SPECIAL AAR SERIES Part 2: Gamer-Player/ Gamer-Avatar: The Potential of a Video-Gaming Body by Sara Frykenberg with introduction and response by Mary Hunt

 Introduction:

This is one of four papers presented in Chicago at the Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion, November 17, 2012, in a session entitled  “Feminism, Religion and Social Media: Expanding Borders in the Twenty-First Century,” organized by Gina Messina-Dysert and chaired by Rosemary Radford Ruether with Mary E. Hunt as the respondent. What follows is the general response followed by, after each of the contributions, Hunt’s appreciative analysis. The first paper was posted here on Feminism and Religion, and the other two papers are posted here and here on the Feminism in Religion Forum. 

General Remarks by Mary Hunt:

The stated purpose of the panel is to discuss “how digital projects are remapping the feminist theological terrain and creating opportunities for a wide range of voices to participate in ongoing and new conversations related to feminist issues in religion.” These writers have done that and more.

Several things stand out: first, two vital blogs exist that deal with exciting, new material which I recommend highly. Their very existence is reason for celebration. Second, their creators are sufficiently evolved to work together to promote their own, each other’s, and many other forms of social media as pedagogical and organizational tools. This is reason to rejoice. I can recall previous projects that I will not cite in which leaders whom I will not name worked with different results. They competed with one another in unhelpful ways, destroyed the very work they created, and ruptured the fabric of the field they wished to enhance. So the cooperative model manifest in this work is reason enough to commend it.

We never scratched in the sand with a stick. But when the Women’s Alliance for Theology, Ethics and Ritual (WATER) began in Silver Spring, Maryland (suburban Washington, DC) in 1983, typewriters, albeit electric ones, were essential equipment. I write this response on a MacBook Air, same basic keyboard but a far cry from the old machines.

The founding document of WATER was a three-page proposal for the “Women’s Theological Alliance” which I typed complete with White Out. For the uninitiated, White Out is a liquid correction fluid applied to paper when one makes a typo, allowed to dry, and then typed on again. We made copies of the original document at the neighborhood print shop for distribution. Voilà, we were in business.

Thirty years later, we handle routine communication on iPhones, Apple laptops and iPads, and printers that scan and fax. We utilize social media including Facebook and Twitter. We maintain a website and strategize how to move our newsletter from print to digital mode. Google groups are tools of the trade; flash drives are indispensable.

The evolution has felt seamless if obligatory at times—from floppy disks to compact ones, from fax to email, from printing photos to carrying them around on the phone. We plan to embed videos soon in our web site. The implications at each step are not trivial, and the gestalt is telling. More people are aware of our work and involved in parts of it than ever before. This is how a 21^st century non-profit functions.

In the midst of enthusiasm for techno wonders, it is wise to remember, however, that the pioneers in the field of feminist studies in religion—including Georgia Harkness, Nelle Morton, Pauli Murray, to name just a few—never sent an email. I am quite sure that Mary Daly never blogged a day in her life. Ideas still trump technology. Hard work is all. But technology plus ideas and hard work can change the world as we know it.

Thanks again to each of these writers, and to all who have shaped and contributed to the FIR and FAR blogs. I hope that this discussion will pave the way for dozens more blogs to come. The more media the merrier.

Gamer-Player/ Gamer-Avatar: The Potential of a Video-Gaming Body by Sara Frykenberg
July 26^th, 2011, 10:43 a.m.:

The Lady Sheogorath has not forsaken thee!  She is instead, looking for amber matrices in the Shivering Isles… wondering why she can’t get her minions to do this while she lazes about and watches dances provided for her entertainment… or [better yet] summon Haskil just because she feels like it.

I am the Lady Sheogorath.  I earned this identity through multiple quests and different in-game choices made while playing the Land of Madness expansion pack to Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion.  Posting this comment on Facebook over a year ago, I expected fellow gamers to “like” my post.  What I did not expect was the way in which non-gaming friends also “liked” it, attracted to the fantasy goddess image.  My post opened up a dialogue squarely in-between parts of my identity: the gamer, the avatar, the friend, the un-omnipotent goddess, the cyber-technology user (which itself, is an aspect of identity that speaks to my class privilege and aspects of my global identity) and the person relating to other beings from both physical and non-physical aspects of my experience.  My gamer-player/ gamer-avatar body is also a kind of embodiment that I choose, earn and is given to me, based on the parameters of the game I am playing.

This is a scene from the Land of Madness, aka, The Shivering Isles.

I think that some feminists might ask me, why would you play these games? Video games are often seen as juvenile, unreal fantasies that are at best, a waste of time or a temporary escape, and at worst, addictive mechanisms for the reproduction of societal oppression and violence… And many of these critiques are warranted.  Linda Eklund’s study of 8 female gamers who play World of Warcraft (WoW), suggests that the creation of game avatars was often motivated by racist standards and that the game itself— the way in which it is created – enforces heternormativity.[i]  Nora Campbell describes male video-game avatars as, “establishing the fantasy of armored impenetrability.”[ii]   That is, they tend to reinforce patriarchal and Christocentric understandings of power.

Halo’s “Master Chief” is a great example of this.  He is literally clad head to toe in body armor.  However, ironically, Master Chief isn’t really untouchable.  Actually, as in many video games, the gamer-player/ gamer-avatar playing Halo has to die many, many times in order to in order to complete game tasks.  Immortality is in effect, achieved through death—I know, I know, where have we heard that before, right?  Yet, Master Chief is not the Christ.  The multiplicity of his deaths renders the deaths themselves somewhat meaningless.  And I would suggest that the purpose of this almost godhood is not to “finish” the game (as in, gain salvation): it is to keep playing the game.  The gamer-player/ gamer-avatar is far too complex a relational identity to be written off a pawn of oppression.

The body of the gamer-player/ gamer-avatar is both impenetrable and vulnerable.  He/she/they is online and offline, existing and physically interacting in both places at once.  He/she/they is in-between in an obvious way.  Literally, an observer can see and expects that the gamer-player/ gamer-avatar is functioning in more than one space.  Critically, this in-betweenness also allows the player to embody difference.  He/she/they’s avatar body may or may not “match” their offline body.  Nor is there an expectation for cisgendered or racial offline/online matching by other human-driven avatars despite heteronormative and often racially scripted game play and relationships with game-driven characters.  The gamer-player/ gamer-avatar chooses the embodiment that will help to create their story in the game world; but, as Eklund also notes, all chosen bodies can achieve the same levels and corresponding power (2011).  This ability to embody multiple and sometimes conflicting aspects of identity in a highly visible and often obvious way, combined with the ability to access power in an egalitarian way, tampers with our relational expectations in the world of game play.  As a kind of manipulation of racist and heterosexist expectancy, this multiple-bodiment has transformative potential.

Donna Haraway calls cyborgs, “the offspring of implosions of subjects and objects and of the natural and artificial.”[iii]  The gamer-player/ gamer-avatar is a relation to this cyborg and her family of misfit toys because he/she/they is born in a similar way.  The problem with this cyborg-relation is that he/she/they and their kin is born into an oppressive and abusive narrative.  The gamer-player/ gamer-avatar’s embodiment does not directly oppose this environment; it, actually, often actively participates in the narrative.  The gamer-player/ gamer-avatar is not anti-abusive.  Yet, this kind of embodiment is a self-conscious participation in muddling and the blurring of boundaries within an environment where others are muddling and blurring boundaries.  The gamer-player/ gamer avatar challenges oppressive paradigms by disfiguring them with a complex and multiple embodiment.

Feminist theologian Catherine Keller talks about the importance of refiguring and disfiguring abusive and destructive forces in order to create an “intersubject” that can challenge existent paradigms in relational ways.[iv]  This is a part of what she calls counter-power.  Using counter-power, you’re not in favor of a particular form of violence; but you’re also not the opposite of this violence because you are in (close) relationship to it.  In order to change the way we think about a narrative or paradigm, particularly an abusive one, we cannot deny our relationship to it.  Therefore, counter-power is about diffracting the image of abuse so it can become something different.  Diffraction is a distortion—a quarter turn of the mirror in a new direction.   It is a means of changing the way we ‘think a narrative.’  Cyborgs do diffraction, according to Haraway.[v]  I argue that gamer-player/ gamer-avatars do too. Actually, so does Eklund.  She sees the online game as having the potential to create gender-queer space (2011).  The gamer-player/ gamer-avatar can be whom he/she/they choses to be within limitation, embodying their own autonomy and even, “otherness.”

My husband looks a little different in the game; this image comes from the book series that inspired her name.

I play video games because I enjoy them.  I also consider online and gaming worlds “real” spaces of significance and significant potential.  Oblivion is not an MMORPG, but I am eagerly awaiting the launch of the Elder Scrolls Online.  I am currently playing Guild Wars 2 as a female Nord Giant, Sasinthe, with my husband, who plays a female human, Laura Lantha Lasa (He named herself after our favorite Golden General from the Dragon Lance series).  Laura Lantha Lasa is too sexy.  She is the image of heterosexist and racist patriarchy: big boobs, big butt, but petite with long blond hair.  She is also a man.  She is also my husband.

This may not seem like a radical challenge, but I believe that it is.  What non-players do not see is the way in which player-characters help one another online, putting their hands on the ground to resurrect fallen strangers and friends alike.  And I am excited for the potential within the gamer-player/ gamer-avatar’s embodied difference.