Kevin Moberly: "Reality for Sale: Roleplaying, Ideology, and Multi

Reality for Sale: Role-playing, Ideology and Multi-user Dungeons1 Kevin Moberly The might of industrial society is lodged in men’s minds. – Adorno and Horkheimer (127) Proponents claim Multi-User-Dungeons (MUDs) offer participants the ultimate in agency: the chance to inhabit and master virtual worlds where things like race, gender, and age have no effect. They simultaneously praise MUDs as community spaces, calling them interactive novels in which the world of the game is created by the actions of its player base. These twinned propensities are evident in the subtitle of a popular science fiction Multi-User- Shared-Hallucination (MUSH),2 OtherSpace: The Interactive Science Fiction Saga, and in the way its creator, Wes Platt, describes it. In an early edition of his “Survivor’s Guide,” he writes, “OtherSpace is an evolving science fiction epic in an original- theme setting, where participants become central characters, drive the story along. They make news. They make history. Some take turns for the better; others take turns for the worse but everyone has a chance to shape the very universe by their actions [. .]3.” This statement, which at one point seems to echo a Marxist view of history, is strikingly similar to one that can be found on the title page of the fantasy MUD, Achaea: Dreams of Devine Realms: Mainly, Achaea is about the other players. Its gameplay is heavily oriented on player vs. player whether in com- bat, politics, or economics. Some barely participate in these larger struggles, while some rise to the top and exert great influence on world affairs [. .]. Things hap- pen. The world changes. Development and improve- ment is constant. These two statements are interesting for what they reveal about the underlying social relationships. Structured identically, both WORKS AND DAYS 43/44, Vol. 22, Nos. 1&2, 2004 218 WORKS AND DAYS begin by characterizing their respective MUDs as constructions. While Platt calls OtherSpace an “epic” and a “story,” the unnamed author of Achaea’s website refers to it as “gameplay.” At the end of each statement, however, it is obvious that both MUDs have under- gone a transformation. Achaea is suddenly spoken of as a world that changes, in which “developments and improvements are constant,” while Platt refers to OtherSpace as a universe. The MUDs have thus become real. Through the actions and the participation of their players, whom the grammar of each statement places at the cusp between game and reality, they have been transformed from what Baudrillard calls a second-order simulacra, a game clearly distinct from the material world, to a third-order simulation, a game that is, for all intents and purposes, the material world. In the process, however, a second, parallel transformation takes place. As Platt’s statement reveals, the game’s participants, the flesh and blood individuals who play the MUD, are reduced to characters. Second order-copies of themselves, simulacra whose originals are destroyed in the transformation, it does not matter whether they succeed or fail at the game. Whether “some take turns for the better [or] some take turns for the worse” (Platt), or whether “[s]ome barely participate [or] some rise to the top and exert great influence on world affairs” (Achaea), what is important is what Althusser calls “the reproduction of the relations of production and of the relations deriving from them” (183). This is the subject of this essay. In describing how role-playing functions as an ideology within the construct of games like OtherSpace and Achaea, it’s goal is to show how MUDs ensure the reproduction of their commodity value, their virtual reality, while simultaneously maintaining the illusion that their players have individual agency4. Accordingly, this essay focuses on text-based MUDs like OtherSpace and Achaea. Its conclusions, however, are also appli- cable to Massively-Multiplayer-Online-Role-Playing-Games (MMORPGs) such as EverQuest, Starwars Galaxies, and Ultima Online. Corporate ventures, these games host upwards of hundreds of thousands of players, each of whom pays as much as fif- teen dollars a month for the privilege of participating in their lush graphical environments. Yet despite their size and the obvious dif- ferences in the way they convey information, most MMORPGs are constructed around a model of game play that is similar to that which text-based MUDs feature. Perhaps the most obvious exam- ple of this is Sony’s EverQuest. As its chief designer Bill Trost admits, the game was modeled after text-based MUDs. Speaking about the origins of EverQuest, he states, “co-operative MUDs most appealed to us, games that were challenging and fostered a strong sense of community by creating interdependence on the players’ behalf” (qtd. in Kent). In this context, MUDs like OtherSpace and Achaea provide an excellent opportunity to look beyond the sweeping three-dimensional vistas of EverQuest and Starwars Galaxies, the inexhaustible graphic dungeons of Ultima Online. While their scrolling text and their telnet-based architecture of might seem primitive in comparison, the strategies that text- Moberly 219 based MUDs employ to manage their players are very much the state of the art in the culture industry. What follows is an attempt to come to terms with these strategies, to show how MUDs ulti- mately win the consent of their players to act as labor power and are thus able to reproduce what, in another context, Althusser calls “the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence” (162) . In attempting this task, this essay questions many commonly articulated claims about MUDs. The first two claims—assertions often made about individual agency and community in MUDs— are mentioned above. A third claim becomes apparent in the fol- lowing passage, as MUD programmer and designer Feor5 attempts to come to terms with the question of whether text-based MUDs are still viable: While there are more and more graphical online games coming into the market constantly, muds can still offer things that those games cannot. For the most part, muds are free. They do not require huge downloads or pow- erful computers to play. They are accessible from any- where that offers telnet access. You can always play the same game whether you are at home, at work or visit- ing an internet café in Paris. While Feor is correct in stating that the majority of MUDs are not run by professionals or for profit, and that most do not require the same investment in technology, it is nevertheless becoming increasingly difficult to differentiate between MUDs and commercially produced graphics-based role-playing games. Not only do GUI-based games like Atari’s NeverWinter Nights6 and Microsoft’s Dungeon Siege offer players the ability to host and participate in networked multi-player games, but as mentioned above, MUD- based MMORPGs such as EverQuest and StarWars Galaxies have become enormously popular, sometimes hosting thousands of players at a time. Moreover, text-based MUDs are becoming more commercialized. OtherSpace, for instance, offers e-books based on the game for sale on its Amazon.com website. Achaea sells hats and t-shirts, and features a pay-per-credit system with which players can purchase skills and objects for their characters. It is important, in this respect, to recognize that MUDs are as much commodities as commercially produced computer games. Dependent on much of the same infrastructure, the complex web of technological production Fredric Jameson uses as a metaphor for third stage capitalism7, MUDs can only transcend their scrolling lines of text and their telnet-based architecture by being exchanged. As Karl Marx writes in Capital, “It is only by being exchanged that the products of labor acquire a socially uniform objectivity as values, which is distinct from their sensuously varied objectivity as articles of utility” (166). In this context, it is more accurate to speak of MUDs as plural entities: OtherSpaces and Achaeas. While MUDs do have a singular material existence, files 220 WORKS AND DAYS stored on a central server, a MUD’s exchange value as a virtual reality depends on distributing these files to client computers. Yet even then a MUD is not ‘real.’ Reproduced in hundreds of different ways on hundreds of different machines, its dungeons, mon- sters, and treasures cannot have meaning until the MUD’s participants have read and responded to them as if they have meaning. As is implied by the acronym MUSH (Multi-User Shared Hallucination), MUDs must win the consent of participants to produce what, to paraphrase Althusser, is a shared imaginary relationship to the material condition of the game (162). It is thus the participants who produce the virtual reality of the game, who stand in as labor-power. It is in their imaginations that signs are transformed into signifiers, that in reading and responding to the game, the text the MUD server sends scrolling down their computer screens begins to look like reality. In this sense, MUDs are implicated in the culture industry, as Adorno and Horkheimer understand the term in their work The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception. Mass culture, they write, “now impresses the same stamp on everything. Films, radio, magazines make up a system that is uniform as a whole and in every part. Even the aesthetic activities of political opposites are one in their enthusiastic obedience to the rhythm of the iron system” (120). Mass culture thus fulfills an ideological function with the larger capitalist framework. In “[molding] men as a type unfail- ingly reproduced in every product” (127), it produces subjects, laborers, who in return reproduce the relations of production that the culture industry and the industries that underpin the culture industry depend on; this is what Jameson calls “the whole new decentered global network of the third stage of capital itself.” In this context, it does not matter that Achaea offers twelve races, “over 15,000 uniquely described rooms” (“features” np), and “40+ Skills, most with 25-50 unique spells or abilities within them” (“features”).

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