Today’s readings made me a little nostalgic for my World of Warcraft days. I am pretty sure I spent more than 60% of my waking time in middle + high school online.
I probably talk about my past mental health too much for this blog (at least comparatively, haha) but looking back in hindsight, the time I spent online was probably not a healthy amount, I’d get maybe a maximum of four hours of sleep at night. I definitely think it was an escapism thing, the “”real””/“corporeal” world was too much so I escaped to grand quest lines and raid bosses and cyber economies. The gold farming article talked a bit about it, "the game world can be a space of empowerment and compensation for them. In contrast to their impoverished real lives, their virtual lives give them access to power, status and wealth which they can hardly imagine in real life.” (Jin, 2) I know this piece is only tangentially related to my situation, but the thought of virtuality giving me access to power was an interesting one, it was the only stability I could find in an unstable home. The events were scheduled, the dungeons had a certain time frame to running them, the auction house was relatively predictable. The fact that the power was something I could tangibly access kind of supports the idea of virtual worlds being an extension of reality, instead of them being in different spheres of sorts.
Of course, it was a little difficult for me to reconcile the “online world of gaming” with my current reality as I entered college. I became more and more aware of the politics of oppression and a lot of the microaggressions that I kind of brushed off while gaming (my name being made fun of, terrorist jokes, casual homophobia, etc.,). It made the world a lot more hostile, so I’ve never been truly able to reconnect with that part of my past. So yeah, virtual economies of power are an interesting piece here, how is power circulated w/ re: to the pink elephant of whiteness in online communities since servers are location-based and so on.
In other news, the politics of lurking were brought up in the Ethnography of Virtual Worlds piece, which read them as malicious. I don’t see that always being the case though, but I can see where they are coming from. It’s sort of what the "Ethical Decision-Making and Internet Research” piece said, all virtual ethics have to be determined based on context. If you’re playing a video game and need to adjust to the cultural context of the virtual world, it takes a period of observation and processing to truly understand how to navigate said space. I have experienced this every time I jump back into a previous video game I used to play, there is a process of re-adjusting to that plane of reality that takes place where I don't really feel compelled to joining a guild or some bigger group activity because I’m afraid of messing something up--not that the consequences would be that significant. However, if it’s, say, an identity based-forum, and the investigator is coming from a more privileged identity group, then it can definitely be violent and tourist-y. Context!
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