Part Two: The Role of the Avatar

Technology extends the reach of the body into new digital spaces. In these spaces, we try to defy gravity and physicality, literally separating the mind from the body. This is a theory called post-humanism, and post-humans are often described as having fluid conceptions of reality and an ability to develop different identities based on multiple perspectives of the world around them — a notion that makes sense given the nature of the virtual environments they inhabit. Avatars, supported by technological achievement and divorced from real need, have morphed into a kaleidoscope of synthetic manifestations.

MMORPGs took cues from young, mostly male developers whose main source of character inspiration came from comic books. The results were obvious. For male avatars, strength and a supernatural build. For female avatars, an unrealistic idealism defined by the physical attributes young men would most like to see on a woman: trim figures, narrow waists, large breasts, tight and/or little clothing. Even now, when developers are careful to define the look and feel of their avatars based on game themes, physical idealism generally remains constant. Most games allow players to select and define their avatar using a set of predetermined or pre-coded possibilities. Second Life lets residents define every aspect of their avatar’s physical attributes. Residents can buy or sell clothing, jewelry, accessories, body shapes, hair, skin, tattoos, virtual gestures, and poses. And for those not interested in the human form, Second Life allows avatars to take on animal (stuffed or otherwise) forms called “furries.” Some players even settle for an avatar somewhere in between the two.

Furries

Still, physical idealism saturates the experience. These idealized interpretations of the body upset real world social orders and hierarchies by evening out disparities. For that alone, avatars transcend reality. Since appearance plays a large role in creating, sustaining, and destroying relationships, the ability to manipulate image affects interpersonal communication and relationships in both positive and negative lights. More interesting is that in post-human virtual worlds, where level playing fields can and should move players beyond the body, media stereotypes and more basic human compulsions hold sway.

With their perfect avatars in tow, the anonymity of the synthetic offers freedoms of action and expression not possible in the real world. Without being hindered by the obligations and expectations of conformity, the power of an avatar becomes apparent. The avatar is a conduit between what we are and what we wish we could be, and it’s the permission we’ve been seeking. The problem is that synthetic spaces grant permission regardless of the consequences. Terrestrial conformist and synthetic fetishist are divided by a grey zone, and the two pass back and forth between a very permeable membrane that can’t keep worlds separate. While synthetic social spaces provide needed relief from real life pressures and allow role play without the weight of human emotion, players don’t have to care about what they say or do because the repercussions are limited to a place where nothing really matters. The result is players in constant role play. Honest and sincere relationships are rare, and most connections are merely an extension of the fantasy and anonymity afforded by avatars. Even so, human emotion and real problems are constantly appearing in synthetic life and because of synthetic life.
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Part One: The Rise of the Avatar

The promise of virtual reality was built on a hardware revolution attempting to envelop individuals in three-dimensional, multi-sensorial experiences. By the mid-1960s, pioneers like Ivan Sutherland at MIT were designing head-mounted display systems and wired data gloves. In the late 1980s, a second wave of acolytes (including John Walker at Autodesk and Jaron Lanier at VPL Research) helped popularize this fascinating mix of science and science fiction. But beyond the goggles and the gloves, virtual reality never lived up to our initial expectations. When attention and capital shifted to supporting progress in networking and internet capabilities, virtual reality quietly shifted focus to educational applications, like simulations for the medical, military, and transportation industries. The dream that humans could be transported by technology into endless digital landscapes never fully evaporated: it found a strong ally with nascent computer gaming enthusiasts and game-based human proxies called avatars. Since their inception, avatars have evolved from simple line drawings to complex vector graphics imbued with much more than bits and bytes.

One of the first gamers to apply his competitive passion to the computer screen was Will Crowther. By 1973, Crowther was working for technology pioneer BBN — the company responsible for developing internet packet switching. In his spare time, Crowther enjoyed spelunking and rock climbing. He shaped these into Adventure (also known as Colossal Cave Adventure), an early computer game where a player moves through an imaginary cave using simple text commands and computer responses. In 1976 Don Woods at Stanford University’s artificial intelligence lab played the game and asked Crowther if he could enhance the experience. Together, they added code that let players pick up, use, or drop objects. They also included fantasy elements based on their shared interest in the classic role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons (D&D). By having players interact with characters like dwarves, elves, and trolls, Crowther and Woods abandoned the real world and directed players into early immersive role play.

Maze War

Maze War was developed by Steve Colley at NASA’s Ames Research Center, introduced around the same time as Adventure. A shooting game, Maze War had a three-dimensional graphic interface and, with the help of co-workers who linked two computers together, multi-player gaming capabilities. Most interesting was that on screen, players were represented as eyeballs — a rudimentary sort of avatar. Maze War spawned the development of other multi-player games, many of which were based on fantasy role play and the popularity of D&D. Inspired by these, Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle — students at Essex University in England — developed the first multi-user text-based game in 1978. They named it MUD — “multi-user dungeon,” another nod to fantasy role play. Bartle described MUD as, “Originally little more than a series of interconnected locations where you could move and chat.” After several rewrites, MUD1 became highly interactive, providing a social network for like-minded gamers to battle monsters and create friendships, all within the context of a virtual medieval world. MUD1 became popular with students at Essex University and eventually with a global audience who could connect to the game through ARPANet. Just over a decade later, computer scientist James Apnes built on the success of MUDs with TinyMUD, a flexible virtual world that gave players the tools to build their own objects, rooms, and puzzles — a precursor to more complex worlds like Second Life. Technology professionals saw the success and rapid growth of MUDs in the 1980s as a turning point and recognition that virtual reality, with its bulky hardware and high costs, could not deliver the social or thematic experiences that audiences craved. It marked the ascendancy of software over hardware as the vehicle taking us into a virtual dimension.
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The cover story in the February issue of Takarajima 『宝島』 is titled 「バカ化する若者」— “Youth are Becoming Idiots.” The small print above the title states 「”ゆとり”チルドレンが日本を滅ぼす！」You see, our idiot Japanese children — spoiled by the less rigid “yutori” education established in the early 1990s as a way to bolster individualism and creative thought — are ruining Japan. Tough to be a kid in Japan these days: you are not only stupid, you’re a traitor.

Takarajima, however, is hardly broaching a new topic. Earlier this year, Japanese critic Uchida Tatsuru’s latest book 『下流志向──学ばない子どもたち、働かない若者たち』」 (my trans: Aiming Downward: Kids Who Don’t Learn, Youth Who Don’t Work) got some attention, another in a long series of “下流” titles about the (semi-voluntary) descent of middle-class kids into the pits of lower-class hell. The basic idea that the younger generation has failed “society,” however, goes back even further — one of the few constant themes in 20th century Japanese social criticism. Maybe the radical young soldiers in the 1930s who assassinated liberal politicians and demanded greater power for the Emperor proved themselves good kids in a warped sense, really living up to the ideals of the Imperial Rescript on Education. But ever since then, young people have basically dropped the ball generation after generation: juvies, hippies, bikers, consumerists, whores. Youth of the 1980s were derisively christened 新人類 (shinjinrui, The New Breed) — almost as if to say, these kids’ rotten values must be the result of genetic dysfunction and devolution, like overbred mini-chihuahuas.

So like every cohort in the past, the current batch of Adults are ripping into their own offspring, regretting the Whitney Houston Principle that “Children are our future.” The cast of guest authors at Takarajima, however, are not suffering from mere moral outrage. They have objective measure on their side!

Famed management consultant Ohmae Kenichi starts things off by noting that Japanese 20-somethings do not sufficiently feel urges for material things. They no longer desire cars (this is supported by lots of data and a panicky auto industry). They do not buy computers, and their share of total web users has dropped from 23.5% in 2000 to 11.9% in 2006. They are not interested in international affairs apart from the occasional vacation abroad. They have low expectations for the future, nil ambition, and not enough wrath to make any challenges to an economic system that puts all the nation’s assets into the hands of their elders. With such low salaries and pitiful future earning potential, young men find it too sadistic to ask for their girlfriend’s hand in marriage — especially when women can live a life of luxury under their parents’ auspices.

Ohmae makes a particularly good point that the weakened consumer power of youth in Japan has forced manufacturers to re-gear their marketing and merchandising to suit older customers. (This is evidenced already in the fact that almost no youth-oriented products made the “Hit Products of 2007” guide in Nikkei’s newspaper Marketing Journal.) Since most material needs are manufactured or at least greatly influenced by the commercial complex, companies ignoring youth essentially amplifies the problem of their insufficient materialism.
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The following text originally appeared as the March 24, 2007 entry on economist Ikeda Nobuo’s personal blog. We have published this translation without the author’s express permission, and we accept all responsibility for any issues resulting from its publication.

At the second session in yesterday’s symposium, we talked about the antagonism between blogs and traditional media. People often say that rhetoric on the Net is “conservative” or that there are lots of “Net Right-Wingers,” but I don’t think this is true. Mr. Sasaki and I had the same opinion: this isn’t a confrontation between “Left” and “Right” but a confrontation between generations.

If you look at the comments left on this blog about the “comfort women” issue, you’ll realize that hardly anyone is thinking about the problem from the standpoint of apologizing for the Pacific War; most everyone is ideologically naive. In the “Okutani Reiko [bashing] festival” as well, opinions were overwhelmingly criticizing social stratification (格差社会) and left-wing. So the problem at hand is not “ideology.”

What these “anonymous majorities” share is a distrust of the traditional media. For example, the traditional media is unable to level criticisms against funding for organ transplants or prosecutors’ investigations of national policy. Blogs provide an Antithese to the mainstream media’s phony self-narrative and hypocrisy of being an “Ally of Justice” that can’t manage to speak out against subjects with which they have connections.

I am part of the second post-war generation, so I was educated by teachers in the [pro-Socialist] Japan Teacher’s Union, who praised the democracy of the new constitution. It was an era where [left-leaning newspaper] Asahi Shimbun and [progressive publisher] Iwanami Shoten wielded intellectual authority. Until high-school, I believed in an anti-war/pro-peace ideology, and since that followed in the field of sociology into Marxism, I participated in things like campus protests. The more you studied Marxism, however, the more you understood that it’s pretty worthless stuff. And that resulted in the leftist ideology losing its intellectual authority throughout the ’70s.

But there was a considerable lag between the leftists’ decline on an intellectual level and the workings of the real world. Politically, Tanaka Kakuei consolidated his socialist “1970 System,” and there was support for progressive local governments (革新自治体) to redistribute economic growth through the excessive scattering of welfare money (バラマキ福祉). This Social Democratic-like system reached its heyday in the 1980s. The patriarchal “Japanese Management Style” was praised all around the world as a guiding model, but in reality, it decreased Japan’s potential growth rate (productivity).

Then at the end of the ’80s, socialism collapsed, and then the Bubble burst. Right as leftist ideology disappeared, lavish social spending also became impossible. The internet appeared in that post-socialist world, so the “establishment” to be rallied against was no longer “American imperialism” or “monopoly capital” but the hypocrisy of the media’s anti-government pose (despite its parasitic reliance on the administration for broadcast rights and kisha club access) and pro-peace/pro-equality stance.

This kind of protest is not allowed to take place openly in Japanese society, so anonymity was required. The media will not acknowledge this fact either, so they just describe the protesting voices negatively as “Net Right-Wingers” and “cruel 2Channelers.” Of course, there are negative elements in the protests, but the old “student conflicts” were little more than pure violence. The difference is that the students embraced Marxism as an ideology and as a political faction; the Net rebellion has neither an ideology nor an organization.

Young people’s means of lodging a formal objection have therefore shifted from violence in the streets to debate on the internet; and the target of their protest has moved from the government to the media. In most cases, this kind of rebellion is simply young people venting their excess energy, but there is a possibility that youth can create something new if they can skillfully channel that energy. The American counterculture of 1960 led to innovations like the internet and GNU and transformed the nation during the Clinton-Gore administration. It would be a real waste for Japan if the energy of youth is just wasted on 2ch ranting.

In the December issue of OL fashion monthly CanCam, the editors provide a useful guide called「モテ子の習慣 vs. ブス子の習慣」to delineate the lifestyle differences between girls who attract boys — the so-called “moteko” — and those who do not — “busuko.” The article has sparked a bit of backlash on the internet with CanCam readers who were shocked to find out that they weren’t in the proper athletic club in high school nor drink the right alcohol on a date. (Hint: never start the night with a beer.) Apparently based on “survey results,” some of the findings are pretty on-message and obvious — “hot girls look like Ebi-chan!” — but some of the critiques may speak painful truths to readers — “bejeweling your iPod is probably not appealing to boys.”

Here is a translation of the guide to that thin blue border between being an attractive moteko and a completely worthless busuko.

(Bonus: pictures of the actual pages here.)

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Moteko
• Otsuka Ai “Sakuranbo”
• aiko “Kabutomushi”
• Ayaka “I believe”
• Dreams Come True “Love Love Love”
• mihimaruGT “Koi suru kimochi”
• Do As Infinity “Ever…”
• HY “Nao”
• Otsuka Ai “Planetarium”
• Kōda Kumi “Taisetsu na Kimi e”
• Matsutoya Yumi “Yasashisa ni tsutsumareta nara”

Busuko
• Akikawa Masafumi “Sen no kaze ni natte”
• The Toraburyuu “Road”
• Ishikawa Sayuri “Amagigoe”
• DJ Ozma “Age Age Every Kishi”
• Kahala Tomomi “I’m Proud”
• MISIA “everything”
• Morning Musume “Love Machine”
• Shiina Ringo “Kabukicho no joō”
• Cocco “Tsuyoku hakanai monotachi”
• Britney Spears “Baby One More Time”