Are Any Female Night Elves Really Women?

I wanted to respond to something that I thought were interesting about the Turkle article. I got to thinking while reading it about people playing with multiple identities, particularly gender identities because that's the easiest ones for people to either imagine or be shocked by. I found the article interesting because the way it focuses almost exclusively on those who create these identities and not the audiences for them. Thinking back to around the time when the article was written; that time when I was playing SimLife on my dad's Macintosh SE and we got our first modem. (aside: It's nostalgic to think of those particular levels of technology, I'm curious when I'll start to feel nostalgic for my iPod and DVD collection.)

At that time I had a e-mail pen pal, Heather Eisner*, who lived somewhere in New York. I don't remember too much about the experience but I do remember how I felt when she stopped writing. Back then it cost a quarter to send an e-mail on Prodigy (an online service like AOL) and she told me that her parents were upset with how much it was costing her to write her dozen or so pen pals. I never heard from her again. For 10 or so years I've always assumed that everything that Heather told me about herself was true. I had no reason to doubt it until reading Turkle's article really. I approached it with the naiveté that I assume many people did at that time, that generally people online are "indexical" for real people living in the real world.

A while after that I started dialing into the University of Utah's gopher, similar to the internet we see nowadays but with an interface similar to a BBS or a terminal prompt. Through it you could access various databases, programs and MUDs. I started playing a MUD during my computer class in Junior High and continued on playing MUDs in every computer class I had through to High School. During my Senior year I started playing a game called "DragonRealms" on AOL which I was happy to see is still around today if anyone is interested in looking into what a MUD is/was like. It was pretty much standard Tolkeinesque fare, I started a hobbit-like thief character and for a change decided to make it a female. The attention that I got was noticeably different than when I had played before and I quickly began to get weirded out by the situation. One day, after a few class periods of playing as this character, a guy who I had hung around with in the game wrote me and said, "Are you okay? Did you hear?" I didn't have a clue what he was going on about. "Princess Di has died." I realized at that moment that he assumed I was a girl. The clashing of the MUD world that I was playing in and something in the real world colliding like that really disturbed me. Of course I really didn't care that Princess Di had died, I was a 17 year old male. But the reality of it was to much and I never played a MUD again.

More recently, my friend Jim was one of the first people I knew to have a blog. It sits empty now since he's moved on to MySpace but at the time he was blogging a lot about pop-culturey stuff. He had made friends with a bunch of other bloggers including a girl, "Plain Layne", who he'd tell me about at different times and confessing once that he was really excited about how quickly his friendship was progressing with her. Layne would post comments on Jim's blog, giving Jim advice or support and such. Layne's blog became quite popular and because Jim talked about her so much I began to read it every now and then, mostly when Jim linked to it from his blog. Layne's blog began to become much more titillating and the things she wrote about became more risque, as she became more lurid the popularity of her blog grew. She developed a reputation as a blogger who would answer any question about her self in as detailed ways as possible. She met a girl on a trip to Spain and became a lesbian, later she decided that she was straight again all along the way sharing incredibly private details about herself. She was constantly losing jobs or having crazy experiences.

Then one day Layne disappeared. She stopped posting and Jim got really worried about her because of her sometimes irrational blog posts. The blog disappeared off the net the next day and people started worrying about her. Bloggers started searching for anyone that had actually met her and it was quickly realized that no one ever really had. Then people started quickly figuring out that Layne probably didn't exist at all. Jim commented at the time that,

"There is no emoticon for what I'm feeling. This whole tale started strangely and ended more strangely. The only questions that come to my mind are the most obvious: who did this, and why?"

Things became apparent through nosey bloggy research that Layne is a man. Jim and others were heart broken. As for the man who was Layne he continued writing the blog as his alter-ego Layne for a little while but people lost interest. And so into the night passed another internet meme and someone, somewhere probably bought the ironic t-shirt associated with it. When asked about his experience writing the blog "Plain Layne" the author, Odin Soli, said this which I think is very telling in the post-modern way identity players approach their situations.

Most people were reacting to the blog itself. The comments were a type of personal interaction--that's why I called it "creative interactive fiction." People got whatever they wanted out of Plain Layne. Most folks never commented. Others became very caught up in the character, much like you would with fan fiction or massive multiplayer online role-playing games. All I did was share the character. It was also interactive in that people would suggest new plots.

It seems that he saw the experience of not as a hoax but rather as a new form of experimental, death-of-the-author infused fiction.

So now I think back on Heather Eisner and I wonder if she was anything that she said she was. Did she like the Beatles because she was actually 45 and not the same age as me? I've definitely become more cynical with my online interactions. But what does that do for those who freely shift identities when everyone automatically assumes your not who you say you are? I've heard that people who play World of Warcraft openly assume that anyone playing a female night elf is actually a 13 year old boy. So when it's taken for granted that on the internet your likely not to be who you say you are, when cynicism gets so great that you're not fooling anyone anymore, how does that change things for those doing the acting? Kevin theorized today in tutorial that those playing with identity are doing it for themselves and don't really care if the audience was aware of the mask. As I stated, if that's the case it seems that makes it a lot like the "not very good transvestite" in Little Britain where everyone who interacts with these "identity players" tries to clue them in on that they know they're not who they say they are and they just keep repeating "but... I'm a night elf laaady, and I do night elf lady things."

*name changed to protect the pen pal