispute such complications, but doing so not only means missing out on the opportunities afforded by these increasingly useful and popular applications but, more importantly, does little or nothing to question, challenge, or improve existing policies or social structures. Instead of opting out, we can actively engage these new social systems, capitalizing on their opportunities while remaining critical of the limitations of their existing social contract and advocating for improvements. And there are good reasons to be believe that such effort can and will have traction. The social and political structures of LambdaMOO, for instance, have not been static; they have developed and evolved as a result of user involvement, complaint, and struggle. The “Rape in Cyberspace,” although a less-than-pleasant affair, caused the residents of the MOO to take seriously the question of governance and led to numerous discussions, debates, and innovative experiments with social policy. Similarly, Dibbell finds reasons to be optimistic about the effect and impact of user activism in a seemingly authoritarian and autocratic virtual world like EverQuest. “Don’t get me wrong,” Dibbell (2003, 1) writes,. “EULAs are evil. Or at least EULAs as generally executed tend to be. But that’s because the EULA as generally executed tends to be effectively nonnegotiable. Whereas the EULA for a game like EverQuest— as I could no longer deny after seeing its designers come face to face with the fierce enthusiasms of its players—was effectively renegotiated on a daily basis.” EverQuest, as Castronova (2001) had initially discovered, provides a particularly good example of this kind of user-initiated renegotiation. EverQuest’s EULA, like that implemented by many virtual world proprietors, strictly prohibited “foreign trade.” “Foreign trade,” as Castronova (2003b, 1) explains, “refers to the common practice of selling in-game items for real money in out-of-game markets such as eBay. This trade is simple to conduct and hard to detect.” Users responded to this prohibition as they always do and have done, by creating their own underground black markets, which turned out to be quite profitable and prosperous. In response

120

Gaming the System

to this, Daybreak Game Company (formerly Sony Online Entertainment) eventually opened EverQuest Marketplace in 2008, ostensibly “decriminalizing” this economic activity. Obviously, there is no reason to believe that every user-initiated effort will have traction, but Dibbell’s point remains: this kind of activity can and does have an impact. Finally, there is Facebook, currently the most popular and populous virtual world, which has, as we have seen, developed and evolved its own political structures in response to crisis and user criticism. In that pivotal year of 2009, as the result of what can now, in retrospect, be called a “mistake,” the users of Facebook helped the organization’s ruling elite recognize that the traditional Terms of Use Agreement, which had been standard operating procedure and, for that reason, gone largely unquestioned, was obsolete and no longer appropriate for Facebook’s stated mission and objective. As a result, Facebook introduced what are arguably revolutionary innovations in virtual world governance—Facebook Principles and Statement of Rights and Responsibilities—effectively changing what had been an autocratic totalitarian commonwealth or “company town” (Jenkins, 2004) into something that is more of a benevolent dictatorship supporting some level of user participation. Despite this remarkable transformation, however, it can still be legitimately argued that these improvements did not go far enough—that Facebook’s “transparent process” was cloudy at best, if not opaque, and that its efforts at democratic participation were a façade and mere theatrics. Pointing this out does not, it should be noted, negate the importance or influence instituted by the innovation. It merely recognizes that things do not necessarily end here and that the struggle is ongoing. Like all forms of political activism, therefore, users of virtual worlds need to engage the structures as they currently exist, work to identify their inconsistencies and problems, and advocate for improvements. What is needed, therefore, is not mere opposition and abstinence, but rather informed involvement and critical participation—a kind of “occupy” movement. And there is no reason to believe that this activity needs to be or should remain an individual effort. “Right now,” Woodrow Hartzog (2013) admits, “contract terms aren’t negotiable. You can’t ask Facebook to exempt you from Graph search. You could ask Instagram to waive its mandatory arbitration clause, in case you ever want to defend your rights before a jury, but they would say no. You forfeit those options just by using the services. But why not try to collectively negotiate a contract that reflects some common consumer priorities? We think the best tack here is for interested users and consumer advocates to publicly debate their consensus priorities and draft them into a model contract.” In other words, it may be possible to mobilize a kind of collective bargaining approach to responding to and dealing with the EULA/ToS of a virtual world. Whatever form these user-initiated interventions eventually take, we can end by recalling and reissuing the concluding statement from Pavel Curtis’s LTAND document (1992): “I think we’re going to have a lot of fun, here . . . :-)” This brief comment should now be read in light of the emoticon that punctuates the sentence. What the sideways smiley face indicates is that the word “fun” might need to be

understood and interpreted with some wry humor. That is, the opportunities that are available with virtual worlds and other forms of social networks may, in fact, turn out to be interesting, engaging, and entertaining. This “fun,” however, will still require a good deal of struggle, effort, and conflict, and might, at times, appear to be less than what one might consider immediately enjoyable or amusing. It will be fun, but ensuring that it is and remains that way may take considerable work. 121

1. LambdaMOO is not unique in this regard. There was, especially in the first decade of internet application development, the sense that the virtual world of cyberspace was a kind of lawless new frontier. For this reason, as Dorothy E. and Peter J. Denning (1998) explain, “analogies to the Old American West, populated by unruly cowboys and a shoot-first-ask-later mentality, are more appropriate than the coiners of the phrase ‘electronic frontier’ ever imagined. Many law-abiding citizens, who simply want to conduct their business in peace, are demanding that the marshal come to cyberspace.” For a critical examination of the legacy and logic of this frontier ideology and rhetoric, see chapter 1. 2. Facebook and other social media applications are, whether we recognize it as such or not, direct descendants of the MUD. Richard Bartle, creator of the first MUD, explains it this way: “I was once asked by a journalist what debt social networks owe MUD. You know how astronomers point telescopes to far distance points in the universe and pick up radiation from the big bang that’s still there but is only really noticeable if you specifically look for it? That’s MUD’s relationship to social networks” (Bartle 2016, 112). 3. Although ToS, EULA, and other contractual mechanisms have been recognized as the principle governing documents for virtual worlds (Grimes, Jaeger and Fleischmann 2008; Fairfield 2008; Halbert 2009), there has been some debate about their legal status, especially in the case of user property rights (Passman 2008). 4. Despite the fact that users, service providers, journalists, game studies scholars, and even jurists tend to use these acronyms interchangeably, there is an important historical difference between the EULA and ToS/ToU that derives from the underlying client-server architecture of the internet. The EULA is an artifact of software distribution and was originally formulated to cover stand-alone software products that are installed on the user’s computer system. The ToS and ToU, by contrast, were initially developed for online service providers and are designed to regulate the use of server resources and other server-side operations. Because many virtual worlds, like World of Warcraft, involve both a proprietary client that is installed on the user’s computer system and an online service component supplied and supported by Blizzard Entertainment, many virtual worlds actually have both a EULA and ToS. As Adam Ruch (2009, 2) explains for World of Warcraft: The contractual agreements required from each player who wishes to play this game are split into two parts, as the game itself is. The EULA is directed mostly at the software client, as with most other pieces of software. We users are given the limited right to use this copy of the software to do specific things (namely to connect to the Warcraft universe). . . . The server-side is the WoW universe itself; massive server arrays housed by Blizzard which ­co-ordinate and control the world of WoW. These machines do the rest of the work of maintaining the integrity of the coded world and its laws. Interacting with these servers is subject to the Terms of Use. The TOU is a larger, seemingly more comprehensive document which is stated to be the overruling guide if the two are found to conflict.

Social Contract 2.0

Notes

122

Gaming the System

5. This authority also extends to and covers interactions between users. Because the EULA/ ToS is positioned as an exclusive contract between each user and the proprietor of the virtual world, all user-to-user interactions and disputes are mediated by this third party. “These license agreements,” as Kim Barker (2013) notes, “are not between one user and all other users—rather, they are between one user and the developer. This, whilst making the situation workable from the perspectives of the game provider, is not beneficial to the users of these online environments. In this way, if there is a dispute between user A and user B, there is no contractual agreement between the [two] parties in disagreement. Therefore, users A and B must either rely upon the developer to intervene in the dispute—which is highly unlikely given the statements issued by providers such as Linden Labs—or base their position on third party contractual rights.” 6. These contracts are also called “clickwrap licenses,” a term that was derived from and makes reference to the “shrinkwrap” licenses that had been commonly associated with the distribution of boxed software (on CD-ROM or DVD). “Shrinkwrap licenses,” as Richard Kunkel (2002) explains, “get their name from the clear plastic wrapping that encloses many software packages. They contain a notice that by tearing open the shrinkwrap, the user assents to the software terms enclosed within.” Clickwrap licenses work in a similar fashion for software products that are not distributed in physical form. “Upon downloading, installation or first use of the application, a window containing the terms of the license opens for the user to read. The user is asked to click either ‘I agree’ or ‘I do not agree.’ If the user does not agree, the process is terminated.” 7. Not all organizations are culpable to the same degree, and some EULAs and ToS agreements are more transparent than others. Mojang’s EULA for the game Minecraft is one notable exception. Mojang not only takes considerable effort to formulate a more user-friendly EULA but uses the frustrating experiences users typically have had with these overly complicated documents as part of its rhetorical strategy: “In order to protect Minecraft (our “Game”) and the members of our community, we need these end user license terms to set out some rules for downloading and using our Game. This license is a legal agreement between you and us (Mojang AB) and describes the terms and conditions for using the Game. We don’t like reading license documents any more than you do, so we have tried to keep this as short as possible” (Mojang 2016). 8. The legal precedent for this is something that is well established in US law: “Thanks to a doctrine called the Objective Theory of Contracts,” as Woodrow Hartzog (2013) explains, “the courts treat a contract as valid when people give the impression they accept or reject it, even if they were actually ignorant, or just confused. Bizarre as this legal logic might seem, it is deeply entrenched in the judicial system. It isn’t changing anytime soon.” 9. In an effort to combat this widespread ignorance concerning the contents of ToS documents, the website “Terms of Service; Didn’t Read” (https://tosdr.org/) rates the ToS of popular internet services on a scale extending from Grade A (very good) to Grade E (very bad). As explained on the organization’s “About” page, “Terms of Service; Didn’t Read” (short: ToS; DR) is a young project started in June 2012 to help fix the “biggest lie on the web”: almost no one really reads the terms of service we agree to all the time. The organization is currently headed up by Hugo Roy and funded by nonprofit organizations and individual donations. By way of comparison, ToS; DR rates SoundCloud Class B and YouTube Class D. Virtual worlds like RuneScape and World of Warcraft do not yet have an assigned class but both are cited for not allowing users to delete their accounts. Although Facebook is also listed as “No Class Yet,” it has accumulated a substantial number of negative items including: • • • •

Very broad copyright license on your content This service tracks you on other websites Facebook automatically shares your data with many other services Facebook uses your data for many purposes (ToS; DR 2017)

10. In an effort to assemble an archive of EULA/ToS documents and track changes over time, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has partnered with the Internet Society and ToS; DR on a project

123

Social Contract 2.0

called TOSBack.org. “Terms of service,” as the EFF’s Tim Jones explains, “form the f­ oundation of your relationship with social networking sites, online businesses, and other Internet communities, but most people become aware of these terms only when there’s a problem. We created TOSBack to help consumers monitor terms of service for the websites they use everyday [sic], and show how the terms change over time” (EFF 2009). 11. According to Jill Walker Rettberg (2009), this fundamental alteration in Facebook’s approach also speaks to and accommodates what she sees as the common user expectation: “I think Facebook’s users do not see Facebook as a business. To us, it’s a place where we meet and communicate with our friends and familys [sic]. It’s a place we inhabit and where we leave traces of ourselves. It’s a world— and that’s why “Terms of service” jar so horribly with our expectations” (emphasis in the original). 12. This arrangement is complicated by the fact that Facebook is also a user of Facebook. That is, Facebook has a Facebook page where it, like other users, can share information and interact with others. For this reason, Facebook actually occupies the uncanny position of both sovereign and user. 13. The US Department of Justice’s (DOJ) Computer Crimes and Intellectual Property Section has, since January of 2003, generated a number of memoranda instructing US law enforcement agents in methods to obtain and use information from social networking sites. These internal documents were made public in March 2010 as the result of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). The documents may be accessed at https://www.eff .org/files/filenode/social_network/20100303__crim_socialnetworking.pdf. 14. In a move that appears to lend official recognition to this development, the Danish government has established a new diplomatic post—“digital ambassador.” “Just as we engage in a diplomatic dialogue with countries,” Danish Foreign Minister Anders Samuelsen explained in a Washington Post interview from February 2017, “we also need to establish and prioritize comprehensive relations with tech actors, such as Google, Facebook, Apple and so on. The idea is, we see a lot of companies and new technologies that will in many ways involve and be part of everyday life of citizens in Denmark. And some [of these companies] also have a size that is comparable to nations” (Taylor 2017). 15. This principle draws the analysis around to the utopian rhetoric that had been associated with the “new world” of the Americas and projected into the nascent virtual worlds of cyberspace. See chapter 1 for more on this subject. 16. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg reiterated this commitment in a highly publicized February 16, 2017, open letter: “Building Global Community.” “We may not have the power to create the world we want immediately,” Zuckerberg (2017) writes, “but we can all start working on the long term today. In times like these, the most important thing we at Facebook can do is develop the social infrastructure to give people the power to build a global community that works for all of us.” 17. Despite the examples furnished by Dibbell, there remains some debate concerning the actual range of available EULA opportunities in the virtual world market. As Humphreys (2008, 163) argues by way of his comparative investigation of the governing documents for EverQuest and World of Warcraft, there appears to be a lack of diversity in contracts: “As shown above in excerpts from two popular virtual worlds, the lack of diversity of contracts demonstrates that there is little differentiation between the licenses on offer in this market place. The ‘exit power’ of the consumer assumes a diverse marketplace where choices are available. The almost uniform standard contracts available for virtual worlds demonstrates a market failure that puts the lie to the argument of consumer empowerment through choice.” Although Humphrey’s conclusion differs significantly from that provided by Dibbell, what both investigators share and agree on is the importance of diversity in EULA/ToS contracts as a way to empower user decision-making and choice.

chapter four

IN THE FACE OF OTHERS

as a political document, the EULA/ToS regulates social interactions with others. The “other” in a virtual world, however, consists of more than other human users. There are also artificial entities that populate these environments, including the corporation, which is considered a legal person and a party to the social contract, and bots, which have a status that remains inde­ terminate, unspecified, and ambiguous. “Bots are cool,” Andrew Leonard (1997, 12) explains. “They stoke our imaginations with the promise of a universe populated by beings other than ourselves, beings that can surprise us, beings that are both our servants and, possibly, our enemies.” The opportunity and challenge presented by these other kinds of beings is perhaps best illustrated by the rather unfortunate experience of Robert Epstein. Epstein is a Harvard psychologist who began toying with online dating in 2006. In the process, he met and eventually fell for whom he believed was a Russian woman named Ivana. After several months of amorous interactions via email, Epstein began to get suspicious (or at least concerned) about the “true nature” of his virtual paramour, eventually discovering that she was nothing but a cleverly programmed chatterbot—a software robot designed to emulate human social interactions.1 All of this occurred despite the fact that Epstein knew better. As Epstein (2007, 17) explained in an article he wrote for Scientific American: “I should know about such things, and I certainly should have known better in my exchanges with Ivana. I am, you see, supposedly an expert on chatterbots. I have been a computer nerd most of my life, and in the early 1990s I directed the annual Loebner Prize Competition in Artificial Intelligence, a contest in which judges try to distinguish between people and computer programs. I am even editing a 600-page book [Epstein et al. 2009], coming out in a few months, on this very subject.” Epstein, therefore, was not some naïve first-time user who got fooled by some newfangled technology he did not understand. He is, according to his own account, a well-informed expert who, despite extensive knowledge of computer technology, chatterbot operations and deployment, and the nuances of human psychology, got taken in and seduced by a robot.

124

125

In the Face of Others

Figure 4.1. Portion of the Infographic “How to Avoid Falling in Love with a Chatbot.” Image produced and provided by “Who Is Hosting This” (2015). http://www.whoishostingthis .com/blog/2015/12/09/chatbots/

Epstein’s experience, however, is not an anomaly; there have been numerous reports and accounts of this kind of experience with the bots that now occupy and operate in the virtual spaces that compose contemporary existence—so much so that there are now online resources and self-help guides that are designed to assist users in navigating the potential problems and pitfalls caused by bots (Moraes 2015; Fig. 4.1). And to make matters worse (or more interesting), the problem is not something that is unique to amorous interpersonal relationships. “The rise of social bots,” as Andrea Peterson (2013, 1) accurately points out, “isn’t just bad for love lives—it could have broader implications for our ability to trust the authenticity of nearly every interaction we have online.” Case in point—national politics and democratic governance. In a study conducted during the 2016 US presidential campaign, Alessandro Bessi and Emilio Ferrara (2016) found that “the presence of social media bots can indeed negatively affect democratic political discussion rather than improving it, which in turn can potentially alter public opinion and endanger the integrity of the Presidential election.” Investigation of the social impact and consequences of bots typically involve asking about the “influence” these mechanisms have on the human user

126

Gaming the System

(Misener 2011; Boshmaf et al. 2013) and the effect of this on human sociality and institutions (Gehl 2013; Jones 2015; Gehl and Bakardjieva 2017). As Castronova (2005, 97) describes it in his examination of MMOs and MMORPGs, “These games allow users to interact with both humans and robots. What does a mix of humans and robots in the social milieu offer that a world of only robots or only humans does not? Robot-human diversity in the social environment can provide truly extraordinary enhancements to our emotional experiences, even to the point that there may be breathtaking consequences for human emotional and social development.” These are certainly important questions, but they limit research to an anthropocentric framework and instrumentalist view of technology, both of which are contested and put into question by these increasingly social and interactive artifacts. For this reason, the final chapter seeks to develop a mode of inquiry that is oriented otherwise—one that can grapple with other questions concerning who or what can or should be “Other.”

The Rise of the (Ro)Bots “Bot” is short for “soft-bot,” which, in turn, is derived from a concatenation of the words “software” and “robot” (Ellis 2010, 77). Bots, therefore, consist of a chunk of software code that is designed to accomplish some particular routine task automatically and autonomously. And the virtual spaces of the internet are crawling with them, so much so that bot activity now accounts for over 50 percent of all traffic on the internet (Zeifman 2017). There are web crawlers like the Googlebot, which seek out and rank web pages; spambots, which automatically generate email messages and overwhelm our inboxes with everything from marketing pitches to phishing campaigns; and there are chatterbots and socialbots, two related subspecies of bot that are designed for human-level social interactions. As Robert Gehl and Maria Bakardjieva (2017, 2) parse the terminology, “the socialbot is designed not simply to perform undesirable labor (like spambots) and not only to try to emulate human conversational intelligence (like chatbots). Rather, it is intended to present a Self, to pose as an alter-ego, as a subject with personal biography, stock of knowledge, emotions and body, as a social counterpart, as someone like me, the user, with whom I could build a social relationship.”2 And it is precisely this capability that worries social scientists like Sherry Turkle (2011, 9): “I find people willing to seriously consider robots not only as pets but as potential friends, confidants, and even romantic partners. We don’t seem to care what their artificial intelligences ‘know’ or ‘understand’ of the human moments we might ‘share’ with them . . . the performance of connection seems connection enough.” If the main concern is that a bot is able to “pass itself off as a human being” (Boshmaf et al. 2011, 93)—to such an extent that it gives individuals like Turkle reason to be seriously concerned about the future of human sociality—then bots are not just one specific implementation of artificial intelligence (AI), or what Richard Bartle (2003, 616) has called “AI in action,” but are the defining condition of machine intelligence per se. This is immediately evident in Alan Turing’s

agenda-setting paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence.” Though the term “artificial intelligence” is the product of an academic conference organized by John McCarthy at Dartmouth College in the summer of 1956, it is Alan Turing’s 1950 paper and its “game of imitation,” or what is now routinely called “the Turing Test,” that initially defines and characterizes the endeavor.

The Imitation Game

I propose to consider the question, “Can machines think?” This should begin with definitions of the meaning of the terms “machine” and “think.” The definitions might be framed so as to reflect so far as possible the normal use of the words, but this attitude is dangerous. If the meaning of the words “machine” and “think” are to be found by examining how they are commonly used it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the meaning and the answer to the question, “Can machines think?” is to be sought in a statistical survey such as a Gallup poll. But this is absurd. (Turing 1999, 37)

In response to this difficulty, a semantic problem with the very words that would be employed to articulate the question to begin with, Turing proposes to pursue an alternative line of inquiry. Instead of attempting such a definition, I shall replace the question by another, which is closely related to it and is expressed in relatively unambiguous words. The new form of the problem can be described in terms of a game which we call the ‘imitation game.’ It is played with three people, a man (A), a woman (B), and an interrogator (C) who may be of either sex. The interrogator stays in a room apart from the other two. The object of the game for the interrogator is to determine which of the other two is the man and which is the woman. (Turing 1999, 37)

This determination, as Turing explains, is to be made by way of a sequence of questions and answers. The interrogator (C) asks participants A and B various things, and based on their responses tries to discern whether the respondent is a man or a woman (Fig. 4.2). “In order that tone of voice may not help the interrogator,” Turing (1999) further stipulates, “the answers should be written, or better still, typewritten. The ideal arrangement is to have a teleprinter communicating between the two rooms” (37–38). The initial arrangement of the “game of imitation” is, as Turing describes it, computer-mediated communication (CMC) avant la lettre. The interrogator interacts with two unknown participants via a form of synchronous computer-mediated interaction that we now routinely call “chat.” Because the exchange takes place via text messages routed through the instrumentality of a machine, the interrogator cannot see or otherwise perceive the identity of the two interlocutors and must, therefore, ascertain gender based on responses that are supplied to questions like

127

In the Face of Others

Although Turing begins his essay by proposing to consider the question “Can machines think?” he immediately recognizes persistent and seemingly irresolvable terminological difficulties with the question itself.

128

Gaming the System

Figure 4.2. The Game of Imitation, Phase One. Image by Bilby, public domain, via Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test

“Will X please tell me the length of his/her hair” (Turing 1999, 37). Like the avatar that is encountered in the space of a virtual world, the “true identity” of the interlocutors is something that remains hidden from view and is only able to be surmised by way of the messages that come to be exchanged. Consequently, the game of imitation, like the game shows To Tell the Truth and What’s My Line (see chapter 2), is designed to leverage and play with ontological difference. Turing then takes his thought experiment one step further. “We can now ask the question, ‘What will happen when a machine takes the part of A in this game?’ Will the interrogator decide wrongly as often when the game is played like this as he does when the game is played between a man and a woman? These questions replace our original, ‘Can machines think?’” (Turing 1999, 38). In other words, if the man (A) in the game of imitation is replaced with a computing machine, would this device be able to respond to questions and pass as another person, effectively fooling the interrogator into thinking that it was just another human interlocutor? (See Fig. 4.3.) It is this question, according to Turing, that replaces the initial and unfortunately ambiguous inquiry “Can machines think?” Consequently, if a computer or a computer application like a bot or nonplayer character (NPC) does in fact becomes capable of successfully simulating a human being, of either gender, in communicative exchanges with a human interrogator to such an extent that the interrogator cannot tell whether he is interacting with a machine or another human being, then that machine would, Turing concludes, need to be considered “intelligent.” Or in Žižek’s (2008a, 209) terms, if the machine effectively passes for another human person in conversational interactions, the property of intelligence would be “retroactively (presup)posited” for that entity, and this is done irrespective of the actual internal states or operations of the mechanism (which, according to the stipulations of the game, remain always and already hidden from

129

view). As Turkle (2011, 9) has described it, we don’t care “what their artificial intelligences actually ‘know’ or ‘understand’ . . . the performance of connection seems connection enough.”

ELIZA and Her Children At the time that Turing published the paper, he estimated that the tipping point— the point at which a computational mechanism would be able to successfully play the game of imitation—was at least half a century in the future: “I believe that in about fifty year’s [sic] time it will be possible to programme computers, with a storage capacity of about 109, to make them play the imitation game so well that an average interrogator will not have more than 70 per cent chance of making the right identification after five minutes of questioning” (Turing 1999, 44). It did not take that long. In 1966, Joseph Weizenbaum demonstrated a simple natural language processing application that was able to converse with human interrogators in such a way as to appear to be another intelligent agent. ELIZA, as the ­application was called, was the first chatterbot. Although this term was not utilized by Weizenbaum, it has been applied retroactively as a result of the efforts of Michael Mauldin, founder and chief scientist of Lycos, who introduced the neologism in 1994 in order to identify a similar natural language processing application that he eventually called Julia. ELIZA was, technically speaking, a rather simple piece of programming, “consisting mainly of general methods for analyzing sentences and sentence fragments, locating so-called key words in texts, assembling sentences from fragments, and so on. It had, in other words, no built-in contextual framework of universe of discourse. This was supplied to it by a ‘script.’ In a sense ELIZA was an actress who commanded a set of techniques but who had nothing of her own to

In the Face of Others

Figure 4.3. The Game of Imitation, Phase Two. Image by Bilby, public domain, via Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test

130

Gaming the System

say” (Weizenbaum 1976, 188). In terms of its programming, these conversational interactions were facilitated by what Weizenbaum (1967, 475) called “a set of decomposition and reassembly rules”: “A decomposition rule is a data structure that searches a text for specific patterns, and, if such patterns are found, decomposes the text into disjoint constituents. A reassembly rule is a specification for the construction of a new text by means of recombinations of old and possible addition of new constituents.” Consider the following, often-quoted exchange, from Weizenbaum’s 1967 paper, published in a special issue of The Communications of the ACM on Computational Linguistics (following Weizenbaum’s precedent, ELIZA’s contributions are displayed in uppercase): Men are all alike IN WHAT WAY They’re always bugging us about something or other CAN YOU THINK OF A SPECIFIC EXAMPLE Well, my boyfriend made me come here. YOUR BOYFRIEND MADE YOU COME HERE He says I’m depressed much of the time. I AM SORRY TO HEAR YOU ARE DEPRESSED It’s true. I am unhappy. DO YOU THINK COMING HERE WILL HELP YOU NOT TO BE UNHAPPY I need some help, that much seems certain. WHAT WOULD IT MEAN TO YOU IF YOU GOT SOME HELP Perhaps I could learn to get along with my mother. TELL ME MORE ABOUT YOUR FAMILY My mother takes care of me. WHO ELSE IN YOUR FAMILY TAKES CARE OF YOU My father YOUR FATHER. WHAT RESEMBLANCE DO YOU SEE You are not very aggressive but I think you don’t want me to notice that. WHAT MAKES YOU THINK I AM NOT VERY AGGRESSIVE You don’t argue with me. WHY DO YOU THINK I DON’T ARGUE WITH YOU You are afraid of me. DOES IT PLEASE YOU TO BELIEVE I AM AFRAID OF YOU My father is afraid of everybody. WHAT ELSE COMES TO MIND WHEN YOU THINK OF YOUR FATHER Bullies DOES THAT HAVE ANYTING TO DO WITH THE FACT THAT YOUR BOYFRIEND MADE YOU COME HERE

Despite this rather artificial and constrained form of interpersonal interaction, Weizenbaum’s program demonstrated what Turing had initially predicted: ELIZA created the most remarkable illusion of having understood in the minds of many people who conversed with it. People who know very well that they were conversing with a machine soon forgot that fact, just as theatergoers, in the grip of suspended disbelief, soon forget that the action they are witnessing is not “real.”

This illusion was especially strong and most tenaciously clung to among people who know little or nothing about computers. They would often demand to be permitted to converse with the system in private, and would, after conversing with it for a time, insist, in spite of my explanations, that the machine really understood them. (Weizenbaum 1976, 189)

ELIZA was just the beginning. Since Weizenbaum’s initial demonstration, there have been numerous efforts to further develop the capabilities and operations of chatterbot technology, including the following:

In the Face of Others

• Kenneth Colby’s PARRY (1972). Unlike Weizenbaum’s ELIZA, which was originally designed to emulate the conversational activities of a Rogerian therapist, PARRY (which was written in LISP) simulated a person with paranoid schizophrenia. In 1972, PARRY and a version of ELIZA that was named DOCTOR were connected over ARPANET (the precursor to the internet) and interacted with each other in a highly publicized demonstration at ICCC 1972 (International Conference on Computer Communications). The transcript of a subsequent “conversation” was recorded and published by internet founding father Vinton Cerf (1973) in January of the following year. • Michael Mauldin’s CHATTERBOT (1994). Unlike ELIZA and PARRY, which could only engage in conversational interactions with a single dedicated user, CHATTERBOT was designed to be an NPC in the virtual world of TinyMUD. Mauldin (1994, 16) explains, “We created a computer controlled player, a ‘Chatter Bot,’ that can converse with other players, explore the world, discover new paths through various rooms, answer players’ questions about navigation (providing the shortest-path information on request), and answer questions about other players, rooms and objects.” Since this initial demonstration in the virtual world of TinyMUD, bots of various kinds and configurations have become a standard feature in computer games and online virtual worlds (Castronova 2005; Hingston 2014).3 • Richard Wallace’s A.L.I.C.E., or “Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity” (1995). A.L.I.C.E. was originally written in Java and utilized an XML schema called AIML (Artificial Intelligence Markup Language). The aim of AIML, which was distributed with an open source license and has been implemented on a number of different platforms (see Pandorabots.com), was to encourage other developers to modify the initial program and produce numerous Alicebot clones. A.L.I.C.E. won the restricted category Loebner Prize three times: in 2000, in 2001, and in 2004. This prize, initiated by Hugh Loebner in 1991, is “the first formal instantiation of the Turing Test” (Loebner 2017). Additionally, filmmaker Spike Jonze’s has credited his personal experience with an Alicebot as the source of inspiration for the film Her (Morais 2013). • Rollo Carpenter’s Cleverbot (1997). Unlike previous chatterbot systems, Cleverbot’s responses are not prescripted. Instead, the bot is designed to learn its conversational behaviors from interactions with human users on the internet. Although the exact method by which this is accomplished has not been made

131

132

Gaming the System

public (Pereira et al. 2016, 7), it has been described as a kind of crowdsourcing. “Since coming online in 1997,” Natalie Wolchover (2011) explains, “Cleverbot has engaged in about 65 million conversations with Internet users around the world, who chat with it for fun via the Cleverbot website. Like a human learning appropriate behavior by studying the actions of members of his or her social group, Cleverbot ‘learns’ from these conversations. It stores them all in a huge database, and in every future conversation, its responses to questions and comments mimic past human responses to those same questions and comments.”4 Similar learning capabilities were devised for and exhibited by Tay.ai, Microsoft’s “teenage” Twitterbot that eventually learned to be a raving neo-Nazi racist in less than eight hours of interactions with users (more on this event in what follows). • Speech Dialog Systems (SDS). The recent development of SDS implementations, like Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa, and Google Home, consist of an ensemble of several different-but-related technological innovations: “automatic speech recognition (ASR), to identify what a human says; dialogue management (DM), to ­determine what that human wants; actions to obtain the information or perform the activity requested; and text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis, to convey that information back to the human in spoken form” (Hirschberg and Manning 2015, 262). Despite their apparent complexity and technical advancement beyond text-based chatterbots like ELIZA, A.L.I.C.E., and Cleverbot, SDSs are still designed for and operate with text data. The principal task of the ASR is to transform spoken discourse into “a textual hypothesis of the utterance” (Skantze 2005, 19) that can then be processed by the DM. The DM “parses the hypothesis and generates a semantic representation of the utterance” in order to fabricate “a response on a semantic level” (Skantze 2005, 19). This processing can be accomplished through the application of different NLP methodologies, extending from modified versions of ELIZA’s simple decomposition and reassembly rules to more sophisticated systems like Stanford CoreNLP, which is able to work out the syntactic structure of individual sentence by using a dependency grammar analysis (Hirschberg and Manning 2015, 262), and machine-learning algorithms trained on various corpora of human conversational interactions. The task of the TTS is to convert the output of the DM, which is typically a text string (Skantze 2005, 19), into intelligible speech sounds. The TTS therefore takes the output generated by the DM, and, instead of presenting it on the screen in readable characters, transforms this data into an a­ udio signal that simulates spoken discourse either though concatenation synthesis, which uses a library of prerecorded samples (either whole words or individual phonetic elements), or formant synthesis, which algorithmically produces the audio waveforms (Fig. 4.4). Consequently, SDS applications like Siri can directly trace their lineage back to ELIZA, and the connection is not just technological; it has become incorporated as part of Siri’s own backstory. “When asked about ‘Eliza,’” as Andrea Guzman (2017, 78) reports, “Siri registers that the user is referring to the ELIZA. Siri’s replies create a connection between her and ELIZA. One response positions ELIZA and Siri as friends: ‘ELIZA is my good friend. She was a brilliant psychiatrist, but she’s ­retired now.’ Siri also alludes to ELIZA as here technological progenitor, including ‘Do you know ELIZA? She was my first teacher.’”

133

Features and Consequences Although there is a good deal that has been written in response to Turing’s essay, the game of imitation, and practical implementations like those provided by ELIZA and her many descendants, Turing’s initial formulation has at least three important features and consequences. First, Turing’s essay situates ­communication— and a particular form of deceptive social interaction—as the deciding factor.5 As Brian Christian (2011, 37) points out, “the Turing test is, at bottom, about the act of communication.” This is not a capricious decision. There are good epistemological reasons for focusing on this particular capability, and it has to do with what philosophers routinely call “the problem of other minds”—the seemingly undeniable fact that we do not have direct access to the inner workings of another’s mind. “How does one determine,” as Paul Churchland (1999, 67) famously characterized it, “whether something other than oneself—an alien creature, a sophisticated robot, a socially active computer, or even another human—is really a thinking, feeling, conscious being; rather than, for example, an unconscious automaton whose behavior arises from something other than genuine mental states?” Attempts to resolve or at least respond to this problem inevitably involve some kind of behavioral demonstration or test, like Turing’s game of imitation. “To put this another way,” Roger Schank (1990, 5) concludes, “we really cannot examine the insides of an intelligent entity in such a way as to establish what it actually knows. Our only choice is to ask and observe.” For Turing, and for many who follow his lead, intelligence is something that is neither easy to define nor able to be directly accessed. It is, therefore, evidenced in and decided on the basis of behaviors that are considered to be signs or symptoms of intelligence, especially communication and human-level verbal conversation. In other words, because intelligent thought is not directly observable, the best one can do is deal with something—like communicative interaction—that is assumed to be the product of intelligence and can be empirically observed, measured, and evaluated.6 Turing’s game of imitation leverages this rich philosophical tradition. If an

In the Face of Others

Figure 4.4. Simplified block diagram of the technological components of SDS. Image by David J. Gunkel (2017)

134

Gaming the System

entity—another human being, an animal, a robot, an algorithm, and so on—is, in fact, capable of performing communicative operations at least on par with what is typically expected of another human individual, irrespective of what actually goes on inside the head or information processor of the entity itself, we would need to consider this entity intelligent. Following from this, Turing had estimated that developments in machine communication would advance to such a degree that it would make sense to speak (and to speak intelligently) of machine intelligence by the end of the twentieth century. As Turing (1999, 44) wrote, “I predict that by the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted.” Second, although this conclusion follows quite logically from Turing’s argument, there has been and continues to be considerable resistance to it. For Turing, the critical challenge had been articulated already by Lady Lovelace (aka Ada Augusta Byron, the daughter of the English poet Lord Byron), who not only wrote the “software” for Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine but is, for that reason, considered to be the first computer scientist. “Our most detailed information of Babbage’s Analytical Engine,” Turing (1999, 50) explains, “comes from a memoir by Lady Lovelace. In it she states, ‘The Analytical Engine has no pretensions to originate anything. It can only do whatever we know how to order it to perform’” (emphasis in the original). According to Lovelace, a computer (and, at the time she wrote this, “computer” referred not to an electronic device but a large mechanical information processor comprised of intricate gears and levers), no matter how sophisticated its programming, only does what we tell it to do. We can, in fact, write a software program like ELIZA or even Apple’s Siri that takes verbal input, extracts keywords, rearranges these words according to preprogrammed scripts, and then spits out seemingly intelligible results. This does not, however, necessarily mean that such a mechanism is capable of original thought or of understanding what is stated in even a rudimentary way. This position is further developed by John Searle in his well-known “Chinese Room” thought experiment. This intriguing and rather influential illustration, introduced in 1980 with the essay “Minds, Brains, and Programs” and elaborated in subsequent publications, was offered as an argument against the claims of strong AI—that machines are able to achieve intelligent thought: Imagine a native English speaker who knows no Chinese locked in a room full of boxes of Chinese symbols (a data base) together with a book of instructions for manipulating the symbols (the program). Imagine that people outside the room send in other Chinese symbols which, unknown to the person in the room, are questions in Chinese (the input). And imagine that by following the instructions in the program the man in the room is able to pass out Chinese symbols which are correct answers to the questions (the output). The program enables the person in the room to pass the Turing Test for understanding Chinese but he does not understand a word of Chinese. (Searle 1999, 115)

135

In the Face of Others

The point of Searle’s imaginative, albeit somewhat ethnocentric illustration is quite simple—simulation is not the real thing. “The Turing test,” as Searle (1999, 115) concludes, “fails to distinguish real mental capacities from simulations of those capacities. Simulation is not duplication.” In other words, merely shifting verbal symbols around in a way that looks like linguistic understanding is not really an understanding of the language. As Terry Winograd (1990, 187) explains, a computer does not really understand the linguistic tokens it processes; it merely “manipulates symbols without respect to their interpretation.” Or, as Searle (1984, 34) characterizes it, computers have syntax and a method of symbol manipulation, but they do not have semantics. Demonstrations like Searle’s Chinese room, which seek to differentiate between the appearance of something and the real thing itself, not only deploy that ancient philosophical distinction inherited from Platonism, but inevitably require, as we have seen previously, some kind of privileged and immediate access to the real as such and not just how it appears (see chapter 3). For example, in order to be able to make the distinction between the simulation of intelligence and “real intelligence,” one would need access not just to external indicators that look like intelligence but to the actual activity of intelligence as it occurs (or does not occur) in the mind of another. This requirement, however, immediately runs into the problem of other minds and the epistemological limitation that it imposes: namely, that we cannot get into the “head” of another entity—whether that entity be another human being, a nonhuman animal, an alien life form, or a robot—to know with any certitude whether it actually does perform whatever it appears to manifest. In other words, Searle is only able to distinguish between and compare what appears to ­happen for those individuals interacting with the room and what really goes on inside the room because he has already provided privileged access to the inner workings of the room itself. His “counter example,” therefore, appears to violate the epistemological limitations imposed by the other minds problem, which is something Turing’s game of imitation was careful to acknowledge and respect. Finally, even if, following Searle’s argument, one is convinced that bots like ELIZA or Cleverbot remain essentially “mindless” instruments that merely manipulate linguistic tokens, the Turing Test also demonstrates that it is what human users do with and in response to these manipulations that make the difference. In other words, whether we conclude that the mechanism is, in fact, intelligent or not, the communicative behavior that is exhibited in, for example, the game of imitation or other social interactive exchanges, does have an effect on us and our social relationships. As Weizenbaum (1967, 474–475) insightfully pointed out, “the human speaker will contribute much to clothe ELIZA’s responses in the vestments of plausibility. However, he will not defend his illusion (that he is being understood) against all odds. In human conversation a speaker will make certain (perhaps generous) assumptions about his conversational partner. As long as it remains possible to interpret the latter’s responses to be consistent with those assumptions, the speaker’s image of his partner remains undamaged.”

136

Gaming the System

This insight has been experimentally confirmed by Byron Reeves and Clifford Nass’s (1996, 22) Computer as Social Actor (CASA) studies or what is also called the Media Equation: “Computers, in the way that they communicate, instruct, and take turns interacting, are close enough to human that they encourage social responses. The encouragement necessary for such a reaction need not be much.[7] As long as there are some behaviors that suggest a social presence, people will respond accordingly. . . . Consequently, any medium that is close enough will get human treatment, even though people know it’s foolish and even though they likely will deny it afterwards.” The CASA model, which was developed in response to numerous experiments with human subjects, describes how users of computers, irrespective of the actual intelligence possessed by the machine, tend to respond to the technology as another socially aware and interactive subject. In other words, even when experienced users know quite well that they are engaged with using a machine, they make what Reeves and Nass (1996, 22) call the “conservative error” and tend to respond to it in ways that afford this other thing social standing on par with another human individual. Consequently, in order for something to be recognized and treated as another social actor, “it is not necessary,” as Reeves and Nass (1996, 28) conclude, “to have artificial intelligence,” strictly speaking. All that is needed is that they appear to be “close enough” to encourage some kind of social response. And this is where things get interesting (or challenging) with regard to questions concerning social standing and how we can or should respond to others (and these other forms of otherness).

The Other Question Social relationships, especially those that involve ethical questions regarding who can or should be other, can be analyzed into two fundamental components. “Moral situations,” as Luciano Floridi and J. W. Sanders (2004, 349–350) point out, “commonly involve agents and patients. Let us define the class A of moral agents as the class of all entities that can in principle qualify as sources of moral action, and the class P of moral patients as the class of all entities that can in principle qualify as receivers of moral action.” In other words, moral situations are relationships involving at least two components: the originator of an action that is to be evaluated as morally correct or incorrect, and the recipient of the action who either is benefitted by or harmed because of it. The former is commonly referred to as the “moral agent”; the latter is called the “moral patient” (Fig. 4.5). Although this terminology has been in circulation in the field of ethics for quite some time (see Hajdin 1994), students of communication and media studies will find a more familiar formulation in the basic communication model provided by Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver (1963). According to their work, as reported in the book the Mathematical Theory of Communication, the act of communication can be described as a dyadic process bounded on one side by an information source or sender and, on the other, by a receiver. These two participants are connected by a communication channel or medium through which messages selected by the sender are conveyed to the receiver. In this model, which is r­ eproduced—in one way or another—in

137

In the Face of Others

Figure 4.5. The two elements of the social relationship. Image by David J. Gunkel (2016)

virtually every textbook on communication, the source of the message is the agent. It is the “sender” who initiates the communicative interaction by selecting a message and sending it through the channel to the receiver. The receiver occupies the position of what is called the patient. It is the “receiver” who is the recipient of the communicated message that is originally assembled and sent by the sender. Although the academic disciplines of moral philosophy and communication studies employ different terminology (terminology obviously derived from their specific orientation and historical development), they both characterize the social-­communicative relationship as bounded by two figures: the originator of the action, the sender or agent, and the recipient of the action, the receiver or the patient (Fig. 4.5).

Parsing the Question In this dyadic relationship, irrespective of the terminology that is used, the agent is understood to have certain responsibilities and can (or should) be held accountable for what he or she or it decides to do. In fact, standard ethical theory can be described as an agent-oriented endeavor where one is principally concerned with either the “moral nature and development of the individual agent,” what is often called “virtue ethics” in classical moral philosophy, or the “moral nature and value of the actions performed by the agent,” which is the focus of the more modern theories of consequentialism, contractualism, and deontologism (Floridi 1999a, 41). As Floridi (1999a) and others have effectively demonstrated, this agent-oriented approach, which comprises the vast majority of moral theorizing in the Western tradition, is basically about and interested in resolving matters of responsibility.

138

Gaming the System

For this reason, patient-oriented approaches are still something of a minor thread in the history of moral thinking (Hajdin 1994 and Floridi 1999a). This way of proceeding is concerned not with the responsibilities of the originator of an action but with the rights of the individual who is addressed by and is the recipient of the action. Historically speaking, the principal example of a patient-oriented approach is the late-twentieth-century innovations in animal rights. Animals are not, at least according to the standard way of thinking, moral agents.8 Typically, for instance, one does not hold a dog morally or legally responsible for biting the postman. But we can and do hold the dog’s owner responsible for cruel treatment of the animal in response to this action. That is because, following the innovative suggestion of Jeremy Bentham (2005), animals are sentient and capable of experiencing pain. Consequently, animal ethicists, like Peter Singer (1975) and Tom Regan (1983), formulate patient-oriented approaches that are concerned not with the responsibilities of the perpetrator of an action but with the rights of the individual who is its victim or recipient. Following this division, we can investigate the social aspects of bots and NPCs from either an agent- or patient-oriented perspective. From an agentoriented standpoint, the fundamental question is whether and to what extent these socially interactive mechanisms have responsibilities to the human individuals and communities in which they are involved. Or, to put it in terms of a question: “Can or should (and the choice of verb is not incidental) bots be held responsible or accountable for the decisions they makes or the actions they initiates? From a patient-oriented perspective, the fundamental question is whether and to what extent these mechanisms can be said to have social or legal standing that we—individual human beings and human social institutions—would need to consider and respect. Or, to put it in the form of a question: Can or should bots or NPCs ever have something like rights?

Standard Operating Presumptions Both questions obviously strain against common sense, and this is because of an assumption, or what is perhaps better characterized as a “prejudice,” concerning the ontological status of technology. Machines, even sophisticated informationprocessing devices like computers, smart phones, software algorithms, bots, and so on, are technologies. Technologies, we have been told, are mere tools created and used by human beings. A mechanism or technological artifact means nothing and does nothing by itself; it is the way it is employed by a human user that ultimately matters. As the National Rifle Association (NRA) often reminds American voters, “guns don’t kill, people do.” This commonsense evaluation is structured and informed by the answer that is typically provided for the question concerning technology. “We ask the question concerning technology when we ask what it is. Everyone knows the two statements that answer our question. One says: Technology is a means to an end. The other says: Technology is a human activity. The two definitions of technology belong together. For to posit ends and procure and utilize the means to them is a human activity. The manufacture and

Machine Agency Characterized as a mere tool or instrument, technical devices like computers, AI applications, and bots are not considered the responsible agent of actions that are performed with or through them. “Morality,” as J. Storrs Hall (2001, 2) points out, “rests on human shoulders, and if machines changed the ease with which things were done, they did not change responsibility for doing them. People have always been the only ‘moral agents.’” This is, in fact, one of the standard operating presumptions of computer ethics. Although different definitions of “computer ethics” have circulated since Walter Maner first introduced the term in 1976, they all share an instrumentalist perspective that assigns moral agency to human

139

In the Face of Others

utilization of equipment, tools, and machines, the manufactured and used things themselves, and the needs and ends that they serve, all belong to what technology is” (Heidegger 1977a, 4–5). According to Heidegger’s analysis, the presumed role and function of any kind of technology, whether it be the product of handicraft or industrialized manufacture, is that it is a means employed by human users for specific ends. Heidegger terms this particular characterization “the instrumental definition” and indicates that it forms what is considered to be the “correct” understanding of any kind of technological contrivance (Heidegger 1977a, 5). “The instrumentalist theory,” as Andrew Feenberg (1991, 5) explains, “offers the most widely accepted view of technology. It is based on the common sense idea that technologies are ‘tools’ standing ready to serve the purposes of users.” And because an instrument is deemed neutral without any valuative content of its own, a technological artifact is evaluated not in and of itself, but on the basis of the particular employments that have been decided by its human designer or user. The consequences of this are succinctly articulated by Jean-François Lyotard in The Postmodern Condition: “Technical devices originated as prosthetic aids for the human organs or as physiological systems whose function it is to receive data or condition the context. They follow a principle, and it is the principle of optimal performance: maximizing output (the information or modification obtained) and minimizing input (the energy expended in the process). Technology is therefore a game pertaining not to the true, the just, or the beautiful, etc., but to efficiency: a technical ‘move’ is ‘good’ when it does better and/or expends less energy than another” (Lyotard 1984, 44). Lyotard begins by affirming the traditional ­understanding of technology as an instrument or extension of human activity. Given this “fact,” which is stated as if it were something beyond question, he proceeds to provide an explanation of the proper place of the technological apparatus in epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics. According to his analysis, a technological device—whether it be a simple cork screw, a mechanical clock, or a digital computer—does not in and of itself participate in the big questions of truth, justice, or beauty. Technology is simply and indisputably about efficiency. A particular technological “move” or innovation is considered to be “good,” if, and only if, it proves to be a more effective and efficient means to accomplishing a user-specified objective.

140

Gaming the System

designers and users. According to Deborah Johnson (1985, 6), who is credited with writing the field’s agenda setting textbook, “computer ethics turns out to be the study of human beings and society—our goals and values, our norms of behavior, the way we organize ourselves and assign rights and responsibilities, and so on.” Computers, she recognizes, often instrumentalize these human values and behaviors in innovative and challenging ways, but the bottom line is and remains the way human agents design and use (or misuse) such technology. According to the instrumental theory, therefore, any action undertaken with a technological device is ultimately the responsibility of some human agent—the designer of the system, the manufacturer of the equipment, or the end-user of the product. If something goes wrong with, or someone is harmed by the mechanism, “some human is,” as Ben Goertzel (2002, 1) notes, “to blame for setting the program up to do such a thing.” Following this line of reasoning, it can be concluded that all machine action is to be credited to or blamed on a human programmer, manufacturer, or operator. This is precisely how Epstein (2007, 17) explained and made sense of his situation: “I had been fooled partly because I wasn’t thinking clearly: I had wanted to believe that a beautiful young woman really cared about me. But let’s face it—this was also darned clever programming.” Consequently, holding the machine culpable on this account would not only be absurd; it would also be irresponsible. Ascribing agency to the mechanism, Mikko Siponen (2004, 286) argues, allows one to “start blaming computers for our mistakes. In other words, we can claim that ‘I didn’t do it—it was a computer error,’ while ignoring the fact that the software has been programmed by people to ‘behave in certain ways,’ and thus people may have caused this error either incidentally or intentionally (or users have otherwise contributed to the cause of this error).” For this reason, the instrumental theory not only sounds reasonable; it is obviously useful. It is, one might say, “instrumental” for parsing questions of both legal and moral responsibility in virtual worlds. And it has a distinct advantage in that it locates accountability in a widely accepted and seemingly intuitive subject position, in human decision-making, and action, and it resists any and all efforts to defer responsibility to some inanimate object by blaming or scapegoating what are mere instruments, contrivances, or tools. At the same time, however, this particular formulation also has significant theoretical and practical limitations, especially as it applies to bots and the various games they play with us.

Machine Learning A decade from now, when our self-driving cars are taking us to the office (assuming we still have jobs to go to . . . but that is another story), we might be tempted to look back on March of 2016 as a kind of tipping point in the development of machine learning technology. Why that month of that year? Because of two remarkable events that took place within a few days of each other. In the middle of the month, Google DeepMind’s AlphaGo took four out of five games of Go against one of the most celebrated human players of this notoriously complicated

141

In the Face of Others

board game, Lee Sedol of South Korea. Then, at the end of the month, it was revealed that Microsoft was disabling its teenage girl chatterbot, Tay.ai, because she had learned to become a hate-spewing, neo-Nazi racist in less than eight hours of interaction with human users. Both AlphaGo and Tay are advanced AI systems using some form of machine learning. AlphaGo, as explained in a January 2016 article published in Nature, uses “a combination of deep neural networks and tree search, that plays at the level of the strongest human players, thereby achieving one of artificial intelligence’s ‘grand challenges.’ We have developed, for the first time, effective move selection and position evaluation functions for Go, based on deep neural networks that are trained by a novel combination of supervised and reinforcement learning. We have introduced a new search algorithm that successfully combines neural network evaluations with Monte Carlo rollouts. Our program AlphaGo integrates these components together, at scale, in a high-performance tree search engine” (Silver et al. 2016, 488–489). In other words, AlphaGo does not play the game by following a set of cleverly designed moves fed into it by human programmers. It is designed to discover its own instructions from the activity of gameplay. Although less is known about the inner workings of Tay, Microsoft explains that the system “has been built by mining relevant public data,” that is, training its neural networks on anonymized information obtained from social media, and was designed to evolve its behavior from interacting with users on social networks like Twitter, Kik, and GroupMe (Microsoft 2016a). What both systems have in common is that the engineers who designed and built them have no idea what the systems will eventually do once they are in operation. As Thore Graepel, one of the creators of AlphaGo, has explained: “Although we have programmed this machine to play, we have no idea what moves it will come up with. Its moves are an emergent phenomenon from the training. We just create the data sets and the training algorithms. But the moves it then comes up with are out of our hands” (Metz 2016). Machine learning systems, like AlphaGo, are designed to do things that we cannot necessarily anticipate or completely control. In other words, we now have autonomous computer systems and applications that in one way or another have “a mind of their own.” And this is where things get interesting, especially when it comes to questions of agency and responsibility. AlphaGo was designed to play the game of Go, and it proved its ability by beating an expert human player. So, who won? Who gets the accolade? Who actually beat Lee Sedol? Following the dictates of the instrumental theory of technology, actions undertaken with the computer would be attributed to the human programmers who initially designed the system. But this explanation does not necessarily hold for a machine like AlphaGo, which was deliberately created to do things that exceed the knowledge and control of its human designers. In fact, in most of the reporting on this landmark event, it is neither Google nor the engineers at DeepMind who are credited with the victory. It is AlphaGo. Things get even more complicated with Tay, Microsoft’s foul-mouthed teenage AI, when one

142

Gaming the System

Figure 4.6. Screenshot of one of Tay’s racist tweets from 3 March 2016. https://twitter.com /tayandyou

asks the question: Who is responsible for Tay’s bigoted comments on Twitter? According to the instrumentalist way of thinking, we would need to blame the programmers at Microsoft, who designed the AI to be able to do these things. But the programmers obviously did not set out to design Tay to be a racist. She developed this reprehensible behavior by learning from interactions with human users on the internet. So, how did Microsoft assign responsibility? (Fig. 4.6) Initially, a company spokesperson—in damage-control mode—sent out an email to Wired, the Washington Post, and other news organizations, that sought to blame the victim. “The AI chatbot Tay,” the spokesperson explained, “is a machine learning project, designed for human engagement. It is as much a social and cultural experiment, as it is technical. Unfortunately, within the first 24 hours of coming online, we became aware of a coordinated effort by some users to abuse Tay’s commenting skills to have Tay respond in inappropriate ways. As a result, we have taken Tay offline and are making adjustments” (Risely, 2016). According to Microsoft, it is neither the programmers nor the corporation who are responsible for the hate speech. It is the fault of the users (or some users) who interacted with Tay and “taught” her to be a bigot. Tay’s racism, in other word, is our fault. This is the classic “I blame society” defense utilized in virtually every juvenile delinquent film. Later, on Friday, March 25, Peter Lee, vice president of Microsoft Research, posted the following apology on the Official Microsoft Blog: “As many of you know by now, on Wednesday we launched a chatbot called Tay. We are deeply sorry for the unintended offensive and hurtful tweets from Tay, which do not represent who we are or what we stand for, nor how we designed Tay. Tay is now offline and we’ll look to bring Tay back only when we are confident we can better anticipate malicious intent that conflicts with our principles and values” (Microsoft 2016b). But this apology is also frustratingly unsatisfying (or interesting—it all depends on how you look at it). According to Lee’s carefully worded explanation, Microsoft is only responsible for not anticipating the bad outcome; it does not take responsibility for the offensive Tweets. For Lee, it is Tay who (or “that,” and words matter here) is named and recognized as the source of the “wildly inappropriate and reprehensible words and images” (Microsoft 2016b). And since Tay is a kind of

“minor” (a teenage girl chatbot) under the protection of her parent corporation, Microsoft needed to step in, apologize for their “daughter’s” bad behavior, and put Tay in a time out. Although the extent to which one might assign “agency” and “responsibility” to these mechanisms remains a contested issue, what is not debated is the fact that the rules of the game have changed significantly. As Andreas Matthias points out, summarizing his survey of learning automata:

In other words, the instrumental theory of technology, which had effectively tethered machine action to human agency, no longer adequately applies to mechanisms that have been deliberately designed to operate and exhibit some form, no matter how rudimentary, of independent action or autonomous decision-making. It is important to emphasize that this does not mean the instrumental theory is on this account refuted tout court. There are and will continue to be mechanisms understood and utilized as tools to be manipulated by human users (i.e., lawn mowers, cork screws, telephones, digital cameras). The point is that the instrumentalist formulation, no matter how useful and seemingly correct in some circumstances for explaining some technological devices, does not exhaust all possibilities for all kinds of devices.

Mindless Mechanisms In addition to machine-learning systems, there are also seemingly “empty headed” bots like ELIZA and NPCs that, if not proving otherwise, at least significantly complicate the instrumentalist assumptions. Miranda Mowbray, for instance, has investigated the complications of moral agency in online communities populated by both human users and bots. The rise of online communities has led to a phenomenon of real-time, multi-person interaction via online personas. Some online community technologies allow the creation of bots (personas that act according to a software programme rather than being directly controlled by a human user) in such a way that it is not always easy to tell a bot from a human within an online social space. It is also possible for a persona to be partly controlled by a software programme and partly directly by a human. . . . This leads to theoretical and practical problems for ethical arguments

143

In the Face of Others

Presently there are machines in development or already in use which are able to decide on a course of action and to act without human intervention. The rules by which they act are not fixed during the production process, but can be changed during the operation of the machine, by the machine itself. This is what we call machine learning. Traditionally we hold either the operator/manufacture of the machine responsible for the consequences of its operation or “nobody” (in cases, where no personal fault can be identified). Now it can be shown that there is an increasing class of machine actions, where the traditional ways of responsibility ascription are not compatible with our sense of justice and the moral framework of society because nobody has enough control over the machine’s actions to be able to assume responsibility for them. (Matthias 2004, 177)

(not to mention policing) in these spaces, since the usual one-to-one correspondence between actors and moral agents can be lost. (Mowbray 2002, 2)

144

Gaming the System

According to Mowbray, bots complicate the way we normally think about social responsibility in virtual world interactions. They not only are able to pass as another human, making it increasingly difficult to distinguish the one from the other, but also complicate the assumed one-to-one correspondence between actor and moral agent. “There is,” as Steve Jones (2014, 245) points out, “a concomitantly increasing amount of algorithmic intervention utilizing expressions between users and between users and machines to create, modify or channel communication and interaction.” And this “algorithmic intervention” is making it increasingly difficult to identify who or what is responsible for actions in the space of an online community or virtual world. Although software bots are by no means close to achieving anything that looks remotely like intelligence or even basic machine learning, they can still be mistaken for and “pass” as other human users (Jones 2015; Edwards et al. 2013; Gehl 2013). This is, Mowbray (2002, 2) points out, not “a feature of the sophistication of bot design, but of the low bandwidth communication of the online social space” where it is “much easier to convincingly simulate a human agent.” This occurred most recently in the case of Ashley Madison’s “fembots,” simple, ­prefabricated computer scripts that were designed to initiate a brief amorous exchange with users in the hope of moving them into the ranks of paying customers. Even if the programming of these fembots was rather simple, somewhat shoddy, and even stupid, a significant number of male users found them socially engaging—so much so that they shared intimate secrets with the bot and, most importantly, took out the credit card in the hope of continuing the conversation. Despite this knowledge, these software implementations cannot be written off as mere instruments or tools. “The examples in this paper,” Mowbray (2002, 4) concludes, “show that a bot may cause harm to other users or to the community as a whole by the will of its programmers or other users, but that it also may cause harm through nobody’s fault because of the combination of circumstances involving some combination of its programming, the actions and mental or emotional states of human users who interact with it, behavior of other bots and of the environment, and the social economy of the community.” Unlike artificial general intelligence (AGI), which would occupy a position that would, at least theoretically, be reasonably close to that of a human agent and therefore not be able to be dismissed as a mere tool, these socialbots simply muddy the water (which is probably worse) by leaving undecided the question of whether or not they are tools. In the process, they leave the question of moral agency both unsettled and unsettling.

Machine Patiency In order for a bot (or any entity, for that matter) to have anything like social standing or “rights,” it would need to be recognized as another subject and not just an

object—a tool or instrument—of human action. Standard approaches to deciding this matter typically focus on what Mark Coeckelbergh (2012, 13) calls “(intrinsic) properties.” The method is rather straightforward and intuitive: “you identify one or more morally relevant properties and then find out if the entity in question has them” or not. “Put in a more formal way,” Coeckelbergh (2012, 14) continues, “the argument for giving moral status to entities runs as follows”:

According to this logic, the question concerning the social standing of bots—or “robot rights,” if you prefer the alliteration—would need to be decided by first identifying which property or properties would be necessary and sufficient for moral standing and then determining whether a particular entity or class of entity possesses these properties. If they do possess the morally significant property, then they pass the test for inclusion in the community of moral subjects. If not, then they can be excluded from moral consideration. Deciding things in this fashion, although entirely reasonable and expedient, encounters a number of difficulties. Take, for example, the property of “sentience,” which is the property that Singer (1975), following Bentham (2005), deploys in the process of extending moral consideration to nonhuman animals. The commonsense argument would seem to be this: machines, whether embodied robots or software bots, cannot feel pain or pleasure, and therefore do not have interests that would need to be respected or taken into account. Although this argument sounds entirely reasonable, it fails for at least four reasons.

Factual Problems It has been practically disputed by the construction of mechanisms that appear to suffer or at least provide external evidence of something that looks like pain. Engineers have, in fact, successfully constructed artifacts—both physically embodied robots and virtual software bots—that synthesize believable emotional responses (Bates 1994; Blumberg, Todd and Maes 1996; Breazeal and Brooks 2004) and have designed systems capable of evidencing behaviors that look a lot like what we usually call pleasure and pain. This has been pursued in game development, in particular, in order to fabricate more believable and human-like social behaviors in NPCs (Vrajitoru 2006; Salichs and Malfaz 2006; Ochs et al. 2009; Slater and Burdon 2009; Acampora et al. 2010; Hingston 2014). Conversely, it appears that human beings already empathize with artifacts and accord them some level of social standing, whether or not they actually feel anything. This insight, initially theorized in Reeves and Nass’s CASA studies, has been confirmed by a number of recent empirical investigations. In an experiment conducted by Christopher Bartneck et al. (2007), for instance, human subjects interacted with a robot on a prescribed task and then, at

145

In the Face of Others

1. Having property p is sufficient for moral status s 2. Entity e has property p Conclusion: entity e has moral status s.

146

Gaming the System

the end of the session, were asked to switch off the machine and wipe its memory. The robot, which was, in terms of its programming, no more sophisticated than a basic chatterbot, responded to this request by begging for mercy and pleading with the human user not to shut it down. As a result of this, Bartneck’s research team recorded considerable hesitation on the part of the human subjects to comply with the shutdown request (Bartneck et al. 2007, 55). Even though the robot was “just a machine”—and not even very intelligent—the social situation in which it worked with and responded to users made human beings consider the right of the robot to continued existence. These results have been confirmed in two recent studies, one reported in the International Journal of Social Robotics (Rosenthal-von der Pütten et al. 2013) where researchers found that human subjects respond emotionally to robots and express empathic concern for machines irrespective of knowledge concerning the properties or inner workings of the mechanism, and another that uses physiological evidence, documented by electroencephalography, of humans’ ability to empathize with robot pain (Yutaka et al. 2015). Although these experiments were conducted using physically embodied robots, similar results have been obtained and reported in situations involving software bots (Zubek and Khoo 2002; Seo et al. 2015).9

Epistemological Problems Although taken as providing evidence of “pain,” these demonstrations run into an epistemological problem insofar as suffering or the experience of pain is something that is not directly observable. How, for example, can one know whether an animal or even another person actually suffers? How is it possible to access and evaluate the suffering that is experienced by another? “Modern philosophy,” Matthew Calarco (2008, 119) writes, “true to its Cartesian and scientific aspirations, is interested in the indubitable rather than the undeniable. Philosophers want proof that animals actually suffer, that animals are aware of their suffering, and they require an argument for why animal suffering should count on equal par with human suffering.” But such indubitable and certain knowledge appears to be unattainable. This returns us to another variant of the other minds problem. Although this problem is not necessarily intractable, as Steve Torrance (2013) has persuasively argued, the fact of the matter is we cannot, as Donna Haraway (2008, 226) describes it, “climb into the heads of others to get the full story from the inside.” And the supposed solutions to this difficulty, from reworkings and modifications of the Turing Test (Sparrow 2004; Hingston 2014) to functionalist approaches that endeavor to work around the problem altogether (Wallach & Allen 2009, 58), only make things more complicated and confused. “There is,” as Daniel Dennett (1998, 172) points out, “no proving that something that seems to have an inner life does in fact have one—if by ‘proving’ we understand, as we often do, the evincing of evidence that can be seen to establish by principles already agreed upon that something is the case.” To put it another way, if another socially

interactive entity, like a bot or NPC, issues a statement like “Please don’t do that, it hurts,” we might not have any credible way to discount or disprove it.

Terminological Problems

Moral Problems Finally, all this talk about the possibility of engineering pain or suffering in a mechanism entails its own particular moral dilemma. “If (ro)bots might one day be capable of experiencing pain and other affective states,” Wendell Wallach and Colin Allen (2009, 209) write, “a question that arises is whether it will be moral to build such systems—not because of how they might harm humans, but because of the pain these artificial systems will themselves experience. In other words, can the building of a (ro)bot with a somatic architecture capable of feeling intense pain be morally justified and should it be prohibited?” If it were, in fact, possible to construct an artifact that “feels pain” (however defined and instantiated) to demonstrate the limits of sentience, then doing so might be ethically suspect insofar as in constructing such a mechanism we do not do everything in our power to minimize its suffering. Consequently, moral philosophers, programmers, and developers find themselves in a curious and not entirely comfortable situation. One needs

147

In the Face of Others

To make matters even more complicated, we may not even know what “pain” and “the experience of pain” is in the first place. This point is something that is taken up and demonstrated by Dennett’s “Why You Can’t Make a Computer That Feels Pain” (1998). In this essay, Dennett imagines trying to disprove the standard argument for human (and animal) exceptionalism “by actually writing a pain program, or designing a pain-feeling robot” (Dennett 1998, 191). At the end of what turns out to be a rather protracted and detailed consideration of the problem, Dennett concludes that we cannot, in fact, make a computer that feels pain. But the reason for drawing this conclusion does not derive from what one might expect, nor does it offer any kind of support for the advocates of moral exceptionalism. According to Dennett, the reason you cannot make a computer that feels pain is not the result of some technological limitation with the mechanism or its programming. It is a product of the fact that we remain unable to decide what pain is in the first place. The best we are able to do, as Dennett (1998, 218) illustrates, is account for the various “causes and effects of pain,” but “pain itself does not appear.” What is demonstrated, therefore, is not that some workable concept of pain cannot come to be instantiated in the mechanism of a computer or the programming of a bot, either now or in the foreseeable future, but that the very concept of pain that would be instantiated is already arbitrary, inconclusive, and indeterminate. As Dennett (1998, 228) writes at the end of the essay, “There can be no true theory of pain, and so no computer or robot could instantiate the true theory of pain, which it would have to do to feel real pain.”

148

Gaming the System

to be able to construct such a mechanism in order to demonstrate moral patiency and the possibility of machine moral standing; but doing so would be, on that account, to engage in an act that could potentially be considered immoral. Or to put it another way, the demonstration of artificial moral patiency might itself be something that is quite painful for others. Admittedly, these four problems do not add up to a convincing proof, once and for all, that bots can or even should have something like social standing or rights. But they do complicate the assignment of rights and challenge us to rethink how we make decisions about who deserves to be considered a moral patient and what does not. Although we might not have a satisfactory and thoroughly convincing argument for including mechanisms like bots in the community of moral patients, we also lack reasons to continue to exclude them from such consideration tout court.

Between a Bot and a Hard Place With bots already accounting for over half of the traffic on the internet, we are, it seems, on the verge of that robot apocalypse that has been predicted by countless science fiction stories, novels, and films. “The idea that we humans would one day share the Earth with a rival intelligence,” Philip Hingston (2014) writes, “is as old as science fiction. That day is speeding toward us. Our rivals (or will they be our companions?) will not come from another galaxy, but out of our own strivings and imaginings. The bots are coming: chatbots, robots, gamebots.” In the face of these other (seemingly) socially aware and interactive others we will need to ask ourselves some important questions. “Will we,” as Hingston (2014, v) articulates it, “welcome them, when they come? Will bots have human friends? Will we grant them rights?” In response to these questions, there appears to be at least three options available to us, none of which are entirely comfortable or satisfactory.

Instrumentalism We can try to respond as we typically have, treating these increasingly social and interactive mechanisms as mere instruments or tools. Joanna Bryson makes a case for this approach in her thought-provoking essay “Robots Should be Slaves”: “My thesis is that robots should be built, marketed and considered legally as slaves, not companion peers” (Bryson 2010, 63). Although this might sound harsh, this argument (which was initially formulated for physically embodied robots, but could also be applied to software-based AI systems) is persuasive, precisely because it draws on and is underwritten by the instrumental theory of technology—a theory that has considerable history and success behind it and that functions as the assumed default position for any and all considerations of technology. This decision—and it is a decision, even if it is the default setting—has both advantages and disadvantages. On the positive side, it reaffirms human exceptionalism, making it absolutely clear that it is only the human being who possess rights and responsibilities.

149

In the Face of Others

Technologies—no matter how sophisticated, intelligent, and social—are and will continue to be mere tools of human action, nothing more. If something goes wrong because of the actions or inactions of a bot, there is always some human person who is ultimately responsible for what happens. Finding that person (or persons) may require sorting through layer upon layer of technological mediation, but there is always someone—specifically some human someone—who is responsible. This line of reasoning seems to be entirely consistent with current legal structures and decisions. “As a tool for use by human beings,” Matthew Gladden (2016) argues, “questions of legal responsibility . . . revolve around well-established questions of product liability for design defects (Calverley 2008, 533; Datteri 2013) on the part of its producer, professional malpractice on the part of its human operator, and, at a more generalized level, political responsibility for those legislative and licensing bodies that allowed such devices to be created and used” (Gladden 2016, 184). But this approach, for all its usefulness and apparent simplicity, has at least two problems. First, it neglects the way that the presence of bots within the social milieu already complicate the location and assignment of responsibility. We are, no doubt, the ones who design, develop, and deploy these technologies, but what happens with them once they are released into the wild is not necessarily predictable or under our control. In fact, in situations where something has gone wrong, like the Tay.ai incident, or gone right, as was the case with DeepMind’s AlphaGo, identifying the responsible party or parties behind the bot is at least as difficult as ascertaining the “true identity” of the “real person” behind the avatar. Consequently, as Mowbray (2002) points out, bots do not need intelligence, consciousness, or sentience to complicate questions regarding responsibility. The complex social circumstances in which they operate already open up troubling “responsibility gaps” (Matthias 2004) that are not easily bridged or resolved by simple and rigid reassertion of the instrumentalist theory. Second, and looked at from the side of moral patiency, this strict reassertion of the instrumental theory willfully and deliberately produces a new class of instrumental servants, or what Bryson calls “slaves,” and rationalizes this decision as morally appropriate and justified. Now, the problem here is not what one might think: namely, how the bot-slave might feel about its subjugation. The problem, rather, is with us and the effect this kind of institutionalized slavery, what I have called “Slavery 2.0” (Gunkel 2012a, 86), could have on human individuals and communities. As Alexis de Tocqueville (2004) observed, slavery was not just a problem for the slave; it also had deleterious effects on the master and his social institutions. Clearly Bryson’s use of the term “slave” is deliberately provocative and morally charged, and it would be impetuous to simply presume that her proposal for “robot slaves” would be the same or even substantially similar to what had occurred (and is still unfortunately occurring) with human bondage. But by the same token, we should also not dismiss or fail to take into account the documented evidence and historical data concerning slave-owning societies and how institutionalized forms of slavery affect the social order. In other words,

simply applying the instrumental theory to these new kinds of mechanisms, although seemingly reasonable and useful, might have devastating consequences for us and others.

Machine Ethics

150

Gaming the System

Conversely, we can entertain the possibility of “machine ethics” just as we had previously done for other nonhuman entities, like animals (Singer 1975). And there has, in fact, been a number of recent proposals addressing this opportunity. Wallach and Allen (2009, 4), for example, not only predict that “there will be a catastrophic incident brought about by a computer system making a decision independent of human oversight,” but they use this fact as justification for developing “moral machines,” advanced technological systems that are able to respond to morally challenging situations. Michael Anderson and Susan Leigh Anderson (2011) take things one step further. They not only identify a pressing need to consider the moral responsibilities and capabilities of increasingly autonomous systems but have even suggested that “computers might be better at following an ethical theory than most humans,” because humans “tend to be inconsistent in their reasoning” and “have difficulty juggling the complexities of ethical decisionmaking” owing to the sheer volume of data that need to be taken into account and processed (Anderson and Anderson 2007, 5). These proposals, it is important to point out, do not necessarily require that we first resolve the “big questions” of AGI or machine consciousness. As Wallach (2015, 242) points out, these kinds of machines need only be “functionally moral.” That is, they can be designed to be “capable of making ethical determinations . . . even if they have little or no actual understanding of the tasks they perform.” The precedent for this way of thinking can be found in corporate law and business ethics. Corporations are, according to both national and international law, legal persons (French 1979). They are considered “persons” (which is, we should recall, a moral and legal classification and not an ontological category) not because they are conscious entities like we assume ourselves to be, but because social circumstances make it necessary to assign personhood to these artificial entities for the purposes of social organization and jurisprudence. Consequently, if entirely artificial and human fabricated entities like Google, IBM, or Microsoft, are persons with associated social responsibilities, it would be possible, it seems, to extend similar moral and legal considerations and obligations to an AI or bot like Google DeepMind’s AlphaGo, IBM’s Watson, or Microsoft’s Tay. Once again, this decision sounds reasonable and justified. It extends both moral and legal standing to these other socially aware and interactive entities and recognizes, following the predictions of Norbert Wiener (1954, 16), that the social situation of the future will involve not just human-to-human interactions but relationships between humans and machines and machines and machines. But this shift in perspective also has significant costs. First, it requires that we rethink everything we thought we knew about ourselves, our technology,

Hybrid Approaches Finally, we can try to balance these two extreme positions by taking an intermediate hybrid approach, distributing agency and patiency across a network of interacting human and machine components.10 F. Allan Hanson (2009, 91), for instance, introduces something he calls “extended agency theory,” which is itself a kind of extension or elaboration of the “actor-network theory” initially developed by Bruno Latour (2005). According to Hanson, who takes what appears to be a practical and entirely pragmatic view of things, machine responsibility is still undecided and, for that reason, one should be careful not to go too far in speculating about things: “Possible future development of automated systems and new ways of thinking about responsibility will spawn plausible arguments for the moral responsibility of non-human agents. For the present, however, questions about the mental qualities of robots and computers make it unwise to go this far” (Hanson 2009, 94). In response to this, Hanson (2009, 94) suggests that the problem may

151

In the Face of Others

and ethics. It entails that we learn to think beyond human exceptionalism, ­technological instrumentalism, and all the other -isms that have helped us make sense of our world and our place in it. In effect, it calls for a thorough reconceptualization of who or what should be considered a legitimate center of moral concern and why. Second, bots that are designed to follow rules and operate within the boundaries of some kind of programmed restraint might turn out to be something other than what is typically recognized as a responsible agent. Terry Winograd (1990, 182–183), for example, warns against something he calls “the bureaucracy of mind,” “where rules can be followed without interpretive judgments. . . . When a person views his or her job as the correct application of a set of rules (whether human-invoked or computer-based), there is a loss of personal responsibility or commitment. The ‘I just follow the rules’ of the bureaucratic clerk has its direct analog in ‘That’s what the knowledge base says.’ The individual is not committed to appropriate results, but to faithful application of procedures.” Coeckelbergh (2010, 236) paints a potentially more disturbing picture. For him, the problem is not the advent of “artificial bureaucrats” but “psychopathic robots.” The term “psychopathy” has traditionally been used to name a kind of personality disorder characterized by an abnormal lack of empathy that is masked by an ability to appear normal in most social situations. The functional morality, like that specified by Wallach and Allen and Anderson and Anderson, seeks to design and produce what are arguably “artificial psychopaths”—bots that have no capacity for empathy but which follow rules and in doing so can appear to behave in socially appropriate ways. These psychopathic mechanisms would, Coeckelbergh (2010, 236) argues, “follow rules but act without fear, compassion, care, and love. This lack of emotion would render them non-moral agents—that is, agents that follow rules without being moved by moral concerns—and they would even lack the capacity to discern what is of value. They would be morally blind.”

be resolved by considering various theories of “joint responsibility,” where “moral agency is distributed over both human and technological artifacts.” This proposal, which can be seen as a kind of elaboration of Helen Nissenbaum’s (1996) “many hands” thesis, moves away from the anthropocentric individualism of enlightenment thought, which divides the world into Self and Other, and introduces an ethic that is more in-line with recent innovations in ecological thinking: 152

Gaming the System

When the subject is perceived more as a verb than a noun—a way of combining different entities in different ways to engage in various activities—the distinction between Self and Other loses both clarity and significance. When human individuals realize that they do not act alone but together with other people and things in extended agencies, they are more likely to appreciate the mutual dependency of all the participants for their common well-being. The notion of joint responsibility associated with this frame of mind is more conducive than moral individualism to constructive engagement with other people, with technology, and with the environment in general. (Hanson 2009, 98)

Similar proposals have been advanced and advocated by Deborah Johnson and Peter Paul Verbeek. “When computer systems behave,” Johnson (2006, 202) writes, “there is a triad of intentionality at work, the intentionality of the computer system designer, the intentionality of the system, and the intentionality of the user.” Verbeek (2011, 13) argues, “I will defend the thesis that ethics should be approached as a matter of human-technological associations. When taking the notion of technological mediation seriously, claiming that technologies are human agents would be as inadequate as claiming that ethics is a solely human affair.” For both Johnson and Verbeek, moral responsibility is something distributed across a network of interacting components and these networks include not just other human persons, but organizations, natural objects, and technologies. This hybrid formulation—what Verbeek calls “the ethics of things” and Hanson terms “extended agency theory”—also has advantages and disadvantages. To its credit, this approach appears to be attentive to the exigencies of life in the twenty-first century. None of us, in fact, make decisions or act in a vacuum; we are always tangled up in networks of interactive elements that complicate the assignment of responsibility and decisions concerning who or what is able to answer for what comes to pass. And these networks have always included others—not only other human beings, but institutions, organizations, and even technological components like the bots and algorithms that increasingly help organize and dispense with social activity in online virtual worlds. This combined approach, however, still requires that someone decide and answer for what aspects of responsibility belong to the machine and what should be retained for or attributed to the other elements in the network. In other words, “extended agency theory,” will still need to decide who is able to answer for a decision or action and what can be considered a mere instrument (Derrida 2005, 80).

Notes 1. How this transpired takes us back to the epistemological problems investigated in chapter 2. Since Epstein never had immediate access to the “real person” behind the Ivana avatar, he had to figure this out by manipulating the appearance in such a way that it betrayed itself from itself. He did this by carefully scrutinizing the bot’s email responses, eventually sending Ivana a nonsense request: “asdf;kj as;kj I;jkj;j ;kasdkljk ;klkj ‘klasdfk; asjdfkj. With love, Robert.” When Ivana responded to this with another long reply about her life that appeared to disregard or not even recognize the strange content of the initial message, Epstein figured it out: “Aha. I had been interacting for nearly four months with a computer program—specifically, a chatterbot, which is a program designed to converse with people over the Internet” (Epstein 2007, 17). 2. Castronova adds another neologism to this taxonomy, biot—a term that, as far as I can tell, occurs in just one other context, Bruce Damer’s Avatars: Exploring and Building Virtual Worlds on the Internet (1998). “A ‘biot,’” as Castronova (2001, 7–8) explains, “is a biological bot. A ‘bot’ is a

153

In the Face of Others

These decisions are (for better or worse) often flexible and variable, allowing one part of the network to protect itself from culpability by instrumentalizing its role and deflecting responsibility and the obligation to respond elsewhere in the system. This occurred, for example, during the Nuremberg trials at the end of World War II, when low-level functionaries deflected responsibility up the chain of command by claiming that they “were just following orders.” But this effort can also move in the opposite direction, as was the case with the prisoner abuse scandal at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq during the presidency of George W. Bush. In this situation, individuals in the upper echelon of the network deflected responsibility down the chain of command by arguing that the documented abuse was not ordered by the administration but was the autonomous action of a “few bad apples” in the enlisted ranks. Finally, there can be situations where no one or nothing is accountable for anything. In this case, moral and legal responsibility is disseminated across the elements of the network in such a way that no one person, institution, or technology is culpable or held responsible. This is precisely what happened in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. The bundling and reselling of mortgage-backed securities was considered to be so complex and dispersed across the network that in the final analysis no one was able to be identified as being responsible for the collapse. In the end, how we decide to respond to the opportunities and challenges of this machine question (Gunkel 2012a) will have a profound effect on the way we conceptualize our place in the world (both real and virtual), who we decide to include in the community of moral subjects, and what we exclude from such consideration and why. But no matter how it is decided, it is a decision—quite literally a cut that institutes difference and makes a difference. We are, therefore, ultimately responsible both for deciding who is a moral subject and, in the process, for determining the very configuration and proper limits of ethics now and for the foreseeable future.

154

Gaming the System

shortening of the term robot and refers to code in multi-user domains that performs some function; a bot may be programmed to say ‘hello, this is the economics 201 chat room’ to whomever enters the chat; in a VW [virtual world], a standard bot is the door that opens and closes when double-clicked. A biological bot is a bot with the features of a biological life form: it generally looks and acts like an avatar, but it is being commanded not by a person but by coded instructions. New visitors to a VW often have difficulty at first determining which beings are avatars and which are biots.” Although the neologism was included and used by Castronova in his 2001 essay, the term “biot” is not retained in the subsequent book Silicon Worlds (2005). In that text, Castronova reverts to “bot.” 3. This development has led to some debate about nomenclature. Although most developers, users, and researchers continue to use the term “bot” to describe these increasingly socially interactive and believable NPCs, other have advanced alternative terminology. D. J. H. Burden (2009, 105), for instance, has introduced the term “robotar” in an effort to distinguish the simple chatterbot from a more robust simulation of human social behavior. 4. Existor, the parent company behind Cleverbot, has recently introduced a developer tool called Cleverscript, which has been promoted as an easy way to add “personality” to NPCs. Cleverscript uses simple spreadsheets to assemble conversational behaviors that call upon and leverage the power of the Cleverbot engine. As reported on its website http://cleverscript.com, Cleverscript has been used in games designed to promote the motion pictures Skyfall and Sherlock Holmes and for Hitchbot, a physical robot that hitchhiked across North America. 5. Because of this, the rules of the game in communication studies, as I have argued elsewhere (Gunkel 2012b), need to be significantly adjusted and recalibrated. In Turing’s game of imitation, the computer occupies the position of both medium through which human interlocutors exchange messages and one of the participants with whom one is engaged in these communicative exchanges. Despite this, the discipline of communication has generally limited its interest and approach to the former. That is, it has typically understood and examined the computer—and all technological apparatus—as a medium of human communicative interaction. This fundamental decision concerning the role and function of the computer is consistent with the instrumental theory of technology, which understands technology as nothing more than a tool of human activity, and the standard model of communication theory, which was initially developed by Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver. Despite the remarkable success of these traditional approaches and formulations, they inevitably miss a crucial opportunity originally identified by Turing: the fact that a machine is not just a means of human activity and concourse but might also be a participant in communicative interactions. Although communication studies appear to have marginalized or even ignored this other aspect, the discipline actually began by trying to address and conceptualize the full range of opportunities. This effort was initially expressed in Robert Cathcart and Gary Gumpert’s 1985 essay, “The Person-Computer Interaction.” In this relatively early text (“early” in terms of the discipline’s recognition and engagement with computer technology), the authors draw a distinction between communicating through a computer and communicating with a computer. The former, it is argued, names all those “computer facilitated functions” where “the computer is interposed between sender and receiver.” The latter designates “person-computer interpersonal functions” where “one party activates a computer which in turn responds appropriately in graphic, alphanumeric, or vocal modes establishing an ongoing sender/receiver relationship” (Cathcart and Gumpert 1985, 114). 6. This assumption has deep philosophical roots, going back at least to the work of René Descartes, where spoken discourse was identified as uniquely human and the only certain method by which to differentiate the rational human subject from ostensibly mindless animals and automatons. If one were, for example, confronted with a cleverly designed machine that looked and behaved like a human being, there would be, Descartes (1988, 44–45) argues, at least one very certain means of recognizing that these artificial figures are in fact machines and not real men: “They could never use words, or put together other signs, as we do in order to declare our thoughts to others. For we can certainly conceive of a machine so constructed that it utters words, and even utters words which correspond to bodily actions causing a change in its organs (e.g., if you touch it in one spot it asks

155

In the Face of Others

what you want of it, if you touch it in another it cries out that you are hurting it, and so on). But it is not conceivable that such a machine should produce different arrangements of words so as to give an appropriately meaningful answer to whatever is said in its presence, as the dullest of men can do.” Turing’s game of imitation leverages this Cartesian tradition and turns it back on itself. If, in fact, a machine is able, as Descartes wrote, “to produce different arrangements of words so as to give an appropriately meaningful answer to whatever is said in its presence,” then we would, Turing argues, have to conclude that it was just as much a thinking rational agent as another human being. 7. The initial “A” in CASA is sometimes rendered “as” and other times “are.” For this reason, the acronym indicates either “Computer as Social Actor” or “Computers are Social Actors.” Clifford Nass, who is credited with introducing the concept, has generally used the former (see Nass and Steuer 1993). 8. There are recorded accounts of animals being put on trial in medieval Europe, but these occurrences are considered something of an anomaly in the history of moral and legal thought. 9. There is some experimental evidence indicating that “people may empathize more with a physical robot than a simulated one” (Seo et al., 2015). If this conclusion is indeed correct, then it indicates, on the one hand, important methodological limitations for HRI (Human Robot Interaction) research, which often uses virtual emulations of robots or bots in laboratory tests. This is the finding that is reported by Seo et al. (2015). At the same time, however, and on the other hand, it also indicates that the bar for “passing” as another socially significant other is higher for virtual entities and therefore a more significant design challenge. 10. This form of “distributed agency” and its application to socialbots is developed and investigated by Bollmer and Rodley (2017), Latzko-Toth (2017) and Muhle (2017).

chapter five

OPEN-ENDED CONCLUSIONS

a classic board game, like chess or go, has a definite ending, and players carefully strategize their moves in an effort to control the endgame—the final stages of gameplay in which the outcome is often incipient. In this context, the word “end” admits at least two different-but-related meanings. As Martin Heidegger (1977b, 374) explained, “We understand the end of something all too easily in the negative sense as a mere stopping, as the lack of continuation.” It is in this sense that a game can be said to have ended and that the activity of playing the game has been concluded or finished. But “end” also denotes the achievement of an objective or the completion of a goal (375). It is according to this other sense of the word that one says, for instance, that “the end of the game is to win.” “End,” therefore, indicates both the point at which the game is finished and where the players—or at least one of the players—has achieved the concluding objective that had defined the game and the activity of game-play from the beginning. Although many video, computer, and online games retain this basic ­structure—a structure that is, it should be noted, also at play in the composition of a book—many do not. In fact, some of the more familiar and popular titles in recent years (e.g., Minecraft, World of Warcraft, Farmville, The Sims, and Fruit Ninja) have been intentionally designed to be ongoing and inexhaustible. Their end— “end” in terms of the objective of the game—is to be a never-ending experience. These games have a definite, and often well-defined point of entry or beginning; they have intermediate objectives that players seek to accomplish; but they do not have a final and conclusive ending point. Many games, therefore, never realize the kind of finality and closure that is available and guaranteed with a game like chess. They are deliberately inconclusive and open-ended. This is precisely the situation with a philosophical head-game like deconstruction; it has ends but not an ending.1

The End of Deconstruction Deconstruction, as we have seen characterized in the introduction and deployed through the course of the four chapters that follow it, is a general strategy for intervening in a particular field—in this case, computer games and game studies. As 156

157

Open-Ended Conclusions

a critical undertaking (one oriented by that understanding of “critique” that does not reduce criticism to being a mere tool of error correction), deconstruction takes aim at the conceptual formations that are already in play in an effort not to choose sides—to pick winners or losers—but to challenge their controlling influence and to devise alternative ways for thinking and proceeding otherwise.2 Like a cleverly designed user-generated mod, deconstruction pays close attention to the exigencies of the game and learns how it is organized and operates in order to use its own rules and resources against it to make it function differently. The preceding four chapters comprise separate-but-related efforts or movements in this direction. The investigation began by exploring the “new world” of games and game studies. Like the terra nova that fifteenth-century Europeans had imagined and projected onto the newly discovered landmass of the Americas, computer games and virtual worlds have been characterized and situated as the location for boundless adventure, inexhaustible riches, and personal liberation and reinvention. Unlike the Americas, however, these virtual worlds appear to be virtually limitless and inexhaustible—a never-ending frontier that seems to be the perfect “no place” for pursuing dreams of utopia in all its forms and configurations. But this mythical construction, like the “new world” and “frontier” that were operative during the time of European exploration and American expansionism, is just that: it is a myth. It is a powerful, seductive, and expedient ideology, but it also has potentially devastating side effects and consequences. In dealing with, responding to, and deconstructing these conceptual formations, we have discovered how this “new world” and “frontier” are not some alternative place situated elsewhere and constituting a viable alternative to the old world and its seemingly inescapable limitations of scarcity of resources, geo-spatial restrictions, social inequality, and political struggle. We have found how these concepts already affect the construction of the so-called “new world” in such a way that makes it not so “new,” but rather an extension of the usual ways of thinking. Migrating or making an exodus to the new world that has been produced by games and nongaming virtual worlds sounds attractive, and it definitely sells. But once there, we find that not much has changed, that we carry with us many of the complications we thought we had jettisoned, and that this entire way of proceeding has potentially devastating consequence for us and others. A similar situation confronts us in the face of the avatar. Although initially positioned and advertised as a kind of alter ego that enables identity experimentation and promotes escape from the problematic sociocultural limitations of the real-world exigencies imposed by race, gender, ethnicity, class, and so on, we have discovered that this way of thinking is also a potentially dangerous fiction. It is dangerous not because of the ease with which one may alter identity and perhaps deceive or be deceived; it is dangerous because this very way of thinking is a problem and a product of the conceptual order one had hoped to challenge and escape from in the first place. It is, therefore, not the case that there is a real-and-true person that is expressed and displayed, more or less accurately, by the avatar or

158

Gaming the System

that can be hidden behind a computer-generated mask, allowing one to become something other than what he or she or it or they really and truly are. What we see in the face of the avatar is that this assumption—this “real person” who supposed stands behind the avatar and anchors its virtual vicissitudes—is itself a “retroactively (presup)posited” (Žižek 2008a, 209) artifact and something that is already a technologically mediated social construction and hypothesis. And this outcome has significant blowback, challenging and unraveling the entire metaphysical system that had been deployed in the process of making these very distinctions. The third chapter extended this critical insight, moving from the personal to the political. Not only are online worlds advertised and promoted as places for personal reinvention and self-actualization, but they have also been determined to be unencumbered by many of the sociopolitical limitations and failings that accrue to the modern nation-state and real-world polities. Like the indigenous peoples of the Americas (who supposedly did not have governments, according to the less-than-credible reports filed by the early European explorers), online worlds have been promoted as a virtual state of nature or lawless frontier town, where a man (and it is always a “man” in this particular narrative formation) can live freely and unencumbered by the unfortunate limitations of imperfect social and political institutions. Once again, however, we have seen how this rather romantic mythology collapses under its own conceptual weight, as both crisis and opportunity have compelled designers and players to get real about political exigencies and social problems.3 As a result, online virtual worlds do not simply challenge or renegotiate the existing social contract (Hildebrandt 2014, 186) but institute a another version of it—a Social Contract 2.0—which results in various configurations of post-nation-state polities that are just as stratified and controlled as ­so-called “real-world” social institutions and political systems. What we sought and were promised was a more open and democratic global assemblage, but what we have settled for are new forms of privatized social order that give real-world governments and political institutions a run for their money. Instead of escaping into a new world of friction-free interaction and exchange, what we get is more of the same, if not considerably worse. Finally, the others whom we meet and with whom we interact in these online communities are not just our friends or other people dressed up for an elaborate, computer-mediated masked ball. As the Peter Steiner dog cartoon from the New Yorker illustrates so well, we can no longer (and perhaps never really could) know for sure who or even what is on the other end of the computer-mediated interaction. In other words, the standard distinction between “who” and “what” (Derrida 2005, 80)—a distinction that has helped us sort out both moral and legal questions concerning who should be respected as another socially significant entity and what can simply be used and exploited as a mere thing that does not matter—no longer holds or is at least increasingly murky and indeterminate. “Once upon a time,” as the Onlife Initiative (2014, 44) explains, “it was easy to distinguish people from artefacts.” Now, however, we are no longer quite so sure

Virtually Endless But the game does not and cannot end here. Like a successful mod, the results of these critical interventions effectively challenge and rework the existing system and its operations. In doing so, however, these efforts cannot help but institute their own, alternative set of rules and protocols. For this reason, the outcome of any critical effort, although potentially innovative and useful, can and must be submitted to further scrutiny. And this applies, in particular, to the “real vs. virtual” distinction that has been in play and with which we have played throughout the course of the analysis. In fact, it is by focusing on the word “virtual” (and its supposed opposite, “the real”) that we can see how and why the task of criticism is and needs to be a virtually endless undertaking.

Virtual Although the word “virtual” is currently associated with—and in many cases virtually indistinguishable from—computer technology, it is considerably older than the tech. The term is of Latin origin and was initially utilized to name the possession of a certain set of virtues. Application of the word to computer systems and technology goes back to the large mainframe machines of the 1970s and the development of what was then an innovative feature called “virtual memory.” Virtual memory, which is now a ubiquitous component of most operating systems, comprises a method for extending the capability of RAM (Random Access Memory) without actually having to increase the number of memory circuits or chips. As Benjamin Woolley (1992, 69) explains, everything the computer does can be understood and characterized as “virtual” in this particular sense of the word. Using a computer gives some experience of what “virtual” really means. Personal computer users generally become comfortable with the idea of the system being at once a word processor, a calculator, a drawing pad, a reference library, a spelling checker. If they pulled their system apart, or the disks that contain the software, they would find no sign of any of these things any more than the dismemberment of an IBM 370 would reveal all that extra memory provided by the virtual memory system. They are purely abstract entities, in being independent of any particular physical embodiment, but real nonetheless.

159

Open-Ended Conclusions

about these distinctions. The cumulative effect of this experience, however, is not something that can be neatly contained and quarantined behind the screen as part of some elaborate game. It comes to effect every aspect of our social existence. The encounter with others and other forms of otherness, which are already—and often remain—undecidable, not only influences the way we conceptualize who or what can or should be Other (with a capital “O”), but also effectively pulls the rug out from underneath the usual way of formulating social responsibility and rights. Games, therefore, are not just “fun and games”; they have a way of compelling us to think about others and other forms of otherness in ways that totally reorient much of what we thought we knew and had taken for granted.

160

Gaming the System

According to this characterization, “virtual” is not the opposite of “real,” but rather something that is functionally real and, at the same time, not really real in terms of having some material or physical embodiment. As Michael Heim (1998, 220) accurately summarized it, the virtual is that which is “not actually, but as if.”4 This particular usage of the word is also evident in attempts to describe and characterize virtual reality (VR). According to Derek Stanovsky (2004, 171), the sensory experiences produced by VR hardware and software do not simply conform to the traditional metaphysical divisions that have been used to differentiate the real from its opposites (e.g., the false, the illusory, and the fake) but constitute something that is entirely different. Stanovsky (2004, 171) writes, “It is not simply that the representations of virtual reality are false (not genuine) like the reflections in a mirror. It is not even analogous to Plato’s view of theater, which was to be banned from his Republic because of its distortions and misrepresentations of reality. Instead, virtual reality may summon up a whole new reality, existing without reference to an external reality, and requiring its own internal methods of distinguishing true from false, what is genuine or authentic from what is spurious or inauthentic.” A similar characterization had been provided by the philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1994, 209), who, outside of and well in advance of both experimental prototypes—like Jaron Lanier’s Head Mounted Display (HMD) or the EVL’s CAVE and commercially available display systems, such as Facebook’s Oculus Rift or Samsung’s Gear VR—defined “virtual” in the following way: “We had opposed the virtual and the real: although it could not have been more precise before now, this terminology must be corrected. The virtual is opposed not to the real but to the actual. The virtual is fully real in so far as it is virtual. Exactly what Proust said of states of resonance must be said of the virtual: ‘Real without being actual, ideal without being abstract’; and symbolic without being fictional.” Deployed in this fashion, “virtual” is not situated as the polar opposite of the real, but comprises something that exceeds the grasp of the conceptual opposition situated between the real and its conceptual opposites. As Deleuze (1994, 211) concludes, “The virtual is not opposed to the real; it possesses a full reality by itself.” Despite these efforts to deploy and situate the word “virtual” in such a way that it designates a kind of third alternative that is neither real nor its mere opposite, the term has been successively and successfully reappropriated in such a way that it conforms to the logic of this binary distinction or dichotomy. As Pierre Lévy (2001, 29) explains, “the word ‘virtual’ often signifies unreality, ‘reality’ here implying some material embodiment, a tangible presence. The expression ‘virtual reality’ sounds like an oxymoron, some mysterious sleight of hand. We generally assume that something is either real or virtual, and that it cannot possess both qualities at once.” Understood in this way, the term “virtual” is not only situated in opposition to the real but is allied with a constellation of other terms that have customarily been differentiated from and opposed to the “real”—representation, fantasy, image, illusion, fiction, artificial, and so on. This is, for better or worse, the way “virtual” has been taken up and operationalized in much of the literature

on games and game studies. And this is precisely the problem that Derrida had in mind when he argued that efforts to intervene in existing dichotomies are “constantly risking falling back within what is being deconstructed” (Derrida 1976, 14). Although initially naming an alternative to the real and its opposite, “virtual” becomes (virtually without question) the opposite of the real.

Onlife

With interfaces becoming progressively less visible, the threshold between here (analogue, carbon-based, offline) and there (digital, silicon-based, online) is fast becoming blurred, although this is as much to the advantage of the there as it is to the here. To adapt Horace’s famous phrase, “the captive infosphere is conquering its victor.” The digital online world is spilling over into the analogue-offline world and merging with it. This recent phenomenon is variously known as “Ubiquitous Computing,” “Ambient Intelligence,” “The Internet of Things,” or “Web-augmented things.” I prefer to refer to it as the onlife experience. It is, or will soon be, the next stage in the development of the information age. We are increasingly living onlife. (emphasis in the original)

Although some observers and critics of digital media and technology, like Sherry Turkle (2011), continue to uphold and exploit the conceptual opposition that divides being online from the exigencies of real life, the distinction no longer holds, or is at least increasingly tenuous and indistinguishable. “There is,” as Mark Coeckelbergh (2017, 161) explains, “no longer an online world separate from an offline world, or a virtual world separate from a real world”; “we live online and offline at the same time” (242). And for Coeckelbergh, gaming provides a particularly good and easily accessible illustration of what being “onlife” designates: Gaming is as real as any other technology-mediated practice today. The gamer exercises agency and personality in the new world. Her experience and actions are real. Gaming is also social: contemporary gaming often involves many players, is interactive, and requires role playing. Gamers meet new people and develop friendships and romantic relationships. They thus have real social experiences, including emotional experiences. . . . Gamers’ thinking, interaction, engagement, and feelings are not fictional or virtual; they are totally real. Thus phenomenologically, gamers do not leave this world for another world; their subjectivity is shaped by the reality of the game, which is at the same time “here” and “there,” which is as real as any other experience in this world (2017, 165–166).

161

Open-Ended Conclusions

Subsequent efforts to challenge and move beyond the real/virtual distinction do not do much better. Take, for example, Luciano Floridi’s proposal designated by the neologism “onlife.” If one examines, Floridi (2014, 43) argues, the way digital technology and the user experience has evolved over time, the prevailing conceptual distinction that has, as Lévy pointed out, differentiated “online” virtual experience from “real life” no longer seems to be an appropriate way to characterize how we actually live, work, and play in the twenty-first century.

162

Gaming the System

Despite considerable promise, however, “onlife” cannot be the final word or the end of the game. This is because the alternative it identifies, although embodying and exemplifying what The Onlife Manifesto calls a “privileging of dual pairs over dichotomies” (The Onlife Initiative 2014a, 9), is immediately defined and unavoidably tangled up in terminology that redeploys the kind of conceptual oppositions and dichotomies that it works to mediate and resolve. “Onlife,” in other words, is only able to be described and defined by situating it as an alternative to another way of thinking—that previous configuration where one differentiates between the virtual world and real life. Consequently the previous conceptual duality “online versus real life” is now surpassed and replaced by a new dichotomy “onlife versus online/real-life.” So this solution—this “concept reengineering” (The Onlife Initiative 2014, 7)—does not put an end to things once and for all; it too proceeds and takes shape according to conceptual dichotomies that are and need to be submitted to the critical efforts of deconstruction. The problem with “onlife”—especially as it comes to be developed and fleshed-out by the members of The Onlife Initiative in The Onlife Manifesto—is not that its conceptual reengineering is too radical; the problem is that it is not radical enough. In explicitly recognizing “the blurring of the distinction between reality and virtuality” (The Onlife Initiative 2014, 7) and developing an insightful critique of the “fundamental and ancestral dichotomies” (44) of modernity, The Onlife Manifesto does not recognize, much less submit to critique, the fact that its efforts can only proceed and succeed by arranging a new set of dichotomies organized around the conceptual distinction between “dual pairs” versus “oppositional dichotomies” (9). Consequently, for all its concerted efforts and remarkable insights, The Onlife Manifesto falls short. It effectively pulls its critical punches, declares “game over” too quickly, and misses the fact that critique only works, when it remains operative and in play. This is not, however, some “deficiency” that is unique to this text—or any other work, for that matter. It is the necessary condition that is imposed on any and all efforts to formulate an alternative to existing ways of thinking. Consider, for example, one of the proposed solutions to the gender binary that has been advanced in the context of discussions concerning the rights of transgender individuals. Gender identity, it has been argued, does not easily accommodate itself to the existing rules of the game—the duality of male or female. In response to this, there have been efforts to articulate an alternative to the male-female binary. This alternative has been called “nonbinary,” which immediately, and not surprisingly, produces a new duality or binary opposition: “nonbinary versus binary.” Deconstruction, for its part, has experienced a similar fate. The term, which Derrida introduced in an effort to deconstruct the conceptual opposition situated between construction and destruction, has come to be defined and characterized by situating it in opposition to this conceptual opposition. To make matters worse, or at least significantly more complicated, the term “deconstruction,” like “virtual,” has been subsequently and successfully reappropriated into the

previous conceptual order. Consequently, this neologism that was to have named “what remains to be thought beyond the constructionist/destructionist schema” (Derrida 1993, 147) has been accommodated to this conceptual opposition by what are often well-intended by ultimately misguided efforts to explain things. This has had the practical effect of transforming “deconstruction” into little more than a sophisticated way of saying “destruction.” So Derrida was right, though perhaps too right, when he wrote that the product of deconstruction always and necessarily risks slipping back into the existing conceptual order. It is in response to this problem and seemingly unavoidable exigency that Derrida (1976, 14; 1981, 42) has insisted that deconstruction is and must remain “an interminable analysis,” meaning that the end of deconstruction is necessarily endless. Although one particular instance of critical intervention might successfully escape from the controlling influence of one specific set of conceptual dualities, like the “online versus real-life” distinction, that innovation is temporary and perishable, it eventually and unavoidably passes over into and comes to be defined in terms of other binary oppositions of the same type, like “onlife versus online/real life” or “dual pairs versus oppositional dichotomies.” The critical effort of deconstruction, therefore, must be ready from the very beginning to submit its own movements, outcomes, and conclusions to further criticism. Unlike other efforts that have (or at least make the pretense to have) an exit strategy and endpoint, the work of deconstruction is endless and never able to be finished or entirely completed. If it is done correctly, the words “game over” never appear on the screen. Concluding in this fashion, however, does have repercussions and consequences. First, recursive critical efforts like that of deconstruction often appear to be less than “scientific” or at least contrary to a concept of “science” understood and imagined as linear progress. But this conclusion is not necessarily accurate. Scientific treatises, books, and journal articles typically end in a similar manner, even if this has not been identified as such or has not been made an explicitly object of the investigation. Scholarly texts typically conclude by summarizing the results of the examination and then immediately move on to a consideration of possible limitations or problems with the study in an effort to transform this critical selfreflection into a description of the opportunities and challenges for future research. And that is precisely what has transpired in this conclusion. We summarized what was discovered in the course of the investigation and then addressed the inherent difficulties of closing-off or ending the critical undertaking in the effort to use these insights to invite and motivate future critical reflection. The only difference, if there is a difference, is that this conclusion theorizes the problem of concluding, explicitly taking-up and contending with what often “goes-without-saying” (Barthes 2012, xi). Second, everything depends on how one understands and operationalizes the word “science.” In having the configuration of “an interminable analysis,” deconstruction dissimulates (with at least one crucial difference) the “speculative

Open-Ended Conclusions

Interminable Analysis

163

164

Gaming the System

science” that is the hallmark of G. W. F. Hegel’s “philosophical sciences.” For Hegel, “speculative” was not, as is often the case in colloquial usage, a pejorative term meaning groundless consideration or idle review of something that is inconclusive. Instead, Hegel understood and utilized the term “speculative” in its original and strict etymological sense, which is derived from the Latin noun speculum, meaning mirror. Understood in this way, a “speculative science” is a form of self-reflective knowing. That is, it consists in a mode of cognition that makes its own operations and outcomes an object of its consideration.5 Like the speculative science that was described by Hegel, deconstruction does not approach and ascertain its object of investigation from the outside but makes itself and its own innovations the object of investigation.6 It is, therefore, a thoroughly self-reflective undertaking that continually must submit its own operations and advancements to critical reevaluation. However, unlike the Hegelian system, which did have a definite teleological orientation and exit strategy, deconstruction appears to be caught in the vortex of what can only appear to be an infinite regress of endless self-reflection and auto-affective inquiry. Third, it is this increasingly self-involved and self-reflective aspect of the effort that is the thing that gets on everyone’s nerves, and Derrida (1993, 141) knows it. Such operations frustrate standard operating procedures and do not sit well with readers and critics, who have come to expect that a book, like a game, eventually ends and achieves something approaching closure. As Mark Taylor (1997, 325) explains, “the growing self-reflexivity of theory seems to entail an aestheticizing of politics that makes cultural analysis and criticism increasingly irrelevant.” In other words, what’s the matter with critical undertakings like deconstruction is that it—for all its promise to change things and help us to think otherwise— appears to be increasingly immaterial and unsatisfying. “Instead of engaging the ‘real,’ theory seems caught in a hall of mirrors from which ‘reality’ is ‘systematically’ excluded” (Taylor 1997, 325). Critics of deconstruction, therefore, find the insistence on an “interminable analysis” to be solipsistic (or self-involved) at best and a potentially dangerous kind of intellectual narcissism at worst. At the same time, however, deconstruction already has a response to this criticism, which, it rightfully would point out, necessarily mobilizes and relies the classic conceptual oppositions—“real versus unreal” and “open versus closed”—that deconstruction would have targeted and put in question in the first place. As Niklas Luhmann (1995, 9) insightful recognized, “the (subsequently classical) distinction between ‘closed’ and ‘open’ systems is replaced by the question of how self-referential closure can create openness.” Finally, despite that this outcome cuts across the grain of the usual set of expectations, it is a necessary and unavoidable aspect of the philosophical enterprise. Philosophers as different (and, at times, even antagonistic, especially to each other) as Martin Heidegger (1962), Daniel Dennett (1996), George Edward Moore (2005), and Slavoj Žižek (2006), have all, at one time or another, described philosophy as a critical endeavor that is more interested in developing questions

Notes 1. Although this has been noted before (Gunkel 2007a), it probably bears repeating in this particular context. Philosophers clearly have a way of making things difficult for themselves. They have, it seems, trouble contending with even the simplest of things. G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831), for instance, had a hard time with prefaces and introductions—those seemingly simple and rather insignificant reflections that are generally appended to the beginning of a book in order to get things started. Here is how Hegel began the now famous (or notorious) preface to his 1801 magnum opus The Phenomenology of Spirit: “It is customary to preface a work with an explanation of the author’s aim, why he wrote the book, and the relationship in which he believes it to stand to other earlier or contemporary treatises on the same subject. In the case of a philosophical work, however, such an explanation seems not only superfluous but, in view of the nature of the subject matter, even inappropriate and misleading” (Hegel 1977, 1). Talk about making things difficult for yourself! It is hard enough to write a five-hundred-plus-page book like the Phenomenology, but here Hegel admits to getting tripped up by the first lines of the preface. The problem, as Hegel tries to explain, is that this kind of entry-level material can never be as important as the fully developed work that follows. It is just a preface, a kind of literary appendage or supplement. But for Hegel, this is precisely the problem. He knows the preface is necessary and that readers expect it, but he also knows that this kind of writing is ultimately superfluous and essentially unimportant. He therefore feels compelled to write a preface, and yet he knows that this very effort is already inappropriate, insignificant, and potentially misleading. Deconstruction, by contrast, never really had this kind of trouble. If you looked through the numerous publications of Jacques Derrida, for instance, you would find all kinds of interesting and intriguing prefatory texts that thoroughly exploit the opportunities and challenges of this kind of extraordinary writing. There is the famous “Outwork,” or what is officially titled “Outwork, Hors D’Oeuvre, Extratext, Foreplay, Bookend, Facing: Prefacing,” appended to the beginning of Disseminations in order to deconstruct the very difference between the work and its various textual appetizers, appendages, and add-ons. There is “Tympan,” the preface to Margins of Philosophy, which deals with liminal writings situated at or on the threshold between the inside and outside of the text. And there is the “Preface” and “Exergue” to Of Grammatology, both of which supplement the analysis with more supplementary writings about (the) writing. Prefaces, it seems, were never the problem. What is a problem for deconstruction, however, are conclusions. In fact, if you look at Derrida’s literary output, you would be hard pressed to find anything resembling a concluding chapter. Most of the time, his books just sort of drop off at the end and remain open-ended, inconclusive, or even intentionally—and some might add “frustratingly”—incomplete. This problem with endings is not some literary affectation or the result of insufficient compositional skill on the part of the writer. The difficulty with fabricating a conclusion proceeds from the end of deconstruction itself.

165

Open-Ended Conclusions

than in providing definitive answers. “There are,” as Žižek (2006, 137) describes it, “not only true or false solutions, there are also false questions. The task of philosophy is not to provide answers or solutions, but to submit to critical analysis the questions themselves, to make us see how the very way we perceive a problem is an obstacle to its solution.” This has been the task and objective of this book from the beginning, and if, in the end, readers emerge from the experience with more questions—“more” not only in quantity but also (and more importantly) in terms of the quality of inquiry—then it will have been successful and achieved its end, even if, in the final analysis, this end is not an ending strictly speaking.

166

Gaming the System

2. I have now used this particular verbal construction “thinking otherwise” in a number of different places, so much so that it could be considered a kind of trademark for a research program. The phrase, as explained elsewhere (Gunkel 2007a, 2007b; 2012; 2014a), indicates a way of thinking differently that is able to address and respond to differences that have configurations which are different from the usual way of proceeding. 3. For a detailed and insightful analysis of the interactions between Romanticism and information technology, see Mark Coeckelbergh’s New Romantic Cyborgs (2017). 4. For a systemic account of the full range of the different ontological opportunities that accrue to the “as if,” see Johanna Seibt (2014). 5. A little history of philosophy might help at this point. Hegel’s Science of Logic (the second big book in Hegel’s literary output, originally published in 1812), for example, begins with being, which is immediately challenged by its opposite or antithesis, nothing. But what motivates and drives Hegel’s dialectical method is not the opposition, per se, but rather its resolution in a third, mediating term, which is commonly called the “synthesis”—although, strictly speaking, Hegel never really used this terminology. The opposition situated between being and nothing is resolved or “sublated” (the English translation of the Hegelian watchword aufheben) in the third term becoming. In Hegel’s logic, however, this third term already constitutes a new thesis, which then has its proper antithesis and this dialectical opposition is once again sublated in a subsequent synthesis. And on and on it goes until, at least in Hegel’s formulation, the process reaches its endpoint in the “self-­ comprehending pure concept” or sich begreifenden reinen Begriffe” (Hegel 1989, 844). 6. This is, as explained in the first chapter, the reason why deconstruction cannot be construed as a “method” in the usual sense of the word.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aarseth, Espen. 2001. “Computer Game Studies, Year One.” Game Studies 1, no. 1: 1–4. ______ . 2004. “Gender Trouble: Narrativism and the Art of Simulation.” In First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game, edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan, 45–55. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Acampora, Giovanni, Fabio Ferraguto, and Vincenzo Loia. 2010. “Synthesizing Bots Emotional Behaviors through Fuzzy Cognitive Processes. IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence and Games (CIG), 18–21. (August). http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/5593338/. Althusser, Louis. 2008. On Ideology. Translated by Ben Brewster. London: Verso. Amazon. 2016a. New World Revealed. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com /watch?v=CvPZOg6Zu-E. ______ . 2016b. Amazon Game Studios. https://games.amazon.com/games. Anderson, Karen. 1991. Chain Her by One Foot: The Subjugation of Women in Seventeenth-Century New France. London: Routledge. Anderson, Michael, and Susan Leigh Anderson. 2011. Machine Ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Apter, Emily. 2008. “Technics of the Subject: The Avatar-Drive.” Postmodern Culture 18, no. 2. http://www.iath.virginia.edu/pmc/current.issue/. Aslinger, Ben and Nina B. Huntemann. 2013. Gaming Globally: Production, Play, and Place. New York: Palgrave MacMillan. Au, W. James. 2007. New World Notes (blog). Accessed September 10, 2017. http://nwn.blogs.com. ______ . 2008. The Making of Second Life: Notes from the New World. New York: HarperCollins. Barker, Kim. 2012. “MMORPGing—The Legalities of Game Play.” European Journal for Law and Technology 3, no. 1. http://ejlt.org/article/view/119 /194#_ednref41. ______ . 2013. “Online Games and IP—Battle of the Forms to Social Norms: Reconceptualising and Re-layering?” SCRIPTed: A Journal of 167

168

Bibliography

Law, Technology & Society 10, no. 3. https://script-ed.org/article/online -games-ip-battle-forms-social-norms-reconceptualising-re-layering /#_ftn66. Barlow, John Perry. 1990. “Being in Nothingness.” Mondo 2000 (Summer): 34–43. ______ . 1994. “Jack In, Young Pioneer!” Keynote essay for the 1994 Computerworld College Edition. https://w2.eff.org/Misc/Publications /John_Perry_Barlow/HTML/ jack_in_young_pioneer.html. Barthes, Roland. 1978. “Death of the Author.” In Image, Music, Text. Translated by Stephen Heath, 142–148. New York: Hill & Wang. ______ . 2012. Mythologies. Translated by Richard Howard and Annette Lavers. New York: Hill & Wang. Bartle, Richard A. 2003. Designing Virtual Worlds. Boston, MA: New Riders. ______ . 2004. “Virtual Worldiness: What the Imaginary Asks of the Real.” New York Law School Law Review 49, no. 1: 19–44. http://www.nylslawreview .com/wp-content/uploads/sites/16/2013/11/49-1.Bartle.pdf. ______ . 2010. “From MUDs to MMORPGs: The History of Virtual Worlds.” In International Handbook of Internet Research, edited by Jeremy Hunsinger, Lisbeth Klastrup, and Matthew Allen, 23–39. Amsterdam: Springer. ______ . 2016. MMOs from the Inside Out: The History, Design, Fun, and Art of Massively-Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games. New York: APress. Bartneck, Christopher, Michel van der Hoek, Omar Mubin, and Abdullah Al Mahmud. 2007. “Daisy, Daisy, Give Me Your Answer Do!—Switching Off a Robot.” Proceedings of the Second ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), Arlington, VA, 217–222. Barton, Matt. 2008. Dungeons and Desktops: The History of Computer Role-Playing Games. Wellesley, MA: A.K. Peters. Bates, Joseph. 1994. “The Role of Emotion in Believable Agents.” Communications of the ACM 37: 122–125. Baudrillard, Jean. 1988. America. Translated by Chris Turner. New York: Verso. ______ . 1994. Simulacra and Simulation. Translated by Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Bell, Mark W. 2008. “Toward a Definition of “Virtual Worlds.” Journal of Virtual Worlds Research 1, no. 1: 1–3. https://journals.tdl.org/jvwr/index.php/jvwr /article/view/283. Bennington, Geoffrey. 1993. Jacques Derrida. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bentham, Jeremy. 2005. An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Berger Peter and Thomas Luckmann. 1966. The Social Construction of Reality. New York: Anchor Books. Berkhofer, Robert F. 2011. The White Man’s Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present. New York: Vintage Books.

169

Bibliography

Bessi, Alessandro, and Emilio Ferrara. 2016. “Social Bots Distort the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election Online Discussion.” First Monday 21, no. 11. http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/ fm/article/view/7090 /5653. Billington, Ray Allen. 1965. The American Frontier. Washington, DC: The American Historical Association. Blizzard Entertainment. 2012. “World of Warcraft Terms of Use,” Blizzard Entertainment website. August 22. http://us.blizzard.com/en-us/company /legal/wow_tou.html. Blumberg, Bruce, Peter M. Todd, and Pattie Maes. 1996. “No Bad Dogs: Ethological Lessons for Learning.” In Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Simulation of Adaptive Behavior (SAB96), 295–304. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Boellstorff, Tom. 2008. Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ______ . 2010. “A Typology of Ethnographic Scales for Virtual Worlds.” In Online Worlds: Convergence of the Real and the Virtual, edited by W. S. Bainbridge, 123–133. London: Springer. Boellstorff, Tom, Bonnie Nardi, Celia Pearce, and T. L. Taylor. 2012. Ethnography and Virtual Worlds: A Handbook of Method. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Bogost, Ian. 2007. Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Video Games. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ______ . 2012. Alien Phenomenology, Or What It’s Like to Be a Thing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bollmer, Grant, and Chris Rodley. 2017. “Speculations on the Sociality of Socialbots.” In Socialbots and Their Friends: Digital Media and the Automation of Sociality, edited by Robert W. Gehl and Maria Bakardjieva, 147–163. New York: Routledge. Bonneau, Joseph. 2009. “Democracy Theatre on Facebook.” Light Blue Touchpaper Security Research, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge website. March 29. http://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org /2009/03/29/commentary-on-facebooks-terms-of-service/. Borgmann, Albert. 1999. Holding on to Reality: The Nature of Information at the Turn of the Millennium. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Boucher, David, and Paul Joseph Kelly. 1994. The Social Contract from Hobbes to Rawls. New York: Routledge. Boshmaf, Yazan, Ildar Muslukhov, Konstantin Beznosov, and Matei Ripeanu. 2011. The Socialbot Network: When Bots Socialize for Fame and Money. In Proceedings of the 27th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference, 93–102. Orlando, Florida, 5–9. (December.) New York: ACM Press. http://lersse-dl.ece.ubc.ca/record/264/files/264.pdf.

170

Bibliography

Bragg v. Linden Research, Inc. 2007. 487 F. Supp. 2d 593, Eastern District of Pennsylvania. http://www.paed.uscourts.gov/documents/opinions /07D0658P.pdf. Brandon, William. 1986. New Worlds for Old: Reports from the New World and Their Effect on the Development of Social Thought in Europe, 1500–1800. Athens: Ohio University Press. Breazeal, Cynthia, and Rodney Brooks. 2004. “Robot Emotion: A Functional Perspective.” In Who Needs Emotions: The Brain Meets the Robot, edited by J. M. Fellous and M. Arbib, 271–310. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brown, Kathleen. 1996. Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Bryant, Levi R. 2011a. “Onticology–A Manifesto for Object-Oriented Ontology, Part I.” Larval Subjects. https://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2010/01/12 /object-oriented-ontology-a-manifesto-part-i/. ______ . 2011b. The Democracy of Objects. Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press. ______ . 2014. Onto-Cartography: An Ontology of Machines and Media. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Bryson, Joanna J. 2010. “Robots Should be Slaves.” In Close Engagements with Artificial Companions: Key Social, Psychological, Ethical and Design Issues, edited by Yorick Wilks, 63–74. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Burden, D. J. H. 2009. “Deploying Embodied AI into Virtual Worlds.” In Applications and Innovations in Intelligent Systems XVI: Proceedings of AI-2008, The Twenty-eight SGAI International Conference on Innovative Techniques and Applications of Artificial Intelligence, edited by Tony Allen, Richard Ellis, and Miltos Petridis, 103–116. London: Springer. Burke, Timothy, and Jack Dickey. 2013. “Manti Te’o’s Dead Girlfriend, the Most Heartbreaking and Inspirational Story of the College Football Season, Is a Hoax.” Deadspin (January 16). http://deadspin.com/manti-teos-dead -girlfriend-the-most-heartbreaking-an-5976517. CBS Evening News. 2006. “Is Virtual Life Better than Reality?” July 31. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/07/31/eveningnews/main1852600 .shtml. Calarco, Matthew. 2008. Zoographies: The Question of the Animal from Heidegger to Derrida. New York: Columbia University Press. Calleja, Gordon. 2012. “Erasing the Magic Circle.” In The Philosophy of Computer Games, edited by John Richard Sageng, Hallvard Fossheim, and Tarje Mandt Larsen, 77–94. New York: Springer. Calverley, David J. 2008. “Imaging a Non-Biological Machine as a Legal Person.” AI & Society 22, no. 4: 523–537. Canovan, Margaret. 2005. The People. Cambridge: Polity.

171

Bibliography

Caraci, Ilaria Luzzana. 1992. “Columbus’ Otro Mundo: The Genesis of a Geographical Concept.” Renaissance Studies 6, no. 3–4 (September): 336–351. Carey, James. 1992. Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society. New York: Routledge. Carr, Paul Bradley, and Graham Pond. 2007. The Unofficial Tourists’ Guide to Second Life. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin. Castronova, Edward. “Virtual worlds: A First-Hand Account of Market and Society on the Cyberian Frontier.” Center for Economic Studies and Ifo Institute for Economic Research, CESifo Working Paper Series no. 618, 2001. Available at http://ssrn.com/abstract=294828. ______ . 2003a. “The Price of ‘Man’ and ‘Woman’: A Hedonic Pricing Model of Avatar Attributes in a Synthetic World.” CESifo Working Paper Series no. 957. http://ssrn.com/abstract=415043. ______ . December 2003. “On Virtual Economies.” Game Studies 3, no. 2. http://www.gamestudies.org/0302/castronova/. ______ . 2005. Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ______ . 2007. Exodus to the Virtual World: How Online Fun is Changing Reality. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Cathcart, Robert, and Gary Gumpert. 1985. “The Person–Computer Interaction: A Unique Source.” In Information and Behavior, vol. 1, edited by B. D. Ruben, 113–124. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Cerf, Vinton. 1973. “PARRY Encounters the DOCTOR.” Network Working Group, RFC 439, January 21. https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc439. Chesher, Chris. 1993. “Colonizing Virtual Reality: Construction of the Discourse of Virtual Reality 1984–1992.” Cultronix 1, no. 1: 1–29. http://cultronix.eserver.org/chesher/. Christian, Brian. 2011. The Most Human Human: What Artificial Intelligence Teaches Us About Being Alive. New York: Doubleday. Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. 2003. “Orienting Orientalism, or How to Map Cyberspace.” In AsianAmerican.net: Ethnicity, Nationalism and Cyberspace, edited by Rachel C. Lee and Sau-ling Cynthia Wong, 3–36. New York: Routledge. Churchill, Ward. 1998. Fantasies of the Master Race: Literature, Cinema and the Colonization of American Indians. San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books. Churchland, Paul. M. 1999. Matter and Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Coeckelbergh, Mark. 2010. “Moral Appearances: Emotions, Robots, and Human Morality.” Ethics and Information Technology 12, no. 3: 235–241. ______ . 2012. Growing Moral Relations: Critique of Moral Status Ascription. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

______ . 2017. New Romantic Cyborgs: Romanticism, Information Technology and the

172

Bibliography

End of the Machine. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Conway, Steven and Mark Finn. 2013. “Carnival Mirrors: Sport and Digital Games.” In Digital Media Sport: Technology, Power and Culture in the Network Society, edited by Brett Hutchins and David Rowe, 219–233. New York: Routledge. Conway, Steven, and Jennifer deWinter. 2016. Video Game Policy: Production, Distribution, and Consumption. New York: Routledge. Cooley, Charles Horton. 1962. Social Organization. New York: Schocken Books. Cooper, Jeffrey R. 2000. “The Cyberfrontier and America at the Turn of the 21st Century: Reopening Frederick Jackson Turner’s Frontier.” First Monday 5, no. 7 (July): 1–25. http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue5_7/cooper/index .html. Cooper, Robbie. 2007. Alter Ego: Avatars and Their Creators. London: Chris Boot. Cosmic Origin. 2007. Frontier 1859. https://web.archive.org/web /20080509054422/http://frontier1859.com/mmorpg/ Cruz-Neira, Carolina, Daniel J. Sandin, and Thomas A. DeFanti. 1993. “Surround-Screen Projection-Based Virtual Reality: The Design and Implementation of the CAVE.” Paper presented at SIGGRAPH 1993, http://www.evl.uic.edu/EVL/RESEARCH/PAPERS/CRUZ/sig 93.paper.html. Curtis, Pavel. 1992. “LambdaMOO Takes a New Direction.” LambdaMOO Help Archive, December 9. Also available at http://www.cc.gatech.edu/classes /AY2001/cs6470_fall/LTAND.html. ______ . 1993. “LambdaMOO Takes Another Direction.” LambdaMOO Help Archive, May 16. Also available http://www.cc.gatech.edu/classes/AY 2001/cs6470_fall/LTAND.html. ______ . 2002. “Not Just a Game: How LambdaMOO Came to Exist and What It Did to Get Back at Me.” In High Wired: On the Design, Use, and Theory of Educational MOOs, edited by Cynthia A. Haynes and Jan Rune Holmevik, 25–44. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Damer, Bruce. 1997. Avatars: Exploring and Building Virtual Worlds on the Internet. San Francisco, CA: Peach Pit Press. Datteri, Edoardo. 2013. “Predicting the Long-Term Effects of Human-Robot Interaction: A Reflection on Responsibility in Medical Robotics.” Science and Engineering Ethics 19, no. 1: 139–160. de Certeau, Michel. 1984. Heterologies: Discourse on the Other. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. della Cava, Marco R. 2005. “Utopia Goes Digital.” USA Today August 21. http://www.usatoday.com/tech/products/games/2005-08-21-virtual -utopia_x.htm. Deleuze, Gilles. 1994. Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton. New York: Columbia University Press.

173

Bibliography

Dennett, Daniel C. 1996. Kinds of Minds: Toward and Understanding of Consciousness. New York: Perseus Books. ______ . 1998. Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Denning, Dorothy E., and Peter J. Denning. 1998. Internet Besieged: Countering Cyberspace Scofflaws. New York: ACM Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1976. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. ______ . 1976. Positions. Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ______ . 1993. Limited Inc. Translated by Samuel Weber. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. ______ . 2005. Paper Machine Translated by R. Bowlby. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Dery, Mark. 1994. Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Descartes, René. 1988. Selected Philosophical Writings. Translated and edited by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ______ . 1991. The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. 3. Translated by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, Dugald Murdock, and A. Kenny. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dibbell, Julian. 1993. “A Rape in Cyberspace: How an Evil Clown, A Haitian Trickster Spirit, Two Wizards, and a Cast of Dozens Turned a Database into a Society.” The Village Voice (December 23): 36–42. https://www .villagevoice.com/2005/10/18/a-rape-in-cyberspace/ Reprinted in Dibbell, Julian. 1998. My Tiny Life: Crime and Passion in a Virtual World, 11–32. New York: Henry Holt and Company. Also at http://www.juliandibbell .com/texts/bungle_vv.html. ______ . 1996. “My Dinner with Catherine MacKinnon: And Other Hazards of Theorizing Virtual Rape.” Presentation delivered at Virtue and Virtuality: A Conference on Gender, Law, and Cyberspace, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, April 21. ______ . 2003. “OWNED! Intellectual Property in the Age of eBayers, Gold Farmers, and Other Enemies of the Virtual State. Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the End-User License Agreement.” Paper presented at the first annual State of Play Conference, New York Law School, New York. http://www.juliandibbell.com/texts/owned.html. ______ . 2006. Play Money: Or, How I Quite My Day Job and Made Millions Trading Virtual Loot. New York: Basic Books. Doctorow, Cory. 2010. “Video-Game Shoppers Surrender Their Immortal Souls.” BoingBoing website. April 16. http://boingboing.net/2010/04/16 /video-game-shoppers.html.

174

Bibliography

Douglas, Christopher. 2002. “‘You Have Unleashed a Horde of Barbarians!’: Fighting Indians, Playing Games, Forming Disciplines.” Postmodern culture 13, no. 1 (September). http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/pmc/v013/13.1douglas .html. Downes, Larry. 2009. The Laws of Disruption: Harnessing the New Forces that Govern Life and Business in the Digital Age. New York: Basic Books. Drane, Grey. 2007. “Utopia in Second Life?” Grey’s Blog (blog). April 11. http://drane.zaadz.com/blog/2007/4/utopia_in_second_life. Duckling Kwak. 2007. “User Comment. Issue Tracker Login Bug Fixed.” http://blog.secondlife.com/2007/05/31/issue-tracker-login-bug-fixed/. Dyson, Esther, George Gilder, George Keyworth, and Alvin Toffler. 1996. “Cyberspace and the American Dream: A Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age.” Information Society 12, no. 3: 295–308. http://www.pff.org/issues -pubs/futureinsights/fi1.2magnacarta.html. Edwards, Chad, Autumn Edwards, Patric Spence, and Ashleigh K. Shelton. 2013. “Is that a Bot Running the Social Media Feed? Testing the Differences in Perceptions of Communication Quality for a Human Agent and a Bot Agent on Twitter.” Computers in Human Behavior 33: 372–376. Eisenstein, Zillah R. 1998. Global Obscenities: Patriarchy, Capitalism, and the Lure of Cyberfantasy. New York: New York University Press. Electronic Arts. 2016. User Agreement October 28. http://www2.ea.com/terms -of-service#section3. Electronic Frontier Foundation. 2009. “EFF Launches TOSBack—A ‘Terms of Service’ Tracker for Facebook, Google, eBay, and More.” June 4. https:// www.eff.org/press/archives/2009/06/03-0. Ellis, David. 2010. Deus Ex Machina Sapiens: Minding the Machine. Detroit, MI: Elysian Detroit. Epstein, Robert. 2007. “From Russia, with Love: How I Got Fooled (and Somewhat Humiliated) by a Computer,” Scientific American Mind 18, no. 5 (October/November): 16–17. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article /from-russia-with-love/. Epstein, Robert, Gary Roberts, and Grace Beber. 2009. Parsing the Turing Test: Philosophical and Methodological Issues in the Quest for the Thinking. London: Springer. Eskelinen, Markku. 2001. “The Gaming Situation.” Game Studies 1, no. 1 (July). http://www.gamestudies.org/0101/eskelinen/. ______ . 2004. “Toward Computer Games Studies.” In First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game, edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan, 36–44. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Facebook. 2015a. “Statement of Rights and Responsibilities.” January 30. http:// www.facebook.com/terms. ______ . 2015b. “Facebook Principles.” January 30. https://www.facebook.com /principles.php.

______ . 2016. “Data Policy.” September 29. http://www.facebook.com/about

175

Bibliography

/privacy/. Fairfield, Joshua A. T. 2008. “Anti-Social Contracts: The Contractual Governance of Virtual Worlds.” McGill Law Journal 53: 427–476. http:// scholarlycommons.law.wlu.edu/wlufac/245/. Feenberg, Andrew. 1991. Critical Theory of Technology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fine, Gary Alan. 1983. Shared Fantasy: Role-Playing Games as Social Worlds. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Flew, Anthony. 1975. Thinking About Thinking—Or, Do I Sincerely Want to be Right? London: Collins Fontana. Floridi, Luciano. 1999a. “Information Ethics: On the Philosophical Foundation of Computer Ethics.” Ethics and Information Technology 1, no. 1: 37–56. ______ . 1999b. Philosophy and Computing: An Introduction. New York: Routledge. ______ . 2013. The Ethics of Information. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ______ . 2014. The Fourth Revolution: How the Infosphere is Reshaping Human Reality. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Floridi, Luciano, and J. W. Sanders. 2004. “On the Morality of Artificial Agents.” Minds and Machines 14: 349–379. Ford, Eric. 2004. “A Whole New ‘World.’” The Stanford Daily September 2. http://stanforddailyarchive.com/cgi-bin/stanford?a=d&d =stanford20040902-01.2.22&e. Foreman, Rob. 2006. “Sid Meier’s Colonization.” Gameology website. June 21. http://www.gameology.org/alien_other/colonization. French, Peter A. 1979. “The Corporation as a Moral Person.” American Philosophical Quarterly 16, no. 3: 207–215. Fuentes, Carlos. 1999. The Buried Mirror: Reflections on Spain and the New World. New York: Houghton Mifflin Books. Fuller, Mary, and Henry Jenkins. 1995. “Nintendo® and New World Travel Writing: A Dialogue.” In Cybersociety: Computer-Mediated Communication and Community, edited by Steven G. Jones, 57–72. London: Sage Publications. Fusco, Coco. 1995. English is Broken Here: Notes on Cultural Fusion in the Americas. New York: New Press. Galloway, Alexander R. 2006. “Warcraft and Utopia.” CTheory. February 16. http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=507. Gasché, Rodolphe. 1986. The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gehl, Robert W. 2013. “The Computerized Socialbot Turing Test: New Technologies of Noopower.” Social Science Research Network (SSRN). June 21. http://ssrn.com/abstract=2280240. Gehl, Robert W. and Maria Bakardjieva. 2017. “Social Bots and Their Friends.” In Socialbots and Their Friends: Digital Media and the Automation of Sociality, edited by Robert W. Gehl and Maria Bakardjieva, 1–16. New York: Routledge.

176

Bibliography

Gibson, William. 1984. Neuromancer. New York: Ace Books. Gilson, Dave. 2007. “Even Better Than the Real Thing: Sweatshop Gamers, Virtual Terrorists, Avatar Porn, and Other Tales from the Digital Frontier.” Mother Jones website. May 21. http://www.motherjones.com/news /exhibit/2007/05/exhibit.html. Goertzel, Ben. 2002. “Thoughts on AI morality.” Dynamical Psychology: An International, Interdisciplinary Journal of Complex Mental Processes. http://www.goertzel.org/dynapsyc/2002/AIMorality.htm. Gonzáles, Jennifer. 2000. “The Appended Subject: Race and Identity as Digital Assemblage.” In Race in Cyberspace, edited by Beth E. Kolko, Lisa Nakamura, and Gilbert B. Rodman, 27–50. New York: Routledge. Grimes, Justin, Paul Jaeger, and Kenneth Fleischmann. 2008. “Obfuscatocracy: A Stakeholder Analysis of Governing Documents for Virtual Worlds.” First Monday 13, no. 9 (August 30). http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm /article/view/2153/2029. Gunkel, David J. 1999. “Lingua Ex Machina: Computer Mediated Communication & the Tower of Babel.” Configurations 7, no. 1: 61–89. ______ . 2000. “Rethinking Virtual Reality: Simulation and the Deconstruction of the Image.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 17, no. 1: 45–62. ______ . 2001. Hacking Cyberspace. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. ______ . 2006. “The Virtual Dialectic: Rethinking The Matrix and Its Significance.” Configurations 14, no. 3: 193–215. ______ . 2007a. Thinking Otherwise: Philosophy, Communication, Technology. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press. ______ . 2007b. “Thinking Otherwise: Ethics, Technology and Other Subject.” Ethics and Information Technology 9, no. 3 (July): 165–177. ______ . 2008. “Žižek and the Real Hegel.” International Journal of Žižek Studies 2, no. 2. http://zizekstudies.org/index.php/IJZS/article/view/105/105. ______ . 2010. “The Real Problem: Avatars, Metaphysics and Online Social Interaction.” New Media & Society 12, no. 1: 127–141. ______ . 2011. “To Tell the Truth: The Internet and Emergent Epistemological Challenges in Social Research.” In Emergent Technologies in Social Research, edited by Sharlene Nagy Hesse-Biber, 47–64. New York: Oxford University Press. ______ . 2012a. The Machine Question: Critical Perspectives on AI, Robots, and Ethics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ______ . 2012b. “Communication and Artificial Intelligence: Opportunities and Challenges for the 21st Century.” Communication +1 1, no. 1. https:// doi.org/10.7275/R5Q J7F7R. ______ . 2013. “Toplumsal Sözlesme 2.0: Hizmet Kullanim Sartlari Anlasmalari ve Siyaset Teorisi,” trans. by Neşe Kaplan. In Kültür, Kimlik, Siyaset, edited by Can Bilgili and Gülüm Sener. Istanbul, 199-232. Istanbul, Turkey: Baski Mayis.

______ . 2014a. “A Vindication of the Rights of Machines.” Philosophy & Technology

27, no. 1: 113–132.

______ . 2014b. “Social Contract 2.0: Terms of Service Agreements and Political

Theory.” Journal of Media Critiques 2, no. 1: 145–67.

______ . 2016. “Another Alterity: Rethinking Ethics in the Face of the Machine.”

177

Bibliography

In The Changing Face of Alterity: Communication, Technology and Other Subjects, edited by David J. Gunkel, Ciro Marcondes Filho and Dieter Mersch, 197–218. London: Rowman & Littlefield International. ______ . 2017. “The Other Question: Socialbots and the Question of Ethics.” In Socialbots and Their Friends: Digital Media and the Automation of Sociality, edited by Robert W. Gehl and M. Bakardjieva, 230–248. New York: Routledge. Gunkel, David J., and Ann Hetzel Gunkel. 1997. “Virtual geographies: The new worlds of cyberspace.” Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 14, no. 2: 18–21. Gunkel, David J., and Ann Hetzel Gunkel. 2009. “Terra Nova 2.0—The New World of MMORPGs.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 26, no. 2: 104–127. Gunkel, David J., and Paul A. Taylor. 2014. Heidegger and the Media. Cambridge: Polity Press. Guzman, Andrea. 2017. “Making AI Safe for Humans: A Conversation with Siri?” In Socialbots and Their Friends: Digital Media and the Automation of Sociality, edited by Robert W. Gehl and Maria Bakardjieva, 69–85. New York: Routledge. Gygax, Gary E. 1979. “Dungeons & Dragons: What it is and Where it is Going.” The Dragon 3 (February): 20–30. Halbert, Debora J. 2009. “Public Lives and Private Communities: The Terms of Service Agreement and Life in Virtual Worlds.” First Monday 14, no. 12 (December 7). http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php /fm/article/view/2601/2405. Hajdin, Mane. 1994. The Boundaries of Moral Discourse. Chicago: Loyola University Press. Hall, J. Storrs. 2001. “Ethics for Machines.” KurzweilAI.net. http://www .kurzweilai.net/ethics-for-machines. Hanson, F. Allan. 2009. “Beyond the Skin Bag: On the Moral Responsibility of Extended Agencies.” Ethics and Information Technology 11, no. 1: 91–99. Haraway, Donna. 2008. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Harman, Graham. 2002. Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects. Chicago: Open Court Press. Harrigan, Pat and Noah Wardrip-Fruin. 2007. Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hartevelt, Caspar. 2012. Making Sense of Virtual Risks: A Quasi-Experimental Investigation Into Game-Based Training. Amsterdam: IOS Press.

178

Bibliography

Hartzog, Woodrow. 2013. “Fighting Facebook, A Campaign for a People’s Terms of Service.” The Center for Internet and Society, Stanford Law School. May 22. http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2013/05/fighting-facebook -campaign-people%E2%80%99s-terms-service. Hawhee, Debra. 2004. Bodily Arts: Rhetoric and Athletics in Ancient Greece, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Hegel, G. W. F. 1977. Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by A. V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ______ . (1830) 1987. Hegel’s Logic: Being Part One of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences. Translated by W. Wallace. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ______ . 1989. The Science of Logic. Translated by A. V. Miller. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International. Heidegger, Martin. 1962. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harpers & Row Publishers. ______ . 1977a. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Trans. by William Lovitt. New York: Harper & Row. ______ . 1977b. “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking.” In Martin Heidegger Basic Writings, edited and translated by David F. Krell, 370–392. New York: Harper and Row. ______ . 1978. Wegmarken. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann. Heider, Don. 2009. Living Virtually: Researching New Worlds. New York: Peter Lang. Heim, Michael. 1993. The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality. New York: Oxford University Press. ______ . 1998. Virtual Realism. New York: Oxford University Press. Helmreich, Stefan. 2000 Silicon Second Nature: Culturing Artificial Life in a Digital World. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Hildebrandt, Mireille. 2014. “The Public(s) Onlife.” In The Onlife Manifesto: Being Human in a Hyperconnected Era, edited by Luciano Floridi, 181–194. New York: Springer. Hill, Jonathan D. 1988. Rethinking History and Myth: Indigenous South American Perspectives on the Past. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Hillis, Ken. 1999. Digital Sensations: Space, Identity, and Embodiment in Virtual Reality. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hingston, Philip. 2014. Believable Bots: Can Computers Play Like People? New York: Springer. Hirschberg, Julia, and Christopher D. Manning. 2015. “Advancements in Natural Language Processing.” Science 349, no. 6245 (July): 261–266. https:// doi.org/10.1126/science.aaa8685. Hobbes, Thomas. 2008. Leviathan. Forgotten Books. Holeton, Richard. 1998. Composing Cyberspace: Identity, Community, and Knowledge in the Electronic Age. New York: McGraw Hill.

179

Bibliography

Humphreys, Sal. 2006. “‘You’re in My World Now.’ TM Ownership and Access in the Proprietary Community of an MMOG.” In Information Communication Technologies and Emerging Business Strategies, edited by Shenja Van Der Graaf and Yuichi Washida, 76–96. London: Idea Group. Humphreys, Sal. 2008. “Ruling the Virtual World: Governance in Massively Multiplayer Online Games.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 11, no. 2: 149–171. http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1367549407088329. ______ . 2009. “Norrath: New Forms, Old Institutions.” Game Studies 9, no. 1. http://gamestudies.org/0901/articles/humphreys. Ingram, Mathew. 2012. “Facebook Doesn’t Want Your Vote on Privacy.” Bloomberg. December 12. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/ articles/2012-12-12/facebook-doesn-t-want-your-vote-on-privacy. InnoGames. 2007. The West. https://www.the-west.net/?subid=twqcfm11 _2099_48033228. Jaffary, Nora E. 2007. Gender, Race, and Religion in the Colonization of the Americas. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing. Jankowich, Andrew. 2006. “EULAw: The Complex Web of Corporate RuleMaking in Virtual Worlds.” Tulane Journal of Technology and Intellectual Property 8, no. 1: 1–59. Jenkins, Peter S. 2004. “The Virtual World as a Company Town: Freedom of Speech in Massively Multiple Online Role Playing Games.” Journal of Internet Law 8, no. 1: 1–21. Jennings, Francis. 1994. The Founders of America: How Indians Discovered the Land, Pioneered in it, and Created Great Classical Civilizations, How They Were Plunged into a Dark Age by Invasion and Conquest, and How They are Reviving. New York: W. W. Norton. Jin, Dal Yong. 2010. Korea’s Online Gaming Empire. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Jin, Dal Yong, and F. Chee. 2008. “Age of New Media Empires: A Critical Interpretation of the Korean Online Game Industry.” Games and Culture 3, no. 1: 38–58. Johnson, Barbara. 1981. Translator’s introduction to Disseminations by Jacques Derrida. Translated by Barbara Johnson, vii–xxxiii. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Johnson, Christine R. 2006. “Renaissance German Cosmographers and the Naming of America.” Past and Present 191 (May): 3–43. Johnson, Deborah G. 1985. Computer Ethics. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. Johnson, Deborah G. 2006. “Computer Systems: Moral Entities but not Moral Agents.” Ethics and Information Technology 8, no. 4: 195–204. Johnston, Adrian. 2008. Žižek’s Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Jøn, Allan Asbjørn. 2010. “The Development of MMORPG Culture and The Guild.”  Australian Folklore: A Yearly Journal of Folklore Studies 25 (January): 97–112.

180

Bibliography

Jones, Steven G. 2014. “People, Things, Memory and Human-Machine Communication.” International Journal of Media & Cultural Politics 10, no. 3: 245–258. ______ . 2015. “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bots.” Social Media and Society 1, no. 1: 1–2. Josephy, Alvin M. 1993. America in 1492: The World of the Indian Peoples Before the Arrival of Columbus. New York: Vintage. Josephy, Alvin M. 2007. Lewis and Clark Through Indian Eyes: Nine Indian Writers on the Legacy of the Expedition. New York: Vintage. JVWR, Editorial Board. 2017. “Overview: Focus and Scope.” Journal of Virtual Worlds Research. http://jvwresearch.org/index.php/2011-07-30-02-51-41 /overview. Juul, Jesper. 2005. Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Kant, Immanuel. 1965. Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by Norman Kemp Smith. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Kelly, Kevin and Howard Rheingold. 1993. “The Dragon Ate My Homework.” Wired 1, no. 3 (March 1): 68–73. https://www.wired.com/1993/03/muds-2/. Kelly 2, R. V. 2004. Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games: The People, the Addiction and the Playing Experience. Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company. Kennedy, John F. 1960. “John F. Kennedy’s Acceptance Speech to the Democratic National Convention. John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum.” July 15. https://www.jfklibrary.org/Asset-Viewer /AS08q5oYz0SFUZg9uOi4iw.aspx. Kirkpatrick, D. 2007. “Second Life: It’s Not a Game.” Fortune. January 23. http://money.cnn.com/2007/01/22/magazines/fortune/whatsnext _secondlife.fortune/index.htm. Kittler, Friedrich A. 1999. Film, Gramophone, Typewriter. Translated by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Korpijaakko, Maria Leena. 2015. Cracking Facebook: The Importance of Understanding Technology-Based Communication. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Kücklich, Julian. 2003. “Perspectives of Computer Game Philology.” Game Studies 3, no. 1 (May). http://www.gamestudies.org/0301/kucklich/. Kunkel, Richard G. 2002. “Recent Developments in Shrinkwrap, Clickwrap and Browsewrap Licenses in the United States.” Murdoch University Electronic Journal of Law 9, no. 3. http://www.murdoch.edu.au/elaw/issues/v9n3 /kunkel93_text.html#Shrinkwrap%20License%20Cases_T. Lakoff, George. 2002. Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives think. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

181

Bibliography

LambdaMoo Governance. 2005. http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~eroberts /cs181/projects/online-governance/governance-structures/lambda-moo .html. Langer, Jessica. 2008. “The Familiar and the Foreign: Playing (Post)Colonialism in World of Warcraft.” In Digital Culture, Play, and Identity: A World of Warcraft Reader, edited by Hilde Corneliussen and Jill Walker Rettberg, 87–108. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Lastowka, F. Gregory. 2003. New Worlds/Old Worlds. Terra Nova (blog). September 13. http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2003/09/index.html. Lastowka, F. Gregory, and Dan Hunter. 2006. “Virtual Worlds: A Primer.” In State of Play: Law, Games, and Virtual Worlds, edited by Jack M. Balkin and Beth Simone Noveck, 13–28. New York: New York University Press. Latour, Bruno. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-NetworkTheory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Latzko-Toth, Guillaume. 2017. “The Socialisation of Early Internet Bots: IRC and the Emerging Ecology of Human-Robot Interactions Online.” In Socialbots and Their Friends: Digital Media and the Automation of Sociality, edited by Robert W. Gehl and Maria Bakardjieva. New York: Routledge. Leary, Timothy. 1999. “The Cyberpunk: The Individual as Reality Pilot.” In Cyberreader, edited by Victor Vitanza, 364–372. Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon. Leaver, Tama and Michele Willson. 2016. Social, Casual and Mobile Games: The Changing Gaming Landscape. New York: Bloomsbury. Leisen, Maurício. 2016. “Game Over: About Illusion and Alterity.” In The Changing Face of Alterity: Communication, Technology and Other Subjects, edited by David J. Gunkel, Ciro Marcondes Filho, and Dieter Mersch, 103–121. London: Rowman & Littlefield. Leonard, Andrew. 1997. Bots: The Origin of New Species. San Francisco, CA: Hardwired. Leonard, David J. 2006. “Not a Hater, Just Keepin’ It Real: The Importance of Race- and Gender-Based Game Studies.” Games and Culture 1, no. 1: 83–88. Lévy, Pierre. 2001. Cyberculture. Translated by Robert Bononno. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Licklider, J. C. R., and Robert W. Taylor. 1968. “The Computer as a Communications Device.” Science and Technology. April. http://memex .org/licklider.pdf. Linden Lab. 2008. Secondlife.com. ______ . 2015. “Terms of Service.” Linden Lab website. December 1. https://www .lindenlab.com/tos. Little, Gregory. 1999. “A Manifesto for Avatars.” Intertexts 3, no. 2. (Fall.) http:// www.gregorylittle.org/avatars/text.html. Locke, John. 1821. Two Treatises on Government. London: R. Butler.

182

Bibliography

Loebner. 2017. “Home Page of the Loebner Prize in Artificial Intelligence.” Loebner.net. http://www.loebner.net/Prizef/loebner-prize.html. Lopez, Barry. 1992. The Rediscovery of North America. New York: Vintage. Luhmann, Niklas. 1995. Social Systems. Translated by John Bednarz Jr., with Dirk Baecker. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Lyotard, Jean-François. 1984. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Macario, Giuseppe, and Cory Ondrejka. 2014. “Virtual Worlds: Theoretical Perspectives and Research Methods. Paper presented at the United States Embassy in Italy.” Wikisource website. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki /Virtual_Worlds:_Theoretical_Perspectives_and_Research_Methods. MacCallum-Stewart, Esther, and Justin Parsler. 2007 “Controversies: Historicising the Computer Game.” Situated Play, Proceedings of DiGRA 2007 Conference. http://www.digra.org/wp-content/uploads/digital -library/07312.51468.pdf. MacKinnon, Richard. 1997. “Virtual Rape.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 2, no. 4. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111 /j.1083-6101.1997.tb00200.x/full. MacKinnon, Catherine A. 2005. Women’s Lives, Men’s Laws. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. MacKinnon, Rebecca. 2012. Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom. New York: Basic Books. Magnet, Shoshana. 2006. “Playing at Colonization: Interpreting Imaginary Landscapes in the Video Game Tropico.” Journal of Communication Inquiry 30, no. 2: 142–162. Marcondes Filho, Ciro. 2013. O Rosto e a Máquina: O Fenômeno da Comunicação Visto Pelos Angulos Humano, Medial e Tecnológico. Nova Teoria da Comunicação, vol. I. São Paulo: Paulus. Matthias, Andreas. 2004. “The Responsibility Gap: Ascribing Responsibility for the Actions of Learning Automata.” Ethics and Information Technology 6, no. 3: 175–183. Mauldin, Michael L. 1994. “CHATTERBOTs, TINYMUDs, and the Turing Test: Entering the Loebner Prize Competition.” Proceedings of AAAI-94. http://www.aaai.org/Papers/AAAI/1994/AAAI94-003.pdf. McLuhan, Marshall. 1995. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Cambridge: MIT Press. Meadows, M. S. 2008. I, Avatar: The Culture and Consequences of Having a Second Life. Berkeley, CA: New Riders. Mersch, Dieter. 2016. “Countance—Mask—Avatar: The “Face” and the Technical Artifact.” In The Changing Face of Alterity: Communication, Technology and Other Subjects, edited by David J. Gunkel, Ciro Marcondes Filho, and Dieter Mersch, 17–37. London: Rowman & Littlefield International.

183

Bibliography

Metz, Cade. 2016.“Google’s AI Wins a Pivotal Second Game in Match with Go Grandmaster.” Wired. http://www.wired.com/2016/03/googles-ai-wins -pivotal-game-two-match-go-grandmaster/. Microsoft. 2016a.“Meet Tay—Microsoft A.I. Chatbot with Zero Chill.” https://www.tay.ai/. ______ . 2016b. “Learning from Tay’s introduction.” Official Microsoft Blog (blog). https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2016/03/25/learning-tays -introduction/. Mildenberger, Carl D. 2013. Economic and Social Conflict: Evil Actions and Evil Social Institutions in Virtual Worlds. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Miller, Kiri. 2012. Playing Along: Digital Games, YouTube, and Virtual Performance. New York: Oxford University Press. Misener, Dan. 2011. “Rise of the Socialbots: They Could be Influencing You Online.” CBC News. http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/story /2011/03/29/f-vp-misener-socialbot-armies-election.html. Mnookin, Jennifer L. 1996. “Virtual(ly) Law: The Emergence of Law in LambdaMOO.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 2, no. 1. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ j.1083-6101.1996.tb00185.x/full. Mojang. 2016. “Minecraft End User License Agreement.” May 31. https:// account.mojang.com/documents/minecraft_eula. Moraes, Frank. 2015. “How to Avoid Falling in Love with a Chatbot.” Who Is Hosting This (blog). December 9. http://www.whoishostingthis.com /blog/2015/12/09/chatbots/. Morais, Betsy. 2013. “Can Humans Fall in Love with Bots?” The New Yorker. November 19. http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/can-humans -fall-in-love-with-bots. Morningstar, Chip, and F. Randall Farmer. 1991. “The Lessons of LucasFilm’s Habitat.” In Cyberspace: First Steps, edited by Michael Benedikt, 273–302. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Morrison, James C. 2006. “Marshall McLuhan: No Prophet without Honor.” AmeriQuests website. http://ejournals.library.vanderbilt.edu/ojs/index .php/ameriquests/issue/view/4/showToc. Moutot, Dora. 2014. “My Avatar, My Alter Ego.” The Other: Home of Subcultures & Style Documentary. http://www.the-other.info/2014 /avatar-alter-ego. Mowbray, Miranda. 2002. Ethics for Bots. Paper presented at the Fourteenth International Conference on System Research, Informatics, and Cybernetics, Baden-Baden, Germany, July 29–August 3. http://www .hpl.hp.com/techreports/2002/HPL-2002-48R1.pdf. Muhle, Florian. 2017. “Embodied Conversational Agents as Social Actors?” In Socialbots and Their Friends: Digital Media and the Automation of Sociality, edited by Robert W. Gehl and Maria Bakardjieva, 86–109. New York: Routledge.

184

Bibliography

Nacher, Anna. 2010. “Web 2.0: Mmiędzy Wikinomią a Kontrkulturą–Przypadek Facebooka.” Annales Universitatis Paedagogicae Cracoviensis—Studia de Cultura 1, no. 1: 7–19. http://studiadecultura.up.krakow.pl/article /view/1583. Nakamura, Lisa. 1995. “Race in/for Cyberspace: Identity Tourism and Racial Passing on the Internet.” Works and Days 13, no. 1–2: 181–193. ______ . 2002. Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet. New York, Routledge. ______ . 2007. Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Nass, Clifford, and Jonathan Steuer. 1993. “Anthropomorphism, Agency, & Ethopoeia: Computers as Social Actors.” Human Communication Research 19, no. 4: 504–527. Navas, Eduardo. 2012. Remix Theory: The Aesthetics of Sampling. Vienna: Springer. Newman, James. 2004. Videogames. New York: Routledge. Ninemoons Family. 2007. “Granado Espada: Dispatches from the New World.” GenineMoons (blog). March 15. http://geninemoons.blogspot.com/. Nissenbaum, Helen. 1996. “Accountability in a Computerized Society.” Science and Engineering Ethics 2, no. 1: 25–42. Noble, David W. Autumn. 1964. “Cooper, Leatherstocking and the Death of the American Adam.” American Quarterly 16, no. 3: 419–431. Noveck, Beth Simone. 2006. “Democracy—the Video Game: Virtual Worlds and the Future of Collective Action.” In State of Play: Law, Games, and Virtual Worlds, edited by Jack M. Balkin and Beth Simone Noveck, 257–282. New York: New York University Press. Nye, David E. 2003. America as Second Creation: Technology and Narratives of New Beginnings. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Obar, Jonathan, and Anne Oeldorf-Hirsch. 2016. “The Biggest Lie on the Internet: Ignoring the Privacy Policies and Terms of Service Policies of Social Networking Services.” TPRC 44: The Forty-Fourth Research Conference on Communication, Information, and Internet Policy, August 24. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2757465. Ochs, Magalie, Nicolas Sabouret, and Vincent Corruble. 2009. “Simulation of the Dynamics of Nonplayer Characters’ Emotions and Social Relations in Games.” IEEE Transactions on Computational Intelligence and AI in Games 1, no. 4 (December): 281–297. http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract /document/5325797/. Oguibe, Olu. 1996.“Forsaken Geographies: Cyberspace and the New World “Other.” Fifth International Cyberspace Conference.” Madrid, Spain, June. http://internet.eserver.org/oguibe/. Ondrejka, Cory. 2006. “Finding Common Ground in New Worlds.” Games and Culture 1, no. 1: 111–115.

185

Bibliography

The Onlife Initiative. 2014a. “The Onlife Manifesto.” In The Onlife Manifesto: Being Human in a Hyperconnected Era, edited by Luciano Floridi, 7–16. New York: Springer. ______ . 2014b. “Background Document: Rethinking Public Spaces in the Digital Transition.” In The Onlife Manifesto: Being Human in a Hyperconnected Era, edited by Luciano Floridi, 41–50. New York: Springer. Paccagnella, Luciano. 1997.“Getting the Seats of Your Pants Dirty: Strategies for Ethnographic Research on Virtual Communities.” Journal of ComputerMediated Communication 3, no. 1. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi /10.1111/j.1083-6101.1997.tb00065.x/full. Pagden, Anthony. 1993. European Encounters with the new World: From Renaissance to Romanticism. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Passman, Michael H. 2008. “Transactions of Virtual Items in Virtual Worlds.” Albany Law Journal of Science & Technology 18: 259–290. Pauli, Michelle. 2006. “Braving a New World.” The Guardian. October 24. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/oct/24/fiction. Pearce, Celia. 2004. “Celia Pearce Response in Turn. Riposte to: Towards a Game Theory of Game.” Electronic Book Review. November. http://www .electronicbookreview.com/thread/firstperson/metric. Peckham, Matt. 2007. “Game On: Castronova Predicts Exodus to Virtual Worlds.” PCWorld.com. December 11. http://blogs.pcworld.com/gameon /archives/006051.html. Penny, Simon. 1994. “Virtual Reality as the Completion of the Enlightenment Project.” In Cultures on the Brink: Ideologies of Technology, edited by Gretchen Bender and Timothy Druckrey, 231–248. Seattle, WA: Bay Press. http://ace.uci.edu/penny/texts/enlightenment.html. Pereira, Heloisa Prates. 2014. A Sedução do Falso: Emergência e Significação de Falsos Perfis nos Websites de Redes Sociais. Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo, Brasil. https://tede2.pucsp.br/handle/handle/4676. Pereira, Maria João, Luísa Coheur, Pedro Fialho, and Ricardo Ribeiro. 2016. “Chatbots’ Greetings to Human-Computer Communication.” https:// arxiv.org/pdf/1609.06479.pdf. Perfect World. 2016. Star Trek Online. http://www.arcgames.com/en/games. Peterson, Andrea. 2013. “On the Internet, No one Knows You’re a Bot. And That’s a Problem.” The Washington Post. August 13. https://www.washingtonpost .com/news/the-switch/wp/2013/08/13/on-the-internet-no-one-knows -youre-a-bot-and-thats-a-problem/?utm_term=.b4e0dd77428a. Phillips, Jeremy. 2006. “Editorial: The MMORPG the Merrier.” Journal of Intellectual Property Law & Practice 1, no. 7: 427. Plato. 1982. Crito. Translated by Harold North Fowler. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ______ . 1982. Phaedrus. Translated by H. N. Fowler. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

______ . 1987. Republic. Translated by Paul Shorey. Cambridge, MA: Harvard

186

Bibliography

University Press. Postman, Neil. 1970. “The Reformed English Curriculum.” In High School 1980: The Shape of the Future in American Secondary Education, edited by A. C. Eurich, 160–168. New York: Pitman. ______ . 2000. “The Humanism of Media Ecology.” Proceedings of the Media Ecology Association 1, no. 1: 10–16. http://www.media-ecology.org /publications/MEA_proceedings/v1/humanism_of_media_ecology.html. ______ . 1993. Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology. New York: Vintage Books. Priest, Stephen. 1990. The British Empiricists. New York: Routledge. Protalinski, Emil. 2011. “Israel Uses Facebook to Blacklist Pro-Palestinian Protesters.” ZDNet. July 10. http://www.zdnet.com/blog/facebook/israel -uses-facebook-to-blacklist-pro-palestinian-protesters/2113. ______ . 2014. “Facebook Estimates that Between 5.5% and 11.2% of Accounts are Fake.” The Next Web. February 3. http://thenextweb.com /facebook/2014/02/03/facebook-estimates-5-5-11-2-accounts-fake/. Provenzo, Eugene F. 1999. Video Kids: Making Sense of Nintendo. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Randall, Kim. 2008.“Keeping It Real in a Virtual World.” Sadiepippita (blog). http://sadiepippita.blogspot.com/2008/05/keeping-it-real-in-virtual -world.html. Ravetz, Joe. 2005. “The Internet, Virtual Reality and Real Reality.” In Cyberspace Divide: Equity, Agency and Policy in the Information Society, edited by Brian D. Loader, 113–122. New York: Routledge. Rawls, John. 2003. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ______ . 2007. Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Regan, Tom. 1983. The Case for Animal Rights. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Reeves, Byron and Clifford Nass. 1996. The Media Equation: How People Treat Computers, Television, and New Media Like Real People and Places. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Resneck, Jacob. 2013. “Facebook Censorship of Pro-Kurdish Political Party.” Deutsche Welle. February 11. http://www.dw.com/en/facebook-censorship -of-pro-kurdish-political-party/a-17199752. Rettberg, Jill Walker. 2009. “Facebook Democratisation: The Balance Between Community and Business.” jill/txt. February 27. http://jilltxt.net /?p=2336. Rettberg, Scott. 2008. “Corporate Ideology in World of Warcraft.” In Digital Culture, Play, and Identity: A World of Warcraft Reader, edited by Hilde Corneliussen and Jill Walker Rettberg, 19–38. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

187

Bibliography

Reuveni, Erez. 2007. “On Virtual Worlds: Copyright and Contract Law at the Dawn of the Virtual Age.” Indiana Law Journal 82, no. 2: 261–308. http://www.repository.law.indiana.edu/ilj/vol82/iss2/2. Rheingold, Howard. 1993. The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. New York: Addison-Wesley. ______ . 2000. The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. Revised Edition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Risely, James. 2016. “Microsoft’s Millennial Chatbot Tay.ai Pulled Offline After Internet Teaches Her Racism.” GeekWire. March 24. http://www.geekwire .com/2016/even-robot-teens-impressionable-microsofts-tay-ai-pulled -internet-teaches-racism/. Roberts, Eric. 2005. “A Review of the Various Governance Systems of Online Communities and Ethical Issues that Arise.” Stanford Engineering, Computer Science website. http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~eroberts /cs181/projects/2004-05/online-governance/index.html. Robertson, Adi. 2016. “Inside Sansar, the VR successor to Second Life.” The Verge. November 18. http://www.theverge.com/2016/11/18/13501492 /linden-lab-project-sansar-vr-second-life-hands-on. Robins, Kevin. 1995. “Cyberspace and the World We Live In.” In Cyberspace, Cyberbodies, Cyberpunk: Cultures of Technological Embodiment, edited by Mike Featherstone and Roger Burrows, 135–156. London: Sage Publications. Rockstar Games. 2004. Red Dead Revolver. http://www.rockstargames.com /reddeadrevolver/. ______ . 2010. Red Dead Redemption. http://www.rockstargames.com /reddeadredemption/. Rockwell, Geoffrey, and Stéfan Sinclair. 2016. Hermeneutica: Computer-Assisted Interpretation in the Humanities. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Ronell, Avital. 1989. The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Rosenbloom, Stephanie. 2011. “It’s Love at First Kill.” The New York Times. April 22. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/24/fashion/24avatar.html. Rosenfelder, Andreas. 2007. “World of Warcraft: Die Neue Welt.” Frankfurter Allgemeine. January 21. http://www.faz.net/aktuell/technik-motor /computer-internet/world-of-warcraft-die-neue-welt-1409182.html. Rosenthal-von der Pütten, Astrid M., Nicole C. Krämer, Laura Hoffmann, Sabrina Sobieraj, and Sabrina C. Eimler. 2013. “An Experimental Study on Emotional Reactions Towards a Robot.” International Journal of Social Robotics 5, no. 1: 17–34. Ross, George MacDonald. 2009. Starting with Hobbes. New York: Continuum. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 1893. The Social Contract, Or The Principles of Political Rights. Translated by Rose M. Harrington. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons. ______ . 2004. Discourse on Inequality. Translated by G. D. H. Cole. Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing.

188

Bibliography

Ruch, Adam. 2009. “World of Warcraft: Service or Space?” Game Studies 9, no. 2. http://gamestudies.org/0902/articles/ruch?em_x=22. Ryan, Marie-Laure. 1991. Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Safko, Lon. 2012. The Social Media Bible: Tactics, Tools and Strategies for Business Success. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons. Said, Edward W. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Random House. Sale, Kirkpatrick. 2006. Christopher Columbus and the Conquest of Paradise. New York: Tauris Parke Paperbacks. Saleem, Muniba, and Craig A. Anderson. 2013. “Arabs as Terrorists: Effects of Stereotypes within Violent Contexts on Attitudes, Perceptions, and Affect.” Psychology of Violence 3, no. 1: 84–99. Salichs, Miguel A., and Maria Malfaz. 2006. “Using Emotions on Autonomous Agents: The Role of Happiness, Sadness and Fear.” Proceedings of ASIB Integrative Approaches to Machine Consciousness, 157–164. April 4–5. http://users.sussex.ac.uk/~robertc/Papers /IntegrativeApproachesToMachineConsciousnessAISB06. Sampson, Geoffrey. 2008. Electronic Business. Swindon: British Computer Society. Sapir, Edward. 1941. “The Status of Linguistics as a Science.” In Selected Writings of Edward Sapir in Language, Culture and Personality, edited by David G. Mandelbaum, 160–144. Berkeley: University of California Press. Sardar, Ziauddin. 1996. “alt.civilization.faq: Cyberspace as the Darker Side of the West.” In Cyberfutures: Culture and Politics on the Information Superhighway, edited by Ziauddin Sardar and Jerome R. Ravetz, 14–41. New York: New York University Press. Semitsu, Junichi P. 2011. “From Facebook to Mug Shot: How the Dearth of Social Networking Privacy Rights Revolutionized Online Government Surveillance.” Pace Law Review 31, no. 1 (March 9). http://ssrn.com /abstract=1782267. Schaap, Frank. 2002. The Words That Took Us There: Ethnography in a Virtual Reality. Amsterdam: Aksant Academic Publishers. Schank, Roger C. 1990. “What is AI Anyway?” In The Foundations of Artificial Intelligence: A Sourcebook, edited by Derek Partridge and Yorick Wilks, 3–13. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schell, Jesse. 2010. “Design Outside the Box. Dice 2010.” G4 website. http://g4tv.com/videos/44277/dice-2010-design-outside-the-box -presentation/. Schroeder, Ralph. 2008. “Defining Virtual Worlds and Virtual Environments.” Journal of Virtual Worlds Research 1, no. 1: 1–3. https://journals.tdl.org /jvwr/index.php/jvwr/article/view/294. Schröter, Felix. 2016. “My Avatar and Me: Toward a Cognitive Theory of Video Game Characters.” In Video Games and the Mind: Essays on Cognition, Affect

189

Bibliography

and Emotion, edited by Bernard Perron and Felix Schröter, 32–52. Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company. Scott, J. W. 1988. “Gender: A useful category of historical analysis.” In Gender and the politics of history, edited by J. W. Scott, 28–50. New York: Columbia University Press. Searle, John. 1984. Minds, Brains and Science. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ______ . 1999. “The Chinese Room.” In The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences, edited by R. A. Wilson and F. Keil, 115–116. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Seibt, Johanna. 2014. “Varieties of the ‘As If ’: Five Ways to Simulate an Action.” In Sociable Robots and the Future of Social Relations: Proceedings of Robophilosophy 2014, edited by Johanna Seibt, Raul Hakli, and Marco Nørskov, 97–105. Amsterdam: IOS Press. Seife, Charles. 2014a. Virtual Unreality: The New Era of Digital Deception. New York: Penguin Books. ______ . 2014b. “The Weird Reasons Why People Make Up False Identities on the Internet.” Wired. July 29. https://www.wired.com/2014/07/virtual -unreality-the-online-sockpuppets-that-trick-us-all/. Seo, Stela H., Denise Geiskkovitch, Masayuki Nakane, Corey King, and James E. Young. 2015. “Poor Thing! Would You Feel Sorry for a Simulated Robot? A Comparison of Empathy Toward a Physical and a Simulated Robot.” Proceedings of the Tenth Annual ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, 125–132. http://hci.cs.umanitoba.ca/assets /publication_files/2015-Stela-PoorThing.pdf. Shannon, Claude, and Warren Weaver. 1963. The Mathematical Theory of Communication. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Silver, David, Aja Huang, Chris J. Maddison, Arthur Guez, Laurent Sifre, George van den Driessche, Julian Schrittwieser, Ioannis Antonoglou, Veda Panneershelvam, Marc Lanctot, Sander Dieleman, Dominik Grewe, John Nham, Nal Kalchbrenner, Ilya Sutskever, Timothy Lillicrap, Madeleine Leach, Koray Kavukcuoglu, Thore Graepel and Demis Hassabis. January 28, 2016. “Mastering the Game of Go with Deep Neural Networks and Tree Search. Nature 529: 484–489. https://www.nature.com/articles/nature16961 Singer, Peter. 1975. Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals. New York: New York Review of Books. Siponen, Mikko. 2004. “A Pragmatic Evaluation of the Theory of Information Ethics.” Ethics and Information Technology 6: 279–290. Sisler, Vit. 2008. “Digital Arabs: Representation in Video Games.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 11: 203–220. Skantze, Gabriel. 2005. “Exploring Human Error Recovery Strategies: Implications for Spoken Dialogue Systems.” Speech Communication 45: 325–341.

190

Bibliography

Slater, Stuart and David Burden. March 23–24, 2009. Emotionally Responsive Robotic Avatars as Characters in Virtual Worlds. Conference in Games and Virtual Worlds for Serious Applications. http://ieeexplore.ieee.org /abstract/document/5116548/. Smith, Barry, Hans Albert, David Armstrong, Ruth Barcan Marcus, Keith Campbell, Richard Glauser, Rudolf Haller, et al. 1992. “Open letter against Derrida receiving an honorary doctorate from Cambridge University.” Times (London). May 9. Reprinted in Cambridge Review 113 (October 1992): 138–139; and in Jacques Derrida (1995). Points . . . Interviews 1974–1994, 419–421. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Søraker, Johnny Hartz. 2011. “Virtual Entities, Environments, Worlds and Reality: Suggested Definitions and Taxonomy.” In Trust and Virtual Worlds: Contemporary Perspectives, edited by Charles Ess and May Thorseth, 44–72. New York: Peter Lang. Sparrow, Robert. 2004. “The Turing Triage Test.” Ethics and Information Technology 6, no. 4: 203–213. Spinelli, Martin. January 1996. “Radio Lessons for the Internet.” Postmodern Culture 6, no. 2. http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/authors/spinelli/radio -lessons.html. Stanovsky, Derek. 2004. “Virtual Reality.” In The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Computing and Information, edited by Luciano Floridi, 167–177. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Steiner, Peter. July 5, 1993. “Dog Cartoon,” The New Yorker, 61. Stenger, Nicole. 1993. “Mind is a Leaking Rainbow.” In Cyberspace: First Steps, edited by Michael Benedikt, 49–58. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Stenovec, Timothy. 2015. “Facebook is Now Bigger Than the Largest Country on Earth.” The Huffington Post. January 28. http://www.huffingtonpost .com/2015/01/28/facebook-biggest-country_n_6565428.html. Stephenson, Neil. 1993. Snow Crash. New York: Bantam Spectra. Stern, Joanna. 2012. “Get Out and Vote For Your Right to Vote on Facebook.” ABC News. December 4. http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/facebook -vote-vote-vote-facebook/story?id=17878996. Stone, Allucquere Rosanne. 1991. “Will the Real Body Please Stand Up?: Boundary Stories About Virtual Culture.” In Cyberspace: First Steps, edited by Michael Benedikt, 81–118. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ______ . 1995. The War of Desire and Technology at the close of the Mechanical Age. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Suzuki, Yutaka, Lisa Galli, Ayaka Ikeda, Shoji Itakura, and Michiteru Kitazaki. 2015. “Measuring Empathy for Human and Robot Hand Pain Using Electroencephalography.” Scientific Reports 5, Article No. 15924. http://www.nature.com/articles/srep15924. Tate, Ryan. 2012. “How You Killed Facebook Democracy: A Short History.” Wired. December 10. https://www.wired.com/2012/12/you-killed -facebook-democracy/.

191

Bibliography

Tavinor, Grant. 2009. The Art of Video Games. Malden, MA: Wily-Blackwell. Taylor, Adam. 2017. “Denmark is Naming an Ambassador Who Will Just Deal with Increasingly Powerful Tech Companies.” The Washington Post. February 4. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews /wp/2017/02/04/denmark-is-naming-an-ambassador-who-will-just-deal -with-increasingly-powerful-tech-companies/?utm_term=.d3f4e86053b5. Taylor, Mark. 1997. Hiding. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Taylor, T. L. 2006. Play Between Worlds: Exploring Online Game Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Tebbutt, David. 2007. “Is Second Life a Brave New World?” Information World Review. March 5. http://www.itweek.co.uk/information-world-review /features/2184795/second-life-brave-worlds. TensorFlow. 2017. “TensorFlow—Getting Started r0.12.” https://www .tensorflow.org/versions/ r0.12/get_started/. Terdiman, Daniel. 2004. “Fun in Following the Money.” Wired. May 8. Available at http://archive.wired.com/gaming/gamingreviews/news/2004/05/63363 ?currentPage=all. Todorov, Tzvetan. 1984. The Conquest of America. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: HarperCollins. Torrance, Steve. 2013. “Artificial Consciousness and Artificial Ethics: Between Realism and Social Relationism.” Philosophy & Technology 27, no. 1: 9–29. TOS; DR. 2017. “Terms of Service; Didn’t Read.” https://tosdr.org/. Turing, Alan. 1999. “Computing Machinery and Intelligence.” In Computer Media and Communication: A Reader, edited by Paul A. Meyer, 37–58. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Turkle, Sherry. 1995. Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. New York: Simon and Schuster. ______ . 2011. Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. New York: Basic Books. Turner, Frederick Jackson. 1894. “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” Annual Report of the American Historical Association, 199–227. Washington, DC: The American Historical Association/Government Printing Office. Twinam, A. 1999. Public lives, Private Secrets: Gender, Honor, Sexuality, and Illegitimacy in Colonial Spanish America. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. United States of America. 2011. 1 USC Section 1. http://uscode.house.gov /download/pls/ 01C1.txt. Vault Interactive. 2017. The Final Frontier: Space Simulator. http://store .steampowered.com/app/416140/. Van Gelder, L. 1985. “The Strange Case of the Electronic Woman.” Ms., October.94–95. http://www.msmagazine.com/ Verbeek, Peter Paul. 2011. Moralizing Technology: Understanding and Designing the Morality of Things. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

192

Bibliography

Vespucci, Amerigo. 1916. Mundus Novus: Letter to Lorenzo Pietro Di Medici. Translated by George Tyler Northup. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Vlahos, Michael. 1998. “Entering the infosphere.” Journal of International Affairs, 51, no 2 (Spring): 497–525. Vogel, Rich. 2007. “Utlima Online—the Last Great Frontier.” Games, Learning, and Society Conference (GLS 3.0), Madison, Wisconsin, July 12–13. http://glsconference.org/2007/sessionpages/session-514.html. Volanis, Nikolaos. 2007. “Legal and Policy Issues of Virtual Property.” International Journal of Web Based Communities 3, no. 3: 332–344. Voorhees, Gerald. 2013. “Criticism and Control: Gameplay in the Space of Possibility.” In Ctrl-Alt-Play: Essays on Control in Video Gaming, edited by Matthew Wysocki, 9–20. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Vrajitoru, Dana. 2006. NPCs and Chatterbots with Personality and Emotional Response. IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence and Games. Reno, NV, May 22–24. http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/4100120 /citations. Wallach, Wendell. 2015. A Dangerous Master: How to Keep Technology from Slipping Beyond our Control. New York: Basic Books. Wallach, Wendell, and Colin Allen. 2009. Moral Machines: Teaching Robots Right from Wrong. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Walters, Chris. 2009. “Facebook’s New Terms of Service: ‘We Can Do Anything We Want with Your Content. Forever.’” Consumerist. February 15. http://consumerist.com/5150175/facebooks-new-terms-of-service-we-can -do-anything-we-want-with-your-content-forever. Wardrip-Fruin, Noah, and Pat Harrigan. 2004. First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Ware, Nicholas. 2016. “A Whirl of Warriors: Character and Competition in Street Fighter.” In The Play Versus Story Divide in Game Studies: Critical Essays, edited by Matthew Wilhelm Kapell, 158–170. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Wark, McKenzie. 2007. Gamer Theory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Weber, Rolf H. 2010. Shaping Internet Governance: Regulatory Challenges. London: Springer. Weizenbaum, Joseph. 1967. “Contextual Understanding by Computers.” Communications of the ACM 10, no. 8: 474–480. ______ . 1976. Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation. San Francisco, CA: W. H. Freeman. Whitby, Blay. 2011. “On Computable Morality: An Examination of Machines as Moral Advisors.” In Machine Ethics, edited by Michael Anderson and Susan Leigh Anderson, 138–150. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. White, Brian A. 2007. Second Life: A Guide to Your Virtual World. New York: Que. Wiener, Norbert. 1954. The Human Use of Human Beings. New York: Da Capo.

193

Bibliography

Williams, Michael C. 2005. The Realist Tradition and the Limits of International Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Williams, Patrick, Sean Q. Hendricks, and W. Keith Winkler. 2006. Gaming as Culture: Essays on Reality, Identity and Experience in Fantasy Games. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Winograd, Terry. 1990. “Thinking Machines: Can There Be? Are We?” In The Foundations of Artificial Intelligence: A Sourcebook, edited by Derek Partridge and Yorick Wilks, 167–189. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wolchover, Natalie. 2011. “How the Cleverbot Computer Chats Like a Human.” LiveScience. September 7. http://www.livescience.com/15940-cleverbot -computer-chats-human.html. Wolf, Gary. 1996. “Channeling Mcluhan.” Wired 4, no. 1 (January). http://www .wired.com/wired/archive/4.01/channeling_pr.html. Wolf, Mark J. P. 2003. The Medium of the Video Game. Austin: University of Texas Press. ______ . 2008. The Video Game Explosion: A History from PONG to Playstation and Beyond. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Woolley, Benjamin. 1992. Virtual Worlds: A Journey in Hype and Hyperreality. New York: Penguin Books. Yahoo2008. “Yahoo! Terms of Service.” November 2. http://info.yahoo.com /legal/us/yahoo/ utos/utos-173.html. Yee, Nick. 2008. “Avatar and Identity.” The Daedalus Gateway: The Psychology of MMORPGs. http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus/gateway_identity.html. Zach, Jason S. 2007. “The Ultimate Company Town: Wading in the Digital Marsh of Second Life.” The University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law 10, no. 1: 225–255. http://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/cgi /viewcontent.cgi?article=1200&context=jcl. Zagorin, Perez. 2009. Hobbes and the Law of Nature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Zamora, Margarita. 1993. Reading Columbus. Berkeley: University of California Press. Zaphiris, Panayiotis, Chee Siang Ang, and Andrew Laghos. 2012. “Online Communities.” In The Human-Computer Interaction Handbook: Fundamentals, Evolving Technologies and Emerging Applications, edited by Julie A. Jacko, 623–643. London: CRC Press. Zeifman, Igal. 2017. “Bot Traffic Report 2016.” Incapsula (blog). January 24. https://www.incapsula.com/blog/bot-traffic-report-2016.html. Zeman, Ned. 2013. “The Boy Who Cried Dead Girlfriend.” Vanity Fair. April 25. Žižek, Slavoj. 1989. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso. ______ . 1992. Enjoy Your Symptom! New York: Routledge. ______ . 1993. Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

______ . 2001. On Belief. New York: Routledge. ______ . 2002. Welcome to the Desert of the Real. London: Verso. ______ . 2003. The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity.

Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

______ . 2004. Organs without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences. New York:

194

Bibliography

Routledge. ______ . 2006. The Parallax View. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. ______ . 2008a. For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor. London: Verso. ______ . 2008b. In Defense of Lost Causes. London: Verso. ______ . 2016. Disparities. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Zubek, Robert, and Aaron Khoo. 2002.” Making the Human Care: On Building Engaging Bots.” AAAI Technical Report SS-02-01. Palo Alto, CA, March 25–27. https://www.aaai.org/Papers/Symposia/Spring/2002/SS-02-01 /SS02-01-020.pdf. Zuckerberg, Mark. 2009. “Governing the Facebook Service in an Open and Transparent Way.” The Facebook Blog (blog). February 26. http:// blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=56566967130. ______ . 2017. “Building Global Community.” Facebook Notes. February 16.https://www.facebook.com/notes/mark-zuckerberg/building-global -community/10103508221158471/.

INDEX

acronyms, 2, 7–11, 13, 16 analog: electronic device, 3–5; games, 5, 12 artificial Intelligence (AI): attempts at, 129–132, 143–144; consequences of, 125–126, 140–143; definition/defining features of, 126–127, 133–134; ethics concerning (and rights) of, 144–152; social interactions/relationships with humans, 125–126, 135–136, 153n1, 154n5. See also Turing test avatar: character creation, 43–44; debates about, 62–64, 75–77; definition/defining features of 7, 23–25, 61, 88n1; identity alteration, 24-25, 43, 67, 70, 87, 157–158; reality and/versus appearances, 63–65, 70–74, 76, 80–81, 83; (fake) profiles, 69–70 Au, Wagner James, 22, 29–31, 71 Bartle, Richard, 8–12, 24, 27n3, 100, 121, 126. See also MUD; virtual worlds Bell, David, 11, 13. See also Journal of Virtual Worlds Research; virtual worlds Brown Box, See under console Burke, Kenneth, 17

studies, 3–7, 55-56, 59n6, 156–157; -generated experiences/environments, 12, 35–42, 49–53, 80–83 (see also The Matrix); -mediated communication (CMC), 62–63, 69–70, 75, 80–83, 127–128 (see also Turing Test); network/program/system, 7, 141, 159; scientist (see Lady Lovelace); technology, 7, 47, 124, 159 conceptual oppositions/dichotomies, 17–21. See also deconstruction; Jacques, Derrida console: Brownbox, 3–4; cowboys, 30; games, 5, 16; ray tube amusement device, 3 CVE (collaborative virtual environments), 13. See also acronyms Cooley, Charles Horton, 34. See also new world Critique of Pure Reason, 73, 91n16. See also Kant, Immanuel cyberpunk: 35, 58n5, 61 cyberspace: as a platonic structure, 66; introduction and impact of, 30, 34; new frontier/ world of, 30, 34, 47–50, 60n7, n 9, 121n1; writings on, 29–30, 34–35, 41, 63, 96, 119. See also internet; new world cybertypes: 51–52, 58n5

Castronova, Edward, 7, 11-12, 16, 23, 29–31 cathode ray tube (CRT), 3–4 chatterbot, 124–126, 129–132, 153n1 See also artificial intelligence (AI); ELIZA; robot; socialbot; Turing test chinese room thought experiment, 134–135. See also Turing test Columbus, Christoper: history, 31–34, 44, 46, 53; Diario, 43 computer: 4, 34, 134–136, 159; controlled player, 25, 33 (see also nonplayer character [NPC]); ethics (see under Ethics); game and game

deconstruction: critiques of, 164; definition and methodology of, 18, 19, 166n6; “double science,” 20–21; gaming and, 22, 26, 156–157, 162–163. See also Derrida, Jacques Dennett, Daniel, 146–147. See also epistemology; Turing test Derrida, Jacques: 17–19, 26, 152, 161–163, 165n1, See also deconstructivion; poststructuralism digital games, 5–6, 16. See also computer games; video games Dungeons and Dragons (D&D), 7, 37, 95. See also RPG

195

196

Index

ELIZA, 129–132. See also chatterbot; artificial intelligence (AI); Turing test empirical: evidence, 97, 101; knowledge, 14; methodology, 68, 74, 133 end user license agreement (EULA): as contractual document, 24–25, 100 as a social contract (compact), 92, 98, 100; writings on, 100 102, 104, 116–120, 121n4, 122n5. See also terms of service (ToS) agreement; social contract endings, 156–157 ethics: computer/robots 136–140, 150–153; ethical theory, 137 ehnocentrism, 31, 46–49, 53. See also cybertypes EverQuest, 29, 43–44, 99–100. See also MMO; MMORPG Facebook: data policy 109–111; identity and, 69–70, 88n1; innovations of, 6–7, 102, 113–115, 120; social contract/statement of rights and responsibilities of, 97, 102–104, 113–115, 119, 122n9; the, principles, 104–108, 111–112, 115– 116; the virtual world of, 89n8, 117, 122n16 frontier: frontier hypothesis, 32–34 (see also Turner, Frederick Jackson); historically, 32–33, 39, 46, 48, 52, 57n2, 60n8; rhetoric of, 45, 47–48, 53–54, 157. See also new frontier game studies: 16–19, 22, 27, 60n10; Kant and, 76, 89–90n9. See also under computer gaming the system, 1–2, 26. See also game studies; video games; virtual worlds Google technologies, 126, 132, 140–141, 150 Heidegger, Martin: on language, 17, 156; on technology, 138–139; on truth, 85, 91n16. See also word games; endings. Hobbes, Thomas, 93, 95–97, 107–108, 117–118. See also social contract theory; state of nature IBM, 6, 150, 159 information and communication technology (ICT): forms of, 5-6, impact of, 34; Plato and, 66. See also Heidegger, Martin; technology instrumentalist theory, 139–140, 143, 148–150, 154n5 interactive social environments, 9, 61 Journal of Virtual Worlds Research (JVWR), 11, 13. See also virtual worlds; Bell, David Kant, Immanuel: and avatars, 74, 84; critical perspective of, 77, 83, 87, 91n16; critiques by others of, 77–79, 84; philosophies on

intuition/reality and appearances, 24, 72–73, 76, 89–90n9, 89–90n13. See also Critique of Pure Reason Lacan, Jacques, 78, 86 Lady Lovelace (Byron, Ada Augusta), 134. See also computer scientist; Searle, John; Turing, Alan; Turing test Linden Lab: on Second Life and MMO(RPG)s, 6, 10, 40, 57–58n3; terms of service, 99–100, 102. See also New World Notes; Second Life linguistic turn, 14, 17. See also word games Locke, John, 93, 98, 104, 108, 111. See also social contract theory; state of nature Lyotard, Jean-François, 139. See also instrumentalist theory; technology MMO/MMOG (Massively Multiplayer Online [Games]): definition/defining features, 10, 13, 16, 45, 126; identity/avatars in, 69–70; the new world (rhetoric) of, 41–42, 50, 53–54; social compacts of, 98; virtual worlds of, 29, 37–40. See also MMORPG; acronyms MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game): definition/defining features, 9–11, 16, 100, 126; the new world (rhetoric) of, 22, 29, 37–47, 53–54, 60n9 The Matrix, 19–20 moral agency: theory, 136–139, 145; of machines/ robots, 139–140, 143–145, 147–148, 150–153 (see also under artificial intelligence (AI); Robot). See also ethics Microsoft: Tay.ai, 132, 141–143 (See also, artificial intelligence [AI]); Xbox, 5 (See also consoles) Minecraft, 3, 50, 156. See also sandbox games multiplayer game. See MMO; MMORPG; MUD MUD (multi-user dungeons/domain/dimension), 2, 8–10, 13, 24, 94, 121n2. See also acronyms; Bartle, Richard MUSH (multi-user shared hack/habitat/holodeck/hallucination), 8, 9. See also acronyms MUVE (multi-user virtual environment), 2, 13. See also acronyms new Frontier: cyber/(bio)electronic), 34–35, 38–39, 48, 50, 53; rhetoric of, 34–35; simulations and in games, 22–23, 29–31, 35–37, 42–47, 52–54, 58–59n5; writings on, 29–30, 34, 38–39. See also frontier; Terra Nova [2.0] new world, 22, 29–57 passim; historical instances of, 32; rhetoric, 30. See also terra nova [2.0]; frontier

New World Notes, 22, 30. See also, Au, Wagner James Nintendo, 3, 30, 50 nonplayer character (NPC): computer directed, 25, 143, 145; socially interactive, 128, 131, 138, 147, 154nn3, 4. See also avatar; robot

robot: definitions/defining features of, 124, 126, 148, 153–154n2, 154n3; fears over, 148, 151; ­intelligence (see also artificial intelligence [AI]; Turing test); interactions with humans 124– 126, 134, 143–146, 155n9; rights/responsibilities of, 137–139, 145–148 (see under artificial intelligence [AI]). See also instrumentalist theory role playing game (RPG), 7–9; new world and frontier rhetoric, 36–39, 45, 52–54; tabletop, 29–31, 88n1 (see also Dungeons and Dragons). See also MMORPG Rousseau, Jean-Jeacques, 93. See also social contract theory sandbox game, 3, 38. See also MMO(G); MMORPG; Minecraft Sardar, Ziauddin, 32, 35, 41, 52–53. See also new world; frontier Searle, John. See chinese room thought experiment Second Life: application, 6, 10, 31, 57–58n3; identity and, 64, 72–74, 89n8; terms of service of, 99–100, 102; terra nova/new world rhetoric and, 40–42, 45; written works on, 29–30, 38, 44, 57n1. See also Linden Labs; New World Notes social contract theory, 92–93, 95–97, 100, 107– 108. See also state of nature; Hobbes, Thomas; Locke, John socialbot, 126, 144. See also artificial intelligence (AI); chatterbot; robot; Turing test Socrates, 14–15, 65–66. See also epistemology; ethics; Plato Space Invaders, 24–25 state of nature: philosophical tradition, 93, 95–97, 107; virtual, 93, 95–97, 158

technology: definitions/defining features of, 47, 54–55, 138–139, 154n5; gaming, 161 ; the real/ virtual distinction, 161 (see also under virtual). See also under computer; See also information and communication technology (ICT) terms of service (ToS): as a social contract, 24–25, 92, 116–119; features of a 100, 102, 104, 113–114, 121nn3, 4, 122n5; specific, of companies/games, 99-100, 102, 122n7; reading behaviors of, 101, 117, 122n9. See also end user license agreement; social contract theory terra nova (2.0): cyberspace as the, 22, 29, 50, 157; rhetoric of, 31, 57–58n3. See also frontier; new world; Terra Nova (weblog) Terra Nova (weblog), 30 TinyMUD, 9, 131. See also acronyms; chatterbot; MUD Turing, Alan, 126–129. See also Turing test Turing test: critiques, 134–135; ELIZA, 129–130; features and consequences, 133, 154n5; the imitation game, 126–128; philosophical implications, 133–134, 146, 154–155n6. See also Turing, Alan Turner, Frederick Jackson: personal life, 46; frontier hypothesis, 32-34, 38, 53. Ultima (game series), 9–10, 23, 31. See also MMORPG utopia, 41–43, 123n15 virtual: definitions/defining features of, 11–12, 23–25; and new world rhetoric, 35, 38, 41–46, 50–53 (see utopia); graphical, 37 (see also MMO/MMOG; MMORPG); reality (VR), 22, 31, 66–67; social interaction, 74–76, 124–126, 153–154n2, 155n9 (see also MUD); textual/text based, 9, 88n1 (see also MUD); writings on, 34–35, 44, 60n9, virtual worlds (VW): 10–17, 29, 43, 63, 101; language of, 54–56; social contracts within, 92–95, 98–100, 116–121 (see also state of nature); versus reality/the real, 64, 67, 72, 84, 89n8, 159–162 (see also Žižek, Slavoj). See also Journal of Virtual Worlds Research video game: concerns with, 51–52, 61; definition/ defining features of, 3–6, 16, 41; studies of, see under game studies. See also digital games Wiener, Norbert, 25, 150 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 17, 54

197

Index

Plato: Allegory of the Cave, 19, 66, 88n6; metaphysics 65–66, 72; works: The Cratylus, 14–15; Crito, 93; Phaedo, 14; Phaedrus, 66; The ­Republic, 65. See also platonism; Socrates platonism: 24, 65–66, 68, 83, 87; critiques of, 72 postmodernism: and cyberspace/technology, 41, 92, 115, 139; philosophical, 89n9. See also Kant, Immanuel. poststructuralism, 18. See also structuralism; Derrida, Jacques.

structuralism, 18. See also poststructuralism; Derrida, Jacques

word games, 14. See also linguistic turn World of Warcraft: design/format, 1, 6, 39, 156; identity, 70; terms of use (ToU), 92, 99, 102, 121–123n4, 121–123n9, 121–123n17. See also MMO; MMORPG

198

Žižek, Slavoj: critiques/interpretations by, 77– 78, 84, 90–91n14 (see also Hegel; Kant; Lacan); on language, 15–16; on the real and truth, 79– 81, 85–88, 165; on the state of nature, 93; on technology, 128

Index

DAVID J. GUNKEL is Distinguished Teaching Professor of Communication Technology at Northern Illinois University. He is the author of seven books, including Thinking Otherwise: Philosophy, Communication, Technology; The Machine Question: Critical Perspectives on AI, Robots, and Ethics; and Of Remixology: Ethics and Aesthetics After Remix.

em

AM

th

e

Ga

Gaming the system

david J. gunkel is Distinguished Teaching Professor of

D ES EC ST ON UD S IE TRU S, C AN TI N D G VI V RT ID UA EO L G W AM O RL ES D , S

gunkel

Gaming the System takes philosophical traditions out of the ivory tower and into the virtual worlds of video games. In this book, author David J. Gunkel explores how philosophical traditions— put forth by noted thinkers such as Plato, Descartes, Kant, Heidegger, and Žižek—can help us explore and conceptualize recent developments in video games, game studies, and virtual worlds. Furthermore, Gunkel interprets computer games as doing philosophy, arguing that the game world is a medium that provides opportunities to model and explore fundamental questions about the nature of reality, personal identity, social organization, and moral conduct. By using games to investigate and innovate in the area of philosophical thinking, Gunkel shows how areas such as game governance and manufacturers’ terms of service agreements actually grapple with the social contract and produce new postmodern forms of social organization that challenge existing modernist notions of politics and the nation state. In this critically engaging study, Gunkel considers virtual worlds and video games as more than just “fun and games,” presenting them as sites for new and original thinking about some of the deepest questions concerning the human experience.

m Sy i st n g

FILM & MEDIA, PHILOSOPHY

G

d

vi

Da

Communication Technology at Northern Illinois University. He is author or editor of seven books, including Thinking Otherwise: Philosophy, Communication, Technology; The Machine Question: Critical Perspectives on AI, Robots, and Ethics; and Of Remixology: Ethics and Aesthetics after Remix.

J. Gu el

nk

iupress.indiana.edu

PRESS