For another class, I once watched a film called Darkon. It was about people somewhere in the northeast who had created a ‘dungeons and dragons’ style world in a local park, and met to fight wars from cardboard castles, whacking each other with foam clubs. In real life, they were cashiers at Wal-Mart, or stay-at-home parents under the thumb of a domineering spouse. It was very similar to Turkle’s MUDs, and I remember feeling very bad for those people. On the one hand, they seemed incapable of seeing the divide between real and imaginary. On the other hand, they enforced it tirelessly. Wives in Darkon should not offend real-life spouses. No one ever saw Darkon friends outside of the park. It was only a game. But at the same time, a player was more likely to think of himself as a knight than as a cashier. One player even called out another in the parking lot of a Denny’s for ‘betraying’ him in the game. If I felt sorry for those people, it was nothing to my concern for the MUDders.
Turkle says that virtuality tends to cause us to see the artificial as ‘real,’ just because it is less technologically-mediated than the alternative. Well, at least the crazy Darkon players had conversations with real people. At least their friendships and their sense of self-worth weren’t dependent on a surge protector.
Turkle recognizes the potential of virtual life. It has the ability to give a political voice to people who feel that their ‘real’ lives are insignificant. It can make people feel like part of a community when they previously felt alienated. Her fear is that the honest and democratic grass-roots sensibilities characteristic of online communities will stay online. She is worried that these MUDders will abandon the real world in favor of the virtual one, where their “selves” are fluid concepts which they can shape, or change if they don’t like it. She writes, “If the politics of virtuality means democracy online and apathy offline, there is reason for concern” (244). Virtual life will no longer be resistance to an unfair reality, with the ultimate aim of changing the real world. It will simply replace reality.
Turkle points out two specific problems with this. First, virtual life tends to “make denatured and artificial experiences seem real” (236). We lower the bar for reality, and lose sight of what a ‘real’ relationship is, or what it is to truly have a conversation.
The second, and perhaps the most pernicious problem, is that virtual realities allow us to “believe that within it we’ve achieved more than we have” (238). We lose the ability to define ourselves or our accomplishments in terms of the real. Turkle cites MUDders who believe that playing another gender online gave them insight into live as the opposite gender. This kind of detached and ‘conceptual’ idea of what it is to ‘be a woman’ does not account for experience. No one can begin to know what it is to be a woman without that embodied experience. Indeed, Haraway also argues that this unified conceptualization of ‘being’ a woman is dangerous. It discounts experience, and reduces complex identities to an essentialist definition. Does the disembodied, virtual ‘self’ reduce identity in this way, too? In the end, what are we? Are we just our actions? Can ‘action’ be defined as commands we type on our keyboard? No. Just like Hayles, both authors would agree that embodiment and experience are vital. And gender experience is only the tip of the iceberg. Those who live in castles online might still live in dangerous apartments in real life. “Feeling” better about it won’t stop them from getting shot. They could be a millionaire online, but that won’t feed them in real life. Success happens in the real world, and you can’t fake it. Running away from it will only make it worse.
We cannot forget the material underpinnings of virtual life. Like Sadie Plant points out, we cannot skim over the “material past” with a “simple, linear” virtuality (264). Virtuality can only reach its true potential if it stays connected with what is really real.
I think you're completely right...the people who live in a virtual reality might find comfort there, but they are still living in the real world-one that requires working and communicating with others in everyday life, outside of a computer screen. Games that allow a person to create their own version of themselves in avatar form, ultimately allow those individuals an outlet for creating a sort of self that they aspire to be. In that virtual reality, no one knows what they truly look like, or even behave like, in reality. This offers a kind of freedom, and I'm sure it's addicting. From a personal standpoint however, I don't think it's healthy to "live" two lives, there's a fracturing of self-hood that occurs if a person does. Although the real world is hard to live in sometimes, I don't think virtual reality should be a way for people to escape their problems...it really just puts them on hold.
ReplyDeleteI definitely felt some pity for the MUDders while reading as well. And I kept thinking, "Wow, these people are such nerds!" Will a day come when online gamers are the cool crowd and those that aren't gamers become the losers, behind the times? I feel like success online is invisible in the physical world. You may be the coolest wizard on MUD, but no one looks at you as you're walking down the street and thinks, "God, that's that guy from MUD!"
ReplyDeleteI also don't see how seperating your physical self and your mental online self can be very mentally healthy. I feel that a truly happy person must be in tune with their body and their mind. If you seperate them and treat them differently, you can only be pleased with one while the other falls behind. Call me a hippie, but but that's what I think!