World of Warcraft- a tale of two cities

Being somewhat familiar with WoW (having played it back when 60 was the level cap), I was able to move quickly from city to city in both factions' territories, giving me a unique perspective on the world of Azeroth and its inhabitants. I was immediately drawn to the capital cities of each faction - Orgrimmar and Stormwind, as providing contrasts both obvious and subtle.

At first glance, Orgrimmar is strongly hypermasculine. Even ignoring for a moment the wonky scale that is present everywhere in WoW (The average beam used in construction is apparently larger than the average tree), Orgrimmar is very definitely a city at war. From the seemingly hurried construction of the massive walls to the tent-like nature of its buildings, Orgrimmar feels more like an entrenched war-camp than an established capital city. Its ruling council, all men, meet in a building more akin to a giant tent inside walls than a solid building.

Stormwind, on the other hand, has a completely different set of architectural cues. Though still built of surprisingly large materials, Stormwind is refined and embellished - instead of rough-hewn logs still with axe-marks on the ends, Stormwind is made of nicely squared-off beams and well-cut stone. If Orgrimmar is a city at war, Stormwind is very deliberately a city at peace. Stormwind is humanist, positive, and optomistic about the future...

And yet it's Orgrimmar that has female guards.

This made me double-take. Why would the super-masculine war culture also be more progressively feminist than the enlightened human one? Was this a commentary on humanity being quietly, oppressively sexist? Clearly, more research would be required.

I decided to look into businesses in both cities and see what the gender ratios of shops in a variety of categories were. Though more subtle than the patrolling guards, the genders of business owners provide two important perspectives - how stereotypes of gender roles apply to the shopkeepers, and the progressive nature (or lack thereof) of business in Azeroth.

My findings were very interesting. As I expected, merchants in the armor and weapon businesses are overwhelmingly male - thirteen out of sixteen in Orgrimmar and fourteen out of nineteen in Stormwind. Beyond that, at least in Stormwind, the genders are fairly evenly balanced. The two outstanding fields were crafting/profession-based merchants, where eight of twelve are female, and inns (which Stormwind seems to have no end of), which are 75% male.

Orgrimmar, on the other hand, is strongly male in all categories. The only even category was innkeepers, of which the only one is run by a husband-and-wife pair. Crafting/profession merchants are 9-to-5, magic is 6-to-2, and even the all-inclusive "general" category is 5 to 3 in the guys' favor.

So, where did the female guards in Orgrimmar come from?

I believe (and, being someone other than the Blizzard world-building people, this is only a belief), that their existence comes from the fact that Orgrimmar is meant to be a city at war. Much like Rosie the Riveter, the female guards are a symbol of wartime necessity - but in a world where gender means precisely nothing in terms of combat ability. Rosie took a conventionally masculine job, assembling aircraft, and did it just as quickly and just as precisely as her male counterparts. In Orgrimmar, the female guards are doing the same thing, but carrying shields and axes instead of welder's masks and rivet guns.

It's the end of week three...

So, halfway through the class, and so far, it has definitely not been what I had expected. I was expecting a sit-down lecture from a White Apologist professor that would basically consist of six weeks of "You're horrible for being white, you're horrible for being male, you're horrible for being middle-class," and so on, complete with a multi-page paper every few weeks to drive the point home.

Suffice to say, it's been nothing like that. This class is making me think. It's making me think about what (and how) I think. Even more importantly, it's making me think about when I don't think.

What do I want to see out of the next three weeks? I'm not sure. So far, it seems to me that we've been establishing a framework and terminology, and are just now starting to apply it to the internet and video games. That application seems to me to be what will really make the course - we've talked about how people can change gender and race online, but not really what that means. So I can log onto CoH and play a latina superheroine. So what? How does it change my understanding of race? How does it change anyone else's understanding of race? Sure, people who've been living under the proverbial rock (and never thought of crossplaying) might assume slightly different things about me, but it's City of Heroes - a far more important question than whether I'm an illegal immigrant is whether I'm going to light you on fire from a hundred feet away or chop you to bits with a big freaking sword.

Racism and White Guilt...

Once again, fun discussion in the last few minutes of class has taken this blog into a completely different topic than sexual orientation and gender stereotypes - although I might come back to them after I get this off my chest.

This blog post, to pick a convenient strawman, seems to say that only Persons of Color (or POCs, as they use it) can tell when something is racism, and us horrible white folks need to pay attention and bend over backwards the moment a POC plays the race card.

Bull.

Counterexample from work: In the CUB, we have a bunch of TVs hooked up to various game consoles that students can check out controllers for from the front desk. Now, it's policy that they have to be WSU students and show student ID cards to check out a controller. I'm only at the front desk in passing, and I hear them explain this policy every week or so. A couple weeks ago, a non-student POC tried to check out a controller, and very quickly cried "racism" (quite loudly, too) while the front desk staffer explained the policy. No, it's not racism. No, the staffer isn't a horrible person. It's policy, nothing more, and that same staffer was explaining the exact same thing with the exact same words to those 4-H kids last week.

The whole blog gets on my nerves, because it seems to me to be (on a fairly regular basis) lumping all "white" people into a block, and also trying to induce white guilt on the whole mess.

Guess what? I'm not "white" (the stereotype), whatever that may be. I'm not even from the Caucasus mountains, so I'd question whether or not I'm "caucasian" (racially). For that matter, both terms are trying to categorize me based on my great-great-grandparents (or theirs, even), which I sorta take exception to. I was born in Kirkland, raised in the hills above Renton, and am now a WSU student. To try and guilt me into feeling bad about slavery in america multiple hundred years ago because people who looked like me were responsible strikes me as being just as much of a stereotype-based attack as any other - and as it tends to come from people who claim to be educated and aware of stereotypes and how important it is to deliberately avoid them, it makes me roll my eyes faster than most.

Yeah. Trying to blame me for something my ancestors did strikes me as being a bit silly, especially as the obvious response is "which ones?" By my paternal line, I'm a third-generation Swedish immigrant. The Hermanson family is a Swedish military family that dates back to the Napoleonic wars. The McCambridges are, obviously, Irish, and a few generations older to America. The Englunds are from Holland, and the Couriers, though an "Old American Family" (The Courier in Courier & Ives is a many-times-great granduncle) were Bostonian until they moved to Colorado and took up ranching. My family tree branches in so many directions that the hypothetical race-baiters might as well (and as accurately) blame me for the Crusades while they're at it - or the burning of Paris by the Vikings.

Okay, back to gender stereotypes. I was having a long and involved discussion with a friend the other day about love, attraction, and all that, and in response to my comment (approximately: "I have yet to really be attracted to anyone - girls who are friends are just "one of the guys" in my mental filing system. Maybe it's destiny, and I haven't met the right person yet, maybe I'm asexual... I really don't know."), he suggested that I might be gay. Now, it is the obvious option that I hadn't mentioned, and maybe I'm just massively overanalyzing, but it worked for Nakamura, right? Anyways, he went on to list a few reasons - I'm obviously not the conventional hypermasculine muscled build, I tend to be quiet and reserved, I actually have a fashion sense...

And as I'm sure you've noticed, those are all feminine stereotypes. "Queering" was mentioned in class - once someone is outed as gay, they are immediately expected to fit the aforementioned feminine stereotypes. Looking back at it, I can't help but be amused that it was queering in reverse. Because I'm not stereotypical hypermasculine outwardly, I must be queer - there must be something wrong with me.

(Due disclaimer - that last comment is most definitely not what was implied in the conversation. I'm stretching to address the comment as a social construct, rather than this particular conversation.)

Day Seven: Nakamura, cyberpunk, and internet culture

So, beyond a brief hand-wave at having read and enjoyed Snow Crash, Neuromancer, and both its sequels, I'm going to ignore most of what was said in class and focus my commentary on the last five minutes of class.

Because I can.

You can't stick a sign on everyone's keyboard saying "Leave your preexisting social constructions and schema at the door!" Culture, which is the real issue under discussion, is so ingrained into our very being that the idea that we can just set it aside and walk away is almost laughable. Even on the internet, where physical appearance is removed from the first impression on most forums, culture is inescapable.

This shouldn't be a terribly surprising fact. Communication is inherently a cultural act. Every comment is made in a cultural context, and it has been suggested (in a lit. crit work that I can't find a link for now), that without shared context, communication is impossible regardless of linguistic difficulties.

So, if we cannot leave our culture behind when we log on, does this mean that the Internet is a cultural dead-end? Are we doomed to remain stuck in last century's cultures forever?

No!

Culture is emerging in communities across the internet. One particular example that I'm a member of, a community which exists around a shared continuum of stories, provides a very good example. Though jump-started by revolving around a fictional continuum, we are beginning to generate our own culture. We have our own social structures, our own legendary figures (both fictional and real), and our own shared language which is approaching the incomprehensibility of the English spoken by biologists or computer scientists.

This is the true strength of the internet as a cultural machine. Old cultures will not magically reform or disappear, but the internet allows the creation of new cultures, based on interests and hobbies rather than geographical location. To paraphrase Randal Munroe (who draws a hilarious webcomic), I look forward to the day when "where are you from" can be answered with "the internet", and people ask "what part?" instead of "no, seriously."

Days three and four: Southland Tales

In the discussion at the end of day three, Shawn mentioned that the movie was full of amusing side-references for sharp observers. Having been enjoying it as a form of cinematic dadaism, I decided to reach for the big guns, the internet.

After a single-paragraph summary that only very loosely explained the matter, TVtropes summed up the movie as "an American Akira that manages to match the imagination and multiply the incomprehensibilty." It was at this point that I realized I was in trouble.

(As an aside, Dwayne-the-Rock-Johnson does the cutest pensive-look-and-finger-twiddle ever. That, right there, completely sold the character.)

But yes. Panopticism. An interesting movie to consider, as it so deliberately plays on the ideas of surveillance, voyeurism, and a media-driven culture. My first (and thus probably trivial) observation was that all the techs who work at USIdent wear transparent lab coats - in a "who watches the watchers" moment, the very dress code at USIdent is designed to further reinforce the idea that secrets are not only bad for National Security (TM) but also completely impossible to keep.

Towards the end of the film, the news is spooling off weather reports of "record highs throughout the southland" as rain pours down. This was (to my mind) the culmination of a theme that was building throughout the entire film: surveillance systems fall apart because people are boring. The watchers, growing tired of yet another hour of jaywalker-alerts-at-43rd-and-Westlake switch over to watching Krysta Now! instead, and society, realizing this, falls apart in the background.

The riots at the end of the movie contrast with the abandoned USIdent control room to point out the other main problem with a panoptic system: Replacing enforcers with powerless eyes is all well and good until the rioters outnumber the enforcers. Panoptic dread is no replacement for a good RSA or two.

We didn't quite get to the end of the movie, but from what I've heard, the ending only makes things weirder. In response to a movie without a clear, concise ending, have a blog post without a clear, concise conclusion.

Day two - Panopticism, society, and crazy French dudes!

Pet Peeve Of The Day: "White People", once again. There's no real way around it, and it was probably the best brief summary of the situation possible, but I still see it as one of those big warning flags that a rant is incoming.

The main point I'd like to hit on, though, is when the guy said (a bit defensively) "What if I don't want to be a part of the system?" I was really tempted to say "there's a cell for you too." The whole "rebel against society" act/persona/whatever is so standardized it's nothing more than another facet of society, and still most definitely a panoptic structure in its own right. Example: "I'm a rebel, I own a Dell." It's laughable because in the little box of "I'm an artsy rebel against society", the Mac is the only acceptable computer. I'd continue on and talk about how Macs are nazi computers, but that's irony beside the point.

The other thing that I noticed - he was wearing a baseball hat backwards. Way to fit the stereotype of the rebel, there. When was the last time you saw a "rebel against society" wearing a fedora? Or a clown hat? Or an early renaissance jousting helm? Wake up! You're not rebelling against anything! You've bought into the commercial ideal of the iRebel, which is (to quote a friend), "just the same with a different paintjob". (And, I might add, more money spent on your part.)

And then we get into commercialization of culture, which was really covered quite nicely in class.

To the person who asked simply "Why?" when it came to Foucault: Why not? Are you so afraid of new ideas that you're trying to pretend they don't matter? Do you just not like to think?

Overall opinion on the class: Guardedly optomistic. This is making me think, and as long as it keeps going in that vein instead of turning into a platform for indoctrination, it'll be of more value than many classes I've taken.

Day one, post one, all that good stuff.

So, for those of you who happen to stumble upon this, this is a blog of my thoughts and commentary on AmSt (or DTC) 475, Digital Diversity, at WSU, summer 2010. Per Shawn's instructions, I won't hold back in critiquing anything, so if you're a classmate reading this, I'm really not very sorry at all for ripping your idea apart.

There were three big things that came up in the class that made me wince - the phrases "patriarchy", "white privilege", and "white people". Not to prejudge this course, but in my experience, when they come up with relation to a discussion on culture, they're huge, brightly-colored warning flags that someone is about to start ranting. I really have no desire to be told (yet again) that I'm a horrible person because I happen to be white, upper-middle-class, and Christian, especially not in a forum where I will (potentially) be graded on how closely I pay attention, take notes, and agree with it.

Speaking of which (and this is aimed specifically at Shawn), yes, I take notes on my laptop. I'm not on Facebook, instant messenger, WoW, or what have you. You're welcome to make spot checks if you wish. I just learn a lot more thoroughly when I write things down, and I can type much faster and more legibly than I can scribble. If you'd like, I can switch to pencil and paper, but the laptop is my preferred writing platform.

Being the free-form Wikipedia surfer that I am, I'd stumbled upon the idea of the Panopticon before, albeit without considering its social implications. I'm already looking forward to the discussion tomorrow (or later today, as the clock ticks), so I'll put off most of my discussion on it until then. However, this much was a possibly obvious insight: Society at large is a panopticon of sorts.

And I think that covers most of what I wanted to say...