Ode to Elftown

Elftown is a SNS for fantasy enthusiasts. It's a wiki, meaning users can create their own pages and, to a lesser extent, edit the pages of others. This technology allows users -- or 'Elftowners,' as they're called -- an unusual degree of creative control over the 'look and feel' of their site. Opportunities for expression are legion -- via simple manipulations of an easy-to-understand pseudo-HTML design script, Elftowners can create pages for practically any purpose and embed texts, paintings, and graphic designs into the shared environment with ease. There is a team of administrators called the Elftown Council that have the power to remove uploads and even suspend accounts, but from what I can tell, this power is rarely if ever abused. Rather, council members seem content to stay within the bounds of their prescribed duties, trolling the site for copyright violations and breaches of the Elftown obscenity policy and occasionally performing a little bit of maintenance. Their exclusive curatorial access to the site's most heavily trafficked pages allows them to feature the work of users that otherwise wouldn't get much exposure, adding a cultural incentive to council participation. Anyone may 'run' for a council position -- although in truth, it helps to have friends in high places if you want to get in.

So Elftown is one of those online environments where, in theory, anything goes -- although in practice, the prevailing interest in fantasy and sci-fi and the surprising abundance of parents on the site do place some restrictions on what passes as acceptable speech, behavior, and conduct. Nevertheless, the site's DIY sensibility has appealed to a large number of would-be artists, making the Elftown community one that places a high premium on individual expression. People on Elftown like to like to create their own fun; rather than waste hours on Farmville or some other third-party application developed for a secure content site, they'd prefer to waste hours immersed in an interactive text-based role playing game or critiquing their friend's latest comic. In order to play, one must be willing to put themselves out there. It takes assertiveness; one has to feel comfortable in the identity s/he has created for her/himself. What's needed, then, is for people to play nice enough to where others won't feel threatened -- in effect, a tolerant community ethos.

After having spent some time living among the the people of Elftown, I must say I've come to appreciate the community's dedication to diversity. They revel in a technology that minimizes the degrees of hierarchical separation from one user to the next and makes equal access to the community and its culture for all not a pipe dream, but a fact. It is true that the majority of what goes on in Elftown is classifiably stupid. People there dally away God knows how much time rendering sexy portraits of pin-up anime nymphs to hang next to their profile pictures and blowing each other to smithereens with torrents of chatspeak, to name but two of the more popular pastimes I observed there.

But the silliness of it all shouldn't distract from the site's potential as a model for other online community projects. I'm reminded of Jenkins. Imagine, for instance, a social networking wiki similarly devoted to individual expression with a larger goal, such as creating political dialogue or developing funds and resources for an important cause. Is this sort of thing even possible, or would the degree of organization required in pursuing a cause make participation ultimately a matter of rank? Could it be that fully collaborative online environments like Elftown are simply not the best places for serious, purposeful discussions?

Thinking about Davidson and rules of response

As I was reading through Davidson's blog posts, a single objection to her proposal for a more peer-to-peer- oriented student evaluation system popped into my head (for the record, I think it's a great idea)... giving students the power to assess their peers' work and have their work assessed by peers is great and all, but what good does it do the student in terms of feedback and suggestions for growth? As we discussed in class, students tend to put a higher premium on being nice than on being critical. We simply do our best not to get in each others' ways. An instructor following Davidson's suggestions could do a number of things to override this tendency and get his or her students to actually start thinking/reading/responding critically -- they could get the students to sign a contract explaining what kind of evaluation is expected; they could actually grade the students on their grading (not sure if this would defeat the point, but as it turns out it's kind of hard to get away from the whole grades thing); they could even simply devote a good chunk of time to hammering out the importance of proper critical evaluation in class. But would any of these measures actually get the majority of students to care about the quality of their participation in the evaluative process?

It's hard to say, and I guess we won't really know until this method of evaluation starts to catch on. But I have faith that, if more instructors were to borrow from Davidson's approach and start looking for ways to incorporate students in assessments of quality of work, it would gradually lead to a shift in the way students' conceive of their roles vis-a-vis their peers. As Davidson says:

"[V]ery little in our society prepares us for responsible and responsive exchange. Typically, we learn how to please a figure in power. We do not practice or learn principles for helping one another through an iterative, interactive process."

When one person or a small group has exclusive, monopolistic control over what counts as good or acceptable (and, by extension, who gets more pie), then they are the only ones anyone need bother to please or appeal to. These are the rules of authority. And we live in a society where authority and its corresponding notions of the inviolability of expertise are hardwired into practically everything we do. But as Davidson and others have pointed out, the Internet has exposed the limits of expert authority -- and correspondingly, it has foregrounded the importance of sharing and collaboration for building quality bodies of knowledge.

The niceness and deference we regularly accord each other when asked to review our peers' work is simply our learned, conditioned response to the evaluative situation. But there is a difference between niceness and deference; and I think that, whereas we're going to continue needing the former (obviously), the latter simply needs to go. Automatically deferring to the quality of a piece for whatever reason is in reality a deference to the author and a cutting off of the critical impulse, which is simply to respond. The classroom would indeed be a great place to start tweaking these conditioned, deferential responses and adapting them to the current reality.

So what do y'all think? Would a method of collaborative grade evaluation like the one proposed by Davidson really get us to change the way we conceive of our roles as peer reviewers, or would it simply have the effect of reinforcing old hierarchies and modes of response?

Fantasies

One of the more interesting questions raised by EXistenZ is that of free will: to what extent are our actions, thoughts, feelings, and aspirations original to us, and to what extent are they constructed by external forces? In the movie, Pikul poses this same question in so many words while he and Allegra are in the world of the game. Forced to grapple with the uncomfortable feeling that they are being propelled along by an arbitrary external will, unable to choose their own responses to the events unfolding around them, Pikul complains:

Ted: "We're both stumbling around together in this unformed world, whose rules and objectives are largely unknown, seemingly indecipherable or even possibly nonexistant, always on the verge of being killed by forces that we don't understand."

Allegra: "That sounds like my game, alright."

Ted: "That sounds like a game that's not gonna be easy to market."

Allegra: "But it's a game everybody's already playing."

The "unformed world" of the game is, according to the dialogue, not so different from the "unformed world" of existence. Most games are escapes: aesthetically, they simulate worlds, roles, and situations that are obviously imaginary or 'unreal,' and, in terms of their design, contain clear, easy-to-understand rules and objectives that allow the player to feel in control. Free will is very much apparent in single-player adventure games and RPGs -- there are rules and limits, sure, but ultimately, players are allowed to do as they wish, imposing their will on a responsive but passive environment. I remember being blown away by Super Mario 64 (1996), the first fully three-dimensional platformer and one of the first fully three-dimensional games; unlike in two-dimensional platformers, Super Mario players could veer off course and go exploring, spending hours away from the objectives of the game and building objectives of their own. In essence, Super Mario 64 was a groundbreaking fantasy of empowerment, uniquely suited to its time.

What's ironic about EXistenZ is that Allegra Geller has designed a game that is as unnervingly unlike a game as possible. The fantasies of empowerment are swift and fleeting because consequences are always close behind. In Grand Theft Auto, there are no 'real' or significant consequences for killing a cop. Sure, you'll have the entire police force hunting you down, but the worst they can do is kill you and give you a chance to re-spawn and start over. In EXistenZ, Pikul may have enjoyed killing the Chinese waiter, but in so doing he unleashes a chain of events over which he has no control. He cannot see what's coming next, and this causes him some serious existential angst. His complaint, then, is one stemming from feelings of disempowerment -- aren't games, after all, supposed to give us more control and more free will?

The answer is yes, but the funny thing is most of us don't see it that way. We maintain the fantasy that we're pretty much in complete control of our lives -- when we're happy, at least. Questioning this basic tenet of existence leads one down some pretty nasty thought tunnels. So we keep up the fantasy as much as possible. The virtual identities we construct online in digital spaces such as Facebook and World of Warcraft are extensions of this fantasy. They give us the power to conduct 'impression management' and control how the world responds to us as individuals. But ironically, as our technological capabilities catch up with our desire to be whomever we want to be, these identities will inevitably become more fully realized -- more real to us; and perhaps, for that very reason, less satisfying. Our various identities are only becoming more integrated; and the closer our avatars and our SNS profiles get to exposing things about us that we'd rather see left out of the fantasy, the more will we feel disempowered. It will be interesting to watch as these new identities begin to 'bleed through' into the real world, putting us in the uncomfortable position of having to determine our 'real' identities from those that may merely be 'fake' or 'manufactured.'

Ultimately, the lesson here as I see it is that any attempt to fragment existence between 'real' and 'not real' serves the purpose of making us feel better about the fact that there is much in life we can't control. But that's life. There is such a thing as reality -- it simply encompasses all those things we would prefer not to think of as reality, too. And it shouldn't be forgotten that at the end of the day, we do have control over some things. The decision to go online and build an entirely new identity is, after all, a choice -- an imposition of our wills on reality.

S/R 3: EXistenZ

S/R 3: EXistenZ

EXistenZ (1999) is a sci-fi film written and directed by David Cronenberg that explores the limits of how we view reality. Based in a future where ordinary people divide their time between ‘reality’ and astonishingly realistic VR game worlds, it opens with the unveiling of eXistenZ — the latest creation by brilliant game designer Allegra Geller — before a specially selected focus group gathered in a country church. EXistenZ, like other VR games, is accessible via organic “game pods” constructed from bits and pieces of farm-raised amphibious mutants, or “trout.” To experience the game, the gamer must ‘plug’ the pod into his or her “bioport,” a surgical hole at the base of the spinal cord. Once the pod is inserted, the game will begin, constructing a fully immersive virtual world complete with sensations, characters, morals, motives, and choices from the collective thoughts, emotions, fears, and aspirations of the participants. As the group prepares to ‘enter’ eXistenZ, an attempt on Geller’s life by a fanatical assassin acting in the name of “the one true reality” thrusts the designer into the ‘protective’ custody of nervous PR intern Ted Pikul. With Pikul, Geller spends the remainder of the movie on the run, trying to learn the identities of those responsible for the conspiracy against her life. Their search for answers leads them in and out of eXistenZ, where they quickly become embroiled in a ‘virtual’ version of the very conspiracy they have been trying to uncover, eventually losing all sense of where the ‘virtual’ world of eXistenZ ends and the ‘real’ world of existence begins. In the final scene, they appear back at the church, and it is ‘revealed’ that they have been in another game the entire time — this once called tranCendenZ — that neither one of them is actually a famous designer — and finally, that they themselves are the very assassins they’d been trying to catch.

One of the more interesting themes in EXistenZ is that of violence. I never was particularly convinced by arguments suggesting a link between video games and violent behavior; it always seemed to me that the gulf between the world of the game and reality was too great to result in any confusion over the distinction between gunning down cops in Grand Theft Auto and firing an actual weapon at an actual flesh-and-blood person. But Cronenberg’s film presents a very different picture of the distinction — or lack thereof — beween virtual and ‘actual’ violence. Throughout, violent actions are portrayed in an exaggerated, cartoonish fashion, presumably in an attempt to emulate the over-the-top, cartoon violence of video games and low-budget sci-fi movies. While initially comical, these cartoon portrayals become gradually more disturbing as the movie progresses and the characters become increasingly unsure of what’s ‘real’ and what’s not. Pikul makes the first kill, dispatching Gas at the filling station as he is about to kill Geller. We assume, at this point, that he is not in the game — that he is, in fact, in ‘reality’ and that he just did, in fact, kill a ‘real’ person. But ironically, even though Pikul’s next kill — the Chinese waiter — is a character in the game, his death is easily the goriest and most disturbing in the film. We feel more for him than we do for Gas, as his death makes considerably less sense. By leaving us with no perceptible distinction between the ‘virtual’ and the ‘real’ and forcing us to witness acts of violence that could belong to either category, Cronenberg effectively turns our fascination with ‘virtual’ violence around on us with an emphatic twist, reminding us that what’s ‘virtual’ and what’s ‘real’ might not be so different after all.

getting to know the cyberhood

"One thing to keep in mind about social media: the internet mirrors and magnifies pre-existing dynamics. And it makes many different realities much more visible than ever before ... You can see homophily online and you can see the ways in which people who share physical space do not share emotional connections."

Boyd suggests that, by simply going online and having a look around, we can become more aware of how social stratification really works. This is both sad and encouraging. It is sad that more of us aren't using SNSs like facebook to meet new people from different backgrounds. I for one followed the script described by Boyd pretty closely; as a teenager, I defected from myspace because my sister was in college and she and all her friends were on facebook. And since then, I've pretty much exclusively friended people from my offline network. The potential to reach out to a stranger on the basis of a shared interest or to go rub elbows with my old myspace buddies is always there, but the force of habit is strong.

The suggestion that looking online can help us see things we may have formerly missed is encouraging because it might offer a way out of this dilemma. There is apparently a lot going on online that most of us flat out miss. Like bona fide digital stratification. Being a little more aware of where we go and whom we interact with online -- and then making a conscious effort to try new things and seek out new perspectives -- should empower us to at least have a better understanding of our online capabilities.

But my question is: what's the best way to initiate a meaningful dialogue between people of different classes, nationalities, and culturally defined values? It's one thing to go seek people out, but it's quite another to forge that "emotional connection" mentioned in the quotation above. Should there be any rules? Any guidelines?