Playing games, like many other things in life, can be a way to experiment with how we see ourselves. I will describe the self as soft, defined by the contributions of many factors. I'll describe ways we can construct the self, to take a more active process in defining who we are. I'll analyze the tension between the real and the virtual, and conclude that for the self the distinction may not matter. I'll discuss how people decide which selves to reinforce and which to abandon, and how they can start fresh when current selves no longer satisfy.
Soft Selves
We may think of ourselves as cohesive -- that all that makes us who we are exists inside our bodies, or even within our brains. However, our environments constantly shape us. Clark writes that “There is no self, if by self we mean some central cognitive essence that makes me who and what I am. In its place there is just the ‘soft self': a rough-and-tumble, control-sharing coalition of processes -- some neural, some bodily, some technological” (138). We can redefine the soft self constantly. If I don't like being a person who can't see, I can wear glasses. Glasses change my abilities, reshaping my soft self. Before the invention of glasses, when someone's vision declined, he became permanently poor-sighted. That too changed his abilities, reshaping his soft self. All of us who wear glasses blend biological bodies with technology, becoming cyborgs. Glasses augment our natural process of seeing.
Technology can augment how we think and know, as well. Clark describes sufferers of Alzheimer's coping with their disease by using their environments to help them think and remember. They lay important items out on the floor and counters throughout the house, so they don't need to search tediously through drawers. They draw maps of family trees and hang them on the refrigerator. If removed from their environments, they effectively suffer brain damage. Clark writes, “The moral is: certain harms to the environment are simultaneously harms to the person. Our worlds, ourselves” (140-1).
Accepting that our soft selves can include our environments invites us to think about how we use our environments to shape who we are. Choosing our environments consciously allows us to more deliberately shape our soft selves. We grow accustomed to environments accessible and common to us. However, with the advent of virtual worlds, we can choose environments of an entirely different kind. The more we live our lives in these virtual worlds -- doing business, building friendships, and learning -- the more we shape our soft selves in ways we may have never considered before. We can use virtual worlds to shape our soft selves in ways never before possible. For example, pretend I cannot walk. If I spend sufficient time walking around a virtual world, I may begin to think of myself, my true self, as able to walk. That is, my virtual self may affect my sense of my true self to a greater degree than my real physical self. The same could be true for abilities no human has without aid of technology, like an ability to fly. If we have sufficiently easy access to these skills and spend sufficient time using them, we can begin to take them for granted. Clark writes, “It is this bundle of ‘taken-for-granted' skills, knowledge, and abilities that structures and informs our sense of who we are and what we know” (134). We can remake ourselves.
Self Construction
Given that we can remake ourselves, how do we go about it? “Change your environment” is vague direction at best. What environment helps us create the soft selves we like best? We don't know. We must experiment to find out, and what better place to do it than the Internet? Turkle writes, “The Internet has become a significant social laboratory for experimenting with the constructions and reconstructions of self that characterize postmodern life. In its virtual reality, we self-fashion and self-create” (180). The Internet gives us access to many different environments and communities in which we can try different roles and selves. In particular, MMOs help us experiment with reconstructing self, from our bodies to our abilities to our thoughts.
Turkle describes self construction through playful experimentation. She tells the story of Sandy, an MIT professor who learned to think of himself as an engineer by disassembling radios during childhood. He experienced a “great thrill” (78) when discovering something new. Turkle writes, “He came to see himself as the kind of person who was good at figuring things out” (78-9). By experimenting with self, Sandy became a tinkerer. He enjoyed feeling that he was good at something and continued the activity that gave him that feeling throughout his life. MMOs can give players the chance to playfully explore different constructions of self and find those that help them see themselves as good at something.
Self construction in Labyrinth
We've designed Labyrinth as students' first exposure to a variety of math concepts. By introducing the math using the game, rather than reinforcing it after classroom lessons, we give students the chance to play and experiment as mathematicians. We enable them to construct selves as competent math thinkers who enjoy what they do. Many players who succeed in constructing such selves would struggle to see themselves that way based only on classroom experience. As MIT professor Sandy began to enjoy being a tinkerer, so too will players enjoy being puzzle solvers. The enjoyment and utility of these tinkerer selves creates personal relevancy for players that encourages them to carry these selves with them past the completion of the game.
Sandy experimented with self-construction on his own. In Labyrinth, players sometimes vie with each other for the role of the expert. Many MMOs employ a class system. Labyrinth does not. A class system maintains roughly equivalent contributions from each team member during group play. Labyrinth allows one player to master every puzzle, probably gaining significant influence within the team. Conversely, some players may struggle to feel relevant if they can't master new puzzles before teammates do. This dynamic creates opportunities for fewer players to construct more masterful and meaningful selves, but some teammates likely will experience reduced social and personal relevancy without sufficient opportunities to contribute. Those who attain greater mastery may also feel greater self presence, since people don't reject selves that feel good. Those who feel they have contributed less may feel reduced self presence, as they reject identification as non-contributors. Players who naturally progress more slowly can choose to compensate by investing more time, but many won't. The ones who progress the fastest naturally may also invest more time, because play brings less frustration and more rewards for them. This competition increases social relevancy and visibility, but could also reduce personal relevancy for players who don't win the roles they prefer.
In our play testing sessions with Labyrinth, certain players sitting at the same computer did indeed take on dominant or submissive roles, regardless of their actual level of mastery. Since play testing happens only once a week, players didn't get a chance to build up the required personal relevancy that would encourage them to invest in progress through the game. With more personal relevancy, I suspect dominant players would defer more frequently to those with the best ideas.
Real/Virtual
People who maintain multiple selves experience tension between those selves. If some of those selves are virtual, people may feel the additional tension of prioritizing and legitimizing the real at the expense of the virtual. The needs of the real self, and especially the body, do take priority because the consequences of not prioritizing them are more severe (e.g. death). Health aside, in an age when we can conduct business and personal relationships through virtual selves, the real selves may not warrant as much priority as we have traditionally given them. Turkle writes that for some the distinction between RL (real life) and the virtual may no longer mean much. Both real and virtual selves can have different kinds of experiences, and some people choose to value all kinds of experiences equally. Turkle concludes that virtual experiences shape the real self to such a degree that a valid distinction between real and virtual can no longer be made. Maybe we can avoid the struggle between the two types of selves by defining our primary self as an amalgam of both real and virtual experiences. Turkle interviewed an interior designer experiencing this tension, “I feel very different online. I'm a lot more outgoing, less inhibited. I would say I feel more like myself. But that's a contradiction. I feel more like who I wish I was” (179). She expresses a wish for her real self to incorporate less inhibition, as does her virtual self. Moreover, she gives primacy to her real self, saying she wishes she was more like her online self. This linguistic construction may be force of habit more than anything else, but it still affects her view of the hierarchy of selves. If she thought of herself as a combination of online and off-line selves, she would realize that she's already achieved much of the self-actualization she seeks. As people realize they can access other sides of themselves virtually, they will appreciate online worlds and their time spent in them more.
What aspects of virtual world design help people reconcile the differences between the virtual and the real selves, and what aspects reinforce the distinction? Taylor thinks virtual worlds that have game qualities keep the real and virtual separate more than virtual worlds without those qualities do. Taylor writes:
In nongame virtual worlds users often find the lines between their off-line and online self fairly blurry (Taylor 2002; Turkle 1995). My sense is that while this happens much less in EQ, in large part because its “gameness” allows for grounding its own intentionality -- it is never just about identity play -- avatars continue to present themselves as evocative vehicles for identity and MMOGs offer some unique possibilities. (96)
How is an avatar different in a game versus in a virtual world without game elements? A particular avatar in a non-game virtual world like Second Life still represents me to other players but doesn't affect the actions the world (game rules) allows me to take differently than another avatar would. As soon as the avatar starts to have unique abilities, the virtual world starts to feel like a game. The rules and restrictions games place on player action can reinforce the difference between the game world and the real world.
However, game rules can formalize increasing mastery, adding personal and social relevancy to investment in the virtual self. Whereas people could pursue constructions of self based on mastery in Second Life, games like WoW actively support masterful selves through their rules. Without obstacles to overcome, increasing mastery becomes less visible personally and socially and, consequently, less relevant. For example, Taylor writes, “Sharon Sherman (1997) has noted the development of ‘social power' that men obtain through time spent perfecting gaming skills” (103). Because games support activities that require skills that can be improved, they provide opportunities to access social power that comes from perfecting those skills. Even when not using those skills, players want to demonstrate the current state of their mastery. Taylor writes, “Katink described her relationship to the gear her character wears saying, ‘I'm proud of myself. I have no problem with people inspecting me [...] because you know, I've worked hard for what I have” (103). In Second Life, people can customize the appearance of their avatars to demonstrate fashion sense and avatar creation ability or willingness to purchase upgrades. These uses all emerged without formal game rules. However, it's difficult to determine exactly what character appearance signifies in Second Life. Game rules can focus what avatar appearance means. Certain gear in WoW, visibly worn, can represent years of effort invested, at least a medium level of skill, and membership in a competent, dedicated guild.
Real/Virtual in Labyrinth
In a class system, players obtain more power primarily when their avatars acquire new skills. In Labyrinth, players obtain more power primarily by increasing their understanding. This can decrease visibility of mastery, since growth takes place primarily in players and not their avatars. However, by tying growth to players, we enable them to maintain much of that growth even if they begin the game again with a different avatar. Since Labyrinth doesn't force players to choose a class, they won't choose to start again to try a different class. Players will probably want to play the game again because they enjoy the puzzles and/or want to experience the game with a different team. Subsequent times through the game, players with more experience than teammates solving the puzzles will take on roles of mastery within their teams. This allows even players who contributed less the first time around to feel like the head of the class. Persistent knowledge of how to overcome Labyrinth 's challenges increases all four mastery motivators. Both players and teams can see which players achieve and contribute most. Those contributions increase the social relevancy of players' mastery. All mastery motivators feed into personal relevancy of mastery. On the other hand, by embedding mastery primarily in players and not avatars, we decrease self presence. Players maintain their skills every time they go through the game, even as avatars change. They more easily see avatars as tools instead of additional selves. If avatars in Labyrinth more visibly represented mastery, players would more strongly want to link their senses of themselves to their avatars. As is, representing mastery in the player and not the avatar helps the real self trump the virtual self, reinforcing the divide.
Migration
Time spent with virtual selves can take away from time spent with real selves. At each moment, players decide which self to spend time in. People who have difficulty getting what they want out of their real selves will turn to virtual selves in higher percentages than people satisfied with what they have and who they are. As Castranova writes, people migrate toward the realities that best meet their needs:
Whether the synthetic world grows does depend on the nature of the experience within it, but, critically, it also depends on the nature of experience here on Earth. People will go where things are best for them. It is an issue of migration. (71)
Some people may turn to virtual worlds for wealth or status closed off to them in real life. After work, the janitor may prefer to feel a little bit like a superhero. Others, however, may turn to virtual worlds as a better tool for maintaining both real life and virtual world relationships. Castranova writes, “Growth [of synthetic worlds] will depend on whether avatar-mediated communication is better than its competitors at facilitating the interaction that humans want to have” (68). Using these tools to improve communication undercuts the idea of migration by suggesting dual residency between the real and the virtual instead of emigration from the real. People currently engage in both uses. Some can't leave their real selves behind fast enough, while others enjoy the added dimension of maintaining multiple kinds of selves.
The search for meaning drives some people to leave real life behind and others to integrate what virtual selves have to offer into their existing selves. Castranova, drawing on his economic background, writes, “Catastrophic economic conditions do not explain high suicide rates as well as catastrophic collapses in economic ideology: a loss of the meaning of work” (273). Before people had access to virtual worlds and selves, emigrating from real life meant suicide or living alone in one's imagination. People sometimes took these comparatively more drastic escapes when they failed to find meaning in their primary activities in real life. People who abandon real life as much as they can in favor of virtual lives have probably failed to find meaning in reality. People who have found meaning in reality will more likely choose to enhance that meaning with virtual experiences, striving to integrate the two.
Players can sometimes more easily find meaning in MMOs because they feel more egalitarian than real life. So much about life we can't control defines our opportunities. To compensate, we may search for domains in which we have more control, and in which starting conditions seem fair. Castranova writes, “If (and only if) everyone starts with the same opportunities, the same amount of money (usually none), the same ability to choose roles and character types, then the resulting inequality is not taken to be unfair” (114). Games can make the struggle for status -- the same struggle we have in real life -- feel fun through fairness. By changing our perceptions of these challenges, games set us up for more success than we might achieve in real life if we are already discouraged there.
Migration in Labyrinth
The fairness of the game world increases personal relevancy and promotes self-exploration. Every player begins on equal footing, and through increasing mastery distinguishes herself. This equal footing helps players understand and respect the accomplishments of others, increasing social relevancy. It also helps players feel good in their virtual selves, free from resentment and jealousy of the spoils of inequality. This increases self presence and personal relevancy.
Persistent worlds like MMOs encourage players to invest in constructing selves within those worlds. Players know the world will exist for a long time, and any progress they make now will increase power and possibilities later. Players can join guilds and build social ties that will last for years within the game. Labyrinth provides a much shorter play experience. It has a story with an end and a limited amount of puzzle content through which to play. In other words, the game does not persist indefinitely. This decreases personal and social relevancy significantly, since players know they can't keep their progress forever. It decreases self presence, since players distance themselves from transient, less personally relevant selves. You can't immigrate to a transient world; that's just taking a vacation.
Finally, and perhaps most significantly, Labyrinth does not support a sufficient range of activities to encourage migration. The range of activities available in most MMOs convinces players that, no matter their current mood, they can find an activity in the game to suit it. They can find activities that take several hours at a time (instances and raids) or mere minutes (crafting, auction house), that take all of their attention (player versus player combat) or very little (fishing, traveling). These worlds become lively spaces, Steinkeuhler's third places (2005, 2006), and encourage players' expectations that they can visit these worlds at any time to reconnect with their virtual selves and social networks. Labyrinth does not support this kind of play. No two or three design changes could have transformed Labyrinth into this kind of game. They are fundamentally different. As a result, Labyrinth does not become the third place. This decreases every kind of presence and all mastery motivators. Labyrinth could not have been an MMO with its budget, but someday a game will come along that does what Labyrinth does well and combines that with design choices that turn it into a third place.
Starting Fresh
In real life, people can get stuck in ruts. When we first enter a social situation, we set expectations for future behavior by the way we perform our identities (Goffman 1963). We can set expectations in many ways at first, and with diminishing range over time. Once we have set expectations, we feel compelled to meet them in the future. Short of leaving that social situation behind and associating with new people in a new context, we can have extreme difficulty leaving old roles behind. When people become stuck in roles that no longer suit them, with little hope for change, they disengage from the system of expectations that keeps them trapped. For any environment, virtual or real, to stay relevant, it should allow people the flexibility to start fresh with new roles. It should allow them to remake themselves. For a variety of reasons, finding a new context in real life can feel impractical. Switching schools, jobs, or cities requires tremendous effort. MMOs can make this switch more accessible. Turkle provides an example of a student who was unpopular up into high school, but then had an opportunity to start fresh:
The summer after his sophomore year in high school Gordon went on a trip to India with a group of students from all over the world. These new people didn't know he was unpopular, and Gordon was surprised to find that he was able to make friends. He was struck by the advantages of a fresh start, of leaving old baggage behind. Two years later, as a college freshman, Gordon discovered MUDs and saw another way to have a fresh start. (189-90)
Gordon found ways to switch roles both in real life and online. However, the real life changes he made -- a summer in India, going to college -- had such high costs associated with them that he could only effect these changes infrequently. With MUDs, he could switch roles frequently, experimenting with different constructions of self. Since finding one's preferred self requires a good deal of trial and error, the more opportunities for experimentation he has the more likely the experimenter is to construct a preferred self quickly or even at all.
When people do construct their preferred selves, they want to keep them. If they fail, they want to start fresh. Castranova writes, “Those who have good reputations can make use of them in many places. Those who do not can still start over” (92). The ability to make use of a good reputation in many places adds personal and social relevancy to investments in those selves. That potential reward inspires those who have not yet achieved it to continue remaking themselves until they do.
MMOs both reward successful selves and allow players to start over. I can create a new avatar whenever I wish. I can join a new guild. I can take on a new role (class). I can maintain several avatars or abandon the old for the new each time. However, MMOs could do more to help players achieve successful selves. When I start fresh, I probably only want to make some changes. I may want to switch roles or join a new social circle. However, I probably don't want to lose all of my money and experience and other representations of mastery. If I earn $1 billion in the real world, I can take that money, switch careers, and still start near the top. MMOs make this very difficult, requiring players to throw away much of their investments in previous characters when they start anew, especially if they want to switch servers to play with different friends. MMOs that allow players to maintain both mastery and flexibility will do better at motivating players to invest in avatars in the first place.
Starting Fresh in Labyrinth
As Labyrinth encourages players to keep their puzzle solving selves after the game, it encourages them to leave behind their classroom selves. We presume that in any middle school classroom, students will have impressions of each other that restrict everyone's behavior. People may belong to different cliques. Some people may have histories of appearing better at math than others in the class. Some students' selves may even depend upon appearing to not care for math. Labyrinth helps students leave all of this behind when they enter the game. The game splits the class randomly into teams, and no player knows who the others on her team are. This anonymity removes the expectation that students will conform, adapting their behavior to fit previously established roles, freeing them to experiment. This freedom creates personal relevancy. It also creates self presence, since, freed of expectations, players may feel more like themselves in the game than they do out of it.
Labyrinth allows players to specialize their skills and advancement, but does not require specialization or lock them in once they have specialized. Most MMOs base specialization on a class system, driven by combat. Players choose when they create their characters whether they want to deal damage, absorb damage, or heal damage. This dynamic forces group collaboration, since no one player can competently perform all combat functions. Group collaboration increases social relevancy and visibility. It also prevents players from experimenting with different selves. Traditionally, players wanting to experiment with a different class must begin with a brand-new character. Furthermore, since the primary means of making a character more powerful is investing time, getting the new character up to a higher level can feel like a waste of time, or, in MMO terminology, it can feel like a grind. Labyrinth has little or no grinding, increasing personal relevancy. Labyrinth has no class system. It also has no combat. Players specialized by choosing which puzzles they want to master first. If team members specialize in different puzzles, and if puzzles are sufficiently challenging that team members must rely on each other's guidance to progress at an acceptable rate, everyone maintains social relevancy. However, players who don't forge their own path through new puzzles may find themselves not contributing to the team's forward progress. Since players don't commit to a class at the beginning, or ever, they can always change specialization midstream. Since there are only a limited number of puzzles, though, players may not find unexplored puzzles for which mastery has social relevancy within the team. Teammates may have already mastered every puzzle, so they don't need additional strategic contributions.
Starting fresh with a new character is harder in Labyrinth than in MMOs. Labyrinth doesn't restrict players within a class system, so they have less incentive to abandon an existing character to start fresh. However, if players earn poor reputations within their teams for unhelpful comments, they may want to start fresh. Unfortunately, starting fresh places them well behind their teammates in terms of solving puzzles and freeing pets. Furthermore, since the game restricts team sizes to six players, a newcomer in the middle of play may be treated as an outsider. Finally, since many times classes in school will play the game together, there will be too few players to provide anonymity through obscurity. If one player quits the team and another joins shortly after, most likely they are the same player. Even if the game doesn't formally preserve the player's reputation after he quits and rejoins, teammates who identify him will remember. In MMOs with thousands of players, players can truly start fresh when they create a new character. This major restriction keeps players from experimenting with selves. On the plus side, players may less frequently behave antisocially. On the minus side, players who do behave antisocially may feel compelled to continue in that role. Playing online, disconnected from the social confines of the school, allows more potential teams to join and greater ability to start fresh. However, many players in schools may not have this option.
Integrating Multiple Selves
Most people have multiple selves. Most people have multiple real selves, and those with virtual selves have multiple of those, too. Most people have an innate desire to have one primary self or experience one of their selves as primary, even if they have multiple secondary, situational selves. The primary self may not have qualities of some of the secondary selves that one might like to promote to primary status. Thus, we have the challenge of how to integrate multiple selves, or at least components of them.
How can we integrate multiple selves? Turkle proposes that simply switching between two selves repeatedly strengthens each self's access to components of the other. She tells of her different personalities when speaking French versus English, and how she blended the two over time:
My mother died when I was 19 and a college junior. Upset and disoriented, I dropped out of school. I traveled to Europe, ended up in Paris. While the English-speaking Sherry had little confidence that she could take care of herself, the French-speaking Sherry simply had to go on with it. On trips back home, English-speaking Sherry rediscovered old timidities. I cycled through French- and English-speaking Sherrys until the movement seemed natural; I could bend toward one and then the other with increasing flexibility. When English-speaking Sherry finally returned to college in the United States, she was never as brave as French-speaking Sherry. But she could hold her own. (209)
Most people access at least one of their real selves every day. On days that they also access virtual selves, they switch between two or more selves. This simple act of switching back and forth may allow players to take aspects of themselves from games back to their real selves. Continuing Turkle's example, players with timid real selves may gain confidence through competence in game situations and take some of that confidence back to real life. By allowing players to access virtual selves from mobile devices, they can more easily and frequently switch between real and virtual selves, facilitating integration.
Virtual selves should integrate better with each other. Especially when players have multiple avatars in the same MMO, the game should acknowledge their expertise in multiple roles and reward them accordingly. This change is technically simple and feasible to design. Designers must simply identify and acknowledge the importance of integrating fractured selves in the same world.
Integrating Multiple Selves in Labyrinth
By the time the team completes the game, players will probably know who all their teammates are. Through the course of the game, players may want to play synchronously, and maybe even side-by-side. This requires coordination and potentially doing away with anonymity. Also, as players get to know their teammates better, people may start to ask who everyone is on the message board. Finally, if there is any sort of competition, the winning team will probably want to congratulate itself in person. In short, many circumstances could lead to an unmasking. Players need the most flexibility for self experimentation near the beginning of play, when they feel most uncertain about who they want to be in the game. Early-game anonymity may give players sufficient flexibility for this experimentation. Later-game unmasking could encourage players to revert to their off-line selves, or it could help them integrate their game and off-line selves better. Unmasking at the end of play could help players see themselves and each other in new ways. Depending whether unmasking pushes players back toward their off-line selves, losing anonymity can either increase or decrease self presence. Players who find their game selves accepted by classmates, post-anonymity, may have much less difficulty integrating online and off-line selves. This would increase self presence, as players feel more license to be there virtual selves. This would increase personal and social relevancy and social visibility of mastery, too. People generally feel significant personal relevancy of their real-life selves, so the closer virtual selves connect with real-life selves, the more personally relevant they feel. Less anonymity increases social relevancy and visibility, as well, because now classmates know who their teammates are. Whether classmates have friendly, voyeuristic, or antagonistic relationships they care more about whether classmates succeed than whether strangers do. In some cases, increased social visibility without anonymity may encourage classmates to “put each other back in their places,” discouraging self integration. In that classroom, students likely sense the relative safety or danger of losing anonymity and stay cloaked.
Labyrinth 's lack of real-time, one-on-one chat limits self-construction play. Some players may use instant messaging to communicate with teammates, but, unless they create special account just for the game (which they likely won't), using instant messaging erodes anonymity. Eroded anonymity makes players feel more forced to conform to past behaviors and less free to experiment. If players simply use the message board to communicate, they can't have one-on-one conversations. Private conversations feel safer for taking newly-constructed selves for test drives. Some players may never make the leap to group performance of a new self. Likewise, real-time chat allows a player to develop a rapport with a teammate quickly that encourages self-construction play. Even private, asynchronous chat (like e-mail), can take on a more formal quality that discourages experimentation. This lacking feature limits self presence, since players have fewer opportunities to perform new selves. It also limits copresence, because real-time communication makes players feel more together and accessible. It limits asynchronous social presence, because private, real-time communication helps build a rapport that carries over into asynchronous communications. And, it limits social relevancy and visibility of mastery, because players feel less like a team and feel more hesitant to engage in “trivial” communications that increase visibility. All of these effects in turn limit personal relevancy. In summary, Labyrinth learns from some, but not all, of these lessons of self construction.
