Investigations of a Dog

Via Archaeozoology, an interesting but difficult to spell blog about about the archaeology of non-human animals, I discovered another interesting archaeology blog. Middle Savagery is written by Colleen Morgan, a PhD student at UC Berkeley. She’s doing lots of innovative things with Flickr, YouTube, Facebook and Second Life (don’t let the Goreans get you!).

I think maybe historians and archaeologists don’t talk to each other enough despite supposedly having a common interest in the past. My BA was originally going to be archaeology but I was bored with it after two terms and switched to history – I don’t think I would’ve done very well if I’d stuck with it. That bad experience has affected me for far longer than it should have done, and it’s about time I got over it. I was similarly disgusted with history after finishing my PhD but it only took me 5 years to get over that. (Disgust is a vice.) Studying the non-human is one obvious place where historians and archaeologists need to get together.

The web could well offer a way of breaking down barriers between disciplines. Since getting involved in blogging I’ve come into contact with lots of different ideas which I wouldn’t ever have thought about if I’d just been doing history in the traditional way. Reading blogs has given me easy access to literary theory, philosophy, cognitive psychology, evolutionary biology, linguistics, various feminist perspectives and much more. Writing my blog allows me to try out ideas that are outside my specialist area without investing too much in them. And trying to think differently benefits my “proper” work.

For the first 9 weeks of this year I didn’t read any books or articles – mainly because I’ve been concentrating on Python programming and XML markup. This weekend I broke the embargo in style by reading two exciting new pieces: Karl Steel’s ‘How To Make A Human’ and Esther MacCallum-Stewart’s ‘Real Boys Carry Girly Epics: Normalising Gender Bending in Online Games’. This might sound like a horrible cliche, but both articles are about the blurring of boundaries.

Karl argues that in the middle ages the animal-human boundary was maintained not just by asserting that animals were different from humans, but by subjugating animals to humans. Owning and killing animals was necessary to maintain the distinction between animals and humans. He concludes with the suggestion that taking away the right of the lower classes to hunt was seen as taking away their humanity. This is something that I’m likely to be quoting a lot in my work on horses in the English Civil War, as it could equally be suggested that when soldiers took away people’s horses they were also taking away their humanity.

Esther suggests that gender swapping in online gaming is likely to be a lot more common than many people think. She points out how common it is for players to ask female avatars whether they’re female in real life. This suggests a certain amount of anxiety about gender bending, but although this anxiety might ostensibly be based on an assumption that playing an avatar of a different gender is deviant, the assumption undermines itself. If the question is asked so often, that leads to the conclusion that gender swapping is quite normal, even if you don’t want to admit it. If it’s supposed to be so unusual why waste time asking every female avatar if she’s really a man?

Esther’s article focuses on an issue which was largely glossed over in the Fibreculture article that I posted about the other day: we really don’t know how many women are playing online games because there’s often no way of knowing who’s behind an avatar. If someone plays a female avatar in game but posts on the forum as a male there’s clearly some gender bending going on, but which way? Is a forum persona necessarily any more real than an avatar in a game? (See also my old post on roleplaying in Livejournal) Therefore Fullerton, Morie and Pearce might be assuming too much (or should I say too little?) about female participation in gaming. Could it be that female gamers adopt male personas when playing stereotypically masculine games? Nobody knows whether they do or don’t. Ultimately Esther shows that even when mainstream gaming is dominated by a narrow range of gender stereotypes many gamers are undermining those stereotypes in ways that are really not that deviant or unusual. As Paul Westerberg said, “tomorrow, who’s gonna fuss?”.

1. Tracy Fullerton, Jacquelyn Ford Morie, and Celia Pearce, ‘A Game of One’s Own: Towards a New Gendered Poetics of Digital Space’, Fibreculture, (2008).
2. Esther MacCallum-Stewart, ‘Real Boys Carry Girly Epics: Normalising Gender Bending in Online Games’, Eludamos, 2 (2008).
3. Karl Steel, ‘How To Make A Human’, Exemplaria, 20 (2008), pp. 3-27.

Via Grand Text Auto I found an interesting article in Fibreculture about gendered space in computer games and virtual worlds. I definitely agree with the authors that game designers tend to cater for a very narrow range of gameplay styles which conform to a particular masculine stereotype. Anything which encourages more diverse experiences through different gameplay and different concepts of space is very welcome. On the other hand I was a bit disappointed that the article seems to reinforce gender stereotypes more than questioning them. Although the authors claim not to be calling for more “pink” games but to be encouraging an “androgynous mind”, they still seem to be assuming that violence and competition are male concerns which are of no interest to women. For example they refer to FPS as “distinctly masculine”. Defining games as “male” or “female” is part of the problem, not part of the solution. It’s frustrating that the authors recognise this and try hard to avoid stereotyping women and feminine games (occasionally failing, as when they say that in Second Life “fashion is a prevalent form of player productivity, dominated by female players”), but easily fall into the trap of stereotyping men and masculine games.

Also they seem to have got the links between gender, spatial reasoning, and FPS the wrong way round. The cognitive research they cite to support the argument that FPS favours males isn’t quite as recent as the research I mentioned here which shows that playing FPS increases spatial reasoning skills and that girls don’t benefit from this as much as they could because they’re put off by the idea that FPS is just for boys. This perfectly illustrates the problems caused by stereotyping games as masculine or feminine.

More on cavalry charges later this week, but today I’m taking a break from that to write about virtual reality. This was one of the many interesting things that Wulf Kansteiner talked about at the Institute of Historical Research the other week. He pointed out that we are now very close to the point where virtual worlds become indistinguishable from reality. Massive Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games are increasingly popular, and have both a bigger and more diverse player base than the strategy games and shooters which are the focus of my (stereotypically male) gaming interests. Second Life has moved the genre away from Tolkienesque fantasy worlds towards a simulacrum of a more familiar reality. He also suggested that Artificial Intelligence is reaching a level of sophistication at which it becomes difficult to tell the difference between computer controlled and human controlled characters.

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I went to London yesterday to visit the Public Records Office and the Institute of Historical Research. There was no service record for William A. Wenham, but the battalion war diary mentioned him by name, confirming that he was the missing man from the patrol on 6th December. I also got a copy of his medal card (20p to print it at the PRO, £3.50 to download it at home!) which shows that he was in the French theatre of war from 1st March 1915 and was therefore lucky to have survived some extremely bloody battles. Meanwhile, back in the seventeenth century I looked at some wills of London saddlers, including the original will of John Gower. I had to check it to see if it differed from the probate court’s copy, but in the end it didn’t. Maybe it wasn’t worth getting them to bring it all the way down from a salt mine in Cheshire, but it was interesting to see John Gower’s signature (he didn’t write the rest of the will himself). It would be even better to have Jane Gower’s signature, not least to see if she could write, but she wasn’t one of the witnesses.

After that I went to the Philosophy of History seminar at the IHR to hear Wulf Kansteiner talking about computer games and historical consciousness. I can’t give a full account of it because I missed the start and had to leave before the end of the discussion, but he raised lots of interesting points. He’s definitely among those of us who realise that gaming culture is becoming increasingly hard for historians to ignore, and that it creates both new opportunities and new methodological problems. I sensed that a lot of people in the audience just didn’t get it. I was particularly amused by someone who laid into Wulf for not mentioning gender, but then proceeded to perpetuate some very out of date and ignorant gender stereotypes (apparently women don’t play games!), and also had a right go at bloggers (we’re anti-social egomaniacs!).

Anyway, the whole thing has given me plenty of ideas for future blog posts, so I won’t give too much away now. I’ll just make two quick points. First, the experience removed my doubts that my interest in studying games is a sudden and cynical jump onto a fashionable bandwagon. This is far from something that everyone is doing. It’s still a niche, and still a long way ahead of the academic mainstream with too many people thinking it isn’t proper history because “it isn’t real” (er, religion anyone?).

Second, Timothy Burke at Cliopatria mentioned that it’s very difficult to study and understand the history of virtual worlds unless you were there. Last night it struck me that gaming is largely incomprehensible to non-gamers. This is one more nail in the coffin of objectivity and neutrality, because gaming culture might have to be studied from the inside more than from the outside. But for me that’s more of an opportunity than a problem.