Second Life, Video Games, and the Social Text the Prospect Is Sublime

[ PMLA the changing profession

Second Life, Video Games, and the Social Text The prospect is sublime. Off the coast of the mainland are islands—in fact, sweeping archipelagoes—inhabited by educa- steven e. jones tors and students. The residents have built massive modern class- rooms, high-rises, clock towers, conference rooms, amphitheaters, auditoriums, and libraries among the evergreens, campuses with spacious lawns. To get to one of these islands, you can go directly from certain information kiosks or portals. Or, if you know the way and don’t run into any invisible Plexiglas walls extending far up into the sky, you can just levitate, tilt into the wind, and fly there, while the landscape scrolls along below you like a map (which it is). I’m describing not a real-world landscape but a digital one, the 3-D multiuser virtual environment Second Life, which was opened by Linden Lab in 2003, roughly a decade after the advent of the World Wide Web. In the past few years, some journalists, corpo- rations, and academics have increasingly treated the proprietary platform Second Life as the end toward which the Web is evolving, sometimes in the belief that 3-D is inherently better than 2-D (or the “flat Web,” as some fans refer to most of the rest of the network, as if it were the medieval flat earth) and often under the mistaken -im pression that this newest new thing is a self-contained and unitary virtual world set apart from the general chaos of the Web.1 Intellec- tual, cultural, and financial capital is flowing into and out of Linden Lab’s “metaverse,” often because of an assumption that Second Life represents the “future of the Internet.” On April Fool’s Day 2008, the United States congressional Subcommittee on Telecommunica- steven e. jones is professor of English tions and the Internet held a hearing on the topic of online virtual at Loyola University, Chicago, where he worlds, focused almost exclusively on Second Life. Simulcast inside teaches Romantic literature and textual Second Life, the hearing took up questions such as the possibility studies. The author of The Meaning of that Islamic militants could use avatars inside the virtual world to Video Games: Gaming and Textual Strate- gies (Routledge, 2008) and Against Tech- recruit and plan terrorist attacks. The idea that this would be more nology: From the Luddites to Neo-Luddism likely or more effective in Second Life than on any number of exist- (Routledge, 2006), he is also cocreator and ing “2-D” Web sites is a sign of the mystifying aura surrounding coeditor of the Web site Romantic Circles. this platform.

the arrow keys, as in many video games, to changing Second Life has a prehistory. It was built move in one of four directions—just as when through remediation of earlier technology walking. You often see buildings forming out platforms for interactive virtual spaces, from of pixilated graphic “primitives” as you fly past

the text-based mazes of Adventure to the so-

too quickly. There is a cartoon quality to this profession cial spaces of MUDs (multiuser dungeons) and world, which is graphically anything but re- MOOs (MUDs object-oriented). Like these alistic. Sometimes you experience server lag, earlier platforms, Second Life is often under- and your avatar hesitates to respond to key- stood in terms of the loaded concept of virtual board commands. In any session, you may reality, meaning total sensory immersion in a have to consult maps and signs to know which self-contained alternative world. In the popular building is the one you are looking for. In fact, imagination, virtual-reality environments of- there are signs and labels and other forms of ten represent a disembodied second nature and text everywhere. To communicate with other raise fundamental questions about the nature avatars, you mostly type on your keyboard as of human subjectivity. These questions seemed your avatar makes typing motions in the air, especially urgent in the era from William Gib- and then word bubbles appear above his or her son’s Neuromancer (1984) to The Matrix (1999) head. Text hangs like a cloud of smoke in the and N. Katherine Hayles’s How We Became air above a crowd of avatars. In other words, Posthuman (1999). As Hayles explains, during you necessarily remain at all times both in the the first decade of the World Wide Web, much world and out of it, controlling what happens debate in the humanities arose in response to by way of interface conventions. Although you the notion that information was becoming de- become somewhat less conscious of the inter- materialized, “losing its body.” When Second face with extended time in the simulated world, Life is described (as it often is) as another world it remains a little like watching what’s going on where you can build anything you can imagine in the reflection on your train window at the and be anything you desire, I hear echoes from same time that you’re aware of the city going the heroic era of cyberspace and virtual real- past beyond the window—a multilayered expe- ity.2 During the 1990s, Moore’s law (referring rience of divided attention, at the threshold of to exponential growth in computing processor the virtual world and the physical world. speeds) was often erroneously extrapolated to Neal Stephenson’s novel Snow Crash suggest that an inexorable increase in realism (1992) was the inspiration for Second Life, and immersion was the ultimate end of the and the virtual world is often known by the evolution of the Web’s interface. As a corol- name of his fictional network: the metaverse. lary, human subjectivity was assumed to be Unlike William Gibson’s earlier invented uncoupling from bodily constraints, a process network, cyberspace, which resembles the symbolized by one of the defining images of abstract architecture of a government and fi- Second Life—the animated flying avatar. nancial database, Stephenson’s metaverse is a Flying avatars are fun, as I’d be the first to good deal like a MUD or an early video game. admit. But the overall experience of Second Life Gibson’s cyberspace is vast and lonely. Ste- during any given session is much less totally phenson’s metaverse is full of bars and private immersive, self-contained, and disembodied houses, motorcycles to ride and other avatars than the uninitiated might have been led to be- with whom to interact. Gibson’s lone hackers lieve. For example, to levitate, you have to use have to break into the network. Residents of a keystroke or click a button on the interface Stephenson’s metaverse sometimes own prop- framing your specialized browser. Then, while erty there or, if they can’t afford it, log in from 266 Second Life, Video Games, and the Social Text [ PMLA

cheap public accounts using graphically infe- dence with—the material universe of physical rior avatars. Denizens move fluidly in and out objects and social relations. of the metaverse, opportunistically pursuing That this social world includes even com- quests and engaging in fights both in and out mercial and legal relations was made abun- profession of the virtual world, in a style clearly based on dantly clear during the CopyBot scandal of video games. Economically, cyberspace and 2006, when a cloning program was written by a the metaverse are images of capitalism. But group of programmers named libsecondlife, at Gibson’s is a vision of monolithic corporate first with the support of Linden Lab. Its source changing control, whereas Stephenson’s is of a market- code was released and then retooled within Second Life, with the result that residents who the place of jostling forces (complete with war- lords, tribal enclaves, and rampant viruses). had paid for objects or created their own ob- The tension between these different perspec- jects to use or sell found them unprotected tives on the social economy of Second Life is against rampant duplication. Peter Ludlow, a still playing itself out—for example, with in- journalist who wrote for an in-world newspa- world protests over the recent news that Lin- per, saw the CopyBot affair as “a key moment den Lab was arranging special pricing of land in the evolution of Second Life” and reacted to favor corporate “builds” (as constructed with a tabloid alarm expressing real anxiety: objects are called). But the key technological The era of utopian self-expression insulated difference between these two fictional models from the exigencies of the wider Web was is indicated by the prefix inmetaverse . Just as clearly over. But how much sway the real metadata are data about data, the metaverse world would have remained to be seen. The is a universe of networked activities attached real world and the virtual world were col- to—and encoded in meaningful correspon- liding like never before, and it was anyone’s

Fig. 1 The author’s avatar visiting an educational site in Second Life. 124.1 ] Steven E. Jones 267 the guess whether the energy released in that col- straight into particular locations in Second

lision would be too destructive for the meta- Life (clicking a link launches the Second Life changing verse to handle. (Ludlow and Wallace 262) client program). But the worldliness of Second Life is perhaps most evident in the exchange- Is Ludlow equating the “wider Web” with the ability of in-world and real-world currencies.

“real world” in his crisis scenario? Or does his In Second Life and in almost all massively profession use of “wider” as a qualifier suggest that Sec- multiplayer online role-playing games, such ond Life might after all be a subset of the Web, as World of Warcraft, fungible goods and ser- over and against the real world? Perhaps he en- vices and currency (in Second Life, “Lindens”) visions worlds in three layers—virtual world, can be purchased with dollars on eBay and wider Web, and real world. The confusion is can be exchanged across the border of the vir- typical of a good deal of popular discussions tual world and the real world (Castronova). of Second Life. The CopyBot incident was only a vivid reminder of the already-existing state of affairs. Early adopters’ feelings notwith- The Metaverse and the Social Text standing, Second Life has always been deeply Instead of being a world apart from mate- penetrated by the exigencies of the real world, rial reality, the metaverse of Second Life is including the Web. As Kari Kraus has recently best understood as intertwined with larger shown, the CopyBot incident highlights the trends often referred to under the heading of persistence of intellectual-property disputes “Web 2.0.” Reflecting a change in perspective inside Second Life, where objects can be more among Internet developers and users, Web 2.0 restricted than copyright laws allow, since cre- amounts to a greater stress on the importance ators can set permissions to prevent moving, of rich metadata (often using XML—extensible modifying, copying, or transferring—the kind markup language) and of combinations of of restrictions on an owner’s rights that are marked-up data objects and scripts such as “normally either unregulated or protected by AJAX (asynchronous JavaScript and XML). In law in real life” (2). As Kraus shows, Second Life general, the trend is toward a more modular, residents who purchase a virtual copy of a book recombinatory approach to texts, images, and to read in-world, for example, might very well other objects available on the Web, as exempli- be less able “legally” to annotate or share that fied by popular social-networking sites. Web book than they would be if they had purchased 2.0 is a flexible platform on which to configure a paper copy from their university bookstore. variously designed (and often user-created or Despite this sort of difference in its codes, user-enriched) services. Google Maps, Face- both legal and programming, the publicity book, Flickr, YouTube, Wikipedia, and podcasts generated by the CopyBot affair, as well as the are familiar examples. Wherever possible, very existence of critical analysis like Kraus’s, sites enlist users in tagging objects, relying demonstrates that Second Life cannot re- on bottom-up “folksonomy” versus top-down ally remain separate from the wider world of taxonomy, on the benefits of “collective intel- intellectual-property laws and the debates sur- ligence” that have been discussed by the media rounding them. Second Life has never been a theorist Henry Jenkins, for example (27). Such world apart. To begin with, it has always been schemes recognize that every use of an object part of the Web, which after all provides its on the network represents a node in the history infrastructure. The clearest reminder of this of the object, and the object itself is the totality dependency is the system of Second Life URLs of its history of uses. The goal is to build on (slurl.com), which show up in Google searches that history to enable ongoing, multiple, dy- as Web pages from which one can jump namic recombinations. It’s a way of leveraging 268 Second Life, Video Games, and the Social Text [ PMLA

what computers do so well—recording and This should sound familiar to historically tracking complex interactions in great detail— minded scholars, and particularly to textual making the computer a partner in the collec- scholars. Textual theorists such as D. F. Mc tive acts of marking, sharing, combining, and Kenzie and Jerome McGann have argued profession

editing. Human agency and machine intelli- that the texts we study are best conceived of gence are thereby interrelated by design. as nodes of social relations. Texts are the cu- In her recent book on electronic literature, mulative histories of their own receptions. N. Katherine Hayles outlines a general trend The social-text theory of textual transmission, changing

toward binding human beings and computers therefore, focuses not on static and isolated together in recursive, “dynamic heterarchies verbal objects but on dynamic discourse fields the characterized by intermediating dynamics” and composed of interacting verbal, graphic, biblio- sees this relation as fostered by what some have graphic, cultural, ideological, and social forces. called “augmented reality”: the fact that com- A text, according to this theory, is a switch or puters are increasingly “moving out of the box node in the network of these forces, the place into the environment though ubiquitous com- where meanings are dynamically generated. In puting, embedded sensors and actuators, mo- this sense, McKenzie called for a sociological bile technologies, smart nanodevices embedded understanding of textuality and for a broader in a wide variety of surfactants and surfaces, definition of the social text—as any recorded real-time sensors and data flows” (Electronic form of “verbal, visual, oral, numeric data, Literature 47–48). For Hayles this scenario is a in the form of maps, prints, and music, of ar- harbinger of “a new kind of subjectivity char- chives of recorded sound, of films, videos, and acterized by distributed cognition, networked any computer-stored information” (13). Note agency that includes human and non-human that he imagines the social text in the form of actors, and fluid boundaries dispersed over ac- data and that he envisions it as mapped onto tual and virtual locations . . .” (37). “[P]eople and the networked objects of the wider physical machines are both embodied, and the specifica- world. He famously asked “if there is any sense tions of their embodiments can best be under- in which the land—not even a representation stood in the recursive dynamics whereby they of it on a map, but the land itself—might be a coevolve with one another” (129). In response to text” (39). (This question had serious political the same trend toward augmented reality, Bruce implications, for example, when it came to the Sterling projects a coming “Internet of things,” textuality of the physical landscape as it was based on RFID (radio-frequency identification) mapped and interpreted by competing parties tags and metadata attached to physical objects, to a treaty in New Zealand.) The object of bib- connected by WiFi in networks. This new kind liography and textual studies was for McKen- of network will rely on conceiving of objects as zie a field of data-rich events unfolding in the existing in relation to their users over time. In world: “physical forms, textual versions, tech- this future Internet of things, Sterling suggests, nical transmission, institutional control, their each metatagged object (marked with metadata perceived meanings, and social effects” (13). but also physically tagged with an RFID chip, McGann has argued that McKenzie “would say) would be encoded in ways that reveal its ex- have found that his ‘social text’ approach to istence as a node in a social network, the nexus scholarly work was greatly and practically ad- of various sets of “technosocial interactions vanced by the resources of digital technology” that unite people and objects” (22). In fact, as (“Database” 1592). And McGann has for over a Sterling argues, when “[p]roperly understood, a decade extended his own long-term investiga- thing is not merely a material object, but a fro- tions of the social text into the realm of digital zen technosocial relationship” (68). media, using as a test bed his Rossetti Archive, 124.1 ] Steven E. Jones 269 the for example (“From Text” ). He advocates a tion, a critic, a book dealer, a historical figure,

“quantum poetics” in which texts are seen or someone purely imaginary. The goal is to changing not as “discrete phenomena” but as non-self- establish the relation of the character to the identical events that include the position and text and to its multiple versions and competing engagement of the scholar (Radiant Textuality interpretations. The graphics represent moves

228–31). We will achieve this perspective, he of multiple players and the collective effect of profession predicts, by “exposing the fault-lines of inter- their moves on the discourse field as a whole. pretational methods that implicitly or explic- As conceptually innovative as Ivanhoe is itly treat any part of the study process as fixed in the humanities, this form of modeling— or self-identical,” but also by developing new mapping the actual and possible moves of interpretive practices and tools, including tools avatar characters in relation to one another, derived from games: “Models for these kinds in a shared digital space that visualizes the of tools descend to us through our culture in results of moves as a set of feedback loops— games and role-playing environments” (164). is what video games already do, at a more sophisticated level, in terms of their compu- tational power and the power of their visual- Games of Meaning izations. World of Warcraft, for example, like A number of recent scholars have begun to ex- Second Life, is run across a grid of servers, plore the relation of textual studies and video each hosting at any given time a small subset games. Matthew Kirschenbaum brilliantly of the game’s massive community and keep- applies a method he calls textual forensics to ing records of players’ actions in the game. Or new-media objects of various kinds, including consider Spore, the “massively single-player” gamelike interactive fictions such as Mystery evolution and space-exploration game de- House. In the first book in the new series they signed by Will Wright, creator of The Sims. are editing at MIT Press, Platform Studies, Spore exists in a proliferation of parallel Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost look at the ma- universes, copies of which are stored on the terial conditions for the reception of games for computers of individual players, who may the classic Atari VCS (Video Computer System) populate and shape planets and upload the of the 1980s. My own recent book (2008) ar- results to a grid of Spore servers for down- gues for the relevance of a social-text approach loading by all. Exploiting a social-networking to understanding the meanings of video games model, the game relies on distributed content as collectively constructed by their designers, creation by players and asynchronous content publishers, marketers, players, and fans. From sharing, a kind of time-shifted social interac- a different perspective, McGann and Johanna tion that the developers call the “pollination Drucker’s Ivanhoe project is a practical experi- process” (Shaw; see Jones 150–73). As I play ment developed to use dynamic digital simula- Spore, I can download and encounter other tions in a gamelike environment to explore the players’ creatures, cities, and planets and in- ongoing reception histories of literary works teract with them inside my copy of the game, (see Rockwell). Ivanhoe provides dynamic visu- destroying them, cooperating with them, and alizations on a pie chart of the critical “moves” so on, without altering the other players’ own any group of players make in collectively inter- copies of their creatures, objects, and worlds. preting or rewriting a selected literary text (an And in turn I can pollinate the Spore universe early version was played with Walter Scott’s with my own creations. The Spore servers Ivanhoe). It’s also a kind of role-playing game supply constantly updated “metaverse” sta- (RPG). Players must play in character, whether tistics. In this case, the term refers to game as a character chosen from the text in ques- metadata telling me, for example, that my 270 Second Life, Video Games, and the Social Text [ PMLA

planet in a particular galaxy has been blown collectively constructed from clues hidden in up by another player (or many other play- plain sight. ARGs have been used as viral mar- ers), and giving particulars of the encounter. keting campaigns for films and for Microsoft’s But this destruction is visited only on a copy video game Halo 2 (Jones 76–82). The creator profession

of my planet; the planet will still be there in of “I Love Bees,” the ARG for Halo 2, later or- my game the next time I play. Wright has said ganized a game with global aspirations (and that this model offers the benefits of playing global funding), tied to the 2008 Olympics online—“all the people building the world col- and sponsored in part—to the consternation changing

lectively together”—but without the drawback of some of her fans—by MacDonald’s (Mc that “the fourteen-year-old can kill you or that Gonigal). Instead of sustaining the illusion of a the you’ve invested all this time in your planet virtual world apart, an island of immateriality, and somebody comes along and blows it up” the digital network in an ARG is always only (as happens frequently in World of Warcraft). one part of a larger, impure, social network, Even these mainstream video games rep- and the goal is a marked text dynamically resent sophisticated ideas of what it means mapped onto and embodied in the world. to enable on a digital platform the dynamic, networked, collaborative construction of the The Network Is Everting social text, broadly conceived. Like McKen- zie’s readings of the textual, marked nature In closing, I want to return to the invention of an Australian geographic landscape or of cyberspace. William Gibson has said that of maps in general, these games treat their he was inspired by video games—not by play- “maps” (their game environments) as texts, ing them, but by watching others play them. which is to say not as narratives in the limited The idea of cyberspace came to him while he sense but as sites for collective acts of meaning observed “the body-language” of kids playing making (in the form of gameplay), including early arcade games in the 1980s, leaning into self-conscious modeling and visualization of their painted fiberboard and glass consoles those acts. At its best, Second Life is poten- pinball-style, pushing the buttons, and—so tially gamelike in this sense, as a simulated Gibson assumed—longing to “reach right landscape of textualizable events. Too few through the screen and get with what they of the educational (and corporate) residents, were playing with,” to merge with the game, however, understand or exploit this strength, to inhabit the virtual space behind the glass in part because they are under the sway of an (No Maps). His fiction projected a dark future ideology of virtual reality as a transcendent in which computer networks would make and otherworldly experience. Gamers know such transcendence infinitely easier to achieve better. Consider the hybrid, transmedia form and immersive, an imagined experience that of the alternate-reality game (ARG), in which retained something of the opacity of Gibson’s ad hoc teams of players engage in elaborate vicarious, voyeuristic arcade experience. acts of meaning making in the real world, The idea of arcade players as disembodied using Web sites, payphones, cellphones, and and immersed in the virtual space of the game even mailed physical objects as tokens and “behind the screen,” while perhaps loosely sources of information. The game world in based in a feeling many gamers have experi- this case overlaps with the (marked-up) real enced at times of being temporarily absorbed world, physical spaces and objects encoded in the game, is at best a misleading partial with their geographic locations and tagged in truth. Video gameplay (and this was especially various ways to enable dynamic social inter- true in an arcade of the 1980s) is necessarily actions. A larger textual narrative is thereby a hybrid experience, bodily as well as mental. 124.1 ] Steven E. Jones 271 the And many video games in our own time play The primary artistic practice depicted in the

on this hybridity by foregrounding the player’s novel is locative art, which uses “spatially changing body movements: dancing on electronic pads, tagged hypermedia” to create “annotated manipulating a plastic guitar, pulling physical environments” by overlaying crafted images triggers, performing the motions of skiing or and data onto geographic locations. The plot

driving or kung-fu fighting. Nintendo’s popu- of Spook Country turns on a major political profession lar Wii platform is all about highlighting the demonstration (or prank) that looks like an somatic interface. Players swing and poke and act of terror but turns out to be more like a swipe the Wiimote controller, usually standing work of performance art. An ad hoc group of in front of the screen. But even using the con- interested parties with various kinds of ex- ventional joystick-and-button controls requires pertise, mental as well as physical, including a physical as well as mental engagement, and “geohacking” and martial arts, come together it’s common to see players at home or in ar- and cooperate to “mark [up]” a shipping con- cades twisting and leaning into their consoles tainer full of cash by shooting irradiating cap- or control pads, dancing, or playing drum or sules into it at long range. That goal is blocked guitar controllers. Gibson’s muses, those 1980s by many obstacles, including homeland- arcade gamers, were more likely to have been security laws, and requires the use of special trying to master and manipulate the physical tools and skills. In fact, the more you think fiberboard, glass, and plastic consoles of their of it, the more the “prank” at the heart of the games than seeking an out-of-body transcen- novel appears to be an alternate-reality game. dence in cyberspace. He began with observa- Or a demonstration of Sterling’s Internet of tions of the gamers’ body language, and only things. Or an example of the dynamism of afterward did he interpret the grabbing and any networked social text. At one point, the leaning and bumping as signs of an urge to protagonist imagines a powerful character escape to the imaginary disembodied “space watching the action through satellite feeds behind the glass.” Video gameplay in popular from surveillance cameras on a large screen in accounts (Gibson’s is only a famous early one) his office—“[t]he world as video game” (344). is often falsely depicted as a disembodied im- This formulation carries plenty of sinister mersion in virtual reality, when the real thing implications. Cyberpunk fiction and film codi- usually demands mixed attention, cool in its fied the mood into a tech-noir aesthetic, and, detachment and aware of the game and its al- after Jean Baudrillard’s remarks on the Persian ways at least partly haptic or somatic interface. Gulf War, for example, we now, in an era of total In what looks like a return of repressed security, conventionally understand any com- materiality, Gibson suggests in his latest novel, parison of reality to video games as an ominous Spook Country (2007), set in the present mo- metaphor for techno-hegemony, the production ment, that “cyberspace” is now “everting”— of the culture industry, what the game theo- being “turned inside out” and mapping itself rist McKenzie Wark refers to as the “military- onto the external material world. The totality entertainment complex.” For Wark, the “real of networks, in this view, forms the hybrid re- world appears as a video arcadia divided into ality of a grid imposed on the natural world many and varied games” (005). His term for the by GPS satellite data, for example, linked up logic linking the game world and the real world through RFID tags and WiFi. Instead of a is “allegorithm” (30)—an allegorical correspon- sublime cyberspace apart from the world, this dence controlled by rule-driven processes, or everted network has the constructed, plastic algorithms. Ironically, Gibson offers a slightly feel of the material world as artists experience more hopeful perspective on technology, it, as a possibility space tagged with metadata. power, and the possibilities of resistance, drawn 272 Second Life, Video Games, and the Social Text [ PMLA

perhaps from his interest in street-level uses of ——— . How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cy- technology, hackers’ and artists’ and fans’ ap- bernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999. Print. propriations. In his recent work, he also sees the Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New world as a game world, but in the sense that it is Media Collide. New York: New York UP, 2006. Print. profession

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