Exploring the perceived ‘dark side’ of virtual worlds and gaming, and how I may have inadvertently joined the “gothic web”.
Along with my good friend John, I’ve decided to embark on a more structured writing approach to this blog. Friday afternoons are my time to pick an issue, read a little about it and attempt a short essay. I enjoy writing, but give myself scant chance to practice it and often channel it into projects from which I can glean no critique other than a grade, such as at university. I hope you enjoy it.
I identify myself as being gothic. Such thinking tends to sound pretentious to me, but it’s truth in that I indulge in some darker aesthetics, and tend to linger on a counter-culture, even if it is in rather a muted fashion. I recently came to understand what being a part of gothic culture actually means in the most unlikely of places – my coursework. In studying the use of biomechanical or cyborg themes in visual media, I made one of the exciting, epiphanic (but, in hindsight, obvious) leaps of discovery which only academia can provide me with. Cyberpunk, portrayed in either a positive or a negative light, is macabre and more gothic than I had hitherto realised. It is an aesthetic which Horner and Sloznik (2000) have said “concerns itself with boundaries and their instabilities”, as cited by Anne Quéma in an exciting 2004 paper, entitled The Gothic and the Fantastic.
Quéma covers some thought-provoking arguments in her paper, defining gothic media as basically fantastical, but not as safe as a fairy tale or adventure story. The gothic genre can be said to take a fantasy world, to build up our expectations of it and shock us with stark comparisons to everyday culture. Where a fantasy can transport us to new sensibilities without ever letting us forget that it is just fantasy, gothic fantasy seeks to bring its unique brands of desire and horror directly into our plane, whereupon we can see their impact in our own setting.
Part of me was struck by this sentiment for a different reason other than my choice of culture, and its sudden clarity. I’m also a keen resident of virtual worlds and, most recently, the World of Warcraft. In it, as readers of my previous ramblings may have noted, I’ve dabbled both in what some call ‘augmentationalist’ play, and a particular brand of ‘immersionist’ play. Whilst the former is more common, referring to a user who will invite ‘real-world’ friends around to group and guild activity inside the world, the latter has coined the term ‘digital person’. If I may risk pretense once more, a digital person would define themselves as being ‘of’ their world, immersed into a second life and detached from any first. More than exercising common avatar privacy, however, there is a culture inherent in digital personhood which such users will tend to embrace.
The reason I mention this is because in my time away from such second lives, I have had time to reflect on what they mean to me, and perhaps to the worlds my digital personae inhabit. I now come to realise that, despite suspending many core traits of my own personality inside this second life, I’ve still managed to create a rather gothic persona for myself. Escape, it seems, may be harder than I thought.
The same friend of mine, John, pointed me to a particular essay within the tantalising Journal of Virtual Worlds Research. In a piece which concerns itself with Sulake’s Habbo Hotel, Mikael Johnson and Tanja Sihvonen (2009) write about their perception of gothic culture inside the youth-oriented virtual world. Whilst I disagree with many of their claims about the expression of goth culture, they pin down the notion that goth players will tend to evoke a certain anti-mainstream attitude. As the writers themselves point out, “by re-enacting gothic rituals, players seem to explore and contemplate their own emotional responses to these issues”. This would seem to be to the exclusion of those around them.
Two similarities seem very clear to me, between my own experiences and the examples of a typical gothic player. Digital people, despite being found predominantly on a world named Second Life, are actually rather the minority, and tend to attract some controversy for it. I’ll leave discussion of the irony that has, within a world named such as it is, to a dedicated rant. The plight of some users attempting to live a life free of their own seems similar to the stigma attached not only to goths, but other social cultures in our ‘real world’, typically borne of lifestyle or gender types. Second to this is the similarity between moody Habbo Hotel avatsr, shunning talk with those around them, and contemplation of the deep issues which any mature digital person is likely to have faced.
The Dark Side essay mentions some examples of such player habits. In one, ‘Luna-Lovegood’ recalls her addressing one of a group of Habbos (Habbo Hotel avatars) of gothic appearance, written for a Habbo Hotel fansite. From the essay:
– Hi how are you?
No reply.
– hello?
Still no reply.
– How are you?
Then one of them said:
– Cant you guess, we’re off people.
Apparently, a common way to express gothic anti-culture within Habbo Hotel is to refuse to chat, rebelling against the core function of this chat client. Second Life‘s population of digital people do not share this brand of anti-mainstream culture (in fact they could be described as embracing a truer nature of having ‘a second life’). Where they stand out is in riding against a world in which ‘first life’ details may often be shared. Those who refuse to acknowledge the meaningful presence of their ‘first lives’ become a minority, for a culture has grown in which Second Life avatars would make way for ‘real’ humans wanting to meet each other, for business or, as media often protrays, love. Such a culture has, in fact, bred paranoia in a minority of those described as ‘augementationists’, some of whom refuse to interact with anyone who chooses to withhold ‘real world’ data.
Digital people may share a fate common to role-players, cited by Johnson and Sihvonen as being a catalytic part of goth culture. They say that when themed table-top role-play was attacked during the American Christian moral panic of the early 1980s, both gamers and goths were obliged to take steps to define or justify the nature of their hobbies and cultures. Although the digital cause is not as inflamed as religious objections to role-players were back then, that conflict seems tied into ‘gothism’ itself. Fantasies are implanted upon an unsuspecting world, many began to question that contrast and where some may see such change as positive, horror seems the more common response. Just as Bram Stoker shocked his audiences with the threat of vampires lurking in civilised European society, and groups of youths are seen to be practicing unusual rituals from fascination for the unworldly, those on the outside become fearful and the perpetrators emerge as gothic.
For my own part, I feel that my second life may even be more gothic then my ‘first’. A world which is freer to expression is more than capable of drawing out caricatures of a person, and mine evolved to express desires and fantasies which demand so much more time and effort in application to the ‘real world’. The same can be said of any gamer who longs for adventure with sword and bow in hand, however when your activities become too deviant even for the internet to comprehend, then we have found what I may even label “the gothic web”. Just as I attract stares in the street for my long black coat and sharp tunic collar, my avatar attracts fear and confusion for being an entity unto itself – tricky to comprehend, mysterious and unsettling to an everyday sensibility. Of course, goths being goths, neither I or my avatar had any idea this was happening until now.
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