To Be, or What to Be?

The celebration of identity is the fundamental, critical, absolutely core point of virtual worlds.

Yes, that is quite some assertion.

Except for those worlds that people play for purely practical reasons (such as virtual classrooms), everything that players do ultimately concerns the development of their own identity: who they are. It’s why achievers achieve, explorers explore, socializers socialize, and killers creep up from nowhere and batter you with a stick.

You can’t design for it, because everything affects it; yet for the same reason, you can’t not design for it—it touches everything you do. It’s portable, so it’s beyond a designer’s reach—it can be used across many virtual worlds ¹. It’s unquantifiable—you can’t rate for “identity” the actions, objects, structures, or anything else that’s programmed in. You can design for certain expressions of identity, and you can design ways to channel these expressions, but you can’t do so systematically. Identity flowering is an inherent property of virtual worlds; if you control it or repress it or subvert it, the changes you’d have to make to do so would leave you with something that was no longer a virtual world.

Okay, you’ve let me babble on about this for a couple of paragraphs, but enough is enough. Ask a dozen players why they play virtual worlds, and you’d be lucky if even one gave an answer that even hinted at “the celebration of identity.” They usually reply in terms that categorize them as being an achiever, explorer, socializer, or killer (which is how I derived those types in the first place). To convince you that identity really is the fundamental, critical, absolutely core point of virtual worlds, I’m going to have to provide some evidence.

Fair enough. Let’s start with some empirical observations.

Players of virtual worlds often notice that they behave differently in the virtual world than they do in real life. They may be more (or less) assertive, talkative, flirtatious, argumentative, pensive, creative—the list just goes on. For some people, the changes are more dramatic than for others, but most players would concede that they do seem

to have a virtual personality that’s different from their real one. Generally, they like their virtual personality more than their real one, but not always. Reflecting on this difference will cause them to make judgments about themselves, therefore their personality (virtual or real) will either shift ² or the two will remain in conflict until the issue is resolved.

Most players maintain several characters in a virtual world (if that world allows it). Some may be for specific purposes (for example mules, to do drudge work for the main character) and others may be the result of failed experiments (“Hmm, so elven thieves don’t really work”). There are often two or three, though, that the player uses regularly, depending on their mood. If they’re depressed, they may choose their dark, brooding magic-user; if they’re angry, they may choose their barbarian warrior to let off some steam; if they’re wistful, perhaps their bard would suit best. In these situations, the players are using their various characters in the virtual world to work through their real-life issues. They’ll grow as people because of it.

Suppose you had poor social skills, and found a social environment where this didn’t matter. Merely by interacting in that environment, your skills would improve. In real life, you might be shy and awkward, but if you found a place where wild self-expression was not only permissible, but also positively encouraged, you could suddenly bloom. In becoming accustomed to this virtual personality, you might gain sufficient confidence to be able to maintain it in real life. You wouldn’t necessarily even have to think about it, it could just happen. Wouldn’t that mean you’d developed as a person?

So, after those three cod-psychology examples we can probably agree that it’s possible—common, even—for people to exhibit different behaviors in a virtual world and in reality. This was noticed by academics early in research into virtual worlds. Amy S. Bruckman’s groundbreaking paper on the subject ³ was published back in 1992.

What does this have to do with identity, though?

Well, in the examples I gave there is a separation between the player and the character. This is immersion at the character level. If it stays that way, the player isn’t really going to mature. However, for virtual worlds it’s almost unavoidable that the character and the player will tend toward each other. If you like your virtual self, you’ll take on its characteristics; if you keep mood characters, you’ll gradually stop playing all but one; the social skills you acquire will become skills that you use. Ultimately, you advance to the final level of immersion, where you and your character become one. One individual, one persona: identity.

Okay, so players can create separate selves, and over time unify the best aspects of them into a single identity. That doesn’t mean it’s inevitable, though. This phenomenon of a separate “online self” appears in many other computer-moderated activities, from email to chat rooms to forum postings. Why can’t they raise identity issues if virtual worlds can?

The answer is that they do, but nowhere near as well. Virtual worlds, armed with a potent combination of environment and fellow players that’s unavailable to other online applications, are able to present people with a stream of challenges; an individual’s response to each challenge helps define that individual. The challenges of email, chat rooms and forum postings are much narrower in scope, weaker in intensity and rarer in frequency.

This reaction to challenges is how most identity development occurs. Although mood characters and the like make good, neat, psychology parcels to show to cynics, they’re overt; the main identity action is covert. Things happen, which present challenges; your reaction to these causes you to acquire insights, which in turn lead to minor readjustments in your understanding of yourself (that is, your identity). Examples: Dealing with responsibility, relationships, unfairness, success/failure, betrayal, strangers, and so on.

These aren’t personality change issues. It’s not that you stop being a shy loner and are suddenly compelled to transform into an outgoing extrovert; rather, it’s that you were always an extrovert, you just didn’t realize it. The virtual world lets you try being one, and your opinion of yourself changes as a result of how it works out. If you weren’t an extrovert at heart, then you wouldn’t make the change; the extrovert virtual you would drift toward the introvert real you, rather than the reverse. It can’t make you something you aren’t.

Virtual worlds enable you to find out who you are by letting you be who you want to be.

Not everyone necessarily wants to find out who they are, of course. Others do, but don’t like it when they learn the answer ⁴. Not everyone wants to change, and not everyone likes challenges. Some people may thus be attracted to virtual worlds by the promise of identity freedom, but become increasingly angry and frustrated—unable to leave, but unwilling to do what is necessary to stay. It’s particularly sad when an individual takes a harsh lesson but doesn’t learn anything—continually acting out rather than working through a difficulty. Fortunately, this doesn’t happen very often, but when it does it can be somewhat disruptive.

Incidentally, if you are at all interested in the psychological and/or psychotherapeutic value of virtual worlds, you should look at Life on the Screen ⁵, by Sherry Turkle (if you haven’t already). Chapter 7, “Toward a Critical Aesthetic,” in particular is directly relevant to the subject, and includes a number of interesting case studies.

So, to summarize: For the great majority of players, virtual worlds encourage them to present different sides of themselves in a safe environment; challenges arise in the virtual world which enable them to reflect (consciously or otherwise) on their responses to those challenges, which causes them to develop a greater understanding of themselves; over time, this leads to a gradual merging of the virtual side and the real side, as the player becomes increasingly attuned to their persona.

The persona level of immersion isn’t the end of the journey. You’ve reached the top of a hill, but there may be another one that’s higher: There may be a better you. Thus, people will always create new characters and try out new ways of self-expression. Besides, self-affirmation is good, too.

Hey, you’re an Eastern mystic, and you didn’t even know!