Let's Get Real: Shifting Perspectives of Virtual Life

LET’S GET REAL: SHIFTING PERSPECTIVES OF VIRTUAL LIFE

Cailley Millar

A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of

Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts & Letters

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirement for the Degree of

Master of Arts

Florida Atlantic University

Boca Raton, FL

May 2017

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to acknowledge my thesis advisor, Dr. Julia Mason, for accepting my work in its many stages of disarray and always providing me with words of encouragement. Your confidence was vital to my completion of this project. I would also like to acknowledge Dr. Taylor Hagood and Dr. Carol McGuirk for their willingness to participate in this project and provide much needed support. Finally, I would like to recognize every teacher of English I have had throughout my life and their role in the success of my education.

iv ABSTRACT Author: Cailley Millar Title: Let’s Get Real: Shifting Perspectives of Virtual Life Institution: Florida Atlantic University Thesis Advisor: Julia Mason, Ph.D. Degree: Master of Arts Year: 2017

A hallmark of the cyberpunk era, virtual reality is now a real and readily available medium for technological entertainment and lifestyle. Cyberpunk texts and contemporary

SF that incorporates virtual reality provide a framework for considering the implications of this newly popularized technology. By allowing the user to explore new forms of identity in an alternate reality, virtual reality poses many interesting opportunities for undermining current social constructs related to gender, race, and identity. This thesis investigates real and fictional examples of virtual reality and the significance of authorship and narrative construction, race and social hierarchies, death and self- permanence, and gender performance across the boundary between virtual and material space.

v DEDICATION

This thesis is dedicated to every person who has ever felt out of place within their current reality.

LET’S GET REAL: SHIFTING PERSPECTIVES OF VIRTUAL LIFE

INTRODUCTION ...... 1

CHAPTER ONE: Creation and Authorship in Virtual Reality ...... 10

CHAPTER TWO: Race, Social Hierarchies, and Virtual Realities ...... 20

CHAPTER THREE: Permanency of the Self in Virtual Reality ...... 30

CHAPTER FOUR: Gender and Virtual Reality ...... 39

CONCLUSION ...... 55

WORKS CITED ...... 58

vii INTRODUCTION

THE RELEVANCE OF VIRTUAL REALITY IN THE POST-CYBERPUNK WORLD

In 2012, Claire L. Evans, an editor for the ruthlessly contentious Vice Magazine, published an online article for the magazine’s science and technology section,

“Motherboard.” The article includes the reactions of ten famous Science Fiction (SF) minds to the question: “What happened to Cyberpunk?” The assumption underlying this question is that while cyberpunk was once an important and successful SF subgenre, in the 21st century the world has moved on. Best represented in Jack Womack’s response to the question is the image of a washed up and semi-forgotten hero of the SF genre: “Last time I saw cyberpunk I threw 25 cents in its hat” (qtd. in Evans). But what does this mean for a world in which the technologies and themes of the cyberpunk genre have become non-fiction? Contemporary SF authors grapple with similar subjects and themes and even those outside of the SF community experience the impact of cyberpunk-esque technologies within our ever-changing world. For this reason, cyberpunk is alive and more relevant than ever.

From the dawn of cyberpunk in the early 1980s through the late 1990s, the topic of virtual reality was extensively studied and discussed within literary contexts.

Today, virtual reality is real and readily available. Anyone can purchase a virtual reality headset for $100 and travel to outer space. Or, a popular “augmented reality” game can be downloaded for free onto a cell phone, placing imaginary creatures into one’s living room. As a result of the availability of virtual reality, there are continuous

1 reclassifications of lived experiences taking place that merge the happenings of the virtual and material world. Virtual realities allow users to take control of their existence in a way that the material world does not. Many people choose to represent themselves differently in gender and appearance, while others use these spaces as a way to explore a different narrative of their life. If scholars such as Donna Haraway and Katherine Hayles paved the way for a breakdown of distinction between humans and technology, what implications does this reclassification have upon other social concerns in today’s moment? In what ways are we restructuring life as a response to our continuously increasing interaction with virtual worlds? The meanings created in virtual realities become more concrete as humans integrate themselves further into these spaces. In many ways, virtual identity becomes an extension of the thinking, feeling, and material identity.

These changes impact many facets of human life and will force a reclassification of the meaning and significance of social conditions that define humanity, such as gender, sexuality, race and social hierarchies, relationships, death, and overall identity.

Adapting to the impact of changing technologies and reclassifying theories of social constructs based on a changing technological landscape are not new topics in SF.

Scholars and authors are constantly involved in an ongoing attempt to amend important distinctions between humanity and technology in order to classify various aspects of human life. Questions of distinction between the “material and the virtual,” the

“biological and the technological,” the “human and the posthuman,” and the classic “man and the machine” perpetuate a never ending concern for the need to classify what it means to be a human. These inquiries have only resulted in further questions regarding humans’ relationship to technology, provoking explorations such as the relationships

2 between gender and cyborgs, self-permanency and consciousness uploading, and biological processes and cybernetics.

Katherine Hayles upends previous assumptions about embodiment because they are “wrong about embodiment’s securing the univocality of gender and wrong about its securing human identity, but right about the importance of putting embodiment back into the picture” (xiv). For Hayles, both ‘human’ and ‘posthuman’ conceptualizations of subjectivity prefer information over embodiment and “even a biologically unaltered Homo sapiens counts as posthuman. The defining characteristics involve the construction of subjectivity, not the presence of nonbiological components” (4). Hayles forces us to reclassify what it means to be human in a world integrated with technology.

These types of reclassifications are more than theoretical and have practical implications on our everyday use of technology.

By breaking down the distinction between human and the technological and investigating its consequences for topics such as gender and self-permanency, SF studies has participated in processes of reclassification much like those discussed by sociologists Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star. In Sorting Things Out:

Classification and its Consequences, they embark on a sociological exploration of various systems of classification and their impact. The authors study an interesting range of classification systems, from diseases to race within South Africa under apartheid.

Early on, the authors establish several important precepts regarding classifications: to classify is a naturally human notion, classification systems are often invisible to the general population, and these systems have tremendous impact on social order

(3). Bowker and Star admit that their study of classification systems has a moral and

3 ethical agenda aimed at revealing how categories emphasize certain points of views while silencing others (5); yet, another important result of the study of classification systems is to understand the way these systems change over time and the subsequent impact of this change. Although Bowker and Star emphasize particular classification systems, such systems are not confined to diseases or race; nearly every part of human life is in some way involved in a system of classification. The authors merely use disease and race as examples. Reclassification refers to various sociological and cultural perspectives that shift over time and a classification system is any system of ordering and categorizing knowledge or information. Humans are naturally orderly beings and need to classify information into various groups to make sense of our worlds (Bowker and Star 1).

Bowker and Star give the example of the reclassification of homosexuality within the classification system of disease and mental health disorders. The medical community once defined and diagnosed homosexuality as a mental disorder, but it has since been removed from the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual

(DSM). The sociologists explore this and other areas of life that have been reclassified, arguing that it is important to understand how tensions within human social life affect the reclassifications. They emphasize that an understanding of the results of these reclassifications provides insight into broader questions regarding social order that are normally ignored. In the case of virtual realities, the broader classification system is related to SF scholarship and distinctions made between human and technology, as previously discussed. The shift, or potential reclassification, that will be explored in this project is the relationship between virtual reality and material reality. More specifically, the increased relevance of virtual realities has an impact on the various other avenues and

4 classifications in human life, such as mentioned previously, gender and sexuality, race and social hierarchies, relationships, self-permanency, and overall identity. Bowker and

Star explain that reclassification is often invisible to the public. Virtual realities are no exception. Changes in technology have been extensively studied in SF scholarship, but for the everyday user of virtual reality, in fiction and the contemporary moment, the reclassification is subtly changing the meaning of identity unbeknownst to most users.

The purpose of this thesis is to explore the impact of reclassifying virtual reality as a more integral part of a user’s identity that is no longer distinctly separate or fictional.

Virtual reality users inside and outside literature will continue to realize the importance of their virtual selves as a component of their larger identity and the changes this has on human life are paramount to classifying what it means to be human. Using concepts and theories related to virtual reality, the posthuman, cybernetics, Judith Butler’s gender performance, and Jacques Derrida’s social constructionism, I will investigate the way that humans encounter, perceive, and interact with spaces that are traditionally classified as virtual and therefore assumed to be separate from the physical world/body. I will incorporate examples of virtual realities from a variety of different contexts, including virtual realities within the cyberpunk genre, contemporary novels that incorporate virtual worlds and Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games

(MMORPG), and current, non-fictional examples of virtual realities. Borrowing concepts from Bowker and Star’s study of classification systems, this project will address the tensions between human and virtual life and the current reclassification of virtual reality as a space that is an extension of human identity and social constructions.

5 A cornerstone of the cyberpunk genre, virtual reality allows characters within dark, often post-apocalyptic universes to escape their meaningless existences and enter alternate worlds with magical capabilities. Although many assume cyberpunk to be dead, the content of its literature is more relevant than ever. Even more importantly, many of its themes are being revisited in recent SF novels. Now that virtual reality has become non-fiction, it is more vital than ever to return to the conversation of technology from a contemporary perspective. The purpose of this project is not to study themes and meanings in the overly examined cyberpunk genre, but to bring the previous themes and conversations into a contemporary conversation about virtual reality and the reclassification of virtual worlds. Cyberpunk novels that incorporate virtual realities will be studied along with more recent virtual realities in fiction and non-fiction. Rather than focusing on the meaning of virtual reality within individual texts, this study will look more broadly at the topic of virtual reality across time and medium.

There are two distinctions to be made regarding the topics of virtual realities and cyberpunk as pertains to this project. Cyberpunk, according to Sabine Heuser, is a subgenre that includes “some variant of cyberspace – also called the matrix, the grid, the system, or the Metaverse” (5) as a representation of the cyber. The punk in cyberpunk describes the genre’s complex culture, comprised of references to “rust and chrome, to concrete, and to mirrorshaded sunglasses . . . cyberpunk heroes are typically urban adolescents, skilled in the manipulation of data” and typically are depicted as part of an

“underworld or subculture slang, as further evidence of an underlying punk attitude” (5).

Cyberpunk texts are more than SF novels that include an element of cyberspace, as they

6 often also represent a dark and complex animosity towards establishment culture and advancements in technology.

This view of the subgenre represents one area of SF literature that has unified themes and adopts a particular perspective towards cyberculture. An understanding of this perspective, which is present in several of the texts included here, is necessary for a larger understanding of the conversation, but is not the immediate topic to be studied.

Rather than studying the meaning of virtual realities within cyberpunk texts, this project will utilize the cyberpunk genre as a way to inform a larger understanding of the reclassification of virtual realities that has occurred between the time period of the cyberpunk genre and the contemporary moment. Recent SF texts that incorporate virtual realities are often distinctly non-cyberpunk, and other avenues of art, game study, and scientific exploration utilize different means of addressing cyberculture and virtual realities.

In addition to an understanding of the cyberpunk genre and its proximity to this topic, it is also important to develop a basis for understanding virtual realities as a topic of study. Previous research in cybernetics, technology, and embodiment has analyzed the virtual body. For Hayles and Haraway, the cyborg is the central figure. Consequently, the cyborg has been used extensively to analyze materiality, sexuality, and gender identity.

Other research has covered topics of artificial intelligence, robotics, uploaded consciousness, and cyberspace. This investigation will focus almost exclusively on virtual bodies in virtual realities while drawing upon previous avenues of study as a theoretical basis for understanding the differences between materiality and the technological. A virtual reality, according to Nada Bates-Brkljac, allows humans to

7 “establish the experiences of a real world based on the feedbacks from sense organs such as eyes, ears, nose, and hands. By replacing real images, sound and tactility with computer-generated illusions, a virtual world can be built for the human user to navigate in and interact with” (vii). However, not all virtual realities are computer generated. As will be discussed later, literature itself can be a virtual world with which a human user navigates and interacts.

Heuser draws on the term cyberspace to explain the merging of cybernetics and a literal space. She explains that cyberspace has become a colloquial term to represent the internet, but originally developed as a fictional landscape within Cyberpunk texts, as in

William Gibson’s Neuromancer and Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash (100). Composed of and accessed by a merging of consciousness and technology, cyberspace is only one form of virtual reality. Instead of using the term Cyberspace, this project will focus on various forms of virtual reality. A cyberspace, game, virtual persona, or fictional text are all examples of virtual reality and each has an important relationship to the meaning of material identity and social constructs. Ultimately, a cyberspace is always a virtual reality, but a virtual reality is not always a cyberspace.

Many issues in SF studies are concerned with parallel research in other fields, from examining the psychological significance of a virtual self, the philosophical meaning of embodiment, to the relationship between cyborgs and gender. But what relevance do questions/approaches from other disciplines have to a literary analysis? Hayles justifies her use of literary texts as evidence by explaining that literary texts are not “merely passive conduits. They actively shape what the technologies mean and what the scientific theories signify in cultural contexts” (21). Similarly, Haraway

8 provides a justification for using SF as a way to understand and interpret real life circumstances: “the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion” (149). Many of the imaginings of SF authors are no longer fiction and the topics considered in such texts do not exist in isolation from the real world. Culture, which includes literature and the arts, and science, are interrelated and should operate as mutually informing fields. As Hayles suggests, SF can be used as a way to “read” and

“interpret” our society and technological changes. Cyberpunk is a perfect example of the intermingling between science and culture within a literary text. With a nod towards the

New Historicists, it is possible to reread cyberpunk texts through today’s lens while also

“reading” society and its contemporary texts. My own exploration adopts a multidisciplinary approach, bringing in other areas of culture and science, such as art, gaming, as a way to enrich the conversation about reclassification. In addition, this inquiry would be a hollow study of virtual realities if it did not also give attention to the various scientific explorations of virtual reality and their impact on social life and identity. Finally, psychological, sociological, and philosophical exploration of virtual realities will foster a more comprehensive exploration of the reclassification of virtual reality, contributing to the larger conversation within SF studies regarding what it means to be human.

9 CHAPTER ONE: Creation and Authorship in Virtual Reality

While virtual realities allow users to create alternate identities and subsequently explore new concepts of the self, these spaces also pose some challenges. Unlike material reality in which theory of creation has been open to scientific, religious, and philosophical interpretation, any virtual reality space must be constructed by an identifiable human entity. As a result, these spaces and their users are limited in freedom and must fit into the parameters of the space as defined by an original creator. However limiting, some might argue that this limitation is not unique to virtual reality, and that existence within material reality is also restricted by the social and societal parameters put in place over the course of human civilization.

Before approaching the implications of virtual realities on social constructs and identity formation, the topic of creation and the function of authorship in virtual realities must first be considered. On the one hand, it is possible to assume that the creator or designer of a virtual space functions like an author, writing the rules of that space and controlling the actions of the virtual reality user. Under this assumption, users of virtual reality do not participate in narrative creation and are passive participants in a prearranged story and do not experience significant identity exploration. Yet, it is possible to interpret authorship as irrelevant and virtual reality as user-centric. Neither assumption is unrealistic because there is a tension between the role of the author and the role of the virtual reality user, much like the tensions of meaning making that exist between the author of a text and the reader who interprets that text.

10 There is no question that many people have theorized all texts as forms of virtual reality. Reading is an immersive process and it is easy to see the similarities in a virtual reality where one is immersed in a simulation of sensory projections. Marie-Laure Ryan takes the position that virtual reality can be used to rethink narrativity and the semiotic processing of texts (1). Ryan provides several literary examples that invoke the metaphor of reading as immersive and claims that this metaphor is so pervasive within literary criticism that it is easy to forget the metaphorical nature of this assumed immersion

(90).

Ryan’s reader-centric approach to narrative presented is shared by Marco

Caracciolo, who suggests that the reader has a virtual body that he or she sends into fictional worlds to construct fictional space (117), allowing us to “visit another world without physically leaving our own” as “the ontological gap between ‘reality’ and

‘fiction’” detaches us from “the here and now” and projects us “into another here and now” (120). Those who love reading can easily attest to the experience of losing themselves in a book and feeling as though they have been transported into the narrative space of the text.

It is also possible to interpret virtual reality as a form of narrative. R. Aylett and S.

Louchart argue that virtual reality should be considered its own narrative medium, comparing its characteristics to forms of narrative, such as theater, literature, and cinema.

These characteristics of medium, including “Contingency, Presence, Interactivity and

Narrative Representation” provide a “set of factors and parameters specific to the application of VR” which can then allow for proper demonstration of virtual reality as a

11 narrative form (3). The important point of inquiry in regards to the function of virtual reality as a narrative is in the issue of authorship.

Aylett and Louchart’s inclusion of virtual reality as a narrative form is contingent on the assumption that narrative does not have to be authored. In traditional narratives, the author maintains a dominant control over the experience of the reader/user. however,

Aylett and Louchart claim that virtual reality changes this, by bringing the subject (i.e. user) of virtual reality into a more active role in comparison to the passive role of a spectator in traditional forms of narrative media:

We define, in this paper the user as a person who experiences a Virtual

Environment through interaction and actively participates in the building of the

resulting experience; a user does not contemplate or watch a narrative display as a

spectator does. . . . Such distinction between spectator and user implicates that a

differentiation must also be made between authorial and interactive approaches to

narrative. On one hand, narrative is seen as an artefact that can be studied,

involving non-interactive spectators, whereas, on the other hand, it could be

perceived as the dynamic process resulting from the interaction between

characters and its impact on the user… (3)

Traditional authorship excludes the passive spectator from the experience of narrative, and in virtual reality, the user plays the dominant role in creation of the narrative.

Although these assessments make a generous contribution to the overall understanding of virtual reality as narrative, they ignore important components of narrative in both traditional and virtual reality narratives. First, in traditional narratives, it is generally accepted that the spectator does not have an entirely passive role, and the creation of

12 meaning within a narrative is dependent upon both the author and an active spectator.

This position is clearly presented by Ryan and Caracciolo’s suppositions of narrative as virtual reality. Second, these assumptions forget the role of original authorship in virtual realities, which is a key component in the creation of meaning and identity in contemporary novels with a virtual reality component. It is not only the active user who creates meaning in any text or virtual reality, but instead a dynamic relationship between user and creator that produces the narrative.

In virtual reality, as in other forms of narrative, meaning is derived from two equally important sources, creator and user. The active user of the virtual reality is an obvious source of meaning, as his/her interaction and presence within the simulation develops the events that take place. Additionally and less obviously, the original creator or author of a virtual reality is a source of narrative creation in a virtual reality much like the author in literature or cinema. For a virtual reality to be a narrative, it must have an original creator who determines the conditions and regulations of the environment. As the user of virtual reality interacts with the game or virtual world, there is tension between the authored, predesigned conditions of the space and the actions of the individual user. A virtual reality does not stand on its own and the environmental conditions put in place by the author of that space have a significant impact on the user’s ability to make meaning within that space.

Ernest Cline’s delightful novel pays tribute to the 1980s and cyberpunk culture, Ready Player One (2011), demonstrates the significance of authorship in virtual realities through layers of intertextuality both in the novel and in his fictional virtual reality, the OASIS. After his death, it is revealed that James Halliday, the creator of the

13 OASIS, left behind an Easter egg that unlocks his inheritance. The Hunt for the Easter egg becomes an internationally known contest in the desolate world of the novel that the main character, Wade Watts, ultimately wins. Intertextuality demonstrates the significant role of authorship in the OASIS. Halliday, a man who “harbored a lifelong obsession with the 1980s,” filled the OASIS and “The Hunt” for his Easter egg with “obscure 80’s pop culture references” (2). In order to complete The Hunt, participants must encounter and demonstrate knowledge of music, movies, television, and videogames popular during

Halliday’s teenage years.

Although the fictional users of the OASIS are free to travel and interact, Halliday imposes narrative constructs onto the space where they interact. While participating in

The Hunt, Wade, known as Art3mis in the OASIS, must participate according to

Halliday’s rules. For example, when Art3mis enters the first level of The Hunt in the

Tomb of Horrors, replicated from the famous game Dungeons and Dragons, he learns that Halliday has constructed the area as a “noPvP zone” (an area that restricts contact between players to prevent fighting) because “Halliday must not have wanted anyone to duel for the right to joust the king” (89). As mentioned previously, there is a conflict between the narrative put in place by the author of the virtual reality and the users that interact with that space. Halliday is the primary creator of the narrative, imposing structures, rules, and restrictions on the OASIS. Art3mis is a secondary creator of the narrative, imposing meaning onto the space through his interactions as Aylett and

Louchart refer to as an active participation in the building of an experience (3).

The tension between the author’s original intention and the fictional user’s imposition upon these intentions creates the conflicts of the narrative. Despite Halliday’s

14 imposed structures, there is also the potential for freedom of creation within the OASIS.

The OASIS is made up of many constructed virtual worlds, and users can “alter the content of the virtual worlds inside the OASIS, or create entirely new ones;” users can even build their own private planet to build a mansion (57). The freedoms within the

OASIS sometimes have unintended consequences. Innovative Online Industries (IOI), a corporation that hires people to collectively hunt for the Easter egg, finds loopholes to push the boundaries of Halliday’s contest. At the end of The Hunt, IOI employees, known as the Sixers, have barricaded the final gate, making it nearly impossible for any individual player to gain access. Questionable tactics like this along with deliberate attempts to assassinate key opponents in the material world represent the opposition between Halliday’s intentions for The Hunt and the way that events unfold. The first gate is set up on the planet that houses online schools, so Wade deduces that Halliday has always wanted a child to win The Hunt. Halliday’s former business partner Ogden

Morrow intervenes when IOI begins to take control of the contest to maintain the sanctity of Halliday’s intention for the OASIS and reassert the dominance of the original narrative.

Readers navigate in and interact with the text through participation in Cline’s gamification of the novel. After the novel was published, Cline revealed that he had placed an Easter egg in the novel, and as with The Hunt in the OASIS, the clues in the novel led to a contest in which his readers could participate. The contest involved difficult video game challenges, and the winner, announced in 2012, won a DeLorean.

Cline brings his readers in to the narrative, as they search for the first clue, a url link to the first “gate.” Similarly, he shapes their participation and understanding of the text and

15 their search for clues through the constraints placed upon the text by his original authorship. In Ready Player One, the different levels of narrative control interact with the influence of the real-life participants who experience the texts. The meaning of the text is produced through the fictional character interactions with the OASIS and the readerly participation in the novel.

Neal Stephenson’s Reamde, a play on the common title of a “readme” file in computer software, also focuses extensively on the role of authorship in virtual reality. In this case, the main character, Richard Forthrast, is the founder of a company that created a popular MMORPG game, T’Rain. The novel highlights the challenges and responsibilities of authorship of a massive online world. Richard’s company, Corporation

9592, has a board of directors, “founders, executives, engineer, Creatives, [and] toilers in

Weird Stuff” that work to address issues raised in the creation and maintenance of T’Rain (208). Due to the immensity of T’Rain, major conflicts and events shape the narrative of the world and Corporation 9592 has to respond. Originally, the game creators imposed a player war between “Good” and “Evil,” but a recent player rebellion led to the

War of Realignment (WOR) that has changed the major conflict from good versus evil to character appearance. Players discovered a way to hack the system and alter their colors, creating a war based on appearance that does not align with the traditional good versus evil narrative created by the founders. The changes concern Corporation 9592 because the narrative of the world has “mutated into something that seemed to lack exactly the kind of coherent overarching narrative they had hired” certain developers to supply

(209).

16 The conversations surrounding the WOR often concern whether the developers should rewrite the cultural history of T’Rain to match the new conflicts in order to prevent later financial loss. Corporation 9592 does not make money in the same way as traditional companies that produce goods. Instead, Corporation 9592 “extracted cash flow from the players’ desire to own virtual goods that would confer status on their fictional characters as they ran around T’Rain acting out greater or lesser parts in a story. And they all suspected, though they couldn’t really prove, that a good story was as foundational to that business as, say, a blast furnace was to a steel mill” (Stephenson 209). The usefulness of narrative in a world as immense as T’Rain is clear. The problem for

Corporation 9592 is the role authorship has or should have on this narrative. The players have effectually commandeered the narrative of T’Rain by hacking into original constructs of character appearances. By participating in the WOR, the players of T’Rain are fighting against the original narrative created for the world.

There is an ongoing conflict between the two main authors, Skelator and D-

Squared (nicknames for Devin Skraelin and Donal Cameron respectively), regarding what is most significant in narrative choice for the virtual world. According to D-

Squared, who developed the original canon of T’Rain, the authorship of T’Rain needs to emphasize language. D-Squared is concerned with inconsistencies in the linguistic structures of certain T’Rain coinages, such as “the names of the races: K’Shetriae.

[and] D’uinn” and proposes that an entire language be developed and then translated into

English for users (65). Alternatively, Skelator is concerned with geology and the construction of nature within T’Rain. When D-Squared proposes that a particular volcano be placed in T’Rain, Skelator claims “It simply wouldn’t make sense” thereby “summing

17 up and cutting short what promised to be a long and devastatingly particular tour of the world of volcanology” (Stephenson 66). These conflicts between the fictional writers problematize the purpose of authorship. The writers are concerned about their own opinions on world building and consistency of narrative. It is unclear, based on the ongoing conversations between the writers and developers of T’Rain, whether the usefulness of world building favors authorship or the needs of the users of the virtual reality. This ongoing conflict, coupled with the consequences of the WOR, demonstrates the tension between authors and users in the construction of meaning.

The conflict of the WOR and narrative becomes secondary to the major plot of the novel, Richard’s missing niece. Ultimately, it seems that the WOR functions in the story to mimic themes related to nationalism and race that will be discussed in Chapter Two.

However, the conflict between the players of T’Rain and the creators allows for inquiry into virtual reality as narrative. During the cyberpunk era, Stephenson developed concepts of virtual reality in his writing where issues related to authorship of these spaces first appear. In Snow Crash (1992), he coined the phrase Metaverse to refer to the virtual reality in the novel. Snow Crash also ponders the issue of character appearance in virtual realities and the role of authorship. One of the original programmers of the Metaverse,

Juanita, created lifelike faces for avatars so users were capable of expressing emotions. Soon after her creation, the Metaverse took off in popularity as a result of her faces (64). Considered the most important addition to the Metaverse, the faces create an unmistakable human element to the otherwise technologically calculated world. In regards to authorship, the ability to express human emotions through life-like faces is the work of a programmer. Yet the ability to create and express individual emotions by users

18 of virtual reality shows how creators influence the events and meanings created within that space. The creation of the faces and their application by users works simultaneously to build narrative of the world.

The question of authorship in creating meaning is supplemental to the larger conversation surrounding virtual realities. To posit that the creation of meaning is a dually controlled process which the author of the virtual world has some control over may affect other ways that people create meaning within these spaces. As demonstrated in T’Rain, the power to influence wars and create or end racial conflicts exists in the hands of both the creators and users of these spaces. It is possible; however, to interpret the tension between author and users as being representative of typical social constructs in which there is a tension between the group in power and the general population of people in a society. The issue of authorship opens the topic of social constructs, racial hierarchies, and character archetypes in virtual realities and the result of character choices on interactions inside and outside of virtual reality.

CHAPTER TWO: Race, Social Hierarchies, and Virtual Realities

Systems of classification are constantly mutating. The constant changes that systems of classification undergo provoke the need for an ongoing study of these classifications. One example of a form of classification that is never complete is race and racial identifications. As a result of character construction, virtual reality has brought about the need to reevaluate the experience of race across the boundaries of material and virtual reality. Race and social hierarchies in the material and virtual world have the potential to perpetuate racial conflicts inside and outside of the virtual space. Character construction also provides the virtual reality user the opportunity to transgress the boundary of their biological race because virtual realities encourage anonymity and freedom of identification.

Bowker and Star’s term torque explains the various tensions that affect classifications and is applicable to the problems of defining race across the lines of virtual and material realities. There are various interactions, institutions, and categories that impact a classification system and each has a “trajectory, and the trajectories may pull or torque each other over time if they move in different directions or at different rates”

(195). The authors use the example of race classifications under apartheid in South Africa and the problems that arose out of defining race. Various conflicting categories caused confusion in classification and produced the torque, as Bowker and Star define it, which pulls classification in different directions. The problem of classification under apartheid was that “different aspects of apartheid law could classify a person differently” (203). For

example, where a woman lived “often depended on her husband’s classification” but national origin and the location of work, home, and school could impact classifications and work for or against the individual (203). Similar conflicting forms of classification operate in defining race in virtual realities. Conflicting classifications arise in user experience between one’s racial origin and one’s chosen race through character construction. There are four major factors that may result in the experience of torque upon one’s racial identification 1) the choice to represent one’s self as their biological race, 2) the choice to alter one’s race through character construction, 3) the racial tensions and hierarchies that exist in the material world, and 4) the racial tensions and hierarchies that exist in the virtual reality. These factors may challenge traditional classifications of race or reaffirm the conflicts that arise out of racial classification. With less extreme consequences as apartheid South Africa, all of these tensions work together to torque a virtual reality user’s experience of race and provoke the need for an exploration of identity and the creation of meaning within these spaces.

There is an important distinction between Haraway’s cyborg and the user of virtual reality as it pertains to torque. The cyborg, in Haraway’s ironic political myth, is

“a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction” (149). While the virtual reality blends lived experiences in the material and virtual, the virtual reality user is not “uncoupled from organic reproduction” nor does he or she skip “the step of original unity, of identification with nature in the Western sense” as Haraway suggests is true of the cyborg (151). The virtual reality user is always already attached to his or her original personhood, no matter how separate their lived social relations are from the virtual world. The experience of torque takes hold as the virtual

reality user is strained between their origin as a biologically racial person and their experience as a virtually independent identity. The boundaries between material and virtual may be blurred, but they are never fully separated. In today’s conceptualization of virtual reality, original unity always exists in the material world, thus race will continue to torque the virtual reality user’s identity in both spaces.

This configuration of the physical body’s influence over the virtual body also demonstrates a shift in the interpretation of Hayles’s posthuman. Hayles argues that

"there are no essential differences or absolute demarcations between bodily existence and computer simulation,” but for the use of a virtual reality, the computer simulation is always produced after the physical body and is always influenced by this previous construct (3). Furthermore, Hayles claims that the posthuman view “privileges informational pattern over material instantiation” and thinks of the body as the original prosthesis we all learn to manipulate, so that extending or replacing the body with other prostheses becomes a continuation of a process that began before we were born” (3). We cannot separate the information patterns or culturally assigned classifications of our original prosthesis from the posthuman mechanisms produced later. While it may be true

“that embodiment in a biological substrate is seen as an accident of history,” this does not defeat the impact that this original embodiment has upon subsequent uses of prostheses

(2). Again, in the example of virtual reality, the origin of biology torques the user’s experience of the virtual.

Stephenson’s novels Reamde and Snow Crash both incorporate complicated representations of race and character identification across the boundaries of material and virtual reality. As mentioned earlier, there is disagreement between the creators of T’Rain

in Reamde regarding archetypical conflicts and racial constructions. The original narrative history of T’Rain involves a war between good and evil, as in many classic fantasy games and texts. However, as mentioned, the users of T’Rain discovered a way to hack into the character design system and change the colors of characters, thus sparking a shift in conflict that led to the War of Realignment (WOR). Anna McFarlane explains that the WOR and “the fighting based on colour has more power in the game because the labels of ‘Good’ and ‘Evil’ had not reflected real moral or ethical positions” (30), in other words, good and evil are not a dynamic enough to perpetuate a realistic conflict and the users of T’Rain desired a more life-like game.

The WOR, among other things, functions in Reamde as a narrative model of the larger racial concepts dealt with in the novel as they pertain to the material world.

McFarlane explains this as an intentional gamification of the plot by Stephenson through the creation of continuously challenging and exciting problems that characters must overcome. Stephenson’s novel addresses race in at times daring ways. Among the topics related to race and racial depictions are refugees, adoption, terrorism, organized crime, sex tourism, international police, and more generally, various cultures and countries.

Repeated throughout the novel is the implied theme of racial origin and its pertinence to behavior and abilities. Nearly every character’s origin influences their function in the plot. The characters are “gamified” by their deliberate construction as characters from distinctly different backgrounds with carefully constructed motivations that are derived from their origin. For example, Olivia Halifax-Lin is a British spy of Chinese ethnicity.

Her appearance, knowledge, and language skills play an immediate role in her placement in the mission of spying on Jihadist terrorists in China.

The gamification of the plot and “goal-oriented behaviour disrupts the characters’ moral and intellectual thought processes. Richard feels the effects of gaming on his internal experience of his own cognition” (McFarlane 26). Origin affects the behaviors of characters, and by employing developed characterizations and backstories for every crucial person, Stephenson avoids an unambiguous presentation of good and evil. The

“evil” characters such as Marlon, the creator of Reamde, and Csongor, the Hungarian who works for Zula’s original captor, Ivanov, eventually become “good” characters.

Furthermore, the Jihadist terrorists are humanized through Stephenson’s descriptions of their personalities and relationships. McFarlane’s explanation of gamification provides useful insight for understanding character motivations. Gamification brings us back to the fundamental issue of torque and classifications across the boundaries of material and virtual reality. Like the users of T’Rain, the characters in Reamde do not impose or follow a traditional standard of morality. Instead, they find themselves torqued by origin and self-motivation. At first, Marlon finds himself motivated by his origin as a Chinese hacker seeking financial gain in T’Rain, but ultimately becomes involved in Zula’s conflict and finds his identity shifted by a desire to help her. Although questions of character motivation and origin focus primarily on the material world of Reamde, the torqueing of character motivation through the experience of gamification suggests that behavior is influenced by origin. Whether that be in the context of the gamification of a novel or a user of virtual reality’s adherence to or removal from their racial identity, it is impossible to separate these informational patterns from our original prosthesis or the simulations that are developed separately from our biological substrate.

In Snow Crash, issues with race and ideology also appear throughout the text.

Characters must overcome issues of identity within the larger context of a world defined in nearly every facet by identity and racial identification. The main character, playfully named Hiro Protagonist, has a vulnerable self-image as a result of his familial history and racial status. Hiro is half African, half Korean with dreadlocks, an anomaly within the racially divided society of the novel. In the material world of the novel, racial groups are distinctly divided, thus Hiro experiences a torqueing of identity. Characteristic of many

Cyperpunk protagonists, Hiro is an outcast, unable to fit into a particular racial group and this complicates his self-image and identity.

The novel’s concerns with identity and, more specifically, ideology, are examined by Kelly Wisecup. Wisecup argues that Snow Crash, the drug/virus engineered to overtake the minds of Metaverse users like a virus, “constitutes a culture” because

“Human civilization and sophistication are determined by one’s relationship to the virus”

(857). The creator of Snow Crash, L. Bob Rife, can “control human behavior and thus culture and individuals’ identities” (Wisecup 858). Hiro, who avoids being infected with

Snow Crash, is still affected by his relationship to the drug, as Wisecup explains. As a racial outcast in the material world and an adventurous and popular hacker in the

Metaverse, Hiro experiences a torqueing of his relationship to the people affected in the

Metaverse and his ability to protect the human race that has made him an outcast.

Hiro’s complicated self-image causes him to rely on other sources of connection and belonging, such as his association with the Mafia. As a glorified pizza delivery guy in the material world, when he fails to deliver a pizza on time he not only loses his job and important title; he loses his family. Costa Nostra, the mafia owned business Hiro has

been working for is presented as a pseudo-family he is kicked out of because of his transgression. The previously safe self-image depicted him as a role model in society that could rely on the protective social structure of the Italian mafia. His reliance on the mafia is one example of the torqueing of Hiro’s identity, as he is pulled by a sense of connection to this incomplete form of family. When Hiro later confronts the mafia members, it is made clear to Hiro that his need for a sense of identification was exploited:

The important thing is, Hiro, that you have to understand the Mafia way. And the

Mafia way is that we pursue the larger goals under the guise of personal

relationships. So, for example, when you were a pizza guy you didn’t deliver

pizzas fast because you made more money that way, or because it was some kind

of a fucking policy. You did it because you were carrying out a personal covenant

between Uncle Enzo and every customer. This is how we avoid the trap of self-

perpetuating ideology. Ideology is a virus. (350).

Rather than providing a resolution for Hiro’s torqueing of identity, the Mafia utilizes his vulnerability to exploit his performance.

Hiro’s weak sense of identity from his familial history and exploitation by the

Mafia causes him to seek out a more developed sense of identity through the Metaverse.

Hiro presents his avatar’s physical appearance and race in the Metaverse as a direct representation of his material appearance, leading him to several moments of conflict as a result of this choice. Hiro’s behaviors and conflicts transverse the boundaries of the

Metaverse, and the further into the conflict that Hiro becomes, the more that his experiences and actions between the material and the virtual are blurred. In the Metaverse

Hiro presents himself as a sword wielding badass, but as the conflicts in the Metaverse

carry over into the material world, Hiro is forced to deal with the types of physical altercations that he normally deals with virtually. Hiro encounters a man wielding the

“Confederate flag” with the “embroidered words ‘New South Africa Franchulate #153’” printed on it (301). The man quickly makes his aggression towards Hiro clear by telling him that the only problem with New South Africa is that “There’s no niggers, gooks, or kikes there to beat the shit out of” (302). His threatening behavior leads Hiro to commit his first murder in the material world, and he notes surprise at the immense amount of blood compared to a murder in the Metaverse, where avatars simply fall down after being killed. Normally, the Metaverse functions as a place where Hiro’s identity is secure and thus can be an escape from the torqueing of his racial identity that he faces in the material world. However, when Hiro’s world in the Metaverse is turned upside down and he must deal with battles in the real world, his identity in both spaces is threatened.

Hiro’s racial torqueing comes to a climax through his conflict with Raven, who releases the drug Snow Crash that threatens the minds of hackers in the Metaverse.

Raven serves as a foil to Hiro, with a similar family history. He is the only character who makes Hiro feel belittled and weak. The vulnerability of his racial self-image is enhanced by the introduction of Raven, and he explains that he felt he was the “baddest mother fucker in the world” (271) until Raven came along. Hiro carries Nipponese swords while inside and outside the Metaverse, symbolizing his troubling family history.

Hiro’s father won the swords in a battle during WWII after previously being mistreated by the Army because of his race, so the memory of Hiro’s complicated racial history is symbolized through the weapons he carries on his back. When Hiro and Raven come to their ultimate battle, they tell the story of their fathers together and it is revealed that

Raven’s actions are also driven by an allegiance to his father’s experiences in the war.

Raven and Hiro’s fathers escaped a prisoner of war camp together, only to be captured soon after as a result of a mistake made by Hiro’s father. In the moment of their capture, the atomic bomb hit Nagasaki and Raven’s father was blinded by the blast while Hiro’s father survives unscathed (445). It becomes clear that Raven has been motivated by a need to seek revenge on America for his father. Ironically, Hiro and his father, who bear the brunt of Raven’s hostility, are never fully accepted as American. Much like his father,

Hiro becomes a type of warrior for a country that never fully accepted his racial identity, further exemplifying the experience of torque.

The experiences of racial identification and the resulting experiences of torque across the boundaries of T’Rain and the Metaverse are fictional and arguably extreme examples of what happens to race inside and outside of virtual realities. Despite their moments of extremity, the overall topic of the ways that identification shift across these boundaries is directly relevant to studies being conducted on contemporary and commonly used virtual realities. Groom, Bailenson, and Nass conducted a study in 2009 that “examined how racial representation in an immersive virtual environment (IVE) affects racial bias” (232). The authors study social interactions that increasingly occur online, including social, medical, and economic interactions mediated by an online avatar that identifies features of race such as skin color and facial structure (232). The authors studied models of perspective-taking and stereotype-activation through imagining or embodying a racially unambiguous person. The authors found that “the experience of being embodied by an avatar in an immersive virtual environment affects users enough to change automatic tests of racism outside the virtual environment” (244). Furthermore,

Groom, Bailenson, and Nass cite the 2003 study by Hoyt, Blascovich, and Swinth that found in virtual environments with “sufficient behavioral realism and social presence,” people are affected by social influence and social inhibition (as qtd. in Groom, Bailenson, and Nass 232). These findings make evident that the experience of torque in racial identification can occur in virtual realities and across the boundaries of the virtual and the material.

The experience of choosing one’s physical features and identity within the social mediated environment of virtual reality, combined with the experience of torque in racial identification, causes the virtual reality user to be attached to the virtual self. A virtually constructed identity that features physical and social aspects of one’s life creates a unique importance. The virtual self can no longer be viewed in isolation from the material self.

Therefore, when a virtual user engages in emotional relationships or social interactions, those experiences are real, lived experiences for the user. Ultimately, these lived experiences will have important consequences on the user’s construct of the self. From these experiences, important questions arise related to the experience of self-permanency, death, social attachment, and relationships.

CHAPTER THREE: Permanency of the Self in Virtual Reality

Theories from Hayles and Haraway hinge on the assumed similarities between the processes of human brains and computers. Similar assumptions are at work in cybernetic theory, which creates a parallel between biological and technological processes by way of a feedback loop model. These parallels are the backbone of the Cyberpunk genre. During a time when technology was emerging at break neck speeds, the SF community turned to cyberpunk as a way to consider the implications of this technology. These texts present characters on the fringe of society who thrive on technology and force readers to examine the similarities between our biological selves and our newly technological world.

Technology was no longer a distinctly separate entity, and writers like Gibson and

Stephenson found ways to tear down the pedestal upon which we placed our biological existence. Shifting from the cyberpunk era to contemporary SF, the infiltration of technology is no longer innovative, but assumed. In Ready Player One and Reamde,

Cline and Stephenson explore the role of virtual reality on self-identity and permanency.

The virtual self is simultaneously separate and uniquely connected to the biological self, causing the user and his avatar to experience torque when faced with scenarios that challenge their sense of self permanence. Disease, relationships, and death complicate the simple classification between virtual and material life.

Disease, or more specifically, cyberdisease, is one of the first ways that cyberpunk writers explore the relationship between biology and technology, putting cybernetic theory into practice. In Snow Crash, Stephenson demonstrates the

vulnerability of biological, material embodiment through the transference of a computer virus into a biological virus. Snow Crash, also the term used for a computer malfunction, is a computer virus that originates in the virtual reality, the Metaverse, and then transmits a biological virus into the virtual reality user’s brain. The human brain is attacked by

Snow Crash the same way that a computer experiences a system crash. Wisecup makes an important point about Snow Crash as a virus that is drug, a disease, and a system of cultural control. She explains that Snow Crash is “An informational and engineered virus with cultural and biological components that affects its hosts’ mental capabilities, Snow

Crash defines subjectivity on the basis of resistance or infection to disease, and, by extension, resistance to control” (855). This cyberdisease encompasses the biological, cultural, and individual through transference from virtual space into the Metaverse user’s material brain. Not only does Wiseup demonstrate the theme in Snow Crash that the technological and biological are not inherently separate, but she also makes clear that one virus or system can have both “virtual and real forms” (854). The brain is the component of the embodied form that most readily interacts with virtual reality; therefore, when the brain is attacked in both virtual and real forms, the significance between the virtual and material body is diminished. The Metaverse user is incapacitated in both worlds, which suggests symmetry between the two embodied forms.

In Neuromancer (1984), Gibson complicates the boundary between material and virtual life by unsettling the classifications between life and death. Wintermute and

Neuromancer, two artificially intelligent beings, adopt the personas of former acquaintances of Case who are known to be dead. Linda Lee, Case’s former girl-friend, is resurrected through Neuromancer as a way to manipulate Case. A former hacker named

Dixie Flatline also appears to Case posthumously. Dixie had his consciousness uploaded to a “ROM,” and is able to assist Case and Molly throughout their mission. Gibson’s use of resurrecting dead characters through technological means calls into question the significance of physical embodiment and virtual permanence.

Contemporary texts and recent scientific and philosophical explorations of virtual realities pose similar questions. If a computer virus or other component of technology can cross the boundary of the computer and permeate the human mind, then what does this say about embodiment and identification of the self in the material and virtual worlds? If a virus, an innately assumed biological concept, can be both technological and biological, then can other biological concepts exist in both realms as well? Virtual embodiment is an important question that has been theorized before, and the concerns addressed in these theories coupled with the problems presented in SF produce further questions regarding the role of selfhood and permanency of identity especially as they pertain to loss of life and selfhood in the material and virtual world.

Monica Meijsing attempts to theorize about embodiment and determine whether a self-aware agent can be satisfactorily embodied in a virtual form. By drawing upon philosophical arguments and studies of phantom phenomena, she concludes that most people need to experience physical embodiment before they can experience a virtual embodiment, but that there is no definitive way to determine if the so-called “brains-in-a- vat” scenario is possible. Within this scenario, a disembodied brain maintains consciousness through connection to a computer. Meijsing’s conclusion alludes to the experience of torque, and suggests that the relationship between a virtual body and material body, while distinctly separate, cannot exist independently. A virtual

embodiment is informed by the previous experience of a physical embodiment. In the same way that an amputee cannot understand the experience of phantom limb without having previously had a limb, as Meijsing explains, a virtual body cannot understand its virtual performance without relying on the information from its previous physical embodiment to inform its existence. Likewise, Hayles argues that the body is the original prosthesis that cyborgs learn to manipulate. Hayles’s consideration of this prosthesis is comparable to Meijsing’s determination.

Through the authors’ use of themes related to authorship of virtual reality and gamification, Readme and Ready Player One both emphasize the avatar as an individual that exists separate from the user that complicates the conclusions made above.

Stephenson and Cline suggest a starker contrast or separation between the virtual self and material self. Stephenson goes so far as to depict the virtual and material self as almost distinctly separate characters in the text that have separate motivations.

In Stephenson’s virtual reality in Reamde, T’Rain, when a user suddenly disconnects, their avatar reverts to his “bothavior.” While Richard is trekking through the wilderness with a sprained ankle during one part of his quest to save Zula, his mind wanders towards Egdod, his avatar, from which he was recently disconnected.

In T’Rain, Egdod is famous, while in the real world, Richard is only moderately famous.

During this moment, Richard is detached from his avatar, as his priority is on the survival of his family members. As he ponders Egdod’s fate, there is a distancing between himself and his virtual self: “Egdod would have reverted to his bothavior, which in his case would mean trudging for thousands of mils across T’Rain, trying to get back to his mountaintop palace. This would, to put it mildly, draw lots of notice in that world”

(1030). Richard separates his identity from Egdod, referring to “him” as a distinctly different being with different motives. These motives parallel Richard’s, but still distinguish their identities. Richard thinks about the “aged wizard” scaling mountains and crossing deserts, and notes a fond similarity between their behaviors, finding “something hugely enjoyable about the fact that, at the same moment, both he and Egdod were wandering along across their respective worlds, seeing everything close up in a way that they rarely had a chance to” (1031). Egdod is more like a mirror to Richard’s life, than a part of his identity, and Richard experiences a fondness towards this separate individual. It is possible to interpret Richard’s perception of Egdod as a companion a result of his role as an original author in the T’Rain universe. As mentioned, Richard is more than a casual user of T’Rain, and his placement as a decision maker in the narrative of the world combined with his avatar’s role as a god-like figure given his status in the world may play a role in his ambivalence towards his character.

In Ready Player One, Cline examines the role of permanency of the self through personal relationships and the sense of loss a virtual reality user experiences when a virtual relationship ends. Early in the novel, when Wade relies on the OASIS to be an escape to his miserable life, he describes the OASIS as a place where people have “met, fell in love, and got married without ever setting foot on the same continent. The lines of distinction between a person’s real identity and that of their avatar began to blur” (Cline

60). However, as the text continues and he finds his own love interest in Art3mis, he becomes interested in meeting her in the real world. This contradiction demonstrates

Wade’s experience with torque, as he is pulled between his reliance on the OASIS to

bring him happiness and his curiosity with meeting Art3mis in the real world despite her resistance to the idea.

Wade is forced to confront the complicated distinction between virtual and material life through the death of another character, Daito. Wade witnessed the death of

Daito’s avatar at the hands of the IOI and subsequently misunderstands the significance of Daito’s death. Although Wade is upset by Daito’s death, he does not fully understand the signifance. Daito’s brother, Shoto, visits Wade after the death. First, Shoto explains that the IOI did not only kill Daito the avatar, but actually killed Toshiro Yoshiaki, the twenty-two year old of whom the avatar belongs. Wade’s preoccupation with the OASIS causes him to assume that Daito must have committed suicide after the death of his avatar, but Shoto explains that Daito was only killed because the IOI was able to kill

Toshiro first. Shoto then explains to Wade that the two, who claim to be brothers, “were not brothers. Not in real life. Just in the OASIS…[they] only knew each other online”

(243). Despite having never met in real life, Shoto is visibly upset by the death of Daito, making it obvious that the relationships formed in the OASIS can hold just as much significance as a relationship in the material world. Daito and Shoto were so close they considered themselves brothers, and the loss of Daito, whom Shoto had never met, was just as substantial as if it was the death of a brother he had known in the flesh.

Cline also examines the relationship between an author of a virtual world’s avatar and his perception of self-permanence. As opposed to Richard’s separation from Egdod,

Halliday, the original creator of the OASIS, uses his avatar, Anorak, as a way to replace his physical existence and maintain his identity after his death. Not only does Halliday secure his memory into permanence within the world of the OASIS, but his creation of

The Hunt propels him into a posthumous infamy. Wade acknowledges that “As famous as he was, Halliday’s death should have warranted only a brief segment on the evening news,” but as a result of his creation of The Hunt and the remaining memory of his status in the OASIS, Halliday and The Hunt had “everyone from Toronto to Tokyo crapping in the cornflakes” (2). Halliday leaves behind a video message of himself for the world announcing that the winner of The Hunt earned his fortune and the rights to the OASIS, and from then on every OASIS user becomes preoccupied with Halliday’s life.

Halliday secures his self-permanence by transferring his wealth and status to

Wade after he wins The Hunt. After defeating the final level of The Hunt, Wade’s avatar

Parzival appears in Anorak’s study. Anorak appears to Parzival, and Wade realizes that his avatar is now wearing Anorak’s robes and his credit and player status levels have shot up to Anorak’s levels. In this moment, Wade’s avatar takes over the role of Anorak, and he “saw that Anorak was no longer dressed in his black wizard’s robes. In fact, he no longer looked like Anorak at all. He was shorter, thinner, and somewhat less handsome.

Now he looked like James Halliday” (363). Halliday tells Parzival that he now has anything he could ever want, that he has total control over the OASIS, and even has the power to shut off the OASIS completely. The interaction with Halliday ends with an interesting contradiction. Despite the obvious egocentricity of The Hunt and the extreme lengths the contestants go to learn about Halliday’s life in order to participate, Halliday leaves Wade with a harrowing warning: “as terrifying and painful as reality can be, it’s also the only place where you can find true happiness. Because reality is real” (364). This revelation suggests that near the end of Halliday’s life, he was confronted with the

torqueing of his identities between the virtual world that he could control and the material identity that he ignored.

Stephenson and Cline’s novels both end with an ambivalent tone towards the abilities of virtual reality. Although the authors grapple with the relationship between a virtual reality user and their virtual identity, both end with a humanistic privileging of material presence and face to face relationships. Ready Player One ends with Wade’s acknowledgement that he no longer has a strong desire to log into the OASIS now that he has wealth and relationships in the material world. Similarly, Reamde ends with the characters brought together through virtual circumstances happily existing in the material world.

Despite these apparent contradictions, the topic of self-permanence is an important concern of virtual reality as users in the novels clearly rely on virtual reality as a form of escapism during life and remembrance after death. Like in cases of consciousness uploading and artificial intelligence, the significance of self-permanence is not as easy to define. While it is possible to analyze how people may encounter the issue of self-permanence, such as in the examples of death and relationships that Stephenson and Cline analyze, there is less that can be said about the effect this may have on the individual. Here is a situation in which the concept of torque can provide a theoretical framework for the problem in the abstract, but in application, torque may be insufficient.

Virtual reality may force us to reconsider the classification of life and death when factoring in the way that an individual may still remain within their virtual body posthumously; however, the long term repercussions of this are widely unknown.

Gibson’s Neuromancer provided insight into the future of virtual reality, and may also be

called upon if and when the prospect of consciousness uploading further transforms the face of virtual reality and the significance of death. Currently, the experience of torque in an individual’s identity through an encounter with virtual reality that is most relevant to today’s society is the experience of gender. Not only is gender and gender transformation a contemporary topic in politics and everyday life, but virtual reality is already providing the opportunity for transgender people to explore the malleability of their gender identity prior to undergoing a physical transformation.

CHAPTER FOUR: Gender and Virtual Reality

To establish a link between theories of gender and technological embodiment, one must draw upon a theoretical framework of social constructionism. Bowker and Star’s concept of torque and the difficulties of overcoming tensions in classification is still relevant to this discussion; however, Jacques Derrida’s theory of deconstruction and

Judith Butler’s theory of gender performance are fundamental to gender study and cannot be neglected. As explained in the introduction, according to Hayles, questions of gender, subjectivity, and technological embodiment are uniquely tied to information theory.

Derrida, Butler, and cybernetic theories provide context for such investigations. For this reason, these theories are brought to the forefront in this chapter to compliment Bowker and Star’s perspective on classifications and torque as it was used in previous chapters.

Surprisingly, making a connection between theories of gender and technological embodiment prove to be problematic, given the contentiousness between such theories.

Derrida’s theories of deconstruction and phenomenology are central to the contemporary tradition of social constructionist thought and gender theory. However, SF theories of embodiment draw more readily upon the cybernetic principles of communication initially proposed by Norbort Weiner and later adapted by Hayles in her study of the posthuman.

Cybernetics is a theory of information systems that is applied universally to technological and biological systems. As a result of this universality, cybernetic theories have been useful in furthering arguments about the breakdown of distinction between humans and technology put forth by Hayles. Cybernetic theories of embodiment assume that all

meaning circulates through a process of informational transfer within a system of feedback loops. In other words, every system, whether it be computer code or human

DNA, circulates information in the same essential process. Thus, cybernetic theories of embodiment assert that humans are essentially data processors inside the fleshy outer- layer of our bodies and our DNA is a code to which our computer-bodies read and react.

At first glance, Derrida’s theories and cybernetics are very different. Cybernetics assumes that all meaning derives from a process akin to computer code, while Derrida assumes that writing is at the core of all meaning. Derrida theorizes that reality and the western philosophical tradition of logocentrism is a social construct. In this tradition, speech is central to the deriviation of meaning, placing the source of power in metaphysical truth as external to humanity. Under these assumptions, truth is something that must be sought, thus inciting the religious traditions that place the word of god as central to the creation of meaning. Derrida deconstructs this tradition which “confine[s] writing to a secondary and instrumental function” that is “supplement[al] to the spoken word” (7; 9). And instead, Derrida puts forth the notion of the “gramme- or grapheme” as a nonhuman element that can be “understood as the medium or as the irreducible atom. . . of what consequently one should not even call experience in general, that is to say the origin of meaning in general” (9). The grapheme is a construct of writing; Derrida’s construction replaces speech with writing by asserting that the “’original,’ or ‘natural,’ etc. language had never existed, never been intact and untouched by writing, that it had itself always been writing” (56).

Derrida’s criticism of the western urge to seek out truth is similar to Richard

Rorty’s assertions in “Contingency of Language.” Rorty explains that “the temptation to

look for criteria is a species of the more general temptation to think of the world, or the human self, as possessing an intrinsic nature, an essence” (6). Humans assume that there is one essential component of “humanness” that must be determined which Derrida deconstructs. These assumptions also allude to the problems of classification that Bowker and Star explain. Humans have an urge to classify and categorize our world and the nature of all elements within our world, including our classification of the human self.

When these classifications are complicated and our criteria for explaining the world is complicated, torque occurs.

Despite fundamental differences in the source of meaning, Derrida and cybernetic theories overlap in the consequence of their conclusions. Like Derrida, cybernetics deconstructs the hierarchical structures that determine power and meaning making in the western tradition and reduces all information to a universal, relentlessly material source.

Derrida briefly mentions cybernetics in Of Grammatology:

Whether it has essential limits or not, the entire field covered by the cybernetic

program will be the field of writing. If the theory of cybernetics is by itself to oust

all metaphysical concepts – including the concepts of soul, of life, of value, of

choice, of memory – which until recently served to separate the machine from

man, it must conserve the notion of writing, trace, grammè, [written mark], or

grapheme, until its own historico-metaphysical character is also exposed. (9)

In the preceding passage, Derrida suggests that the codes or feedback loops that constitute cybernetic theory would fall within his theoretical framework. By reducing the entire field of cybernetics to a position within the field of writing, Derrida passes over an opportunity of potential counter argument and suggests that cybernetics rightfully falls

within his own philosophical position. Furthermore, Derrida suggests that cybernetics has not developed its own historico-metaphysical character. While possibly true at the time of Of Grammatology’s publication in 1976, cybernetics has since developed into a more comprehensive and multi-disciplinary theory that can be applied to nearly all topics.

Michael Filimowicz criticizes Derrida’s misappropriation of cybernetics and the pretentiousness of his assumed “observational perspective over ‘the entire field’ of

Cybernetics” (38). It seems, as Filimowicz suggests, that Derrida recognizes cybernetics as an alternative perspective of rethinking the western philosophical tradition and belittles its magnitude as such by situating it within his own framework to defend his perspective.

As Filimowics points out, it is possible, “given its own freeplay between manifest presence and latent absence,” to interpret cybernetics as a separate entity that could speak to the derivation of meaning in western society and this would have important consequences on our understanding of the way information is organized (Filimowicz 37).

Although Filimowicz’s criticism of Derrida’s usurping of cybernetics is justified, an understanding of virtual realities and gender from a faithfully cybernetic or Derridian cybernetic perspective may have the same results. Whether cybernetics is

“covered” by the system of writing or cybernetics is a separate phenomenological perspective, both options would lead to similar conclusions regarding the function of gender and other social constructions across the boundaries of virtual and material reality.

A Derridian perspective reduces all information and meaning to materiality. All graphemes or written marks are equal in their representative power, whether the writing is a mark on a page, the ring of a tree, or the light on a computer screen. Alternatively, a

cybernetic perspective assumes that all meaning is informational code that circulates through a feedback loop process. In this model, the function of a lightbulb, a computer code, string of DNA, or a social interaction all function through the same cybernetic model of information transference and are all inherently equal in their representative power. Ultimately, both frameworks lead to the same conclusion. There is no essential difference between any function of information and meaning making, and this conclusion can be applied universally. All information, whether reduced to the most basic form of materiality, as Derrida would have it, or informational code, as with cybernetics, is inherently equal. Therefore, when this model is applied to the meaning of gender across the boundaries of a material and virtual world, the representation of gender in either space is inherently equal in its representative power as well.

Regardless of the theoretical framework under which this investigation operates, both produce the same conclusion. For Derrida, the light and movement seen through a computer screen is equal in its descriptive powers and materiality to that which is seen in the world we consider physical or “real.” Similarly, the feedback loops through which meaning circulates and are registered by the brain, whether as feedback loops that send information from our material world or a virtual one to our brain, are inherently equal in their ability to create meaning. Therefore, any form of social interaction, identity creation, or gender performance that occurs in the virtual world is equally real to the user as that which occurs in their material body. When a virtual reality user creates an avatar and performs a gender, this virtually embodied avatar is as equally meaningful to that user as their physical embodiment. Both identities, the physical and the virtual, work together to produce the users overall construct of the self. However, these process of

interaction between the two identities is not always a perfect relationship. This interaction alludes to Bowker and Star’s conception of torque. The virtual reality user will always experience some tension between the two forms of their identity, and will never be able to fully mediate the difference.

Butler’s theory of gender performativity is useful for addressing how gender identities are constructed in a material and virtual space. Butler breaks down the assumption that gender is a representation of the physical body’s sexed identity and reasserts that gender and sex are both culturally constructed notions. She argues that

"Gender ought not to be conceived merely as the cultural inscription of meaning on a pre given sex (a juridical conception); gender must also designate the very apparatus of production whereby the sexes themselves are established" (Butler 7). Here, Butler alludes to Derridian thought in order to eliminate the assumption that sex is an innate construct through her use of the term inscription. Cultural inscriptions are like cultural graphemes or individual marks of cultural norms that make up a larger construct. By breaking down the assumed binary between the male and female biological sex, the cultural performances of male and female gender roles are eradicated as well. Like Derrida,

Butler’s theory works under a framework of total materiality in which all of our assumed roles and performances are material constructs that make up or inscribe themselves into our cultural construction. Sarah Salih explains Butler's ability to collapse the sex/gender distinction "in order to argue that there is no sex that is not always already gender. All bodies are gendered from the beginning of their social existence (and there is no existence that is not social), which means that there is no “natural body” that pre-exists its

cultural inscription" (Salih 55). Thus, there is no natural function of gender, and all actions of gender are the product of culture's influence on the body.

Rather than gender being connected to the sexed body, Butler presents gender as a performance. She describes this performance of gender as "the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being" (Butler 33). The acts of gender performance replicate the graphemes or inscriptions of gender imposed upon our social construction. The assumption that there is no natural body that pre-exists cultural inscription and all gender is a performance has important implications for the behavior of gender in a virtual reality. As stated, a Derridian or cybernetic perspective of gender equates gender in a virtual space as equal to gender in the material world.

Therefore, gender for a virtual reality user is performed in both their material and virtual body, and furthermore, both virtual and material performances of gender are a product and reinforcement of the cultural inscriptions that make up each social space. A virtual reality allows for performative choice in gender, but the behaviors of the virtual body still function to create an appropriate appearance that aligns with and reinforces the cultural framework of the given space.

William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984), a foundational cyberpunk novel that incorporates cybernetic themes is an early example of virtual reality and its consequences. Among other topics, Gibson’s conceptualization of virtual realities commenced an exploration of gender functionality within non-material spaces and illustrates what Hayles describes as the ability for texts to illuminate “the ethical and cultural implications of cybernetic technologies” (21). In an attempt to free himself from

physiological entrapment placed upon him by a man named Armitage, Henry Dorsett

Case works with “Razorgirl,” Molly Millions, carrying out many advernturous missions in and out of cyberspace. For most of the novel the characters work together while

“jacked in” to the virtual world coined the “matrix;” however, Gibson also explores another form of virtual reality called “simstim.” A literal simulation of stimuli, simstim allows Case to become a passive participant in Molly’s sensory experiences. Gibson gives characters cyborg like qualities and continuously blurs the boundaries between the virtual and the material in his narrative in order to emphasize the central theme of deconstructing biology and technology. Molly’s depiction as a Razorgirl with cyborg-like augmentations coupled with the computer mediated environment in which they participate facilitates a brief exploration of gender-bending.

Case is subjected to Molly’s sensory experiences through simstim to see what she is doing while they are apart, but he cannot communicate with her or provide her any aid.

She becomes the dominant persona during these processes, and he becomes a passive receptacle for her bodily experiences. He laments that "Her body language was disorienting, her style foreign" and he "began to find the passivity of the situation irritating" (56). By situating Case as a passive observer to Molly's dangerous adventures, gender roles are subtly undermined.

In the dominant role, Molly has power over Case's sensations. She knows this, and chooses to assert her sexual dominance over him by sliding "a hand into her jacket" and circling a nipple under warm silk" causing him to "catch his breath. She laughed. But the link was one-way. He had no way to reply" (56). This moment displays a submissiveness that is both sexual and psychological in nature. Case must accept Molly's

actions. Lauraine Leblanc explains that when they are joined in simstim, "Case's presence masculinizes Molly and feminizes Case, highlighting that it is she, the woman, taking on the active role while Case, the man, remains safely at a distance, contributing his support"

(Leblanc 73). Leblanc attributes this role reversal to Molly’s cyborg qualities.

Donna Haraway defines the cyborg as “a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction”

(Haraway 149). During the simstim process, Molly is not a woman, but a female cyborg, and rather than allowing us to rethink femininity, Molly be characterized as non-human when subverting gender (Leblanc 73). Within the social reality that Molly participates, cyberpunk themes make up the social construction in which characters must perform their gender. As a cyborg, Molly is a hybrid of machine and organism that is trapped within the confines of the social reality of the novel that prefers male anti-heroes and can only justify female dominance through the form of a cyborg woman. When Molly performs a gender role reversal through a virtual reality medium, she is unable to perform as a masculinized or dominant female because of the social inscriptions of the cyberpunk world which will not allow for such a dominant female to exist. As Leblanc explains, her positioning as a cyborg that takes on a masculine role, rather than becoming a dominant human female, replicates the social world of the text. Within Gibson’s cyberpunk construct, a female cannot alter her gender performance, but rather must rely on her nonhumanness in order to justify the malleability of gender roles. As mentioned earlier, torque applies to situations in which problems of classification complicate identity.

Molly’s character construction as cyborg, and therefore not entirely female, is the complicated classification that torques her identity. Molly cannot be classified as

perfectly female if she is to subvert traditional female roles, and instead must be torqued between two contradictory identities, the dominant female and the non-human cyborg.

Ultimately, the use of simstim and cyborg themes allow more fruitful explorations of other philosophical topics that are more thematically pertinent to the story. However, despite its underdeveloped role, the topic of gender as it pertains to cybernetics is unearthed through the complexity of their interaction and opens the door for further exploration of gender in more recent depictions of virtual realities.

In the contemporary moment, conversations regarding the malleability of gender identity coincide with the complexities of today’s virtual realities. Novels like

Gibson’s Neuromancer facilitate current explorations of virtual realities and gender that take a more literal approach. One such exploration that confronts the literal and personal role of gender and its performance is Micha Cárdenas’s multimodal performance piece

“Becoming Dragon.” Cárdenas, who identifies as transgender, embarked on a 365 hour project of “species reassignment,” and lived as a dragon within the virtual reality Second

Life in order to explore topics of identity, gender, and transformation. Cárdenas argues that virtual worlds and biotechnology provide the experience of “becoming” something else through the use of a new body and provide important insight into the experience of gender transitions.

Cárdenas’s analysis alludes to Butler’s notion of gender performance and the cultural inscriptions that produce such performance. Cárdenas explains the social role of the performance and the cultural inscriptions that dictate behavior in Second Life spaces after being kicked out of a sex club:

Dragons are not welcome . . . because they break the illusion, they distract from

the arousing, ostensibly transgressive, scene. Your world. Your imagination," [12]

is the techno-utopic marketing slogan of Linden Labs, but this only applies if you

own the land in question. And yet, if one does own the land in question, or can

find unrestrictive areas suitable to one's desires, such as Desperation Andromeda,

a space for sci-fi sexual fantasies such as tentacle and alien sex, experiences

beyond the physical limits of reality can be explored. (Cárdenas)

Virtual reality allows the user, dragon or otherwise, to explore new realms of bodily possibility, but the hindrance of social constructions requires some adherence to normal human interaction that may be beneficial for a transgender person. For the transgender user, this format provides the opportunity to perform their desired gender in a real space and encounter real, socially mediated reactions to this new version of the self. By performing gender in a socially mediated, albeit virtual, space, the user can experience a real, gendered interaction. Whether it be the social inscriptions or socially mediated feedback loops that display other user’s responses to one’s identity, the experience of performing gender in a virtual reality is a true exposition of identity for that user and helps to develop their larger construct of the self. This may also be an example of the usefulness of virtual reality in mediating and overcoming torque that transgender people experience in the material world. A transgender person may experience torque between the contradictory classification of their true gender identity, and the biological sex of their physical body. In virtual reality, the user can overcome this torque and experience a successful identity formation by rejecting their biologically sexed material body.

The avatar is crucial in creating a sense of gendered identity in a virtual reality.

By embodying a dragon, Cárdenas ironically fulfills the experience of embodiment in a virtual world without the experience of gender. The avatar becomes a computer mediated construct of the self, regardless of whether this is a simulacrum true to one’s physical appearance, or a different form of self-representation. Gerhard et al. explains that the avatar is crucial in “providing a tangible representative form of the users” within the socially mediated space of the virtual reality. The authors also cite theories of identity that “suggest that each individual is composed of a multiple populated self”

(Gerhard 456). Based on this research it can be inferred that one portion of a multiple populated self may take the form of a virtual body. Cárdenas puts forth a similar notion of the “transreal.” The transreal identity “is an identity which has components which span multiple realities, multiple realms of expression” (Cárdenas). One individual’s sense of identity may consist of several embodied forms, and these forms may have significantly different appearances and gender performances. Even when an identity takes the form of multiple realities and gendered identities, the identity in each space is equal in its formation of one larger construct of the self.

Cline’s novel Ready Player One emphasizes gender performance and a divided embodiment through the experiences of Wade’s best friend, Helen Harris, known to

Wade as Aech for most of the novel. Wade has always known Aech as his male best friend in the OASIS; often sharing intimate details about the experience of male teenage life and love. When The Hunt forces them to come together in real life, both are hesitant to learn about a new version of their friend. When Wade confronts the RV that he knows to contain his friend Aech, he feels “a combination of dread and excitement” (318). To

his surprise, Wade finds “A heavy set African American girl” who is about his age “with short, kinky hair and chocolate-colored skin” (318). Initially, Wade expresses hurt that someone he considered his best friend would deceive him for so long, but his feeling of betrayal quickly disappears as he recognizes that the person before him is every bit the person he knows to be his best friend. For Helen, the presentation of her gender and race in the OASIS was not meant to be malicious. Helen explains that her mother encouraged her to perform as a white male in order to succeed in school with the privilege that these appearances provide (320).

In addition to passing as a white male in the OASIS, Helen’s gender performance allows her to fit into the male gamer culture of The Hunt without question from her male friends. As Aech, Helen participates in The Hunt that requires extensive knowledge of

1980s popular culture, SF, and video games. Due to Cline’s meta-textual gamification of the novel, the small amount of scholarship published on Ready Player One focuses on gaming theory. Megan Amber Condis incorporates Butler’s performativity into her analysis of the relationship between “heteronormative white masculinity” and gamer culture in the novel. Condis draws a parallel between Butler’s assertions that “identity categories that seem natural, ubiquitous, and timeless…are actually social constructions” and her own analysis of the “performative codes identified and reinscribed by Cline” as part of gamer subculture. Condis argues that Cline organizes this gamer subculture into an “alternative literary canon” that requires mastery for inclusion. Condis’s assumption that one must be familiar with and conform to the performative roles of the subculture mirror the experiences of Helen in her performance as a male and even more so as a male that participates in the very subculture that Condis is promulgating. Helen immerses

herself in the white, male gamer culture by successfully performing the roles of this subculture by participating in The Hunt and demonstrating her awareness of the same topics and texts as Wade. As Aech, Helen succeeds at The Hunt alongside Wade, and even provides him the answer to one of the puzzles in The Hunt that Wade cannot solve

(225). Helen asserts herself as a knowledgeable member of the canon.

Condis cites Edward Mendelson in order to explain the relationship between performativity and knowledge of a canon. He defines the term “encyclopedic author” as

"one whose work attends to the whole social and linguistic range of the nation, who makes use of all the literary styles and conventions known to his countrymen" (as qtd. in

Condis 3). Helen’s ability to keep up with the same level of textual awareness as Wade and other members of the subculture establishes her as a member, but Wade’s surprise at seeing Helen as a black female demonstrates the role of performativity in the development of this subculture and alludes to the exclusivity of which Condis suggests.

Condis explains that the construction of the gamer subculture “privileges certain kinds of bodies and identities over others” and results in an image of white maleness as the

“default assumption against which all participants are measured” (Condis 1). Although this assertion may be generally true for the larger gamer subculture in which the novel exists, it is wrong to demonize Cline’s novel as propagating the same type of privelege.

Rather than reinforcing the heteronormative white male canon, the anonymity and role of performativity in the OASIS and in Cline’s larger project of metatextual gamification subverts the privileging of a certain kind of body or identity. In the novel, male and female youths succeed at participating in The Hunt, and in fact, four of the five main participants are women or people of color. Furthermore, the external game attached to the

novel develops a larger theme of inclusivity by celebrating the anonymity of the internet because anyone can read the book and participate in the online game developed. Indeed, it is possible to dig deeper into the texts that make up the subculure’s canon and find their own form of white washing and female exclusion, but Cline’s novel cannot be condemned as doing the same.

By performing her gender differently in two different realities that equally comprise her identity, Helen’s gender experience supports Butler’s theory. Helen performs a different gender in two spaces, thus eliminating the significance of her biological sex. Like Butler asserts, there is no inherent relationship between biological sex and performed gender, and Helen’s ability to perform both male and female genders that equally comprise her construct of self proves this assertion. Helen never gives any indication that she prefers one identity over another. Cline never suggests that Helen feels hostility towards her need to behave as a white male in the OASIS, nor is there any indication that Aech is a realization of Helen’s preferred identity. Instead, as Wade notes upon recognizing Aech’s cheshire grin on Helen’s face, Aech is every bit as much Helen as Helen is Aech (318). Interestingly, this may be proof that Helen/Aech has found a way to overcome torque and accept her two separate identities by rejecting the urge to mediate the tension of classification.

The cybernetic theory of informational feedback loops has been applied to all areas of life, from psychological experiences, social interactions, biological processes, rhetorical strategies, to technological processes. Every process operates through the same informational transfer; therefore, every process, whether it be biological or technological, functions equally. Like cybernetics, Derrida’s theories find a way to reduce all

information to an equal level of materiality. The theory of gender put forth by Butler operates within these frameworks. By eliminating the difference between biology and gender performance, both are equal in their representative powers. From a cybernetic perspective, it is because biology and socially constructed gender performances occur through the same type of feedback loops that they are equal. There is no inherent difference between the biological processes that create the sexed body and the social processes that reinforce assumptions about gender roles. Furthermore, it is through these social feedback loops that we assign these gender roles to particular forms of biological sex. When such theories are applied to the embodied forms of a virtual reality, Butler’s theory is further supported. The performance of gender in the material space is equal in its signifying power to the performance of gender in a virtual space. Both embodied forms work together to make up the larger construct of the self and neither gender performance is more or less important.

The material, biologically sexed body is an endangered species. It faces an unknown future in which the imaginings of creative SF writers can provide insight. Avatars are donned for numerous experiences, and immersion into these virtual spaces allows for users to be more consciously aware of their gendered experience and gender performance. As virtual realities gain popularity, the impact of these alternate forms of embodiment will have a long-term impact on our cultural awareness of gender.

As a species, our technological awakening still leaves us with more questions than answers as we face an unknown future in which our virtual bodies may take the place of our physical form.

CONCLUSION

Today, millions of people log on to virtual platforms such as Second Life and participate in MMORPG’s such as World of Warcraft. These virtual worlds give people new names, new physical features, and a new purpose. With these technologies, humans can enter a parallel universe in which they can adjust their lives to fit their desires.

Virtual reality is being used for everyday purposes from communicating with a virtual medical professional to exploring uncomfortable scenarios as a way to deal with anxiety and other mental health disorders.

The pervasiveness of technology complicates our current systems of classification. The complicated narratives, historical backgrounds, and cultures that exist within online worlds can be studied in isolation or by way of comparison. Some online worlds provide complicated social structures and stories that define the space within which users participate, while others allow users freedom to influence the space. Not only do the narrative structures and cultures of virtual realities provide insight into the significance of narrative on user behavior, but they also provide models for the sociological processes of cultural development and social interaction. In many ways, online culture mimics material cultures. As a result, the same type of social conflicts may be present in virtual realities as in material reality.

Virtual realities provide exciting new opportunities, but they may also pose new and complicated problems that we must be prepared to confront. Litska Strikwerda considers one such problem by investigating the possibility and significance of virtual

rape, arguing that rape in a virtual reality should be considered a crime. Another potential problem within virtual reality is sexism. #GamerGate is an online movement dedicated to combatting the problems associated with online gaming and virtual realities. Anita

Sarkeesian and Zoe Quinn are two of the many female gamers who have actively criticized the rampant sexism within gamer culture and have attacked games that promote or allow for sexism. Beyond the immediate problem of sexism within gaming culture, the

#GamerGate movement brought to light the connections between gamer sexism and the alt-right political movement. Discrimination and social injustices cross the boundaries between the material and virtual world, as female virtual reality users experience the effects of sexist classifications of women.

Issues within the online and gaming communities provides foresight into the situations that will continue to present themselves as the popularity of virtual reality continues to take hold. If the deeply rooted sexism of the alt-right movement can permeate virtual worlds and influence social interactions, then what other cultural problems will infiltrate the space that many people use as an escape? Furthermore, what is the connection that such forms of discrimination may have with the ability to change one’s identity? Imagine a situation in which a woman of color participates in a virtual reality with an extensive cultural and historical narrative. She creates a new account, and designs her avatar. One of the character choices is a male character within a dominant and powerful (non-human) race. If she chooses to present herself as this powerful male, is she experimenting with a new type of identity that provides her new forms of privilege?

Or, is she reasserting that the only way to hold power and privilege is to be a part of the

“ideal” form? By choosing to participate in a system that classifies certain races and

genders as privileged and more powerful, she is accepting and reinforcing the status quo that deems others as “less than.” What happens when she leaves the virtual space and returns to her material body? How will her own concept of race and gender be impacted?

If the woman identifies as heterosexual in the material world, what is the significance of her having an intimate relationship with a female in the virtual world? Even more complex, what if this woman commits an act of rape in the virtual reality? The possible conundrums that virtual reality identity are endless when we acknowledge that these are valid identities and the interactions that take places in these spaces are real, in every sense of the word.

SF will continue to provide a medium for exploring the possibilities that arise with virtual reality and other technologies that blur the boundaries between our material and virtual world. SF scholars and other scientists and philosophers alike cannot ignore these changes, and must be willing to further investigate the implications of virtual reality so that we never enter into the shadowy existence envisioned by cyberpunk writers.

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