So I read an interesting post recently that touched on the idea of internet persona and real life personas, and it got me to thinking.
Why do people see the need to create additional personas? Why are some easier than others?
I had another disturbing thought today too.
In that world, I am a king. Why live in yours?
Now, I like to think that I'm a socially adjusted, free-thinking and intelligent human being, capable of functioning amongst my peers and exhibiting a compelling and communicative nature.
But a lot of people who play WoW aren't.
And for them, the answer is probably easy - they create these personas because they are incapable of functioning in the real world, for various reasons. Building a castle in the clouds and going to inhabit it is easier than trying to fit in, trying to follow the unwritten rules of social conduct, merely advancing in the status quo.
And so all these social sub-groups develop, because misery both loves company and victims, each with new laws and new hiarchies, in which these people can function. And everything is fine and dandy.
And don't say this isn't a fact. I've met several of these wretched creatures. So desperate to get into the little circle of firelight that is the social rat race, so pitiful. You can practically smell it on them. They use their weakness as a defence and anger fuels their cunning. They can be vicious little bastards, let me tell you.
So I'd like to think that I understand why people who cannot function in RL build themselves personas - because they have no other.
But why is it that WoW - and all internet activity - attracts people who can operate within our world day to day?
I gave it some thought, and I realised that it is far easier to be yourself online than it is anywhere else.
If you're interested in killing dragons, then there is a place with people who also like killing dragons. If you like to crunch numbers, you can do that with people. If you like being in charge of things, you can be in charge, if you like being ordered about, you can be ordered about, if you like truly horrific scenes of pornography, there's an awful lot of that too.
The point is, no matter what makes you tick, whatever aspect of social interaction you enjoy waxing lyrical about, I guarentee there is a place on the internet where you can go and talk or do it to your hearts content without all that other pesky social stuff getting in the way.
Nothing is between you and the core.
The danger arises when you want to throw yourself into that world utterly. As you spend more and more time in it, your abilities in other areas tend to decay. Especially if you never have to practice your social skills.
I spent three and a half weeks indoors playing WoW when I was sick. Being among people again immediately afterwards was a shock to my system. I couldn't wait to get back to what I had started thinking of as my world.
And that's a dangerous road to go down, but also an understandable one, I think.
The downside to all of this is to get what people really need - warmth, touch (I'm a physical contact junkie), face to face communication, all that jazz - you can't throw yourself into a persona that allows you to strip away your extremeties and let loose your core.
Not all the time, anyway.
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I have this shirt. I know that it was originally meant to be about PvP, but when I pull it out to wear it, I think more of the opposite:
As long as my world is the real world then the delusions of others are unimportant.
The flatmate that I mention in my second "Roots" blog post actually withdrew from the real world. He would not go out to social gatherings. When he did, he would leave early and log on to WoW. He stopped sleeping in his bed, favouring his computer chair. He once raided to 3 A.M. while his father was visiting and trying to sleep in the computer room.
His house, last time I saw it, was falling apart. The place was a pigsty. His job doesn't require excellence - in fact, the pay is the same for incompetence. He stopped shaving, to have an extra ten minutes online every morning before work.
He started a guild with his druid which he later changed to be his main. He took some of the better players from Celerity with him when he left. They are having some success in Ulduar, I believe.
His real friends don't come by anymore - I was there when one did because she really needed to use the toilet. However once she went in to do so, she immediately exited said facilities and went around the corner to another friends' house.
When they were still making the effort, he wouldn't even log off while they were there - he would carry on playing, talking for no more than the length of a gryphon flight.
And I watched him become this person, and nothing I said or did made him veer from his course of real world social self-destruction. Ultimately, that was his choice - one that I strongly believe he will one day regret.
This is the man I don't want to be. This is the man I am afraid too many MMORPGers are willingly becoming.
One final point (for now)...
As a martial arts enthusiast/practitioner, I have read Miyamoto Musashi's Book of Five Rings. Musashi was a swordsman in fuedal Japan who never lost a match. He claimed no teacher and no school of swordsmanship (until he named his own style Hyoho Niten Ichi-ryu "Twin Heavens Strategy" and starting teaching it, that is).
In my copy of his Book of Five Rings, the original scrolls are reproduced on the final few pages, with a translation of the Japanese below. Many times, the scrolls end with the same phrase: "This is a technique for direct transmission."
"Direct transmission" means, in this sense, that there is a depth to the technique beyond that which can be expressed in words.
This is the way of the real word - you can quantify everything, you can express it in maths and physics, you can define it to the nth degree, but how do you express the inexpressible?
Partial list of inexpressible things:
Something truly awesome - mouth hanging open, eyes wide, brain frozen in disbelief that something so amazing could possibly exist.
The rapturous joy of the truly devout.
Love given freely and without restraint, which is returned in the same way.
The joy of holding your newborn child
The pride of watching your children excel
The poetry of motion that is a skilled athlete, dancer or other artist of the physical
How does one express these things in words?
One does not.
One can not.
And that is why the real world will always be better than the virtual.
And while I hold these things to be true, I have no chance of becoming the man I described above.
Expression of self is one the greatest abilities of humanity, and in turn to this, one of the greatest pitfalls to true decadence.
As the world expands itself and the mediums of expression as well grow along side they exist perhaps as the parasite that eats dead skin, but cannot differentiate between new healing skin and that long dead.
Oscar Wilde said that the "first duty in life is to assume a pose", and that "what the second is, no one has yet discovered". I think perhaps that we, much in the same way many of us reroll a toon, attempt to reinvent ourselves, to assume a new pose. Perhaps this skipping past attempting to understand the second duty in life, that which one would have prior spent their life uncovering, with or without any real clemency however the voyage was the purpose, is what results in the duality of persona, this creation of many selves.
11.5 million people play WoW, and although a fraction of humanity more then enough for a case study.
I've often thought as WoW as the opium den of the modern world. Where, within giants such as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle walked, but also the dregs of society found themselves, both sprayed out together living both wonderful dreams of far flung domes.
The ability to provided the mask required by society is a task arduous to even the most talent of mimes. The digression between those whom do, and don't is seemingly just the differing between the man who is lucky or that which is unlucky. However such simplification is a copout and you cannot define one by his luck.
It is the strength of character, defined by the ability to understand that a person, is them, and is layered both able to be cruel and wonderful, pure and corrupt. This blending of the different selves is what perhaps Liri separates thinkers such as you, myself, Massif from those who absorbed everything into one delusion of self in which they are the god of their realm and control the aspects of it, rather then blending this self with the one that does fail, and compile that they are both a success and a failure and this isn't a contradiction but rather a truth.
Xuani, whoever you are, I think I love you.
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