On Being Others

I told Polly’s tale for three reasons:

• To illustrate the importance of identity exploration in virtual worlds, and the emptiness of a world without it.

• To demonstrate how something that many designers take for granted as part and parcel of virtual worlds has a real-world beginning.

• To counter the popular notion among some researchers that MUD1 was written by a couple of one-dimensional hackers whose only aim was to provide a medium for adolescent males to live out fantasies of bloodthirsty violence ¹.

Crossing gender with Polly was not done as a means unto itself: I was attempting to show what role-playing enabled, and that it was okay to indulge in; gender was just the mechanism I used to do this. The fact that researchers almost invariably write about crossing gender in virtual worlds as if it were something amazingly special is slightly off the point. It is important, but no more so than any other severe disjunction between player and character. Maintaining the impression that you’re a 90-year-old ninja elf is far more difficult than acting as if you’re the opposite gender ².

Pretending to be your non-biological sex in a virtual world has a higher profile than other forms of identity dislocation because it’s the only “physical” identity cue that players have to specify in virtual worlds. However, it’s just one of many dimensions. If virtual worlds asked players to specify a real-world race for their characters, whether instead of a fantasy race or in addition to one (a Jewish elf, a Chinese troll), then this would be high-profile too ³. As it is, almost every textual world avoids real-world race; graphical worlds use skin tones and identikit face construction to allow players to present whatever look they want, but it’s never referred to as race or ethnicity. It’s just a look, which is forced on a graphical world in the same way that language forces gender on textual worlds ⁴.

MUD1 didn’t have race, age, class, weight, or any other physical identity cues except for gender; it wouldn’t have had that either if English was up to the job. Players could have still pretended to be the opposite sex had that been the case, of course, but they wouldn’t have been forced to instantiate to either. Constraints diminish opportunity.

Playing a character of a gender opposite to your own should therefore be regarded as merely one of a number of ways that players can choose to explore their selves; it is discussed in greater detail in Chapter 6, “It’s Not a Game, It’s a ….”

For the moment, however, one of the consequences of this kind of identity experimentation is of more pressing interest.

As a man, there’s nothing incompatible with having a female persona (nor vice versa): Although men can’t be women in real life (without a series of very unnerving operations, anyway), they can be women in virtual worlds. Your persona is you, in the virtual world: You can be female there, whatever your real-life gender.

When you’re starting out, though, you have to play a role. You have to decide how you think a character of the opposite sex would act, and stick with it. Your own identity can adapt toward that of your character’s, but your character’s can’t (at this stage) shift much toward your own. It’s locked in place.

This brings us to consider the nature of role-playing.