Miriam wrote:
I am on another list for women in VR, and Teresa Rivera posted this link to
an amazing site:
http://www.rider.edu/users/suler/psycyber/
I haven't read much of this site yet, but I do want to add a note about
it. A friend of mine who's working on a thesis about online identity gave
this guy(Dr. John Suler)'s article on gender-switching as a major example
of a wrongheaded approach to the topic. The article focuses on "detecting"
gender-switching, by providing a list of questions to ask a supposedly
female person online; supposedly women will give the correct answers to
these questions and men will not. The questions are things like "What is
the difference between 'junior' and 'misses' sizes?" There are fundamental
problems with this approach, such as:
o Many women surveyed don't give Suler's "correct" answers to the listed
questions.
o Any man who's read Suler's article *does* know the "correct" answers,
since Suler gives his answers in the article. (Note that Suler is himself
a man, if his name is any indication.)
o Presenting someone with a questionnaire and demanding that they prove
they are who they say they are is unlikely to provide the sort of trusting
relationship that Suler is supposedly trying to promote.
o Gender, particularly as presented online, is often way more complicated
than a simple binary male/female. (In particular, donning an online
persona that differs from your everyday persona in some way is not
necessarily "deceptive.")
Anyway, I didn't mean to go off on an off-topic rant. I guess what I'm
really getting at is that if he takes this kind of approach to one of his
topics, it makes me less willing to trust him to know what he's talking
about with his other topics. (Yes, he does briefly bring up most of the
above issues in the article, but he seems to dismiss them in favor of using
his list to truly determine someone's "real" gender.) (If any of you are
interested in online gender and identity issues, btw, you might check out
Julian Dibbell's book _my tinylife_ -- I'm only a little way into it, but
so far it's totally fascinating.)
Just to make this posting *vaguely* relevant to our list's topic, I'll
note that any good roleplayer can play either gender convincingly for story
purposes. Characters in any story-setting that remotely resembles the real
world are likely to have genders of some sort; what's a good approach to
setting the gender of an interactor's character? Possibilities include:
o Give the character no gender. This is the tack taken by puzzle-solving
games from old text adventures to _Myst_ and _Riven_; theoretically it lets
the interactors "play themselves," but really it helps give the
interactor's in-game persona a *lack* of character. The character being
played becomes a genderless automaton mindlessly seeking out clues to solve
puzzles. Can certainly be fun to play such games, but they generally have
little to do with storytelling. (It is, however, possible to create a
viable character, in a real story, who is neuter or hermaphroditic.)
o Assign a predetermined gender to the character. This may make
interactors uncomfortable if they're not used to roleplaying and the
character is not of their gender. (And yet, male computer gamers seem to
have no trouble with the idea of taking the part of Lara Croft in the Tomb
Raider games -- yes, there's a physical attraction there for many players,
but she really is acting as the player's avatar in the world of the game.
Still, I would expect female players to be, by and large, less happy about
being forced into male personas, because it would seem like yet another
instance of computer stuff being designed by and for men with no thought to
women's perspectives. Several female friends of mine, when they were
growing up, read science fiction with male protagonists and enjoyed it, and
even identified with the male characters; but they also wished there were
more sf with female protagonists.)
o Allow the interactor to choose the character's gender. This is the most
flexible approach, and the one used in VR chat rooms as well as in
textual-interaction environment like MUDs. Seems like the best approach to
me, except that it could require substantial duplication of effort on the
part of the writers and artists creating the story, to handle multiple
kinds of viewpoint characters. (Especially because gender isn't the only
issue here. Race, body shape, disabilities -- lots of variations. And
that doesn't even touch on the question of psychological differences
between characters' personalities.) And once again we come back to the
questions of how to handle multiple possible viewpoint characters --
writing a different version of the story for every possible character is
obviously impossible, so you either have to make the story smart enough to
adapt to any given character, or you have to limit the interactor's choices
of character. But we've discussed this point before
