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CC3 : ARIN 6903 : Andra Keay
Luna/cy is an epic metaphor for the study of time, nature and identity through
the telescopic lens of virtual life, playfully using World of Warcraft (WoW), a
massive multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) as a locus to focus
on discovering the great thinkers of (our) time. While there has been much
talk about identity in our online life, and space in our virtual worlds, only
recently has the timeless time of our 24/7 global village come under scope.
Every new territory you explore in WoW shows you a blank map inside a
sketchy boundary. As you traverse, whole sections of map burst into detail, as
you touch on an important or named place. However, sometimes the map
remains stubbornly blank because youʼve missed the point, as it were, leaving
you to follow only your immediate path and what you can see around you.
I am toying with metaphors of games, playing with real and realm time. I
outline the action of key thinkers on time, here, in juxtaposition with narratives
from virtual life. Even if I am unable to explore them fully (in this short paper), I
have at least been able to map their marks.
In Creative Evolution, Bergson writes, “The more we study the nature of time,
the more we shall comprehend that duration means invention, the creation of
forms, the continual elaboration of the absolutely newʼ. (Bergson, 2002 p 176)
Luna/cy
Represented throughout this paper as the space between the brackets, each
moon is open to your interpretation. Is it a calendar moon? A female moon?
Our moon or an other? A crescent moon of empire? A science fiction or a
science fact? A madness or a light? Interior or exterior? Virtual or actual?
The moon that rises over Orgrimmar or Undercity is no less real to me than
the moon I see tonight, offline over Enmore. It is the ʻFestival of the Blue
Moonʼ today, so there are many moons available for me to see on the local
street. To compare the lush unreality of the moon above my (toonʼs) head on
WoW with the symbolic festival moon, the photographic vs the personal, is to
realize that any moon is unknowable without a philosophy that rewrites time
and nature and the wirings of the mind. The moon is much shorter in real life
than in my real vision, which is through layers of unconscious perception.
As Andy Clark puts it in ʻBeing Thereʼ (1998); “It is only abstractly that we can
separate brain, body and world.”
ARIN 6903 2 ANDRA KEAY
As Hayles says in ʻWriting Machinesʼ (2002); “It instantiates the crisis
characteristic of post-modernism, in which representation is short-circuited by
the realization that there is no reality independent of mediation.”
However, all Oceanic realms are on servers actually located in the US, so
realm maintenance, which is scheduled for 5am every Tuesday (PDT) or
(bloody Blizzard time), always arrives in prime raiding time on a Sydney
Tuesday night. There is much wailing and gnashing of teeth on the forums
about how cheap Blizzard is to not shift the servers to our timezone or pay
extra for a late tech shift every time this happens. Of course, thereʼs no
guarantee that players on an Oceanic server live in the same time zone as
(local server time). I frequently go to bed just as someone else is rising.
When there is nowhere left to go, one returns in time to thinkers who
supersede the postmodern with the posthuman. Time and space are finally
torn asunder from their Kantian (cunt/cant) collapse and given freedom to
evolve. Bergsonʼs ʻTime and Free Willʼ (2002) deKants space and time. We
no longer must conceive of human action as determined by natural causality.
Initially, Bergson differentiates and unties time and space. Next, Bergson
defines the data of consciousness as being temporal, as duration (la duree).
Evolution of Toons
I may have multiple identities in World of Warcraft (WoW) but they are only
toons (from cartoons) rather than the more serious self styling of an avatar.
Some even refer to an individual toon as a many if it/they shapeshift. “My cat
form stealthed till I could get away and gear up my caster form.” In 2009,
there are approx 12 million WoW subscribers, comprising about 65% of the
entire online game market. The US/Oceanic servers host 4-5 million and the
Europe servers host 2-3 million with another 4-6 million players in China (who
pay per hour in cafes not by month in home).
This would make WoW the 73rd most populous country in the world, larger
than Greece (and most European countries!) almost twice the size of Hong
Cinema as Consciousness.
Stiegler (Bernard. Stiegler, 1998) argues for the restoring of an integrity if not
agency to our non human surrounds in the Technics and Time series.
Stieglerʼs hypothesis in Technics and Time 3 is based on Derridaʼs
deconstruction of the opposition of speech and writing: that ‘life (anima – on
the side of the mental image) is always already cinema (animation – image-
object)’ (2008 162). Which, according to Crogan (2006), is a play for ʻThe
understanding of life (at least, human individual and social existence), cinema
and the transcendental gesture itself.ʼ
Some make separations between cinema and animation, from the indexical
status of cinema over animation, to the foregrounded master subject of
animation, to the loss of privileged instant or ʻtranscendental poseʼ, to the
blind spot (animation) and the blind spot of the blind spot (death). But as
Stiegler includes television into cinema, in the characteristic of new Industrial
Temporal Objects, I extend the realm of cinema as consciousness to include
not just animation, but, animated virtual worlds.
Although, in Creative Evolution, Bergson criticizes the ʻnewʼ art of cinema for
presenting immobile images of movement, which can only compound the
philosophical and psychological inertia of the illusion of a sense of central
core of identity and agency, where a commander somewhere in the brain
operates all the machinery. Cognitive neuroscience reverses this analogy.
Evolution of Play
What do we do with a movie in the head? Play it, of course! Since Piaget
(2000), play can be considered essential for the development of cognition and
tangentially, society. Deweyʼs (1986) model of action is not unlike the way we
think of children at play. So there is a parallel universe or universal, whether in
philosophy or physics, neurology, sociology, psychology or cinema, in the
development of thought through play, and the acting of the virtual.
In 2005, the corrupted blood plague escaped the dungeons of Zul Gurub and
contaminated toons and NPCs (non player characters) causing massive in
game fatalities turning Orgrimmar to a ghost town. Several servers introduced
in game quarantine, which failed as some players deliberately thwarted the
controls. Meanwhile altruistic players spent hours ʻhealingʼ in game or
patrolling quarantine zones if they couldnʼt heal. In the end several servers
were wiped clean. Epidemiological researchers have turned to studying the
blood plague outbreak as some researchers in to the formation of terrorist
cells have also turned to virtual game behaviour for modeling human
behaviour, only ethically.
Computers as Cars
Is the distraction of WoW more than the loss of my free time grinding for gold?
The representation of two planes simultaneously, or the plane of the subject
here and now and the plane of non-person elsewhere and when? It is
analogous to the derealized space of Morseʼs ʻAn Ontology of Everyday
Distraction, The Freeway, the Mall and Televisionʼ (1998), sharing the non
space and distraction of Augeʼs (1995) non places, Benjaminʼs (2008)
arcades and Kowinskiʼs (2002) malls, with Bakhtinʼs (1982) archetypal
chronotope, the road, Barthesʼ (1977) metaphor for mythology of driving and
Baudrillardʼs (1990) postmodern spatiality, where the brain is the car and the
window is television.
Both Hegel and Bergson concur that the concrete universe can only be
realized through individuation so itʼs interesting to interject Zizekʼs (Sharpe,
2004) rewriting of Hegelian individuation and the evolution of life forms from
primary ʻorganicʼ identifications into secondary identification, peers,
professions, social roles etc. before returning to Bergsonʼs ʻCreative
Evolutionʼ. If virtual identifications and mobile subjectivities can also be
secondary individuations, they are no longer in opposition with the primary or
original individuation, which is then reintegrated as the “mode of appearance”
of the whole. Of course, adopting secondary identity or avatar as your “mode
of appearance” turns this literally on head but ontologically it remains whole.
At this stage I feel like Iʼve died and am doing the corpse run back to my body.
Heightened disembodiment! The major aspect of WoWʼs success was not the
glorious graphics and movie sound but the lowering of barriers to play. Casual
players are favorably handicapped, given bonus ʻrestedʼ points, allowing you
to catch up with your friends more easily, and most importantly, no big death
penalties! When you die, (not if) you ghost run back to your corpse to
reanimate. It only costs you time, not gold or health or skill. It also doesnʼt cost
too much time, because the grind, the monotonous doing of tasks simply to
get to the next level, reward or whatever is rarely enjoyed and Blizzard
reached Disney like heights of making your waiting always enjoyable! You
never waste your free time in their realm!
For Grosz (2004), waiting is the subjective experience that best exemplifies
the coexistence of a multiplicity of durations, the many timescapes of Adams.
For Heidegger (1978), death is the central knowing of the Dasein in time. Not
knowing the time of death but knowing that the possibility is, is the time of the
Dasein and the Dasein is always running ahead to the future, somewhat like
the corpse run, only the Dasein, at its extreme possibility of being, is time
itself, not in time. But I suspect my cyber selves are not running ahead into
the future, rather saturated in an infinite present, much like Borgeʼs ʻThe
Immortalsʼ (2004). If I never truly die in the game, then the violation of my
virtual body described by Morse cannot occur and the liminal and virtual realm
may become immune from moral issues or major questions. Like Virillioʼs (P.
Virilio, 2006) ʻloss of orientation with the worldʼ in a ʻdictatorship of speedʼ and
paying homage to Virillioʼs (1989) focus on the military and death.
Can my character really die? 5 million players in China lost their characters on
June 7 2009, when the WoW host company changed. When the new host
went public in October 2009, all players had to start from Level 1, leaving the
starting areas seething with 5 million ʻstupid cowsʼ, referring to the Taurens at
Thunderbluff.
What if the game is ended? Poor selling games are still on the shelves of
supermarkets after their online company terminated them. Pity the poor child
Evolution of Nature
Turingʼs Universal Machine that could simulate all machines has already
become Alan Kayʼs Universal Media Machine (Manovich, 2007) capable of
simulating all forms of media. Now, if cinema is consciousness and
consciousness cinema have we not closed the system and eliminated the
possibilities of creative becoming?
The Universal Cyborg is evolving from the Universal Machine, creating all new
Individual Temporal Objects.
Calendar and Clock
In a quantum leap, the feudal realm time of WoW is a fitting return for a study
of temporality. As Hassan describes in 24/7 (2007), our transition from
feudality was driven by the ticking of the clock, as it measured out our
productive moments. Einsteinʼs 1905 theory of relativity could not dent our
Newtonian perspective of absolute time. We are driven to order our lives and
are unable to remain “time aware” (Sabelis, 2002) of the multiplicity of
“timescapes” (Adam, 1998) that we inhabit, that Nowotny (1996) described as
Eigenzeiten, or “a time in everything”.
Stiegler (1998) names the adoption of common collective spatial and temporal
coordinates, ʻcalendarityʼ and ʻcardinalityʼ, as the primary synchronizing basis
of identity. The hyper-industrial exploitation of the synchronizing tendency
closes rather than opens the individualʼs diachronic potential, which is
Stieglerʼs globalization and its discontents.
Conclusion
Jean Luc Godard (1998) says that every story should have a beginning, a
middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order, thus bringing together
the narrative and ludology of game theory, those for whom story comes first
and those for whom play is the thing, with the theories of cinema,
consciousness, and ultimately cyborg. To that end this is a disordered
narrative, where stories from the game become virtual moons to shed their
lunar light on thinkers of space and time, who may in time, come to view or
share this luna/cy.
http://www.n5m.org/n5m2/media/texts/deleuze.htm
24/7 : time and temporality in the network society / edited by Robert Hassan
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