I Don't Know Where Metaphor Ends and Reality Begins (and so I ramble)

Anything that divests itself from the “real world” makes me nervous. Already I realize that my scare quotes are necessary. Real and synthetic/virtual aren’t stable and clear-cut terms that define the earth against those worlds that currently live behind our screens. I’m anxious because I don’t want things to pass unnoticed over here while everyone is busy looking over there.

While I am made nervous, I’m also endlessly intrigued and immersed because the synthetic worlds Castronova describes are predominately concerned with community and social formation. What happens socially in these worlds is certainly real. My concern, however, is for the limits of feedback into the real world. While Castronova makes pains to demonstrate that MMO adherents are not the anti-social basement dwellers of myth, it seems that there are continually increasing rifts between the “real” social world and the synthetic. While these rifts may already exist all throughout someone’s many social circles, the distinction between the real and synthetic worlds’ governing rules makes this an extreme case. Again concern, but excitement. MMOs are creating new, formerly impossible links precisely because they can change the way laws and rules function (governmental but also physical laws). Can this, however, feed back into the world and produce change? Or is the division such that a bridge between in unimaginable and the ruling metaphors become partitioning and divesting?

Castronova argues that part of the function of synthetic worlds is to provide people with different game/value/reward structures than the real world provides. This leads him to claim that multiple synthetic worlds will be produced to accord the variety of desires (both aesthetic and ludic) in the pioneering populace. This reminds me of Fredric Jameson discussion of multiple utopias in Archaeologies of the Future. His argument is that only a utopic system made up of many utopias and allowing free access between them could possibly account for people’s distinct desires. This is think is the strongest argument for the potential for MMOs to function politically, allowing rule/law shifts that can offer diverse solution for contentment.

My favorite discussion that emerges in Castronova (and appeared in The Meaning of Video Games as well) is the discussion of MMOs as frontier space fully capable of accepting immigrants and refugees. While Castronova attends to the metaphor by discussing immigrants earning money to send home, it likes we could say more about the split inherent in the metaphor. Again I feel compelling to argue that the distinction between the two world’s governing rule systems implies a fissure that won’t be easily sutured. We continually butt up against the fact that Earth never gets cut out of the equation. Perhaps this was always the case (see Eurocentrism) and people have always maintained their connections home. If this is the case with MMOs as well, will there be a moment when a real break with the old world occurs? What might that mean? And is it desirable?