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.

The discussion after the paper revealed a lot of scepticism, which is understandable to a certain extent. I still have my doubts about whether AI can pass the Turing test, and about whether the Turing test itself is really any use (there’s a whole post in that, so I’ll leave it for now). For the last 20 years or more we’ve been repeatedly told that Virtual Reality is nearly here, but it has usually failed to materialise, or turned out to be comically disappointing. One of the objections raised during the seminar was that gaming is entirely an audio-visual experience and is therefore fundamentally different from experiencing reality through all the senses. It has to be conceded that vibrating controllers don’t go very far towards redressing this, and that VR helmets and gloves now look like a quaint retro-futurist fantasy. However, it’s easy to miss the ways in which VR is already here, because the boundaries between the real and the virtual are becoming increasingly blurred.

It might seem counterintuitive and even ironic, but text based roleplaying games are among the best examples of Virtual Reality in action. Aren’t text games artefacts of the 1980s which weren’t even very good back then? How can typing “GO NORTH” or “TAKE SWORD” create an illusion of reality? Could you ever feel that you were interacting with independent sentient agents when “THORIN SITS DOWN AND STARTS SINGING ABOUT GOLD”? Well, if you want to take the sword, kill the goblins, and get the gold, then text is a limited medium and modern 3D graphics give you a much more satisfying experience. However, in many ways text has proved to be more powerful and flexible than 3D graphics.

Back in the 80s I was nerdy enough to play The Hobbit on my Commodore 64. If you were a really hardcore nerd (and if you had a lot of money), you could buy a modem and log on to Compunet, where you could chat to other nerds in real time. Using text. 20 years later, we’re still using text to communicate with each other on the internet, but it isn’t just for nerds any more. Even cool, sexy people like to use e-mail, chat on AIM or MSN, build profiles and send messages on Myspace, write blogs and comment on other people’s blogs on Blogspot or LiveJournal. In the 80s, home computers were a niche hobby, in which operating the computer could sometimes be an end in itself, but now they’re utilities which most people are happy to use without understanding very much about how they work. You don’t even have to have a computer: text messaging from mobile phones is a massive phenomenon. What all this means is that people are used to interacting with other people through text. It’s part of how they experience reality.

This isn’t even a new thing which depended on digital technology. Before we had the internet, there were letters and telegrams (and games were being played by mail long before most homes were connected to the internet), but there can be no doubt that new technology has vastly increased the amount of text based communication. The internet has also allowed new ways of communicating through text. Blogs are superficially similar to diaries, but they are public and interactive in a way which wasn’t possible before the web.

The LiveJournal blogging website was originally set up in 1999 to give people an easy way of writing about their real lives without having to know anything about designing or running a website, and to allow networking between people and groups. It now has nearly 12 million journals and communities. LiveJournal is right on the frontier between the real and the virtual. I first set up a LiveJournal in 2004, to keep in touch with my real life friends, but since then my friends list has expanded to include people I’ve never met. Some of these are friends of friends, and some are just random people with shared interests. I’ve never been as heavily involved in LiveJournal as some of my friends (I’ve mostly used it for flippant timewasting, or band promotion), and I have even less time for it now that I’m writing this blog. However, I’ve seen plenty of it from the inside, and it’s been interesting to observe how people use it. There is plenty of inconsequential fun, but LiveJournallers can also turn to their friends list for advice or support in difficult times. Users can, and often do, share intimate details of their lives with people they’ve never met, and clearly care about each other a lot. My friends list even includes not one but two transatlantic marriages in which the couples first got to know each other through text based internet communication. “Aren’t these people just freaks and weirdos?” I hear the regulars at the IHR Philosophy of History seminar cry. Well, I admit that they’re maybe not “normal” in the way that car salesmen from Reading or accountants from Stevenage are “normal”, but they’re not socially retarded sex pests or gun-obsessed neo-nazis either.

If anything, many LiveJournallers are more open-minded, imaginative, and creative than the average person. One of the ways this manifests itself is in using LiveJournal for roleplaying games. Milliways Bar (named after Douglas Adams’s Restaurant at the End of the Universe) is a LiveJournal based game in which players take on the roles of fictional characters. These characters interact with each other through the Milliways community, and through their own journals (players create and write a journal for each character they play). This is only a game in the broadest sense. Power-gaming Dungeons and Dragons nerds will be put off by the absence of a combat system, character classes, wandering monsters, and experience points. It’s as much about creative writing as about playing, and since all the characters have to be from an established canon, rather than invented by the players, there’s a lot of crossover with fan fiction.

As is often the case with fan fiction, the parameters of playing/writing in Milliways will seem militantly realist to anyone with even a passing acquaintance with literary theory. There are rules which cannot be broken. Continuity is king. There seems to be no place for absurdity, aporia, unreliable narrators, or free-floating signifiers, and no distinction between story and plot. While this kind of objectivism might seem to be wasting some of the opportunities that the medium presents, it also has interesting consequences for the relationship between play and reality. Every player has to feel that their character exists in an objective reality along with all the other characters, and that their universe has at least some coherent rules which will always be true. There’s a lot of room for research/speculation about why fantasy and science fiction fans seem to be particularly obsessed with realism and continuity, but for now it can just be noted that the Milliways universe is a lot more realistic than the limitations of the medium (which are almost non-existent) require. Rules are also needed to avoid players’ feelings being hurt, because at least some of them identify very closely with their characters. This is another way in which the distinction between real and virtual breaks down. Players can get upset in real life because of things that have happened to their characters. Relating to a point that Wulf Kansteiner made, memories of things that happened in Milliways are just as valid and significant as memories of the real world.

Text based role playing games are the point at which real and virtual become indistinguishable. There is no difference between writing your own LiveJournal as yourself, describing what has happened to you in the real world, and writing a LiveJournal in character, describing things that have happened in a fantasy world. The interface is exactly the same. There is no reason inherent in the medium why you would be able to tell the difference between a real person and a fictional character. In practice, Milliways hasn’t broken down the barrier to this extent, because a lot of the writing uses the third person and describes actions in the present tense, which is very different from the way that most people write “real” journals. However, the technology is in place to allow a virtual reality roleplaying game which appears no different from the interactions of real people (in fact one of my friends had an idea for a collaborative epistolary novel written in character through LiveJournals, but nothing has come of it yet).

The development of new technology was a necessary condition for this situation to arise, but it’s not a sufficient condition in itself. People who thought that ever improving technology would have to do all the work in catching up with unchanging reality were barking up the wrong tree. The real and the virtual are converging from both directions. Reality is getting more virtual at the same time as the virtual is getting more realistic. Culture is just as important as technology. When the media we habitually use to interact distance us from the reality we’re interacting with, a convincing simulation only needs to simulate the medium, not the reality itself. This negates the technological limitations which have dragged down attempts to simulate direct interaction between a person and a virtual environment. Simulations of tanks and planes were the earliest success of VR, because when you’re driving a vehicle, that vehicle is a medium which distances you from the rest of the world. The primary role of the simulation is to simulate the cockpit, a much easier task than simulating direct contact between a human body and a whole world. In the 1980s, even home computers like the C64 could simulate flying a plane quite convincingly (or at least more convincingly than they could simulate most other things). The SIMNET tank simulator used by the US Army is realistic enough to be a substitute for real exercises (see my post on More Games and Simulations).

Some people will still be sceptical. The internet hasn’t turned us all into cyberpunks or lawnmower men. We still can’t build you, or remember it for you wholesale. But if you take off the retro-futurist goggles and take a broader view, you will see that Virtual Reality is already here, and that many people have failed to notice it precisely because it’s so convincing.

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.