Session 7(a): Accessing Wicked Realities

Session 7a: Accessing Wicked Realities
Chair: Annedith Schneider

ur-Real Evil and Wickedness in a Virtual World
Marlin Bates
Department of Communication, University of the Pacific, California, USA

Massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) are a relatively new phenomenon, but as they near their tenth birthday, there are some trends that are starting to develop in the genre. Most importantly, there is the fact that every game, whether it is science fiction or reality, fantasy or fact, there is always a division of forces based on the philosophical divide of good and evil. This poses an interesting question: what rhetorical purpose is served by creating and playing characters with an evil identity?
This study seeks to answer that question by examining the rhetorical construction of evil identity in the MMORPGs Ultima Online (1998) and World of Warcraft (2004). In doing so, the study discovers that each player is allowed to pursue evil and wickedness for a multitude of reasons. Employing a grounded theory approach to implicit identity theory, the paper investigates how humans create both the product of identity and the process of an evil identity through rhetoric by examining how player-characters in Ultima Online and World of Warcraft follow an implicit schema of the “evil” character and, thus, identity development. The paper makes the argument that players use the site of Ultima Online in order to create identities in a manner that is implicitly recognized by all players. Those identities are then performed in web sites by the player-character. The USENET is then employed not only for the identity’s performance, but also to disseminate changes to the implicit identity structure.

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Social self-organization means that there is a mutual productive interconnection of practices of human actors and social structures. Structures both enable and constrain social actions. This idea corresponds to saying that social systems are re-creative, i.e. self-organizing social systems. Re-creativity is based on the creative activities of human beings. Social structures exist in and through the productive practices and relationships of human actors.
Ethics forms a subsystem of society that is connected to other subsystems such as economy, technology, polity, religion, culture, ecology, science, medicine, etc. Hence if a human being acts in the ethical system of society, (s)he also acts in another societal system. This results in a differentiation of the ethical system and of subsystems such as economical ethics, technological ethics, political ethics, religious ethics, cultural ethics, ecological ethics, sccientific ethics, medical ethics, etc.
There are two types of self-organization: 1. A synchronous one where a system reproduces itself by permanently reproducing and maintaining its elements and hence its unity (autopoiesis). 2. A diachronic one where a system enters a phase of instability, chaos, and bifurcation in which new orders and new qualities emerge from disorder (order from noise).
These two types of self-organization can be applied to the ethical system of society. 1. Existing norms and values enable and constrain human practices, they form a framework for human action and individual norms and values. Based on individual norms and values humans enter social communicative processes where they communicate about norms and values and their legitimatization. This can be done in either a rather conflicting or a rather harmonious way. As a result of ethical communication on the structural level of a social system normative and value-based structures are permanently reproduced. 2. In modern society different values and norms are often conflicting and contradicting each other. This results in social conflicts about the unity and difference of values. In each social system there are prevailing norms and values and alternative ones that challenge this dominance. Social systems can enter phases of crisis and instability that can be caused by different social phenomena where new qualities of norms and values such as a new dominant ethical paradigm emerges.
The different philosophical approaches on ethics can be classified into four categories that form a typology. This typology is based on the distinction between subjects and objects in society. 1. There are subjective, individual ethics that conceive norms and values as individually constructed. 2. There are objective ethics that conceive norms and values on an objective level. Objective here can be understood in two forms: Either as an absolute or as an intersubjective dimension of ethics. Hence there are two subtypes of objective ethics: Absolute ethics that conceive norms and values in transcendental terms. Intersubjective ethics that see norms and values as the result of discourse and communicative action. 3. Dualistic approaches argue that there is a subjective and an objective level of ethics and that these two domains are separated. 4. Dialectical approaches maintain that there is an objective and a subjective level of ethics and that these two areas produce each other and are interconnected.
The evolution of modern society has resulted in a shift from industrial society towards the knowledge society. This transformation is a multidimensional shift that affects all aspects of society. Hence also the ethical system of society is penetrated by the emergence of the knowledge society and ethical guidelines for the Information Age are about to emerge. Ethical issues and conflicts in the knowledge society are connected to topics of ecological and social sustainability. For InformEthics and CyberEthics the sustainable design of social and socio-technological systems is important.

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Can we learn to live non-apocalyptically in a society given to diatribes against evil enemies?  Fears abound, not only from apprehension about terrorism but also from alarm over global viruses, confusions about rapidly changing norms of behavior, and clashes between extremist religious orientations.  Yet, rather than grab at nationalistic forms of moral rectitude, it is possible, and more importantly, desirable, to cultivate a form of citizenship that is at home in ambiguity and artifice.  This paper discusses a geopolitics of prevailing–a nexus of ethics, politics, and aesthetics–that demurs to doom.
The stance of my paper takes its cue from William Faulkner’s Nobel Prize winning speech in which he states: “I decline to accept the end of man.” Rather than sanctioning the apocalyptic script that pervades so much of American culture, it behooves citizens of the United States to emulate Faulkner’s advice to learn to “decline” doomsday scenarios.  His insistence that writers must strive to think beyond the question, “When will I be blown up?” applies to our own Time of Terror as much as it did to his Cold War Era.  As he put it, it is the writer’s “privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail” (Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech, December 10, 1950).  Faulkner’s words resound with a wisdom sorely needed today.  But why limit this outlook to writers?  By promoting a geopolitics of prevailing, this paper seeks to widen the scope of Faulkner’s vision.

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