Mom, you asked the other day whether I dream in World of Warcraft. As of last night, I do.
The implications of this dream for Jim Gee’s hypotheses about the relationships between avatars and players might be interesting. I am not totally clear whether I was the avatar for most of the dream, but by the end it was clearly Me in the dream, along with the real life appearances and behaviors of a few of my guildmates.
The beginning of the dream is not easy for me to recall. The guildies and I — and at this point that included a significant ex-boyfriend, who is not actually in the Learned Freethinkers — were trying to escape from or rescue things. (It’s notable that “escape from” is not a genre of quest common to MMORPGs — it’s better-suited to platformers. I was watching Jess beat Rachet and Clank yesterday, so that’s probably where that part of the dream came from.) At some point we ended up locked in a tall, silo-like, mostly featureless, yellowish sandstone tower through which we descended. We thought ourselves very clever when we bashed our way out through a wooden door at the bottom.
We found ourself in forest much like the one Katie and I and Isaac hiked through earlier this summer — very Eact Coast. Standing in some loose shrubbery at the top of the hill where the tower stood, I realized there were two orcs nearby. One was superhumanly tall and the other was very short. They didn’t look like orcs from WoW at all; I remember registering that they looked like cartoons of pale Pacific Islanders with large tusks. NO idea what that was about… aside from maybe the fact that there was some joking going on in the guild last night about people’s Asian mommas.
The other guildies wanted to engage these orcs, who were talking about coming after us one way or another. I was tired of fighting, at this point, so as they clashed I ran away. Someone’s grey Percheron horse was tethered nearby. As I drew near its flank in first-person camera mode, I considered my options for escape. What did I press to mount? Could I ride someone else’s horse? (In WoW, you can’t, because horses don’t really exist until they are summoned, as far as I can tell, and ones which are just around for scenery can’t be interacted with.) Then I realized there was no way I could ride, as I wasn’t of a high enough level.
So I did the next logical thing: I grabbed the left stirrup, and smacked the horse on the ass as hard as I could. It took off at a gallop, dragging me along like a Western trick-rider. I ruminated proudly on this accomplishment as the world sped by — now seen from behild my avatar and the horse. I was going to have to tell the guild how to do this.
Some time later the fighting was over and I found myself in a blue Voyager minivan with the guild, headed towards logging off for the day. The Significant Ex wouldn’t give any indication he heard me no matter what I said to him, but Sam (the real-life person who plays Schmata) and Snizzlet (who I only know online — in fact, I don’t think I’ve actually seen her av, but my dream-state assumed she was a gnome) and I chatted amiably.
At some point it became clear that the other members of the guild were actually heading back to “the Tower” — not the one we’d escaped from, but another one which seemed to basically be home. Even though I wanted to log off this didn’t alarm me too much, because going back to this home state or logging off seemed to more or less be the same thing. I did worry, however, that the other guildies had been online for far too long already.
After I’d woken up, and was wandering around the house groggily preparing for work, thinking of and forgetting a song lyric which seemed to be a good title for this blog post, it occurred to me that I’d had a conversation the night before in the lab which could reasonably be called existential. It was an argument I often have with myself, played out for a change with a colleague who’d worked at Microsoft but is now studying at Bank Street College of Education down the road from TC. I’d showed him some of the complexity of WoW, and he remarked that players were spending significant time living life in its world while their own lives passed them by.
I tend to start from this position in this argument. But then I think, what other life would they be living? They can’t be in two places at once. It’s not like they’re necessarily forgoing social time — the game can be very social, it’s not like staring silently at TV in that way. Sure, the cat box may be dirty, the bills may be unpaid, but as long as the players eventually grab the poop scoop or send some envelopes off to Con Edison their “real lives” will continue, and what else would there be to them than running around Kalimdor? We cannot be anywhere aside from where we are.
And then I think, sure, that’s what they ARE doing, but as for what they COULD be doing, god, they could be fu(king VOTING or working on an impeachment drive or something. But this disconnect, of course, is not video games’ fault. It’s the fault of very well-established appliances like vacuums and washing machines, the attendant rise of leisure time, the development of TV, the fragmentation of large family units by mobility and economic unrest, and so forth. Like the man said, we didn’t start the fire. It only remains to us to fight it.
So yes, we should do something other than play video games, because we do still have meatspace bodies, and to tell you the truth I really like mine and the dancing and the s.ex and the fresh produce and the sleeping and the feeling of cat fur and the smell of cut grass and all. And while we have our faces pointed into the monitor the earth is warming and the carcinogens are rising and the fundamentalists are going nuclear and the police can search our backpacks. The question now is How do we steal critical mass away from entertainment and consumption culture? I don’t think either Neil Postman or Adbusters has the answer.
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