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Hi there. Sometimes I play an online game. And this is just a little break from whatever
I am doing... but it can also turn out to be a fascinating social experiment. This happened
to me a little while ago, and it wasn't intended, it just happened.
In this game you log in and click a button to join a randomized group of people to kill
monsters together. Waiting in line can take between one and twenty minutes normally, and
clearing this dungeon or instance as it's called usually take between ten and twenty
minutes. It depends.
I play several different characters in this game. Every character has a race, a class,
a gender, a level, a name, and a few other factors. The by far most important is the
class. One of these characters I play is a human priest. And she got discriminated for
a while. What happened was that people started kicking her from groups.
You see, these groups of people consist of five players: Five real human beings. And
if some of them are not happy with one of them, then they have the power to kick this
person out. And this is a good thing in itself. But it's supposed to work like if someone
is rude to the others, do hate-speech or whatever, or don't do their share of the work, then
that person should get kicked out. I mean, if they don't do any damage to the monsters,
or if they endanger the group by doing stupid stuff or something like that. But my priest
got kicked out for no good reason.
First of all, it wasn't about me. Because my other characters didn't get kicked out.
If it was me that people didn't like, this would happen to all my characters. But it
only happened to the priest. And she did do her part: She didn't endanger her group by
pulling random monsters, and she did do quite a bit of damage to them, so it wasn't that
either. It wasn't something strange about her name or the way she was dressed, or anything
like that. So while it was annoying at first, this also was very interesting to me. I was
curious, like, why are these people kicking my character?
As it turned out, my priest was subjected to two different facets of categorism. It
was prejudice and normativity. And people did this based on two factors: Her gender
and her so-called specialization.
You see, when a priest signs up for joining a group, she can sign up either as one of
the damage-dealers, or as the healer who hs the responsibility to keep everybody alive.
I signed up as a damage-dealer because I wanted to relax. I didn't want to have responsibility
for other player's health at the time. And people who are holy or dicipline priests of
the light usually signup as healers, while dark shadowpriests sign up as damage-dealers.
Dicipline priests are entirely capable of being damage-dealers. They are not among the
best, but they can be quite good. In the last group that kicked me, I was doing 20% of the
damage, and a few days later I played as my mage... And the dicipline priest in that group
did 30% of the groups total damage. So, yeah, no problem there. But people don't expect
it! And people don't expect women to do damage. They expect women to take the back seat and
just support the others while THEY have fun.
Of course, female players are not usually considered to be female. On the contrary,
people assume that a female character is played by a male player. However, it really depends.
Because we also have this stereotype that a male player is better than a female player.
And this can lead to the really odd situation that if a female character is played in a
"good" way... that is, either objectively good or simply conform to people's expectations,
then she is assumed to be played by a male player. But if she plays "badly", as in actually
badly OR in a way that people don't expect and therefore assume to be bad... then they
assume that she is some... "***" or something like that. A real life woman who is bad at
playing games.
People get kicked from groups for not doing damage or for pulling the wrong monsters.
My character didn't do that, but she got kicked for it anyway, because of prejudice. People
didn't bother to check the damage meters, they simply assumed that she wasn't doing
any damage -- because she was dicipline, and because she was female.
She didn't pull any wrong monsters, but people assumed that she would do that and kicked
her preemptively because they didn't want a bad player -- a *** -- in their group.
Here we have the prejudice. We also had normativity, a matter of how things are "supposed to be".
According to some people, it is WRONG to be a damage-dealer as dicipline. Not because
it doesn't work, but because "it is not how things are intended to be".
Blizzard, the company who made World of Warcraft, has not made any rule that you can't be a
damage-dealer as dicipline. On the contrary, it's their very system that allow you to sign
up as either a damage-dealer or a healer. But people have their vision of how the world
is supposed to be. This is very much like religious fundamentalism, where people think
that everything must be in a certain way -- everyone who doesn't conform to their stereotypes are
wrong... because... well... just because! That's the way things are supposed to be.
It's much more reasonable to think like that in a computer game than it is in real life.
The world of Warcraft IS an intelligently designed world. The world DOES operate in
rather simple patterns: And my friend who argued that it's "insulting" to play as a
damage-dealing discipline priest because you could do more damage as shadow, she does have
a point.
Lets make a comparison between categorizations in World of Warcraft and categorizations in
real life. For example, lets take what kind of priest you are in world of warcraft and
what kind of gender you are in real life.
The first difference is that real life is so much more diverse. When people think in
stereotypes, they are pretty much wrong. People say that men are stronger than women, for
example, this does have a point: The AVERAGE maie-identified person is physically stronger
than the average female-identified person. But this is a matter of statistics. Categorical
gender differences, that's quite a problematic issue. On the other hand, different kinds
of priests: Well, what bonuses they have and what spells they have, those are very objective.
The other bigger difference, much larger than the first, is that it is so very easy to change
who you are in world of warcraft. A few mouseclicks here, a few mouseclicks there, and you are
someone completely different. You can switch between different characters, and you can
reinvent your current character in many different ways. It's much less to ask someone to change
themselves.
Lets say that gender in real life means a plus 10% bonus to physical strength and endurance.
If you could just walk through a portal and change you gender, then I'm sure some people
would demand that if you are going to work as a firefighter or whatever then you much
switch gender to male to get that extra 10% bonus. I don't think I would agree with that
demand, but I could understand it. It would be quite different from making the rather
common demand that only men should be allowed to be firefighters or whatever.
In the case of my priest in the game, the solution was rather simple. I could keep playing
the way I liked: As a damage-dealing discipline priest. I simply added a little welcoming
message that I clicked every time I joined a group. Explaining that my damage might make
some healing as a side effect, and that I mention this simply so that it won't confuse
anyone. This was a polite way of saying that if you think I don't do enough damage, check
the damage meter instead of assuming things.
It worked quite fine. As long as I didn't bring up the subject again, people would just
shut up and go about their business. If I did bring it up, it could become quite heated
arguments sometimes, with people being angry with me for playing the role I did. Not for
how I played it, but that I played it at all. Quite interesting.
The thing became so much more interesting and so much less annoying because of the circumstances
I have explained. This is scientific experiment circumstances really, where we have cut away
all other factors -- and on top of everything made randomized groups. Really good way of
exploring prejudice and normativity.
But there's another side of that coin. The reason this wasn't such a problem for me was
because of these factors. It was so random, and I could compare with my other characters,
so I didn't have to take anything personally -- and I could just relog whenever I got bored
with the situation.
Now, think of a person in real life. When people have prejudice or normativity againt
women, or people of color, or gay people, or whatever, we have the same situation. That
we meet random people all the time in real life. When ONE person slam a door in your
face or give you a dirty look, that's not even discrimination, that's just one person
bring rude. But when it happens over and over and over because some prejudices are shared
within the society, it becomes a problem. A huge problem. Imagine having that problem
every single facking day.
If you don't have that problem, you can use this as a though experiment to think about
how it feels. And if you have that problem by one categorization, you need to understand
that this is not about your particular categorization. It's about people having prejudice or normativity
based on one categorization -- and it's the same thing when it happens to people from
another category.
I mentioned specifically three categories: Women, people of color and gay people. So,
what about men, heterosexuals and white people? Well, in western society in m opinion, we
have much less prejudice against these categories. They are normative in themselves. Yes, it
does happen that people get treated specially in a bad way because of one of thee three
categories. Bu it doesn't happen all the time, like it happens to the three categories I
mentioned first.
I'm talking about western culture here. When I lived in Indonesia, I was always seen as
somethig peculiar and exotic and all that kind of stuff because I was white. That was
an interesting experience. And it wasn't a problem for me, for two reasons. One was that
it wasn't a category that people despised so much, it was not that people thought that
I was stupid or incompetent because of my skin-color. I was just odd and different and
so on.
The other reason, maybe bigger than the first, was that I would go back to Sweden eventually.
Oh yeah, we have a third reason too: I was already adult. It's much harder growing up
being different than coming as an adult to a situation where you are different. This
is just an example. Everybody is normative in many situations, and everybody is outsider
and odd and different in many situations. But this is something we need to think about,
and we humans need to care for each other. Go beyond our prejudices and try to dismantle
unnecessary normativity.
We will never be entirely free from normativity or prejudice; our brains need those ways of
thinking, the are shortcuts that make things easier. And that's okay, when it doesn't happen
at people's expense. But we have to be careful with it.
In the end, I stopped playing my priest. Not because I had to, but because I couldn't relax
playing her. It wasn't fun, knowing that people would hold it against you if you did any mistakes
-- hold it against you in ways they wouldn't do if you played a more mainstream character.
I have that option, that very simple option, of switching to another kind of character.
In real life, people don't have that option. They are who they are. We can't just click
a button to change our gender or *** orientation or our education history or anything like
that. We are who we are, and yes, we do change a bit over time, we do have a bit of influence
over how we change, but it's not like snapping your fingers.
We need to understand that all three layers of reality are real. Physical reality outside
of people. Social reality between people. And psychological reality within people. Each
of us has our own thoughts and feelings, and these needs to be respected. And we make our
own choices. But these choices affect each other beyond what the individual individual
do.
Some people seem to think that either individuals exists or social structures exists. But the
truth is that we have both. The problems that my priest encountered was individuals making
minor individual decisions. But the problem was that these individual decisions were part
of a social structure.
I don't think that it ever happened that the same person kicked my priest out twice. It
was different people every time. But this only made it worse. So when we interact with
other people, we need to consider ourselves as individuals, and we need to consider the
other person as an individual. But we also need to consider the many social structures
that we are part of. How our actions become a part of these structures. How they can help
or hurt people, in context.
That's all I have to say for now. Live long, and prosper.