Castronova’s argument about MMORPG’s largely concerns virtual worlds structured around game-playing. VW’s that don’t have a clear objective or game are inevitably, he argues, unsuccessful. Which brings us to thinking about Second Life: one can “work” in SL if one desires (selling virtual wares for instance, sitting in chairs to earn Linden dollars), but it’s also possible to not have to work. If I want to walk around SL in my standard, stock avatar with no whistles and embellishments, I can simply enjoy the virtual scenery and chat with people. But the built-in possibility in SL to work if I felt I wanted to echoes Castronova’s line of reasoning and (here’s a short anecdote) reminds me of this pet hamster I had: ambitiously, determinedly, she would run on her hamster wheel and my 10-year old self would ask her, “Why are you running? Where do you think you’re going?” This caged hamster could have lived out her life eating the plentiful amount of food I fed her, lounging on hamster hay- but she didn’t want paradise, she wanted work. Which brings us back to Castronova’s point: are we like hamsters running on hamster wheels, work-horses who need some kind of labor objective even if such works gets us nowhere? This goes back to The Matrix again and the architect’s point that humans rejected the perfect virtual world in favor of one simulating struggle. I’ll end this musing with an exchange that occurred between my boyfriend and I last week: (Me) “Why don’t you open a Second Life account?” (Him) “What’s there to do in SL? Nothing. Let’s get into WoW instead.” Score one for Castronova.

BTW, it’s been a real pleasure being in the cyberpunk seminar with all of you and reading your blogs. This last post is me signing off from the blogosphere (yes, I realize this term is mildly irritating, but it’s apt for this moment) not indefinitely, but for now. Have a wonderful summer, everyone!

I have to disagree with Tim about Stephenson’s sword fights: my favorite scene of the novel has to be when Hiro asks the Japanese businessman, “Didn’t anyone tell you that I was a hacker?” before “hacking” the guy’s head off with his sword. The dilemma of conveying death in the Metaverse brings up neat questions similar to the ontological crises we see in Philip K. DIck’s texts: how real is my world, or it’s real because I can die in it. Tying this idea to Snow Crash, it’s significant that the key event that undesirably reminds everyone that the Metaverse is simulated is when an avatar dies: death in the Metaverse is too hygenic, not wet and gooey enough. And of course even this real life/virtual life distinction is turned on its head with Da5id’s contracting a virtual virus that affects him in the physical realm too.

This all reminded me of the film Avalon (2001), which takes place in the future and is about a virtual reality game where its players (surprise, surprise) don’t know which world is real and which isn’t. Cinematically, the “game” world seems very realistic, that is, until a player dies without blood- just a gray fuzziness on the screen where the avatar stood, and then nothing. I particularly like when one of the characters says, “When one of us dies and that body doesn’t vanish, the other one will know,” in response to whether the game world is real or not.

Finally, in response to The Matrix films, I offer the Japanese film Casshern (2004): this is an amazing movie- think The Matrix meets Akira.

Here’s a picture of my avatar in Second Life. My SL name is completely unoriginal- Julie19- just my name combined with my birthday. I’m really frustrated that we’re not allowed to change names on SL without opening a second account, because obviously I didn’t give a lot of thought to mine initially! All of your SL names and avatars are pretty awesome, by the way.

Fascinated by Rehak’s article on “the Bit Girl,” I attempted to visit one of the websites he had mentioned- gamegrrzls.com. To save anyone else interested in this topic from the trouble, this site is no longer up. In its place are a number of interesting blogs written by hard-core (female) gamers, some of which you can reach by going here and here. The gaming landscape for women, however, appears rather bleak. Performing an internet search for “gamers” and “girls” yielded such completely useless results as playing a “makeover” game with clothes and accessories, or yet worse, games involving those ubiqitous and disturbing Bratz dolls.

Even more discouraging was an article from Forbes.com that I found on women who play games. The first words of the article are completely misleading- “It turns out that women do play computer games. And do they ever”- words that imply that the male-dominated playing field of gaming is being balanced with these hordes of female consumers now buying games. Further reading reveals, though, that women are considered “casual gamers,” which is different from the “hard-core” (typically male) gamers who play time-consuming games like WoW. Game companies are producing games for women like “Diner Dash” or “Wedding Dash” and these games are much cheaper and quicker to make because the companies don’t bother with making cutting-edge graphics for women like they do for their hard-core gaming male demographic. The obvious gendered connotations of a game title like “Wedding Dash” aside, it’s insulting that these companies don’t think that women are sophisticated enough gamers to appreciate good graphics and a well-made game.

Branching out in another direction, I also couldn’t resist googling “Nude Raider” to see what popped up. Going against the grain of Rehak’s argument that Lara Croft fans never creatively produce anything not already condoned by the game’s producers, an article from BBC News points out that the game company threatened legal action against sites posting nude pics of its famous female avatar. The patch-making software that Rehak spoke of appears to be an urban legend, at least according to various game blogs. The nudie Croft pics still proliferate, but no one seems to know if the patch codes really worked (i.e. let you play Tomb Raider with a naked Croft). There was a web site, Nuderaider.com, but it was one of the first to shut down after the legal pressure from Eidos and Core Design.

So we learn via Paul Ceruzzi (A History of Modern Computing) that the notion of introducing the personal computer to the mass public doesn’t fully ignite until some journalist from Rolling Stone sees a bunch of academics at Stanford sitting around playing a computer game- Spacewar. To play games, to have fun, on a machine that costs thousands of dollars is, Ceruzzi points out, to use such machines in a highly “personal” way, outside such standard usages envisioned by those corporate and military minds fueled by bureaucratic and punched-card logic.

In a way, Ceruzzi’s narrative about the rise of the PC is quite moving: unable to arrive via top-down means, it is “hobbyists” and what we might think of as the first hackers who dictate the inevitable trend toward personal computing. Yet in the background, as if begrudgingly, we see brief glimpses of hordes of women laborers tinkering with the integrated circuitry for these devices. The technology has advanced from vacuum tubes to transistors to silicon chips, but one thing that still hasn’t changed is the practice of exploiting the cheap labor of marginalized groups. Somehow, I just can’t see computer gameplay as ultimate freedom, at least not yet.

Unfortunately, though, trends in our society have been leaning toward increased government control rather than any full realization of May’s dream of crypto anarchy. Capitalism, rather than functioning as May’s liberating agent, has developed more according to Alan Wexelblat’s vision of business as information-collecting panopticon. On a related note, I was watching the 1997 film Gattica this weekend, which similarly depicts these anxieties about how the individual can’t escape being a part of an information-collecting society that allows no privacy or anonymity.

The line I’ve cited above is interesting to me because it’s one of the few places in the text where we notice cracks in the shiny, chrome facade that Gibson has created as the world of the renegade cyber cowboy. Or more correctly, the highly glossy commodity that Bruce Sterling has successfully marketed as “cyberpunk” as critics like Csicsery-Ronay and Suvin have pointed out. The outlaw zones where Case and other hackers dance the “dance of the biz” is potentially not subversive or liberatory, the passage above seems to say, but always already anticipated by the hegemonic powers that sustain the status quo. Such a reading would suggest that the cyber cowboy is never able to resist or be outside the control of the entities truly running the show- the multinational corporation, the Tessier-Ashpools, etc.

On the other hand, I think this top-down model of control is overly simplistic. Perhaps a Foucauldian model of power relations would work better for Gibson’s text, where no one actually holds or owns power, but power is something dispersed that circulates within a system. There is of course inequality with regards to how power is dispersed (this would explain why the T-A’s are wealthy aristocrats and Case sleeps in the cheapest and sleaziest “coffins”), but power to some extent flows from Case because his outlaw skills are needed. I haven’t fully worked these thoughts out: to fully parse out the ideas I’ve outlined here, a reading of Dick Hebdige’s ideas on subversion and subcultures would probably be useful.

My PKD fanatacism aside, here are some thoughts on the works we read/watched for this week: 

-Dick and Disney: obviously, critiquing capitalism is a constant theme in Dick’s work. In Palmer Eldritch, though, we find that epitome of capitalist consumption, Disney, seeping into the text: the “Walt” companion doll to “Perky Pat” sounds like an allusion to Walt Disney, Leo Bulero’s satellite is called “Winnie-ther-Pooh Acres,” and the fictional Perky Pat layouts and accessories mirror the real-life manner in which toy companies market toys and accessories to children- an industry that Disney of course has a monopoly upon. Maybe this novel should be called The Three Stigmata of Walt Disney.

-A brief comment on the Bladerunner film and its vision of a future cityscape: a recurring motif that we see in SF films is the convergence of the futuristic landscape and the (predominantly) Asian city. It’s as if the best way to convey the breath-taking novelty of the unimaginable future is to juxtapose it with a culture that is perceived as radically foreign- the Oriental other. After all, what’s stranger than people who skillfully produce cutting edge technology, and yet at the same time set up rural marketplace-like stands to sell their wares (both images we see in BR)? We don’t see that gleaming Western metropolis, the shopping mall, here in the film, and that’s part of how the future is being exoticized.