Christopher Jason Smith, PhD Writing for Life. 1
In 2001 I came across an article in Texas Monthly about an apartment complex in Houston named W@lden that was designed for the high-tech employees of the computer industry.(1) It had, at the time, what was purported to be the fastest domestic internet connection in the world (a T-3) which the residents lovingly called “The Big-Fat Pipe.” The main focus of the article was the soap- opera ups and downs, friendships and betrayals, hopes, dreams, and nightmares of this growing class of white-collar geeks living on the tension of the dot-com bubble (and well before the first hints of the burst). Overall, the piece was a localized version of the now infamous stories of The WELL (2) and countless other online communities like it; but one minor detail of the story of the residents of W@lden stuck with me, and I could not shake the feeling that it said something very important about basic human psychology and how and why we interact with technology.
One of the residents of W@lden told the story of “The Dude”. The Dude was a fat young guy who showed up at the apartment complex one day to stay with a friend and proceeded to sit in front of a large computer screen he set up on the floor in the living room and play the massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) EverQuest for days on end. As days stretched into weeks, he sat in the same spot, moving away from the screen only long enough to answer the door for pizza delivery, grab something to drink, and go to the bathroom. If he slept, which supposedly no one ever saw, he slept in the same spot. Trash piled up around him.
1) Katy Vine, Love and War in Cyberspace." Texas Monthly (Feb.2001 [29.2]) 80-85, 126-133. 2) "WELL" is an acronym for for "Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link. For more about The WELL see, for example John Seabrook, Deeper: My Two-Year Odyssey in Cyberspace (Simon & Schuster , 1997), Katie Hafner’s The WELL: A Story of Love, Death and Real Life in the Seminal Online Community (Carroll & Graf Publishers , 2001), and Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (University of Chicago Press , 2006), to name a few. |
I found it difficult not to imagine the detritus of weeks of Pizza Hut deliveries, Big Gulp cups, potato chip bags, and so on. The Dude played EverQuest religiously until the so-called friend finally kicked him out and cleaned up the trash, only to find that a dark circular stain had permanently formed in the carpet around the spot where the unwelcome visitor had sat, staring into the flickering light of the computer screen, lost in another world.
Something about that image—the screen, the human body, the virtual world, and the circular stain in the carpet, grabbed hold of my imagination and would not let go. In fact, I thought about it for several years while I co-wrote a book on the Alien film series with my partner, Ximena Gallardo C., published several articles on various topics including gender representation in online gaming, and ultimately moved from West Virginia to a new life in New York City. Through it all, there was image of The Dude, now transformed in my mind to “The Dude”.
I have been a fan of online games, and specifically MMORPGs, since around 1996 when I started playing an early 3-D online Robo- tech style game whose exact name I can no longer recall. About that time Ultima Online, launched in 1997 by Origin Systems, was hitting the major publications. After reading an article in the 11 March 1999 issue of Newsweek about the kid who sold his Ultima account for $1500, I charged $9.95 a month to an already over- stressed credit card and gave Ultima Online a try. Five minutes of wandering about the virtual town of Delucia and I was hooked on killing (and being killed by) rabbits and chickens and stuffing strange loot in the bank though I had no idea what to do with it all. I played Ultima Online for years afterwards and subsequently had my turn at EverQuest, and pretty much every other MMORPG that came out. I eventually became a beta-tester (one of the people who play a game for free while in production so the designers can work out problems) on quite a few games. So, certainly, something about the story of The Dude struck home. I too had sat for hours on end at the computer screen lost in the “other world” of light and magic, hacking away at the keys and holding my bladder until the right moment when nothing bad would happen to my online character (just like in real life, there are no “pause” buttons for live games). But my reaction to The Dude seemed broader than mere self- reflection: it seemed somehow more meaningful.
The image I could not get out of my head, the notion that bothered me deeply, was that The Dude was like some sort of religious ascetic engaged in a spiritual quest. I remembered a scene from the Indian epic The Ramayana where the hero Rama encounters sages meditating in the forest. They are so deeply in a meditative trance that ants have built swarming hills about their bodies and only their ant-covered heads or faces can be seen. I found that image deeply moving when I read The Ramayana. The more I thought about it, and the more I connected The Dude with those shamen, the more intellectually interested I became in my troubling thoughts.
At the time, I considered online gaming—when I thought seriously about it at all—as an extension of table-top role-playing games (RPGs). In the past I had played pencil and paper RPGs such and Dungeons & Dragons, participated in the maddeningly slow email version of games at one point, read the “choose your own adventure” books, played solo role-playing video games (RPVGs), and logged-in to early multi-user dimension (MUD) role-playing sites to interact with others in real-time in text-based worlds. Ultima Online simply seemed a more visual version of the same thing and the natural progression of the RPG genre. My college buddies and I, now spread out over several states and countries, could log-in at the same time and play together for hours like we used to in college.
When I finally started to think seriously about it, however, I wondered if online RPGs were just a natural progression from the pencil and paper versions, why then did I keep thinking about The Dude? After all, gamers are often obsessive: which is why you will find many current and former gamers in academe. We are an obsessive lot by nature and by training, and it takes a certain amount of intensive focus to conduct research at the required level and sustain it over long periods of time, just as it does to actually master the basic three volumes of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons in order to run a game. I suppose all academics are Dungeon Masters in their own way and vice-versa.
My own work at the time that I encountered the story of W@lden and The Dude focused on how notions of gender are expressed and transmitted through technology. My background, however, was in mythology, world literature, and cultural theory; and my graduate training included a heavy dose of psychoanalytic theory and gender criticism, including the usual suspects of Sigmund Freud, Anna Freud, Carl Gustav Jung, and the more recent work of Jacques Lacan and Slovoj Žižek. Of the lot, Jung had a particular attraction for me. I have read his collected works several times, though I was often warned in graduate school that Jung, and his literary descendent Joseph Campbell (author of the best-selling The Hero with a Thousand Faces) were “out of favor” in academic circles, and that my time working towards publications would be better spent elsewhere.
Obediently, I turned to the French philosopher Michele Foucault and the American gender theorist Judith Butler and found myself happily working with sex and gender construction in literature and film. But, I did not give up my affinity with Jung’s work and something about the story of The Dude seemed distinctly Jungian. I could use other words, of course, such as “mythic,” “epic,” “religious,” or any other number of terms to indicate a sense of transcendence, of something bigger than our selves, but the sense is the same. The Dude was not simply playing EverQuest (albeit obsessively), he was, like the ascetics and mystics, traveling to a magical Somewhere Else and leaving his mortal flesh behind.
And there we come to the point: where the residents of the apartment complex saw The Dude as an obsessive, out of control, weirdo, loser (a shocking mirror of themselves in many aspects, as the author of the article indicates), I began to see him as the contemporary embodiment of the ancient archetypal story of a certain type of religious figure. Fat, slovenly, unwashed, and reeking, The Dude was having what amounts to a religious experience. He was travelling in other plains of existence, virtually disembodied in his rejection of all but the most essential needs of physical survival.
He wasn’t exactly living on bread and water, of course, but the general principle was the same. What was distinctly different from his religious predecessors, however, was the means of transcendence. Rather than mantras or koans, the Analects of Confucius, or the Tao Te Ching of Lao Tzu; rather than the stories of Rama or Krishna or the Buddha, or the poetry of the “Song of Songs” from the Torah and Old Testament, The Dude had EverQuest: a computer mediated virtual environment, more specifically termed a persistent state world (PSW), massively multi- player online role-playing game (again MMORPG, which is intriguingly pronounced “morgue”).
This was several years before a young South Korean man, Seungseob Lee, died after playing StarCraft for 50 hours straight in an internet café in 2005, and not long before the short film “The Kid” from The Animatrix (released in 2003) implied suicide can set you free from the world we know to the “real world” outside “The Matrix”. William Gibson, of course, set the tone for this level of immersion in his inimitable Neuromancer (1984) where we see two variations on the same theme: the immersive entertainment console and the hacker lost in cyberspace who leaves his “meat body” behind. But what Gibson saw and what he described in the video arcade that served as the basis for his idea of cyberspace was for him something new and potentially, for all of us, horrifying. When I read Neuromancer as a teenager, I had the same feeling: we were in the process of something new, a “terrible beauty,” as Yeats might have described it. Though admittedly it was sometimes difficult to see the future Gibson described in a game of Space Invaders (Midway, 1978), Centipede (Atari 1981), or Ms. Pac Man (Midway, 1982), I can still fell the immersion of the first-person perspective of the early flight game Red Baron (Atari, 1980). (3).
3) See, for example "Red Baron (1980 video game)" on Wikipedia. |
After reading the story of The Dude, however, I suddenly had the opposite sense: I was not seeing something new, but seeing something deeply psychological and monstrously ancient, what Jung would have called “archetypal,” perhaps; and it was on those terms that it interested me. At the time I had trouble putting a name to it. Was what I was seeing in The Dude a symbol or symbolic action? Was it a story being enacted? Was it the horror of the unruly, filthy body and the stain it left behind? Or was it, on the other hand, the pristine virtual landscapes and the sleek virtual bodies that occupied it: bodies of light that do not sweat, defecate, or urinate? In fact, I had no idea what the “something” I was feeling was nor what it meant. Finally I decided that the question I was really asking was “What are the pieces of the puzzle, the strands of influence and confluence, that made up this act embodied by The Dude?”
Most obviously we have a human body interacting with a technology—a moment in time—so I started there, with The Dude and worked my way back along the path of bodies and technologies that led up to the moment represented by The Dude. It was not a straight path. If you can imagine looking at one bud on one tiny twig on one branch of an enormous ancient oak tree, and then tracing back down to the root, that would be analogous to the perception that opened up for me as I worked my way back through the innumerable technologies and psychological structures that added up to that one moment, of that one body, sitting before that one screen, and interacting with thousands of other bodies sitting in front of thousands of computer screens. I set out purposefully to track the origin of the moment and, as a writer, to write about it if I could.
I realized that I needed to get a handle on the language, the terminology, of my investigation, and the first term that needed to be addressed was “virtual reality.” Having been formally trained in English, Spanish, and Arabic, I knew my way around a dictionary and own a couple of dozen myself, but in this case I planned to hit the Oxford English Dictionary—first the multi-volume print version then, later, online (they both have distinct advantages)—to find the origins of the term. I knew that origins can tell us a lot about the hidden meanings of a word or phrase and what they mean historically. But first, I sat down and wrote out what I thought “virtual reality” meant so that I would have a record of my perceptions before they were changed by the formal definitions (the denotations), cultural references (or connotation), and history of the word (the etymology).
What I knew was that virtual reality (VR for short hereafter) was hot in popular culture and promised to remain so for quite some time. Films such as Total Recall (1990), The Lawnmower Man (1992), and later The Matrix film series, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), to name a few, draw on the enduring popularity of computer games which has elevated a technical computer concept to the level of cultural phenomenon. Even more, these films seemed to be rooted in serious philosophical issues that invoked potential long-lasting cultural implications. The most popular of these films The Matrix, The Matrix: Reloaded and The Matrix: Revolutions (1999, 2003, and 2003 respectively) each explores the age-old fear of technology replacing humans in the world’s hierarchy and invokes the very essence of philosophy by asking “What is real?”
In the popular media, parents and politicians obsess about violence in video games. Around the world millions of people log into virtual environments to interact with people they have never met in real life (or RL in the lingo) and more and more often these interactions involve virtual bodies (called “avatars”) inhabiting virtual spaces. Games like The Sims Online (now defunct), EverQuest, World of Warcraft, and the first really popular of these massively multiplayer online role-playing games, the iconic Ultima Online, take video games to a new level that moves beyond simple one on one action into a fully designed world where hundreds and even thousands of players can engage together in long drawn out narratives in worlds that never (or almost never) “turn off.” Like real-life (RL), this VR continues with or without you.
Virtual Reality—the very mention of the term invokes images of computer-generated fantasy worlds. The general denotation of the term from a standard dictionary, however, turned out to be quite mundane: a construction that expresses or manifests the virtues of human experience. But what did the Oxford English Dictionary have to say about it? I decided to first have a go at the 20 volume library print edition that contains the etymology (or history) of virtually every word in the English language. Though obviously the online version is more up to date, I felt that looking for my terms in the more traditional format would give me some grounding in traditional research before I hit the web. When I began reading the entry, I was actually quite surprised at how much information there was on “virtual reality”. The phrase “virtual reality” was first used in computer science to describe a computer generated environment in the late 1980’s by computer scientist Jaron Lanier, who claims to have coined the term. However, the origin of the term is actually a bit more convoluted. For example, the pioneering computer artist Myron Krueger coined the term “artificial reality” in the 1970’s; the French poet, playwright, and actor Antonin Artaud used the term “la réalite virtuelle” in his 1938 book The Theater and Its Double; and science fiction author Damien Broderick used the term “virtual reality” in a related sense in his 1982 novel The Judas Mandala. But it was Lanier who invested himself in the term and popularized it.
It certainly felt to me like it had been around much longer than that, but then I remembered that William Gibson used the conflated term “cyberspace” and not “virtual reality.” But, we should remember that even scientists and engineers tend to choose terms for the potential “buzz” they might start. Like the coining of the term “Chaos Theory” for popular descriptions of the theories arising from the field of “complex dynamics” caused great furor due to its philosophical and religious connotations, “virtual reality” is a term composed of not one historically loaded term, or even two, but three interrelated terms. “Virtual Reality” is based on the complex philosophical concepts of “virtual,” and “reality,” obviously, but also “virtue” (the root of “virtual”) which is a close conceptual corollary to “reality.” In fact, “virtual” is an adjective that already implies a “reality” being emulated, therefore saying “virtual reality” is rather like saying, as second-rate Tex-Mex restaurants are wont to do, “chili con queso with cheese.” Of the long and complicated history of the three interrelated terms, I would like to draw attention to several factors which will have a direct impact on this history of the idea.
First, the word “virtue,” the noun form of “virtual,” is strongly associated through much of the development of the English language with the power or powers of the divine; thus, to “have virtue” was to exhibit or embody some quality of the divine power. The important point here is that to “have virtue” meant to embody the divine, to open oneself up to an external power and let it in. Thus, Jesus embodied all virtues because he was God embodied— what may be called an “avatar” from the Sanskrit “avatara”: a term that will have relevance to our later discussion. Likewise, the hero and heroine of the Ramayana, Rama and Sita, and have both been described as avatars of the Hindu god Vishnu (the 7th and 8th, respectively). But, we will come back to avatars later.
Second, the word “virtue” is historically tied to gender. “Virtue” is from the latin virtus meaning “excellence, potency, efficacy” but more literally “manliness,” the root vir indicating “man” as in “human and male.” Thus, virtue is a quality, power, or essence that has its roots in the male body and is, therefore, no doubt tied to the most obvious symbol of male power, the phallus, as both the male sexual organ and the symbol of masculine strength. For if “vir” indicates the male then it must originally refer to that obvious indicator of sex from birth.
Through time, the virtues expanded in scope and divided into “active” and “passive” virtues. Predictably, those qualities not considered “masculine,” albeit still associated with the divine, came to be associated with women. These “civilizing virtues” of faith, hope, and charity, and so on, contrasted and complimented the more masculine virtues such as justice and the all-encompassing honor. These virtues were also associated with women in form if not in actuality. Justice, like Liberty, is portrayed most often as a woman, and women become “the keeper” of male honor, and thereby the family honor as well, though they do not “defend it” or “wield it.” Therefore, the term “virtual,” tied up as it is in the complex web of signification surrounding “virtue,” is a term heavily imbued through time with gender issues and gendered meanings.
Third, “the virtual” is part and parcel of an ancient philosophical and theological discourses on representation, imitation, and simulation, including Plato and Aristotle’s classical discourses on mimesis, the Buddha’s meditations on the nature of lived reality as illusion, the Christian notion of Heaven (all from around 500 B.C.), and in contemporary discourse, Jean Baudrillard’s critique of simulacra in Simulacra and Simulation. The term, therefore, invokes a long history of discourse on the nature or reality: what the philosophers call “ontology.”
In general, then, the “virtual” is something that has the qualities of something else without actually, or literally, being that thing. However, just to confuse matters further, it could effectively be that thing at which point the line between the “real” and the “simulacrum” would blur. A woman named “Faith” for example could also embody the virtue of her name and, therefore, “be Faith [by name]” and “have faith” and “act out of faith” where the inscribing of the name to the child was in hope of enacting that virtue within her body and life. This was, perhaps, more true in an earlier era but we still understand this naming business when we name our children. Few people would want to name their children names such like “Satan,” “Adolf,” or even “Loser” as we would fear the social repercussions as well as the possibility of invoking the traits of the namesake.
What we term “the virtual” is, in philosopher Jean Baudrillard’s terms, a “simulacrum”—the virtual simulates something else that approaches reality, though it never quite attains it. Though we have given the term “virtual” a new shine with computer technology, the concept itself (and even the word in one form or another) is very, very old; and I believe, and will attempt to demonstrate, that is cuts to the core of what it means to be human. By my way of thinking, to be human is to be self-reflexive, to wonder about ourselves, our origins, our place in the universe, our destiny. Thus, “virtue,” and its adjectival form “virtual,” are core concepts of the human experience.
Our fourth concern is that the term “reality” is one of those terms like “god” and “virginity” that everyone assumes they understand when they do not and assumes everyone else knows when they cannot. We are all supposedly somehow in silent agreement. If we start to talk about it, however, we quickly recognize that while everyone seems to “know” it, no one seems to agree what “it” is. For example, I teach a course on sexuality in literature and every single semester I ask my student-learners to raise their hands if they know what a “virgin” is. They all seem to. I then ask each student the following: “Please write a definition of ‘virgin,’ limiting it only to the human female to avoid confusion.” They think. They write. They all smile happily when done, comfortable in the knowledge that they all have “the right answer.” (It is, after all, very early in the semester yet). “So,” I ask, “what is a ‘virgin’?” “A person who has not had sex!” exclaims one young woman. “Everyone agree? OK, then, all we have to do is define ‘sex’ and we’ll be done and can move on to the poetry for the day! So, what is sex?”
Imagine a well-trained choir all secretly handed a different song, singing the first note in what they assume will be unison only to produce an ear-splitting cacophony of disagreement followed by nervous confusion. Is it “penis and vagina”? “Intercourse”? “Breaking of the hymen”? “Oral sex”? “Any sexual contact”? What is “sexual contact”? Do you have to “fall in love to really lose your virginity”? I have heard all of these and the tendency to over-share is strong in this situation—one young woman claimed to be a virgin because she’s never been “on bottom.” Another student a few years ago asserted in all seriousness to the class that, even though she had given birth to a child, she was still a virgin. I thought it improper at that juncture to pursue that particular line of reasoning any further, but I think the point has been made. The is no general popular agreement on what exactly, constitutes the sex act that removes virginity.
You might be surprised at the sheer number of responses to what seems like a simple question, and a question that seems so fundamental to the sexual mores of a society. They invariably laugh and call each other “liars” and “idiots” in an attempt to force the individual’s reality onto the collective whole. Rather than admit the subjective (and political) nature of an apparently essential term like “virginity” or “sex,” each of my students would rather suppress all of those “other” voices. But, by the end of the class, the point is clear—”virginity” is not only a natural state, but a socially constructed and culturally invested phenomenon used to define and, thereby control, bodies through culturally created mores and laws.
“Reality” may not be quite as contentious as the nature of virginity, but it operates much to the same effect. As far as the dictionary definition, or denotation, goes, “reality” is historically tied to “property” or “land” (therefore “real-estate,” or actual property, as opposed to money or investments) and the root of “real” specifically refers to the fixed nature of land or property— that which is immovable and unchangeable. As they say in my home state of Texas, “Land is the only thing that is real.”
The “real” refers directly to a particular virtue of things which makes them exactly what they seem or purport to be, so that “a real wrestler” embodies the traits of the wrestler in a way which posits the person as defining the term itself (a measure by which to test other wrestler’s skill) while at the same time acknowledging that simulation is possible and denying the simulation in this particular manifestation: if Joe is a “real wrestler” then others who purport to be “real wrestlers” must really be just playing the part (pretenders or mere simulations). To say something is “real,” therefore, is to admit the possibility of mistaking it for the simulation (a simulacrum) as when an advertisement on a juice carton reads “real juice” or as I ran into recently while shopping for milk, “real milk from real cows”—a phrase designed to call into question the “reality” of the other brands of milk on the shelf.
In common speech there are three major schools of thought on reality that have been succinctly summarized in baseball metaphor as the three different varieties of baseball umpires. Reality 1: “Some are balls and some are strikes, and I call them as they are.” Reality 2: “Some are balls and some are strikes, and I call them as I see them.” Reality 3: “Some are balls and some are strikes, but they ain’t nothing until I call them”. The first group—“Hey! A strike is a strike!”—espouses the objective view of reality which essentially argues that reality exists and reasonable humans have access to that reality through observation and the application of formal logic. Anyone who does not agree has not properly applied their observation and logic to the event. Most scientists would fall into this category, though certainly not all (some of the quantum mechanics physicists among them).
The second group—”I’m a trained umpire doing the best I can under the circumstances”—believes that reality is a bit more difficult to get at primarily due to the slippery nature of language, in this case the “rules” of the game, and our inability to describe what we perceive to others. This ambiguity is compounded with our cultural prejudices to “see” what we have been taught to see or, worse, want to see. Thus, an umpire born and raised and trained in Texas might be accused of favoritism when calling balls in Queens, particularly if the Rangers are playing. If he also ascribes to this view of reality, he knows he could be prejudiced but does his best to exceed his upbringing and follow his training.
The final category of umpire knows that he is the first and last authority on balls and strikes (at least in this game) and that is because the rules of the game give him the power to decide reality within the context of the game: “What I say goes!” And because the rules of the game and the authority are behind him, the record books will thereafter record a strike regardless of those yahoos who (operating in Reality 2) argue about it for years. This view holds that authority, derived from law or other source of power, sets the nature of reality. Umpires collectively define what a strike is or is not in general, and specific umpires decide in every specific case, and each umpire has the power, as defined by rule, to decide what is or is not a strike in the reality of that game. This view of reality we might term observer dependent (from physics) or informatics (the science of information): essentially we might say that those who control the rules (information) define what the rest of us—including the players and the fans—experience as reality.
Since receiving my PhD some years ago, my father takes great pleasure in annoying me with the old question “If a tree falls in the woods and there is no one there to hear it, does it make a sound?” The range of answers includes “Yes, of course,” “No, because ‘sound’ is a function of ‘hearing’,” and “How would I know if I wasn’t there?” to “How do you know it fell if you weren’t there?” My favorite answer for him, though I change it up to keep him entertained, is “Well, it depends on whether it is a real tree and a real sound or a hypothetical tree and a hypothetical sound.” I tend to be a bit of a smart-ass with my father. Regardless, though the above is an extreme oversimplification of the variety and depth of ontology, it should suffice for the moment for our inquiry into the nature of “virtual reality” to proceed.
Let us finish, then, with the assertion that “virtual reality” means literally “something that exhibits the virtues of reality to some degree.” Thus, a virtual room would have a doorway and walls and a floor and a ceiling and any of the other “virtues” that imply a room. What makes this room a “virtual room” as opposed to a “real room”? The one trait that the real room has that the virtual does not is that the real room does not require a technical mediator in order for a person with the usual range of senses to experience it, whereas the virtual room requires that the senses of my body be in some way augmented or modified for the duration of the experience. I go into a room, but the virtual room has to come to me by fooling my senses in some way.
For example, we have early examples of virtual art in rooms that were painted to simulate forests. The paint and painter’s technique is a technology that interacts with the senses in an attempt to fool them. Burning pine incense in the room would further the illusion as would covering the floor with pine-needles and so on. The virtual room may seem, then, more “interactive” than a plain room because of our awareness of its artificiality and our desire to interact with it and “test it out,” so to speak, by touching the walls and looking for the source of the pine smell. We wonder at the illusion of the created “virtual reality” and enjoy it but this also may lead to our questioning the nature of “reality” as well. After all, why else would we enjoy a room of fake trees if it did not make us see real trees in new ways. Perhaps more trouble is the idea that if we can see the real in new ways then how “real” is it? Which is to say, for good or ill the virtual pushes us towards Reality 3: “they ain’t nothing until I call them” while at the same time hiding the means of production of the simulation: we do not see the process of the painting of the trees on the wall. This concept is just one step away from games like World of Warcraft. Virtual spaces are created for the players who have no access to the means of their creation (the rules and coding that are the real game).
All of which led me to some very interesting and uncomfortable ideas on which to base my investigation. I started to think that the notion of “virtual reality” is based upon three central concerns of the human experience. First, it depends on the experience or belief that the human body is a “made” thing. This is not a particularly novel idea. After all, most mythology systems include a creation story where humans are created from mud or ash or ribs or some such. Humans are embodied beings; therefore, part of the “illusion” of this world is that very embodiment. No wonder we imagine a part of the body that is eternal, can escape and travel around without the body, can go to heaven, or can be born again. Like virtue, the notion of a soul or spirit, of an eternal part that survives our death is so prevalent that “virtue” and “soul” seem to operate as mutually supporting metaphors. As we shall see, however, virtue arises from the primal body and gives birth to such notions as the soul and eternity. Second, reality--our experience of the world--seems to many of us to be not only subjective (meaning prone to distortion by the individual senses and mind) but also very limited. Throughout recorded history humans have been convinced that there was more to the universe than meets the eye and that “reality” was not the whole story. As Calderon de la Barca wrote more than 300 years ago, “La vida es sueno” [“Life is a dream”]. Life is a dream of our own making—or even more terrifying, life is a dream made for us by others as in Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave”. This is the fear expressed in a broad range of literary works: even those written for children. For example, in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland Tweedle Dee suggests to Alice that “If that there King [who dreams the world into existence] was to wake, you’d go out ‘Bang!’ just like a candle!”
For Plato in classical Greece, Buddha in India, and Jesus in the Middle East, and many others who believed variations on the theme that the “world is a dream,” all the common man calls “reality,” what we experience through our senses every single day, is virtual, exhibiting the qualities (the virtues) of reality but hiding the real reality behind it (heaven, nirvana, the Real). This notion is the basis for all religion and theology and much philosophy. Our inescapably human feeling that this can’t be all there is leads us to the belief that all this is somehow not real and is therefore a copy of what is real that has somehow been lost. Thus we come to the postmodern pop- psych mantra that “I just don’t feel like myself anymore.”
Freudian psychoanalytic theorist Jacques Lacan describes this sense of loss as the very basis for the establishment of the ego. In effect it is the pain of losing the Real (or uninhibited participation with the world) that makes us individuated persons. Or at least makes us believe we are individuated persons. And what causes this primary trauma? Language. Once I say “I” there has to be a “you” and we are lonely and misunderstood ever after, trapped in a world that is not quite as it should be, not quite real, trapped as it were in a virtual world. And, according to Lacan, thank heaven for orgasms because that is the closest you’ll ever get again to feeling “at one with the universe” again.
Orgasms aside, I believe now, at the end of the long journey that culminated in this book, that the virtual is our Alpha and Omega, our beginning and end, and that it ties together the great web of what we call “being human”. So, let’s start at the beginning, at the root of the tree, and see how far up the branches we can go. To do that, however, we will need some sense of the layout of the branches of knowledge that we will be delving into. Starting from an online game like EverQuest or World of Warcraft, what groups of technologies or techniques are necessary for the event of engaging in that online space to happen at all?
Working from the image of the virtual environment on the computer screen I can begin my list by saying the existence of that moment requires the ability to represent bodies and to recognize those representations (or what we might call representational art or technology). I can see a body on the screen, what is called my “avatar” for reasons we will get into later. It was designed by an artist and I can recognize it for what it is supposed to be (a body) and what it actually is (a simulated body). That body occupies a space in the screen, and that space too was created, and I can recognize this created, virtual space as being like the space I occupy. For those spaces to be created and for me to understand them (to see what they are or are supposed to be) requires a basic understanding of geography (negotiating spaces) and cartography (visualizing spaces) and cartography also requires an understanding of artificially rendered perspective (imagining spaces from positions other than standing in them).
To understand the unfolding of the online game, I must have some grasp of narrative structures to be able to follow the “story” (the story of my character and/or the unfolding story of the virtual world as a whole) from point to point, and that story has to be conveyed to me. This technique is based in our human ability to tell stories, to make narratives, and transmit stories through time and space as in mythology and history. Narratives themselves include the ability to imagine bodies moving through space and time as we have to “imagine” the events of the story as we hear them. Though I do not need to be aware of it to play an online game, the online environment requires the additional understanding of the actual rules of movement in spaces through time and the ability to formulate new rules of bodies and spaces and times (logistics) as movement in simulated environments is based on our movement but is not the same. Movement is, however, based on rules, which is part of what makes it a “game.”
But what is a “game”? We might think of the difference between throwing dirt in the air (play), to stacking blocks in a pattern (an individual game), to a game with more formal rules such as Hide and Seek, or even more complex, Dungeons and Dragons. EverQuest is certainly more complex than hide and seek, but the same basic principles are there. Speaking of Dungeons & Dragons,
our MMO is also a Role-Playing Game (or RPG), making it an MMORPG and all RPG’s are based in Dungeons & Dragons (actually its predecessor Chainmail) which are in turn rooted in the rules (logistics again) of miniature wargaming.
And then, of course, we have the computer itself. For all of the above to happen, the PC must bring together a long history of technologies that include the ability to record and transmit sound and/or data, record and transmit images, record and transmit moving images, produce computing power, design and encode computer games, design and encode computer text-based role-playing games, design and encode video games then multi-player video games, connect computers together into a network to form the Internet, and then combine elements to produce multiplayer internet text-based environments followed by the addition of video-game technology to produce massively multi-player online role-playing games like World of Warcraft. That is a lot of technologies and techniques.
Stripping out all of the potential sub-categories for the moment a short list of the broad clusters of technologies and techniques needed for me to log in to an online game like World of Warcraft might break down into a list like this:
• Representation of bodies (representational art)
• Representation of spaces (cartography and representational art)
• Telling stories or creating and conveying narratives of events (narrative)
• Describing how bodies move in space and time (logistics)
• Inventing rules that simulate reality (role-play and formal games)
• Information recording technologies (such as writing, music records, DVD’s, or hard-drives)
• Information transmission and reception technologies (such as books, radio, television, the Internet, and WiFi)
• Computing power (mainframes and personal computers)
This list is, of course, only one way to think of some of the different technologies that support a virtual environment, and any list is, by its very nature, exclusive. However, what I like about this list as a starting point is that it clearly demonstrates the process of producing virtual environments as a historically rooted progression and compiling of technologies and techniques. The representation of bodies, for example, historically precedes the representation of space, which necessarily must come before narrative as “stories” involve bodies moving in space and time (for example, “He went to the store.”) which in turn precedes the invention of rules that simulate bodies moving in space and time (such as in a chess game where the figures represent individuals or armies and the board a country or collection of countries). Still, we have an imposing list to say the least, but if we want to come to some sort of understanding of the story of The Dude, then I will need to start somewhere on that list. One of my professors, James A. Grimshaw Jr., was fond of asking students a question about tackling a large research project. “How do you eat and elephant?” he would ask, one eyebrow rising slightly up his pale forehead. We would all wait for the answer in mute silence, though many of us had been in his classes before and already knew the answer. He would smile slightly, lean in to the class confidentially, “How do you eat an elephant?” he would ask again, and deliver his line: “One bite at a time, people. One . . . bite . . . at . . . a . . . . time.”
Taking that to heart, then, I will begin at what seems to be the first bite: the emergence of representational art and the simulation of bodies.
