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introduction

In discussing the question of whether objects or things have some sort of agency, we are often drawn to examples that are out of the ordinary in the hopes that their exaggeration on some particular scale away from “normal” will allow their agency to shine through all the more forcefully. Thus we focus our attention on the antique, the unique object, the fetishized object, the sacred object or even the last object to be added to a collection. Each of these seem to point to an aspect of human agency that is somehow imparted into the object and with which that object then appears to gain a degree of power over the original giver. Fetishized remains of saints or sexual fetishes surrounding parts of the body substitute a part for the whole. The part is then said to be imbued with the power to perform as the whole might: the relic of the saint can receive prayers as though it were the saint himself, the focus on a single body part provides the pleasure and creates the need that would normally be ascribed to the body as a whole. The part is thus attributed the agency of the whole and, at least in the case of creating pleasure and need,[1] the object truly can be seen as exerting its agency over human subjects.

Beyond the fetish alone, however, objects seem to have other ways of performing roles in relation to subjects that ascribe to them a certain degree of power over us. Baudrillard, for example, discusses how, as modern subjects, we yearn for something more than efficiency. He explains that in antiques and collections, precisely because of their opposition to efficiency and “use” (2005 [1968]: 82-84) and their empty symbolism, they serve as markers of identity. In fact, it is this identity that we are pursuing and thus, rather than collecting objects, Baudrillard asserts that we are actually collecting ourselves (ibid.: 97; see also Stewart 1993). In a similar look at objects and identity, Godelier's focus on “things not given” attributes to the sacred object the role of serving as a “fixed point” (1999) for both individuals and societies. This fixed point is, in some significant ways, similar to Bataille's (1992 [1973]) concept of objects (as opposed to subjects) having duration. Through this fixedness, the immutability of the sacred object serves as an anchoring point around which societies and individuals can form their identity and imagine both a past and a future.

While each of these approaches offers a useful inlet into the role of objects vis-a-vis subjects and thus into the degree and kind of agency we might attribute to objects, they tend to describe this agency as something given to objects by subjects rather than something inherent to objects themselves. Furthermore, by focusing on abnormal objects, these analyses often attribute the agency of their kind of object, versus the absence of agency in other kinds, to the very quality that makes the object abnormal itself: its sacredness, its fetishization by subjects, or its place within a collection. This paper thus seeks to shift our focus toward everyday objects themselves as objects. Given the vast variety of “things” that we encounter in the real world—from land itself to inanimate objects and from animate objects to other people—I have found it useful to take this inquiry into the world of computer gaming. This coded world provides us a somewhat more controlled, designed venue for exploring the relationships between subjects and objects as well as the very dividing line between the two.

While in moving to an analysis of objects in computer games I too am choosing to focus on a sort of non-normal set of objects, the range of objects in computer games does provide a set more similar to that to be found in real life: thus a degree of “normalcy.” Furthermore, as I hope will become more clear towards the end of this paper, the interactions within newer multi-player games indeed come extraordinarily close to that which we would call “normal” in real life. Objects in computer games, rather than merely being repositories for agency lent to them by subjects, actually do themselves have the power to act. Over the course of a program, the player often will find that she has come upon a door that can only be opened by a key that is hidden elsewhere in the game. In such cases, it is clear that it is not the player who, in the end, opens the door, but it is instead the key: the player merely serves as the facilitator that moves the key to a position from which it can act.

Of course, there is also an element of power that is given to the key. The giving of power, however, had nothing to do with the playing-Subject and rather everything to do with the code of the game itself. From this perspective then, the agency of objects in a game does seem to take an analogous position to fetishism-once-removed. The software designers wrote the code that proscribes how, where, and when any object in the game can act. In this way, while the object's agency does come from its material qualities (“material” within the reality of the game), those qualities were given to it, as in the fetish, by humans. Where in the fetish, however, power comes through forgetting the origins of an object's agency, in the game it comes instead from a player accepting the constraints designed into the game world by the software code. Explained in this way, then, the situation appears less like a fetish and more similar to the kinds of structural constraints that objects and other people (simply due to their prior existence and prior exertion of action) place on our own action in the biological present.

Following this perspective of constraints on action, it is important also to note that it is not only objects that have these constraints within games, but also the Subject(s) themselves. From the perspective of a software developer, the code defines everything within the game, including “subjects,” as objects that form a part of the environment. All of these have certain attributes and limitations on their capacities for movement and action as well as proscribed rules for what happens when they encounter other objects. This then, beyond the “normalcy” of objects within a game, is essential to understanding why we should pay attention to the agency of coded objects: from the perspective of the code, the division between objects and subjects breaks down and we are provided a vantage point from which to challenge our own conceptions of object/subject action in the “real” world.

coded objects in a virtual world

Games and gaming are great arenas within which to explore this ambiguous interaction and interrelation between subjects and objects precisely because they did not (and do not) necessarily need to reflect the attitudes and relations apparent in the real world. One of the great promises presented by electronic or “virtual” environments was that, as we were now the deliberate designers of whole worlds, we had the opportunity to create systems that were based on different rules than those restricting us in the real world. Coded subjects as opposed to biological ones, for instance, might be able to fly at certain times or in certain places. New skill sets can be learned (and indeed unlearned) simply by picking up the right object. Where in the real world our actions are constrained not only by the physicality of the world with its laws of nature, but also by limits placed on us by the cumulative choices of previous actors, software promised a tabula rasa on which to truly create without restraint.[2] Filing systems on computers, for instance, far from resembling the cabinets they take their names from, have the ability to store and categorize files regardless of type, shape, or size into one “folder” and then sort them on command. The computer allows us to code our way around the rules of space that apply in the real world. Similarly, time itself can be re-coded in the gaming environment. Games can be designed such that certain portions are untimed and based on “turns” or such that they have portions where time is reinterpreted to speed up or slow down based on events within them.

Yet, despite this ability to recode the rules of space and time, many of our “new” software tricks tend to be oriented precisely in the opposite direction — towards bringing something of this very spatiality and temporality back into our work. We often concentrate on making the virtual more “real” as a way to increase its playability and its usefulness.[3] Thus even within these designed environments, we have tended to import and reproduce many aspects of the real world that are not necessitated by the code itself, but rather by other needs of developers, players, and marketers.

From the very beginning of computer games, however, the importance of objects has been beyond debate. Where some elements of space or time could be modified or reinterpreted, the presence of objects and importance of objects could not be challenged. Without objects, there would be no game. Early computer role playing games at the very least, for instance, required walls to limit the movement of players and objects to defeat, find, or collect. In those games which came out prior to the graphics revolution, objects could be represented or differentiated by ascii characters such as in Rogue. Various methods of incorporating time into the code where introduced through objects as well. Subjects' were limited by having to find and consume food to stay alive or to return to “safe” areas to recover the health that drains out with every step.

Even purely text-based games highlight the importance of objects to the entire concept of such “virtual” worlds. In such games as well as in those later role playing games that built off them, players enter commands like “look” that serve to bring up a general description of the objects that the character can “see.” It is then by reading between the lines of these short descriptions that the player figures out which objects might be worth a closer “look.” In King's Quest IV, an early graphics-based game that continued to use text-based commands, for instance, “looking” at a bookshelf might reveal several titles of books. When the player then “looks” at or tries to “take” a particular book, the space behind it is revealed and the player gains access to a lever that opens a secret passage.

Typically, thus, such role playing games are structured around a more or less linear narrative wherein advancement to the next stage requires the acquisition of specific objects and/or the defeat of specific enemies. Far from the subject or player being the focus of the game, such narratives instead focus on the importance of key objects and success depends less on anything the subject does alone and more on how she might leverage some objects against others. In this, then, the gaming environment closely reflects our relations with objects in real life. Although we like to assume in real life that the agency or action potential of objects lies not in their own materiality, but rather in our use of them, we clearly also know that the materiality matters. To take a trivial example, we learn when we are young that straw and wooden houses will not stand up to hungry wolves the same as brick houses will. In the biological world, the difference is not attributed to the brick or straw per se, but instead to the subject's choice of using one rather than the other. In a game, however, the code prevents us from assuming such an extension of the subject's action through objects. An object's mere existence in a certain place combined with coded limitations on the subject's ability (as well as coded limitations on the object's own ability to move) prevent the subject from passing and force the player to take another route. Coding clearly places limits on the action of the subject and therefore the subject must depend on the action potential written into the code of specific other objects in order to accomplish the tasks set for him.

coded subjects in a real world

As we begin to look more closely at gaming environments then, we can get beyond a focus on the fantastic elements of the world (such as flying, slowing down or speeding up time, and morphing into new bodies) in order to focus more on the similarities in relations between objects and subjects. At the same time, the virtual worlds of these early games were still “virtual” mimics of the real one: they differ from it in substantial ways. The most important of these departures from reality is that biological reality is made up of not just one subject, but multiple things we recognize as “subjects” mixed in among the majority of things which we classify as “objects.” Yet, even in the real world, this distinction between subjects and objects is tenuous at best. Each of us, encased in our own total Subjectivity, can never know that others are equally subjects in their own right. Due to our own Subjectivity, we perceive everything outside ourselves as objects.[4] Yet, we are taught to try to empathize with others as though they too are subjects and much of our childhoods are spent attempting to “properly” distinguish between “pure objects” and those with which we must empathize.[5] Thus the real world is characterized with a confusing mixture of ourselves as Subjects, things we see as pure objects, and others we must treat as subject/objects. Early computer games lacked this key element and all things in the game, from walls to monsters, from food to other characters, could be treated and used as one uses objects in real life.

As with other aspects of the gaming world (such as graphics) which strive toward the “real,” newer games increasingly attempted to overcome this lack of subject/object ambiguity by introducing more and more realistic characters, somewhat randomized responses, and the ability for multiple players to play a game at the same time. The original multi-player games were text-based games played either turn by turn on bulletin board systems or real-time online (these are called MUDs [Multi-User Dungeons] and OTBRPG [Online Text-based Role Playing Games]). Thus in games like Avalon, one of the longest lasting of these OTBRPGs, not only do events occur in real time, thus occurring while you sit pondering your next move, but they also occur while you are offline because there are other people who will continue to play the game. Furthermore, while some of the characters you meet in the game are pure objects controlled fully by their code and the computer, many others are controlled within the limits of their code by other human players. It is, then, with the return of this ambiguity between subjects and objects as well as the fact that “life goes on” with or without you that this type of game becomes less and less a virtual reality and more and more simply an alternative reality:

Avalon is not simply a game - it has evolved to a level beyond mere “game,” and success at Avalon is not a matter of clever button pushing, or isolated linear progress. You will need all the talents which lead to success in real-life; communication, quick-thinking, insight, perseverance, passion and ability. The “game” is founded on conflict and co-operation, its aim is to be a forum for emotional clashes between bitter enemies, and alliances between beloved friends. A land of heroism and villainy, not a sugary safe environment for easy progress and emotionless character building. An ever-changing land of mythical legends and brain-challenging quests - indeed, it is a land unequalled (Introduction to Avalon online).

As the sophistication of these gaming communities and the code that governs them has increased, the popular press has been increasingly worried about players who forsake the “real” world for their online personas: spending hours “in-world” in games like World of Warcraft (see for instance Evers 2007; Spencer 2007; Wang 2005). Yet, besides the very real problem of some extreme gamers forgetting to tend to their biological needs (eating, sleeping, hygiene), these complaints arise from people who do not realize that such games actually do provide a digital real world. Subjects interact with both subject/objects and pure objects, they make friends and enemies just as in real life. The two primary differences are that the goals of the gaming environment may be different (perhaps only because they more well defined) than those of the real world and players can attain completely different socio-economic positions in-world from the ones they command in the biological world:

“RPGs [Role Playing Games] allow you a chance to step outside a world grown too prosaic for magic and monsters,” it claims. Although players may be total losers in the “real world,” the RPG offers them a chance to test their true mettle. Furthermore, RPGs “can and often do become, for both you and your character, a way of life” (the manual for Apshai quoted in Barton [2006]).

Immersion in such a second world can provide a sense of oneself as two people, one biological, with constraints on action imposed by biology and social structure, and one digital, with different constraints imposed by code and the game's emerging social structures.

Further emphasizing this “real world” nature of the coded environment, the game Second Life has attracted a lot of attention as not providing a game with objectives, but rather a platform on which people can live a second (or third) life. Second Life is designed as a capitalist world with its own currency. Players may enter the world and may themselves create objects which range from the digital land they buy (with real money) to their own physical shape, clothes, and accessories giving their creations limits and attributes in much the same way that the original designers did for the earliest objects in the game. In a very real way, the objects of Second Life are not only the basis for the game (in this case, without objects it would merely be a form of instant messenging), but also for the Subject: they are the building blocks of identity. Thus we seem to have returned from within the coded environment to conclusions similar to those of Baudrillard, Bataille, and Godelier. This time, however, we have done so with the quotidian objects that we necessarily interact with in our real lives. The very definition of the Subject is bound up in objects whether that is because she collects them as her own identity or because, given their duration, they serve as fixed points marking the passage of time when the Subject is not present.

While this seems to further empower the Subject over the objects of the game, the very fact that the Subject's own avatar (its body) is itself composed of these “made objects” reminds one that everything “in-world” is to some extent a coded object. Linden Lab, the company that created and runs the world, has further attempted to reinsert (paralleling the discussion above) many real world capitalist interactions and exchanges by introducing ways to buy and sell these produced objects (both in-world and through real world services like Ebay) as well as rules that govern intellectual property and thus the copying of objects. Where games like World of Warcraft also serve as social networking sites, the difference that comes about in Second Life is that it no longer has any distinct goal, no envisioned end, and thus, as with our biological lives, it is up to the users to decide what to do with theirs.

conclusion

The perspectives offered by computer gaming environments provide us with a unique purchase from which to grapple with questions of subject, object, and agency. We might choose to look at the environment from the perspective of the code itself to which all things in the game are objects with limitations and potentials for action regardless of whether they are controlled by humans or computer. Alternately, we might view the world as we tend to in the real world, either as one divided into subjects (users) and objects or, perhaps more honestly, into Subjects, pure objects, and subject/objects. The agency of all objects including that of subject/objects is encountered by the Subject as a part of the structure which limits, facilitates, or guides its own action. Thus from the perspective of a Subject who envisions herself as having real agency, as in the real world, all other things are envisioned as having only structural-agency—it is action that serves only to construct and reconstruct social structure. Yet, at the same time, from the perspective of the code, the Subject is himself merely another object, like all others, whose actions also merely serve to create or recreate the structure within which all objects in the game must interact. The importance that we place on “choice” as key to “agency” actually matters very little when action is viewed from this perspective outside or beyond particular Subjects.

We think of agency as based inherently on choice, but this may actually be more of a philosophical blindspot mandated by our own existence as Subjects. Such an emphasis on choice purports to separate subjects from objects leaving little room even for the ambiguity of the subject/object. Yet, we hold to this view in spite of numerous attempts to recognize the role of history and of social structure in our actions (see for instance Bourdieu 1972, 1990; Long 2001; Ortner 1984). In fact, the largest impact we appear to have is not one emanating from our choices as such, but through the unintentional and unforeseeable consequences of cumulative human action. When we take this as our basis for what action or actant potential is, we come closer to the viewpoint of code; we see that humans and objects are not all that different at all. All have limitations on action and an object's presence, absence, action, and non-action, just as much as a subject's, constantly acts upon the structures that will limit future action. Perhaps this vantage point on coded objects and coded subjects from gaming environments can shed light on the ways in which materiality and various structures constrain the “agency” of all “things” allowing them to act to the extent of their action potential. In both digital and biological worlds, the divisions between subjects and objects can perhaps be surmounted by contemplating the ambiguities that articulate with shifting perspectives—what looks like a dichotomy of subjects versus objects from one, looks like a triumvirate of Subject, subject/objects, and pure objects in another, and like a single heterogeneous group of objects in the third. Perhaps also, as in a game, we too would not meaningfully exist as Subjects without other objects.

references

Barton, Matt. [2006]. “The History of Computer Role Playing Games Part 1: The Early Years (1980-1983).” Posted 23 December 2006 on Armchair Arcade. Accessed 28 February at http://armchairarcade.com/neo/node/1081.

Bataille, George. 1992 [1973]. Theory of Religion. New York: Zone Books.

Baudrillard, Jean. 2005 [1968]. The System of Objects. New York: Verso.

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1978 [1972]. Outline of a Theory of Practice, Richard Nice, trans. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

______. 1990. The Logic of Practice, Richard Nice, trans. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.

Evers, Laura. 2007. “Alternative Reality: World of Warcraft is more popular than ever, but is the game taking students away from reality?” The University Daily Kansan. 1 March. Online at http://www.kansan.com/stories/2007/mar/01/alternative_reality_/ accessed 1 March 2007.

Godelier, Maurice. 1999. The Enigma of the Gift. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Latour, Bruno. 2002. “What is Iconoclash? Or is there a world beyond the image wars.” In Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel eds., Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion, and Art. Pp. 1-37. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.

Long, Norman. 2001. Development Sociology: Actor Perspectives. London: Routledge.

Ortner, Sherry. 1984. “Theory in Anthropology since the Sixties.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 26(1): 126-166.

Spencer, Richard. 2007. “Man dies after 7-day computer game session.” Telegraph.co.uk. 1 March. Online at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/02/28/wgamer128.xml accessed 1 March 2007.

Wang, Faye. 2005. “Plans to limit online game playtime rebuked.” ChinaDaily.com.cn. 5 September. Online at http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/english/doc/2005-09/05/content_475215.htm accessed 1 March 2007.

[1] This type of agency of objects is also referenced in works on iconoclasm and the aesthetics of objects. This perspective stresses how the object can evoke within our bodies and minds a visceral reaction; by their very existence we can be moved to tears or to anger, to praise a work or, quite literally, to destroy it. As in Latour's (2002) formulation of the question, this reaction itself causes us to wonder what it is about these objects (particularly art, religious, and scientific representations) that forces our action.

[2] Of course, a portion of this dream of tabula rasa is more myth than reality. Software developers, like anyone else, are constrained by their own cultural dispositions toward not only what is possible or impossible, but what would be desirable to have in a “virtual” environment. Furthermore, the majority of such endeavors (save, perhaps the earliest role playing games which were designed for limited circulation among friends) are also constrained by the larger capitalist goals of companies which therefore introduce principles of marketing and product placement as limitations or guidance to the design process.

[3] There is often a tension between these two trends, one aiming to move further away from the bounds of reality and the other attempting to reintegrate aspects of reality into the virtual. An excellent example of this back and forth can be found in a demonstration video of a new 3D computer desktop model [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RK_WLVO-TgA] by the Dynamic Graphics Project (Anand Agarawala and Ravin Balakrishnan). The software attempts to reintroduce into computer desktops real world concepts of piling, dragging, and tossing files governed by physics-like algorithms that enable the user to employ structured messiness just as they might on the desk in their office. While most of the comments posted about the video demonstration were positive, some saw this reintroduction of spatial laws as a step backwards, reimposing limits that the computer had already allowed us to overcome:

One of the major benefits of having modern computing in business, is that we don't have to deal with these types of things anymore. So WHY bring them back? File systems are very well designed and make it very easy to find things. You can arrange by date, modification, name, type, etc. This looks like one of those programs you find, and you use for a day, and you realize someone wasted a lot of time developing it (posted by redhatcore around January 2007, English edited).

Similar arguments also arose when Microsoft shifted from DOS, a text based operating system, fully into an iconographic desktop (Windows) that was modeled on Apple’s popular visual interface.

[4] Thanks to Seema Golestaneh for emphasizing this point.

[5] This distinction lies behind many tensions in childhood from imaginary friends to believing that stuffed animals (or real animals) can talk and perform as subjects. Thus a child who clings too long to the idea that objects too should receive some degree of empathy are seen as immature and those who fail to properly treat other people as “subjects” are seen to be anti-social or mentally disturbed. This despite the work of PETA and/or Greenpeace types of activists who, as adults, attempt to further broaden and blur this extension of subjectness beyond the self.


	coded object, coded subject	home
	matt west
T H I N G	introduction In discussing the question of whether objects or things have some sort of agency, we are often drawn to examples that are out of the ordinary in the hopes that their exaggeration on some particular scale away from “normal” will allow their agency to shine through all the more forcefully. Thus we focus our attention on the antique, the unique object, the fetishized object, the sacred object or even the last object to be added to a collection. Each of these seem to point to an aspect of human agency that is somehow imparted into the object and with which that object then appears to gain a degree of power over the original giver. Fetishized remains of saints or sexual fetishes surrounding parts of the body substitute a part for the whole. The part is then said to be imbued with the power to perform as the whole might: the relic of the saint can receive prayers as though it were the saint himself, the focus on a single body part provides the pleasure and creates the need that would normally be ascribed to the body as a whole. The part is thus attributed the agency of the whole and, at least in the case of creating pleasure and need,[1] the object truly can be seen as exerting its agency over human subjects. Beyond the fetish alone, however, objects seem to have other ways of performing roles in relation to subjects that ascribe to them a certain degree of power over us. Baudrillard, for example, discusses how, as modern subjects, we yearn for something more than efficiency. He explains that in antiques and collections, precisely because of their opposition to efficiency and “use” (2005 [1968]: 82-84) and their empty symbolism, they serve as markers of identity. In fact, it is this identity that we are pursuing and thus, rather than collecting objects, Baudrillard asserts that we are actually collecting ourselves (ibid.: 97; see also Stewart 1993). In a similar look at objects and identity, Godelier's focus on “things not given” attributes to the sacred object the role of serving as a “fixed point” (1999) for both individuals and societies. This fixed point is, in some significant ways, similar to Bataille's (1992 [1973]) concept of objects (as opposed to subjects) having duration. Through this fixedness, the immutability of the sacred object serves as an anchoring point around which societies and individuals can form their identity and imagine both a past and a future. While each of these approaches offers a useful inlet into the role of objects vis-a-vis subjects and thus into the degree and kind of agency we might attribute to objects, they tend to describe this agency as something given to objects by subjects rather than something inherent to objects themselves. Furthermore, by focusing on abnormal objects, these analyses often attribute the agency of their kind of object, versus the absence of agency in other kinds, to the very quality that makes the object abnormal itself: its sacredness, its fetishization by subjects, or its place within a collection. This paper thus seeks to shift our focus toward everyday objects themselves as objects. Given the vast variety of “things” that we encounter in the real world—from land itself to inanimate objects and from animate objects to other people—I have found it useful to take this inquiry into the world of computer gaming. This coded world provides us a somewhat more controlled, designed venue for exploring the relationships between subjects and objects as well as the very dividing line between the two. While in moving to an analysis of objects in computer games I too am choosing to focus on a sort of non-normal set of objects, the range of objects in computer games does provide a set more similar to that to be found in real life: thus a degree of “normalcy.” Furthermore, as I hope will become more clear towards the end of this paper, the interactions within newer multi-player games indeed come extraordinarily close to that which we would call “normal” in real life. Objects in computer games, rather than merely being repositories for agency lent to them by subjects, actually do themselves have the power to act. Over the course of a program, the player often will find that she has come upon a door that can only be opened by a key that is hidden elsewhere in the game. In such cases, it is clear that it is not the player who, in the end, opens the door, but it is instead the key: the player merely serves as the facilitator that moves the key to a position from which it can act. Of course, there is also an element of power that is given to the key. The giving of power, however, had nothing to do with the playing-Subject and rather everything to do with the code of the game itself. From this perspective then, the agency of objects in a game does seem to take an analogous position to fetishism-once-removed. The software designers wrote the code that proscribes how, where, and when any object in the game can act. In this way, while the object's agency does come from its material qualities (“material” within the reality of the game), those qualities were given to it, as in the fetish, by humans. Where in the fetish, however, power comes through forgetting the origins of an object's agency, in the game it comes instead from a player accepting the constraints designed into the game world by the software code. Explained in this way, then, the situation appears less like a fetish and more similar to the kinds of structural constraints that objects and other people (simply due to their prior existence and prior exertion of action) place on our own action in the biological present. Following this perspective of constraints on action, it is important also to note that it is not only objects that have these constraints within games, but also the Subject(s) themselves. From the perspective of a software developer, the code defines everything within the game, including “subjects,” as objects that form a part of the environment. All of these have certain attributes and limitations on their capacities for movement and action as well as proscribed rules for what happens when they encounter other objects. This then, beyond the “normalcy” of objects within a game, is essential to understanding why we should pay attention to the agency of coded objects: from the perspective of the code, the division between objects and subjects breaks down and we are provided a vantage point from which to challenge our own conceptions of object/subject action in the “real” world. coded objects in a virtual world Games and gaming are great arenas within which to explore this ambiguous interaction and interrelation between subjects and objects precisely because they did not (and do not) necessarily need to reflect the attitudes and relations apparent in the real world. One of the great promises presented by electronic or “virtual” environments was that, as we were now the deliberate designers of whole worlds, we had the opportunity to create systems that were based on different rules than those restricting us in the real world. Coded subjects as opposed to biological ones, for instance, might be able to fly at certain times or in certain places. New skill sets can be learned (and indeed unlearned) simply by picking up the right object. Where in the real world our actions are constrained not only by the physicality of the world with its laws of nature, but also by limits placed on us by the cumulative choices of previous actors, software promised a tabula rasa on which to truly create without restraint.[2] Filing systems on computers, for instance, far from resembling the cabinets they take their names from, have the ability to store and categorize files regardless of type, shape, or size into one “folder” and then sort them on command. The computer allows us to code our way around the rules of space that apply in the real world. Similarly, time itself can be re-coded in the gaming environment. Games can be designed such that certain portions are untimed and based on “turns” or such that they have portions where time is reinterpreted to speed up or slow down based on events within them. Yet, despite this ability to recode the rules of space and time, many of our “new” software tricks tend to be oriented precisely in the opposite direction — towards bringing something of this very spatiality and temporality back into our work. We often concentrate on making the virtual more “real” as a way to increase its playability and its usefulness.[3] Thus even within these designed environments, we have tended to import and reproduce many aspects of the real world that are not necessitated by the code itself, but rather by other needs of developers, players, and marketers. From the very beginning of computer games, however, the importance of objects has been beyond debate. Where some elements of space or time could be modified or reinterpreted, the presence of objects and importance of objects could not be challenged. Without objects, there would be no game. Early computer role playing games at the very least, for instance, required walls to limit the movement of players and objects to defeat, find, or collect. In those games which came out prior to the graphics revolution, objects could be represented or differentiated by ascii characters such as in Rogue. Various methods of incorporating time into the code where introduced through objects as well. Subjects' were limited by having to find and consume food to stay alive or to return to “safe” areas to recover the health that drains out with every step. Even purely text-based games highlight the importance of objects to the entire concept of such “virtual” worlds. In such games as well as in those later role playing games that built off them, players enter commands like “look” that serve to bring up a general description of the objects that the character can “see.” It is then by reading between the lines of these short descriptions that the player figures out which objects might be worth a closer “look.” In King's Quest IV, an early graphics-based game that continued to use text-based commands, for instance, “looking” at a bookshelf might reveal several titles of books. When the player then “looks” at or tries to “take” a particular book, the space behind it is revealed and the player gains access to a lever that opens a secret passage. Typically, thus, such role playing games are structured around a more or less linear narrative wherein advancement to the next stage requires the acquisition of specific objects and/or the defeat of specific enemies. Far from the subject or player being the focus of the game, such narratives instead focus on the importance of key objects and success depends less on anything the subject does alone and more on how she might leverage some objects against others. In this, then, the gaming environment closely reflects our relations with objects in real life. Although we like to assume in real life that the agency or action potential of objects lies not in their own materiality, but rather in our use of them, we clearly also know that the materiality matters. To take a trivial example, we learn when we are young that straw and wooden houses will not stand up to hungry wolves the same as brick houses will. In the biological world, the difference is not attributed to the brick or straw per se, but instead to the subject's choice of using one rather than the other. In a game, however, the code prevents us from assuming such an extension of the subject's action through objects. An object's mere existence in a certain place combined with coded limitations on the subject's ability (as well as coded limitations on the object's own ability to move) prevent the subject from passing and force the player to take another route. Coding clearly places limits on the action of the subject and therefore the subject must depend on the action potential written into the code of specific other objects in order to accomplish the tasks set for him. coded subjects in a real world As we begin to look more closely at gaming environments then, we can get beyond a focus on the fantastic elements of the world (such as flying, slowing down or speeding up time, and morphing into new bodies) in order to focus more on the similarities in relations between objects and subjects. At the same time, the virtual worlds of these early games were still “virtual” mimics of the real one: they differ from it in substantial ways. The most important of these departures from reality is that biological reality is made up of not just one subject, but multiple things we recognize as “subjects” mixed in among the majority of things which we classify as “objects.” Yet, even in the real world, this distinction between subjects and objects is tenuous at best. Each of us, encased in our own total Subjectivity, can never know that others are equally subjects in their own right. Due to our own Subjectivity, we perceive everything outside ourselves as objects.[4] Yet, we are taught to try to empathize with others as though they too are subjects and much of our childhoods are spent attempting to “properly” distinguish between “pure objects” and those with which we must empathize.[5] Thus the real world is characterized with a confusing mixture of ourselves as Subjects, things we see as pure objects, and others we must treat as subject/objects. Early computer games lacked this key element and all things in the game, from walls to monsters, from food to other characters, could be treated and used as one uses objects in real life. As with other aspects of the gaming world (such as graphics) which strive toward the “real,” newer games increasingly attempted to overcome this lack of subject/object ambiguity by introducing more and more realistic characters, somewhat randomized responses, and the ability for multiple players to play a game at the same time. The original multi-player games were text-based games played either turn by turn on bulletin board systems or real-time online (these are called MUDs [Multi-User Dungeons] and OTBRPG [Online Text-based Role Playing Games]). Thus in games like Avalon, one of the longest lasting of these OTBRPGs, not only do events occur in real time, thus occurring while you sit pondering your next move, but they also occur while you are offline because there are other people who will continue to play the game. Furthermore, while some of the characters you meet in the game are pure objects controlled fully by their code and the computer, many others are controlled within the limits of their code by other human players. It is, then, with the return of this ambiguity between subjects and objects as well as the fact that “life goes on” with or without you that this type of game becomes less and less a virtual reality and more and more simply an alternative reality: Avalon is not simply a game - it has evolved to a level beyond mere “game,” and success at Avalon is not a matter of clever button pushing, or isolated linear progress. You will need all the talents which lead to success in real-life; communication, quick-thinking, insight, perseverance, passion and ability. The “game” is founded on conflict and co-operation, its aim is to be a forum for emotional clashes between bitter enemies, and alliances between beloved friends. A land of heroism and villainy, not a sugary safe environment for easy progress and emotionless character building. An ever-changing land of mythical legends and brain-challenging quests - indeed, it is a land unequalled (Introduction to Avalon online). As the sophistication of these gaming communities and the code that governs them has increased, the popular press has been increasingly worried about players who forsake the “real” world for their online personas: spending hours “in-world” in games like World of Warcraft (see for instance Evers 2007; Spencer 2007; Wang 2005). Yet, besides the very real problem of some extreme gamers forgetting to tend to their biological needs (eating, sleeping, hygiene), these complaints arise from people who do not realize that such games actually do provide a digital real world. Subjects interact with both subject/objects and pure objects, they make friends and enemies just as in real life. The two primary differences are that the goals of the gaming environment may be different (perhaps only because they more well defined) than those of the real world and players can attain completely different socio-economic positions in-world from the ones they command in the biological world: “RPGs [Role Playing Games] allow you a chance to step outside a world grown too prosaic for magic and monsters,” it claims. Although players may be total losers in the “real world,” the RPG offers them a chance to test their true mettle. Furthermore, RPGs “can and often do become, for both you and your character, a way of life” (the manual for Apshai quoted in Barton [2006]). Immersion in such a second world can provide a sense of oneself as two people, one biological, with constraints on action imposed by biology and social structure, and one digital, with different constraints imposed by code and the game's emerging social structures. Further emphasizing this “real world” nature of the coded environment, the game Second Life has attracted a lot of attention as not providing a game with objectives, but rather a platform on which people can live a second (or third) life. Second Life is designed as a capitalist world with its own currency. Players may enter the world and may themselves create objects which range from the digital land they buy (with real money) to their own physical shape, clothes, and accessories giving their creations limits and attributes in much the same way that the original designers did for the earliest objects in the game. In a very real way, the objects of Second Life are not only the basis for the game (in this case, without objects it would merely be a form of instant messenging), but also for the Subject: they are the building blocks of identity. Thus we seem to have returned from within the coded environment to conclusions similar to those of Baudrillard, Bataille, and Godelier. This time, however, we have done so with the quotidian objects that we necessarily interact with in our real lives. The very definition of the Subject is bound up in objects whether that is because she collects them as her own identity or because, given their duration, they serve as fixed points marking the passage of time when the Subject is not present. While this seems to further empower the Subject over the objects of the game, the very fact that the Subject's own avatar (its body) is itself composed of these “made objects” reminds one that everything “in-world” is to some extent a coded object. Linden Lab, the company that created and runs the world, has further attempted to reinsert (paralleling the discussion above) many real world capitalist interactions and exchanges by introducing ways to buy and sell these produced objects (both in-world and through real world services like Ebay) as well as rules that govern intellectual property and thus the copying of objects. Where games like World of Warcraft also serve as social networking sites, the difference that comes about in Second Life is that it no longer has any distinct goal, no envisioned end, and thus, as with our biological lives, it is up to the users to decide what to do with theirs. conclusion The perspectives offered by computer gaming environments provide us with a unique purchase from which to grapple with questions of subject, object, and agency. We might choose to look at the environment from the perspective of the code itself to which all things in the game are objects with limitations and potentials for action regardless of whether they are controlled by humans or computer. Alternately, we might view the world as we tend to in the real world, either as one divided into subjects (users) and objects or, perhaps more honestly, into Subjects, pure objects, and subject/objects. The agency of all objects including that of subject/objects is encountered by the Subject as a part of the structure which limits, facilitates, or guides its own action. Thus from the perspective of a Subject who envisions herself as having real agency, as in the real world, all other things are envisioned as having only structural-agency—it is action that serves only to construct and reconstruct social structure. Yet, at the same time, from the perspective of the code, the Subject is himself merely another object, like all others, whose actions also merely serve to create or recreate the structure within which all objects in the game must interact. The importance that we place on “choice” as key to “agency” actually matters very little when action is viewed from this perspective outside or beyond particular Subjects. We think of agency as based inherently on choice, but this may actually be more of a philosophical blindspot mandated by our own existence as Subjects. Such an emphasis on choice purports to separate subjects from objects leaving little room even for the ambiguity of the subject/object. Yet, we hold to this view in spite of numerous attempts to recognize the role of history and of social structure in our actions (see for instance Bourdieu 1972, 1990; Long 2001; Ortner 1984). In fact, the largest impact we appear to have is not one emanating from our choices as such, but through the unintentional and unforeseeable consequences of cumulative human action. When we take this as our basis for what action or actant potential is, we come closer to the viewpoint of code; we see that humans and objects are not all that different at all. All have limitations on action and an object's presence, absence, action, and non-action, just as much as a subject's, constantly acts upon the structures that will limit future action. Perhaps this vantage point on coded objects and coded subjects from gaming environments can shed light on the ways in which materiality and various structures constrain the “agency” of all “things” allowing them to act to the extent of their action potential. In both digital and biological worlds, the divisions between subjects and objects can perhaps be surmounted by contemplating the ambiguities that articulate with shifting perspectives—what looks like a dichotomy of subjects versus objects from one, looks like a triumvirate of Subject, subject/objects, and pure objects in another, and like a single heterogeneous group of objects in the third. Perhaps also, as in a game, we too would not meaningfully exist as Subjects without other objects. references Barton, Matt. [2006]. “The History of Computer Role Playing Games Part 1: The Early Years (1980-1983).” Posted 23 December 2006 on Armchair Arcade. Accessed 28 February at http://armchairarcade.com/neo/node/1081. Bataille, George. 1992 [1973]. Theory of Religion. New York: Zone Books. Baudrillard, Jean. 2005 [1968]. The System of Objects. New York: Verso. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1978 [1972]. Outline of a Theory of Practice, Richard Nice, trans. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. ______. 1990. The Logic of Practice, Richard Nice, trans. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Evers, Laura. 2007. “Alternative Reality: World of Warcraft is more popular than ever, but is the game taking students away from reality?” The University Daily Kansan. 1 March. Online at http://www.kansan.com/stories/2007/mar/01/alternative_reality_/ accessed 1 March 2007. Godelier, Maurice. 1999. The Enigma of the Gift. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Latour, Bruno. 2002. “What is Iconoclash? Or is there a world beyond the image wars.” In Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel eds., Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion, and Art. Pp. 1-37. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. Long, Norman. 2001. Development Sociology: Actor Perspectives. London: Routledge. Ortner, Sherry. 1984. “Theory in Anthropology since the Sixties.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 26(1): 126-166. Spencer, Richard. 2007. “Man dies after 7-day computer game session.” Telegraph.co.uk. 1 March. Online at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/02/28/wgamer128.xml accessed 1 March 2007. Wang, Faye. 2005. “Plans to limit online game playtime rebuked.” ChinaDaily.com.cn. 5 September. Online at http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/english/doc/2005-09/05/content_475215.htm accessed 1 March 2007. [1] This type of agency of objects is also referenced in works on iconoclasm and the aesthetics of objects. This perspective stresses how the object can evoke within our bodies and minds a visceral reaction; by their very existence we can be moved to tears or to anger, to praise a work or, quite literally, to destroy it. As in Latour's (2002) formulation of the question, this reaction itself causes us to wonder what it is about these objects (particularly art, religious, and scientific representations) that forces our action. [2] Of course, a portion of this dream of tabula rasa is more myth than reality. Software developers, like anyone else, are constrained by their own cultural dispositions toward not only what is possible or impossible, but what would be desirable to have in a “virtual” environment. Furthermore, the majority of such endeavors (save, perhaps the earliest role playing games which were designed for limited circulation among friends) are also constrained by the larger capitalist goals of companies which therefore introduce principles of marketing and product placement as limitations or guidance to the design process. [3] There is often a tension between these two trends, one aiming to move further away from the bounds of reality and the other attempting to reintegrate aspects of reality into the virtual. An excellent example of this back and forth can be found in a demonstration video of a new 3D computer desktop model [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RK_WLVO-TgA] by the Dynamic Graphics Project (Anand Agarawala and Ravin Balakrishnan). The software attempts to reintroduce into computer desktops real world concepts of piling, dragging, and tossing files governed by physics-like algorithms that enable the user to employ structured messiness just as they might on the desk in their office. While most of the comments posted about the video demonstration were positive, some saw this reintroduction of spatial laws as a step backwards, reimposing limits that the computer had already allowed us to overcome: One of the major benefits of having modern computing in business, is that we don't have to deal with these types of things anymore. So WHY bring them back? File systems are very well designed and make it very easy to find things. You can arrange by date, modification, name, type, etc. This looks like one of those programs you find, and you use for a day, and you realize someone wasted a lot of time developing it (posted by redhatcore around January 2007, English edited). Similar arguments also arose when Microsoft shifted from DOS, a text based operating system, fully into an iconographic desktop (Windows) that was modeled on Apple’s popular visual interface. [4] Thanks to Seema Golestaneh for emphasizing this point. [5] This distinction lies behind many tensions in childhood from imaginary friends to believing that stuffed animals (or real animals) can talk and perform as subjects. Thus a child who clings too long to the idea that objects too should receive some degree of empathy are seen as immature and those who fail to properly treat other people as “subjects” are seen to be anti-social or mentally disturbed. This despite the work of PETA and/or Greenpeace types of activists who, as adults, attempt to further broaden and blur this extension of subjectness beyond the self.
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