All of our bodies are made up of sixty percent water. In that respect, we’re all the same. In an MMO, aside from differences that are chosen such as height, weight, class, and a charmingly outlandish haircut, all player characters are also the same. Everyone can run in the game. There’s no disease or physical limitations and you don’t ever have to present as a gender you don’t want to be perceived as. Depending on the game, sometimes it can be difficult to pass for androgynous or ungendered, but we continue to evolve. The important part is that everyone is on the same playing field. Everyone can be a dragon slaying, horse breeding, warrior farmer they want to be.
There have been some pieces of media that have illustrated this strength of MMOs to great effect over the years.
One of my all time favorites is the cult classic, .hack//. .hack// is a series that centers around an MMO called The World and has had many installments, starting with .hack//Sign, the first anime installment. The main character of .hack//Sign is a male presenting character named Tsukasa that gets trapped in the game and can’t log out. Turns out in real life, Tsukasa is actually a girl. This becomes relevant once Tsukasa gets out of the game at the end of the series, because while trapped in the game he falls in love with a girl whose character’s name is Subaru. Subaru is the leader of a prominent guild in The World called The Crimson Knights. In real life, she is a woman with a wheelchair who could never explore the caves, mountains, and forests she can in The World. What’s fantastic about both Tsukasa’s and Subaru’s experience with their characters in The World is that they offer them experiences they can’t have in real life. It’s unclear if Tsukasa chose to play a male character because they have issues with their assigned gender, but the point is that they are able to pass for male within The World. Subaru, on the other hand, gets to walk. When Tsukasa and Subaru finally meet outside The World for the first time, they recognize each other not because of the way they present in the real world, but because of the way they know each other as people from within The World.
The fade to color is a particularly evocative technique here. Only the in-game experiences of The World are portrayed in color throughout the series, while any real world scenes and flashbacks are depicted in the grayscale the video starts in. In this way, .hack//Sign creates a sense of realism within The World, implying that The World is the world that is most real to the main characters in this story. When Tsukasa and Subaru recognize each other as the people they know from the game, their interaction becomes real to them as well.
Because of the level playing field created by the equality of characters in online games, .hack// is able to include a wide and diverse cast of characters. Aside from Subaru and Tsukasa, they also include a trouble making child named Sora. Sora is taken seriously in The World as though he were an adult. This eventually gets him into trouble (spoilers: he ends up in a coma and losing his memory, and then shows back up in .hack//G.U. as the main character Haseo), but he learns from his mistakes and inevitably comes back to The World as a teenager in the .hack//G.U. game series. The other character .hack// has the chance to include that is often left out of most “save the world” stories is a pregnant woman!
.hack//Infection, Mutation, Outbreak, and Quarantine are the first set of .hack// video games that was released in the franchise. One of the first party members Kite (the player’s proxy in-game) acquires is a spell caster named Mistral. In the third game, she informs Kite that she can’t keep fighting against the anomalies in the game with him because she’s going to have a baby. She explains that she’s not just risking her life anymore, and if she was killed by one of the anomalies in game and fell into a coma in real life she might lose her baby. However, in order to protect The World for her child to enjoy free of anomalies and threats of falling comatose, Mistral later returns to the game in time for the final battle. Later, in the manga series .hack//Key of the Twilight, the reader meets Mistral’s child who has inherited Mistral’s old avatar, showing once again that The World is made for everyone.
With things like GamerGate and convention horror stories, it’s no secret that gaming and nerd culture in general can be a pretty sexist scene. In Real Life calls that out within the first few pages of the book:
This is an interesting phenomenon because while female players often play male characters to avoid sexism, there are male players that play female characters because they find them prettier than the male avatars. This is an example of the privilege male gamers enjoy in MMOs.
While the .hack// franchise doesn’t address the issue of sexism in gaming (I can only assume because the creators hoped such things would be resolved in the future era of gaming they chose to set their story in) In Real Life does a great job of being inclusive towards a female audience right from the get-go. The story then chooses to tackle another true-to-life issue with MMO gaming: gold farming.
Gold farmers are players who play the game solely to amass in-game assets and then sell them to other players for real life money. Most MMOs have rules that outlaw this behavior, and players can have their accounts suspended if they are caught participating in such exchanges. However, it doesn’t stop it from happening, and people who have only just started an MMO can find websites to buy in-game weapons, armor, materials, mounts, houses, and even pre-leveled avatars. Like many real life MMO players, Anda’s mentor in the guild doesn’t think it’s fair, and so combats the unfairness of gold farming by killing gold farmers’ characters for cash in her spare time. Killing other player’s characters is often referred to in MMO communities as “player killing” or “PKing” for short. Anda becomes involved in the gold farmer PKing, but when one of the gold farmers talks to her, Anda becomes conflicted.
Raymond is the name the gold farmer gives Anda. He tells her it’s the name he uses in his English classes. Through a mix of English, Chinese, and surprisingly inaccurate online translation services, Raymond tells Anda his story. He’s a Chinese man who works as a gold farmer--meaning he is paid in the real world by the company he works for to play Coarsegold and create in-game assets that the company then sells for real world money. For him, gold farming is not something he does to make a little extra money on the side like PKing is for her. Instead, it’s how he makes his livelihood.
What’s interesting about this story is that it does so many good things while simultaneously telling some really hard truths. Yes, gaming can be sexist, and yes, our global economy is royally messed up if illegal gold farming is the basis for companies in certain countries. Even more messed up if those companies aren’t offering things like health insurance, like Raymond’s company does to him. What I love about In Real Life, though, is that the game itself is never made out to be bad. Some bad things can happen in it like PKing and gold farming, but good things can too! International connections, crowdsourcing, and anonymously started calls to action like the one that gets the workers at Raymond’s company to strike until they receive health insurance are just some of the examples; and it’s because of all of those things the world of Coarsegold is just as real as the real world in some ways.
The transitions between the real world and the online one really illustrate that as well. At no point do we ever see Anda in the real world “playing” her character. Anda is always shown inhabiting her character in the online world, as if her avatar were her real body and the game her real world.
Now go have your own real life adventure in an MMO.
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