computers as culture assignment : real and realm time in wow

luna/cy:RealandRealmTimeinWoW

CC3:ARIN6903:AndraKeay

“Philosophy at its best (genuinely innovative thought) involves harnessing the power that the virtual, in the domain of concepts, exerts.”

Bergson via Deleuze via Grosz via Me (Grosz, 2005)

ARIN 6903 ANDRA KEAY

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luna/cy:RealandRealmTimeinWoW

Introduction 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 Luna/cy is surely the act of creating globes of knowledge, society or identity that bathe in the reflected light of both real and realm time. In this instance, real time is right, realm time is left, luna/cy lies betwixt the two. 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.”


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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.” At this point of time, I could stop untangling temporality and go fishing in Stranglethorn Vale. Every Sunday at 2pm (local server time) I can compete with others to catch a Bergsonian quantitative multiplicity of Tastyfish, The first one back to the goblin with 40 Tastyfish wins. Fortuitously, local server time is also my local time (ADST), so the moon rises and sets on Undercity or Stranglethorn in a seductive simulation of Sydney. 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). In duration, events are not juxtaposed, therefore there is no mechanistic causality and we find freedom. Duration is a qualitative multiplicity; heterogenous, temporal, interpenetrating and/or dualistic, much like my feelings while fishing; as opposed to a homogenous, spatial and countable multiplicity, like the Tastyfish.

EvolutionofToons 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


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Kong and 3 times the size of New Zealand. Blizzardʼs annual revenues in 2009 were $3.6 billion, which puts Activision Blizzard at 111th on the global income list for countries, between Mozambique and Malta. Blizzard is one of the fastest growing (22%) economies in the world. That is not counting the unofficial traffic in WoW goods and services, which is estimated to be the same size, if not greater. My toons are a quantitative multiplicity, in their various spaces and guises, which may be expressed symbolically, unlike the qualitative multiplicity of Bergson. My identification with my identities however has a qualitative quality, although mayhap, as Deleuze (1986) put it, with the rise of the modern subject, ʻthe world has become a bad filmʼ.

CinemaasConsciousness. Deleuze (1986) has appropriated the Bergsonian metaphysics of images. Everything is an image, which acts upon or reacts with others. The human brain is one of many images on the infinite whole or plane of immanence. From the chaotic primordial plane, or metacinema, somehow bodies emerge which introduce an interval between action and reaction, commencing the evolution of the brain. “Time is this very hesitation.” (Bergson, 2002) Knowledge is relational and consciousness is awareness of the gap between perception and action. “Matter is an enfolding that consciousness is capable of unfolding.” Thus even if you argue for the materiality of matter beyond image, Bergson claims this is merely a difference of degree and not kind. Matter cannot exercise powers beyond what is perceived. 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. Bergsonʼs indivisible curve of movement can always be deconstructed or digitized into discrete moments, but no moment or multiplicity of moments can


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capture the movement through the points, which is pure duration. For Bergson, there is always a priority of movement over the things that move and so all these temporal objects, digital, animated or virtual are equally valid, and equally capable of representing the Deleuzean cinema of consciousness! 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. “The first problem of consciousness is the problem of how we get a movie-in-the-brain.” from ʻThe Feeling of What Happensʼ (Damasio, 2000) Rather, according to Damasio, consciousness or ʻselfʼ-perception is an effect of layers of film that are projected ʻin the brainʼs multiplex screensʼ. While it is important to note that the metaphorical movie ʻhas as many sensory tracks as our nervous system has sensory portalsʼ, the use of the term ʻimageʼ to describe them is no accident. Our visual cortex tends to take precedence over other brain areas. (Doidge, 2007)

EvolutionofPlay 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. To date, no purely experimental ethical plagues have been released, but Blizzard spread a self advertizing zombie plague to promote the WOTLK expansion in 2008. Blizzard has maintained a position that World of Warcraft is first and foremost a game, and that it was never designed to mirror reality or anything in the real world. WoW is game not toy, or a tool!


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ComputersasCars

Is the time spent in WoW nothing more than a distraction? Or can it be a Deleuzean assemblage, that strips the world of its traditional functions, and inaugurates a new mode of perception and a new set of habits? 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. To paraphrase Arnheim (2004) on television, “Thus the computer turns out to be related to the motor car and the aeroplane as a means of transport for the mind.” And as Castronova (2005) says of WoW, “users drive around in these worlds using a video game character in much the same way we use a car to drive around the Earth.” “Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions... Unthinkable complexity. Lines of lights ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding.” (Gibson, 1984 p51) Gibsonʼs vision evokes the popular fears of addictive cyber immersion, a derealization and desensitization that Kowinski describes as the “zombie effect” brought on by the contradictory states involved, one being relaxed and stationary, the other being actively present. Morse (1998) describes this private mobile subjectivity as removing us from Canettiʼs (1984) power of crowds, which may release us from individuality via bodily contamination, far from the festival of Bakhtinʼs (1982) streets and she forecasts the potential for submission to consumerism as mass produced bits of our being can be swapped interchangeably to shore up the boundaries of the self. We can be washed up on the chronotopic road, simply meeting obstacles without any change of subject and under an illusion of our control. Or it may be that increasing speed and pervasiveness of communications are reinserting the social back into our private bubble, a double disengagement! However, the loss of hesitation paradoxically reduces our control. /Send.


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EvolutionofIdentity 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


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who purchases a discontinued virtual life. Perhaps we need a Bergsonian theory of virtual evolution.

EvolutionofNature Stieglerʼs reworking of Deleuze, Bergson, Hegel, Husserl and Turing, is to my mind mired in socio-historical arguments (Simondon, Gille, Leroi- Gourhan and Rousseau) which continually revert to a dialectic of technological or biological determinism rather than escaping to the incorporation of technics and time ontologically. Stieglerʼs position that embodies technics becomes a point of interest and not a movement. Grosz has made a parallel revision of Bergson, incorporating Darwin, Nietzsche, Deleuze, and Irigaray. Particularly within ʻThe Nick of Timeʼ, Grosz strives for a thinking style reflecting an open ended continuously becoming system, not a set of arguments against, which is the essence of Bergsonʼ and Darwinʼs theories of evolution. 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? Our playful evolution in WoW could take us to a posthuman time (Hayles, 1999) becoming cyborg (Haraway, 2000). The interplay of the actual and virtual creates a creative temporal loop between ʻthe moments of acting out oneself and witnessing the bodying forth of anotherʼ. (Sinnerbrink 2008) The Universal Cyborg is evolving from the Universal Machine, creating all new Individual Temporal Objects.

CalendarandClock 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.


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As time has really become relative, real time has become infinitely finite. Machine time, in its micromillisyncs is divided ultimately by urgent reaction. ʻHard real timeʼ demands a response within the frame and ʻsoft real timeʼ adapts. The brakes on your car respond before you crash, not quickly on the ICT scale but fast enough. If they donʼt respond in time, you die. Time is a fascinatingly less travelled path in our ʻtimeless timeʼ (Castells, 2004). Bergson calls the last characteristic of temporal progress mobility and that mobility is freedom. This was reinterpreted by Foucault and Deleuze as a spatial rather than temporal idea, however in Warsong Gulch it is clear to me how the temporal aspects of freedom and mobility are constantly with us. Before a battle, I stock up on potions and goods to speed my movement and free me from control spells, traps and stuns. Death is a significant delay. Most virtual battles, from quest races, to Player vs Player, to territorial struggles turn on the speed of control, the control of land, resources, enemy, team, self and so forth. The constant rehearsal of the ʻultrarapid forms of free-floating control that replaced the old disciplinesʼ in Deleuzeʼs ʻPostscript on the Societies of Controlʼ (1990), seem to be teaching us to desire the trappings of control while labouring under the delusion that it is only a fantasy.

Conclusion William James (1988) described Bergson as a Copernican revolution, opening nature to more than our representation of it, where perception is bound up with the action and movement of a body, and consciousness as an emergent property of a network or assemblage, anticipating current philosophy of mind. Bergsonʼs (2002) description of turning a telescope to the heaven, rotating and contracting the stars into the scope and then into the eyes as analogous to the movement of memory, thought or consciousness, between contemplation and action, inspired my lunar allegory. I travelled via Deleuzeʼs Bergsonian thesis that ʻthinking itself is situated within a “machine assemblage of moving images” from which the brain is materially indistinguishableʼ and Groszʼs creative evolution. 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.


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• Updated info retrieved 31/10/09 from WoW forum (post Blizzcon)

0. WoW subscribers decreasing? 09/29/2009 05:55:44 AM PDT http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?sid=1&topicId=20140807754

computers as culture assignment : real and realm time in wow

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