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“The virtual world” can be said to encompass a great many things: the
Internet as a whole, specific spaces therein, the simulacra of media imag-
ery in general, or video gaming specifically. The emancipatory potential
of the whole enterprise has long arrested feminist theorists (Haraway
1990; Stone 1995; Turkle 1995), and some reflect on the history of femi-
nist interventions into the virtual as evincing a dichotomy between “uto-
pian” and “dystopian” thinking (Boyd 2001; Magnet 2007). However, I
would challenge the idea that the distinction is so clean. This dichoto-
mous abstraction obscures the complex perspective often sketched by
so-called dystopian cyberfeminist theorists. Lisa Nakamura (1995), for
instance, was an early theorist who suggested that there was a profound
continuity between the physical world and the virtual one. She showed,
with sobering ethnographic examples from the online roleplaying game
LambdaMOO, that the balance of power in the world seeped into the
World Wide Web; what disrupts the “dystopia” narrative, however, is that
this complex understanding of power was not intended to be pessimistic.
Toward the end of her paper, Nakamura offered her hope that the play-
ers themselves would push back against the boundaries being constructed
in the virtual world. Eagerly seizing on the rich stable of metaphors that
technology offered, Nakamura said each act of roleplay that countered the
“Orientalized theatricality” of racist/sexist play was a “bug” that would
“[jam] the ideology machine.”
What is roleplaying and how can it do this? Roleplaying is something
that instantiates what “utopian” cyberfeminists dreamed of: creating a
character of your own design that you then perform and embody in virtual
WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly 40: 3 & 4 (Fall/Winter 2012) © 2012 by Katherine Angel Cross.
70 All rights reserved.
social space. But to understand its emancipatory potential, and the pos-
sibilities it raises as a “third way” between the false dichotomy of u/dys-
topia, we have to rediscover Hilary Rose’s Laboratory of Dreams—a vivid
workshop where feminist science fiction became enchanting feminist
theory. We must also survey pen-and-paper roleplaying games (an excel-
lent summary thereof can be found in Dormans 2006). Such games render
social construction richly visible through their heavy emphasis on charac-
ter, imagination, and story, which all work together as part of a process of
constant enactment and engagement; a perpetual process of ‘becoming.’
I will begin by elaborating on the history of the Laboratory of Dreams
concept and its roots in feminist science fiction, then move into a brief auto-
ethnographic discussion that illustrates a defiant becoming in the midst of
oppressive virtual space, finally moving into an analysis of the roleplaying
game (RPG) Eclipse Phase as something that builds on “becoming” and
institutionalizes it in a way many other RPGs simply do not. Like liter-
ary science fiction, roleplaying is always moving toward something new,
iterating through never ending phases that progress one’s character toward
an infinite horizon. The enchantingly creative art that inheres to creating a
new world and fully human characters within it fires the imagination anew
as regards this world. The warnings of earlier cyberfeminist theorists are
vital to keep in mind—the whole purpose of this essay is to combine an
emancipatory project with their nuanced understanding of the pitfalls and
continuity of power, not to fall into the trap of Utopia. But in the process
I hope to show how Nakamura’s “ghost in the machine” is rising in virtual
space and that instituting feminist roleplaying games as a new laboratory
of dreams can build on this hopeful trend.
act of constant “becoming” that allows for self-conscious (or at least semi-
conscious) social reconstruction. Feminist transformation—the constitu-
tion of new gendered possibilities and new arrangements of power—can
be and often is one of those things.
Interactive Becoming
Recent research into how people interact with games—giving more heft
to just what the concept of “interactivity” can mean—demonstrates how
these possibilities may exist in the real world. Caroline Pelletier’s 2008
“Gaming in Context” examines the phenomenon of gender identity con-
struction through gameplay by speaking with young children in British
primary schools and having them make video games using a prearranged
set of tools that are easy to use but admit a good deal of customization.
She found that both boys and girls used their game designs to constitute a
gender identity in the real world that did not always line up with their per-
sonal interests in gaming. This arose from the complex ways the students
engaged with gender norms:
She uses this framing to emphasize the dialectical processes that char-
acterize identity formation. “Norms,” she says, “are therefore not simply
imposed on people but used actively to construct identity” (157), echoing
Barrie Thorne’s conception of “play” in her study of children around the
same age. For Thorne (1993), “play” is an active engagement with the sig-
nifiers that suffuse childhood and constitute proactive self-construction
in a way mediated but not obviated by power. Pelletier, in recognizing
the agency such construction may afford, argues that allowing youth to
design their own games gives them more power to use the norms that sur-
round them, rearrange them, transcend them, and potentially create some-
thing new.
Roleplaying as Transition
military hardware. Lush, culturally rich and advanced colonies exist else-
where in the system, however, and “transhumanity”—the human race as
augmented by now-routine bodily modification, literal cyborgs—lives
on. The rich campaign setting gives players a tremendous amount to think
about: gender and sex are extremely fluid, sexuality is normatively poly-
morphous, and the class politics of the game invite much critical reflec-
tion. The campaign sourcebook—the “rulebook” of any pen-and-paper
RPG—lends players a thorough education in the differences between
liberalism and radicalism, as well as multiple phases and wings of resis-
tance politics. Artwork adorns otherwise text-choked pages, bringing the
setting’s manifold distinctions to life in vivid renderings that immerse you
in this brave new solar system. Women of color abound as thinkers and
doers, not passive pornographic objects (see Fernández 1999; Nakamura
2000; Langer 2008, 97). They are also portrayed as being comfortable
with technology, using it with facility in a variety of ways. These images,
produced on a budget by an independent developer with a political mes-
sage—the promotion of transhumanism as well as a generally leftist class
and gender politics—are Nakamura’s “ghosts,” pushing back against hege-
monic images of women, particularly women of color.1 All this is part of
the default setting of a game routinely praised on RPG review websites as
being fun.2
Before going further it is worth exploring how this world will be laid
out and what the nature of its virtual space actually is. This is a pen-and-
paper roleplaying game; perhaps the most famous example of this genre/
medium is Dungeons & Dragons (Cook 2003). While such games share
many features with video games, it is an experience that becomes fully
visualized in one’s imagination rather than on a computer or television
screen. It is also one that is very likely to be shared in physical, rather than
virtual, company.
Another nontrivial distinction this creates is the fact that pen-and-
paper roleplaying games do not necessarily allow players to “hide” their
“true” selves from the people they interact with. If “no one knows you’re
a dog” on the Internet, everyone will around a roleplaying table. Pen-and-
paper roleplaying games are sourced from books that are used as guides for
gameplay that usually takes place between the participants seated around
a table (hence another name for the genre, “tabletop roleplaying”).3 The
impact of this requires more research and would bear directly on my the-
ory; the immediate presence of other, physical players could limit a per-
son’s freedom to play with things like identity in a challenging manner. But
as I will argue, Eclipse Phase’s value is that it heavily legitimizes precisely
the kind of transgressive play that could make trouble for a player of a dif-
ferent game.
Pen-and-paper roleplaying games also offer two layers of customiza-
tion that constitute a kind of proactive game design that occurs during
live play. For instance, players may find themselves acting as mediators
between two rival anarchist factions. The first layer of customization (that
of narrative) is built into the nature of the challenge: it can have several
outcomes based on the players’ actions. Do they succeed and help the col-
lectives reconcile? Merely set tempers flaring and initiate an altogether less
pleasant challenge? Start a whole new political movement? This evolving
and polymorphous story is worked out between the gamemaster and play-
ers, each playing his or her part in weaving/designing the narrative. The
story is made moment to moment. This free form overcomes the struc-
tural limitations of online RPGs like World of Warcraft, which often inhibit
roleplay (MacCallum-Stewart and Parsler 2008).
The second layer is made up of the statistics and dice rolls that help
mediate play.4 Most roleplaying games’ sourcebooks encourage players
to develop “house rules” and otherwise modify what they are given. To
return to my example, the sourcebook may dictate one set of rules for
handling diplomacy with dice rolls, but our gamemaster may elect to use
house rules unique to this story, or something more streamlined. 5 Or per-
haps our hypothetical gamemaster will do what I do: use a well-told story
in lieu of a successful dice roll. If I were the gamemaster setting this chal-
lenge, I would encourage my players to tell me a good story about their
negotiations, rather than simply roll dice to see whether or not they suc-
ceeded. This would be impossible in most video games, even multiplayer
ones. In the latter, players are pitted against an unchanging rule set carved
in digital marble; here rules flow as freely as story and are manipulated as
part of the player’s initiative. It is a social process.
What Pelletier’s research confirmed to her was that game development
is an act of power that could indeed change social relations; her goal is to
see “that game design can become an everyday domestic leisure activity”
(Pelletier 2008, 158). She did not see this occurring on a pure “transgres-
sive/oppressive” dyad, but instead saw it as a powerful means of engaging
with social norms and giving youth the power to begin modifying them.
I would add something more to this, however: pen-and-paper roleplay-
ing games are game design as an everyday domestic leisure activity. Eclipse
Phase, like most pen-and-paper games, recruits the players themselves in
changing the game to suit their tastes (creating “house rules,” for instance)
and to change the setting as they see fit to tell the stories they want to tell.
It excels in comparison with other pen-and-paper RPGs, however, in its
beginning this encouragement from a baseline that is already very politi-
cally charged and deeply thoughtful about its social space, one where vari-
able identity and gender-as-process are already built into the game prior
to player input.
Despite the malleability, sourcebooks exist for a reason. They pro-
vide an authoritative voice that allows players to start from a profession-
ally designed setting and rule set, sparing one the trouble of having to
start from a blank slate (for a useful discussion on the merits of rules in
games, see Nardi 2010, 76–80). This authoritative voice can encourage or
discourage certain kinds of play—even if players are free to ignore such
suggestions in theory. It is what makes Eclipse Phase’s “voice” all the more
noteworthy. The game writers use that power to articulate controversial
and politically charged ideas. Players are asked to consider “What does it
mean when you are born female but you are occupying a male body?” and
are informed about how the writers use gender pronouns: “When refer-
ring to specific characters, we use the gendered pronoun appropriate to
the character’s personal gender identity, no matter the sex of the morph
[body] they are in” (Snead et al. 2009, 114).
The last sentence situates the individual’s identity as the final arbiter of
his or her “true” gender, taking a page out of transgender rights discourse.
The authors also establish that the “singular they” will be the default pro-
noun used throughout the text, instead of the pseudogeneric pronouns of
“he/him.” The players, sitting around a table or at their computer screens,
become immersed in a world where the developers are telling them a new
story about gender. One even lacks the comfortable distance afforded
by the usual science fiction realms (“A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far
away . . .”). Eclipse Phase is set in our own neighborhood; the humans here
are not distant but are our own great-grandchildren. The setting makes
statements about gender and about inequality in terms that are starkly
familiar.
Consider another “authoritative” statement that the developers write
about their setting: “Gender has become an outdated social construct
with no basis in biology. After all, it’s hard to give credence to gender roles
when an ego can easily modify their sex, switch skins. . . . Many others
switch gender identities as soon as they reach adulthood or avidly pursue
repeated transgender switching. Still others examine and adopt untradi-
tional sex-gender identities such as neuters . . . or dual gender” (45). It
almost seems painfully obvious to say that the game has brought Donna
Haraway’s “cyborgs” to life vividly. This echoes Stryker’s formulation of
the sexed body: “‘Sex’ is a mash-up, a story we mix about how the body
means, which parts matter most, and how they register in our conscious-
ness or field of vision” (Stryker 2006a, 9).
Bodies are part of ever evolving identity here, both personal and
instrumental, always subject to change. You may choose a body designed
for zero gravity, for instance, or one that can fly in Venus’s atmosphere.
Haraway’s conception of a cyborg involved the rich social context that
Eclipse Phase provides, going beyond a mere grafting of technology onto a
human being (Haraway 2011, 6), while also ensuring a grounding in lived
reality that some feminists feared might be lost in virtual space (Magnet
2007, 585). Thus trans people are not only represented; the concept of
changing bodies/identities/genders is normalized well beyond anything
imaginable at present (and this is indeed the point: it makes the player
imagine it). In Eclipse Phase the name for the human race as a collective
had shifted to “transhumanity”; whether or not it was intended as a pun on
“transgender” is immaterial. It captures the varied meanings of “trans” all
in one: transsexual, transgender, transgressive, transcendent. Movement
and becoming.
It is worth remembering that Haraway’s storied cyborg was mes-
tizaje, who knew, lived, and thrived upon the multiple consciousnesses
that women of color inhabit (Haraway 1990, 218; Fernandez 1999, 62).
This conciencia de la mestiza (see Anzaldúa 1999) allowed her cyborg to
embody our complex and uneasy lives as feminists of color, and the lib-
erating potential therein. It may be too much to liken Eclipse Phase to the
work of Cherríe Moraga, say, but it nevertheless presents the player with
women in living color who travel between worlds of identity, speaking in
many tongues; it also shows them empowering themselves, inviting the
player to know such mestizaje women in a productive gaming space that is
precisely predicated on identity reformation in a politicized context. This
is a laboratory of dreams that we as women of color can easily see ourselves
in, a stark contrast to many video games where we instead find narratives
of resistance filtered through a much thicker haze of problematic racialized
portrayals (Langer 2008). We are too often uncounted, but Eclipse Phase
is that rarest of imaginative projects that encourages fruitful and creative
exploration of a complex, political identity as a woman of color.
This sort of volatility is a hallmark of the game. By even broaching the
possibility of “repeated sex/gender” switching the developers are positing
an especially radical formulation of the game’s base principle: that change
is a constant and all character in transhuman space is a highly conscious
and ongoing act of becoming. Further, it goes beyond the traditional M/F
dyad in choosing gender in a game, which, as Danah Boyd points out, is a
“slippage . . . between gender and sex—between the body and the perfor-
mance of identities. The question might be framed as one of gender, but
the answer is all about sex” (2001, 110). By contrast Eclipse Phase lets you
build your own gender and sex.
The website tells players that “the ability to switch your body at will,
from genetically-modified transhumans to synthetic robotic shells, opti-
mizing your character for specific missions” is a central part of the game,
and also touts the fact that “characters are skill-based, with no classes,
so players can customize their team roles and specialize in fields of their
choosing”—the latter is important to consider in light of Hayes’s arguing
that “not all choices were as functional as others” in Morrowind (Hayes
2007, 46). Through enabling truly free-form gameplay, Eclipse Phase
admits a wider variety of skill combinations that could be potentially effec-
tive, including—strikingly—academic skills.
The game promotes a profound reverence for social science (“astroso-
ciology” is a trainable skill in this game). In advising players on how to use
skills related to knowledge, like the aforementioned astrosociology, the
sourcebook suggests the following: “The real value of Knowledge skills
is in helping the characters—and the players—understand the world of
Eclipse Phase. In particular these skills can be used to . . . understand the
applicable science, socio-economic factors, or cultural or historical con-
text” (Snead et al. 2009, 185). Rare is the game that asks you to consider
socioeconomics, or anything like “cultural or historical context.” The
gameplay immerses players in critical thinking. A prerequisite of play is
having some means of navigating the complicated political world of the
post-Fall solar system.
Academic knowledge becomes a skill that can move mountains in a
given story line; journalists, social justice activists, researchers, deep space
drifter avant-garde artists now all become people with power in their own
right who can move the story along, in contrast to most games, which cen-
ter on combat experts. Multiple characters in the game are configured as
activists, from technosocialist Zora Moeller, who “feels a responsibility
to bring about the downfall of repressive capitalist structures” to various
activists for robotic rights and the rights of the animalian creatures known
as “uplifts.” Moeller and other activists mentioned in the game, such as Dr.
Katherine Santos, are women of color as well. The player is encouraged to
think in terms of not only a character’s ability to wound, but also his or her
ability to move in this world as a fully formed being. You as the player must
create a character that can act as an agent in a deeply troubled world that is
simultaneously rich in possibility, our own world through a dark looking
glass, but in “laboratory” form, free to be played with.
Pen-and-paper roleplaying games are an act of constant creation. It as
is if your character puts the world under her with each step she takes in
it; roleplaying is an act of imaginative constitution, making and remak-
ing. It is Connell’s structure of practice spelled out ludologically, Stryker’s
reclaimed Monster rising from the operating table, and Nakamura’s ghost
in the machine seizing its host. Eclipse Phase’s great distinction is that it
fully seizes on the process of becoming in order to both tell its own story
and entice players to consciously make their own in the same mold. A story
where identity is in flux, where technology’s social impact is highly vari-
able, where class, gender, and race are set center stage, and where one mili-
tates against powerful social forces in the crucible of trying times indeed
for the (trans)human race. What the authoritative voice of the sourcebook
does here is provide a rich and thriving society in which your character
confronts powerful social forces with her agency.
After all, this is a world where Cartesian dualism has folded back
against itself and collapsed into singularity. One’s consciousness is now a
downloadable and transmittable entity that can be “sleeved” into most any
body. Body-as-identity takes on a variety of meanings here; a body can be
like a beat-up used car one hopes to shed as soon as one can afford bet-
ter, or it can be a vital part of one’s identity, lovingly modified and altered
as an inextricable extension of one’s consciousness. Few other games—
video games or pen-and-paper games—encourage such. But beyond the
gendered possibilities here is the fact that this has become the material
foundation of class in this world: who has a biological body and who does
not. The “haves” specifically have biological bodies, while those who do
not either have low-grade bio bodies or mechanical ones. The latter, in par-
Conclusion
What makes pen-and-paper RPGs special is that they are a site of cre-
ation that necessarily expands the mind of the player. Fantasy is never a
far-off country that is forever foreign to even the peripheries of a person’s
consciousness; this is what makes it both dangerous and productive. The
roleplayed world is one that is constantly in the making. For both Pelle-
tier and myself, the “making” is essential to both the constitution of the
player’s identity and the remaking of social norms themselves. Eclipse
Phase’s fantasy has created a highly believable society, sparing no detail for
many of its moving (and breathing) parts. To extend the lab metaphor,
Eclipse Phase’s laboratory is fully stocked. Its laboratory is premised not on
techno-utopianism or apolitical optimism, but on the very critiques that
Nakamura raised in 1995: that technology had just as much power to rein-
scribe oppression as to liberate us from it. Eclipse Phase enjoins its players
to toy with both ideas: the dangers and virtues of fantasy. The beautifully
terrible power of dreaming.
Games like this, which enlist creative, political minds in its design, can
help to break the tide of prejudicial game design and writing. These are
tools that feminists can easily seize upon, using the well-worn pathways
that have been established by young feminists online and by other social
justice activists with a presence online who have created a ready-made net-
work for roleplaying to become the next stage of feminist storytelling. A
rich body of feminist academic literature also lays a number of theoretical
groundworks for such a project (Cassell and Jenkins 1998; Taylor 2006;
Corneliussen 2008). Feminist game designer Filamena Young used just
such strategies to create a pen-and-paper RPG aimed at children called
Flatpack: Fix the Future (Young 2012). It engages children as creative play-
ers in a postapocalyptic world that is hopeful. Rather than emphasizing
destruction, it stresses reconstruction and the agency of young people in
building a new and better world. Young’s work is in genealogical relation
with the feminist science fiction that has gone before; unlike SF, however,
the laboratory thus proffered is an open workshop that is constituted
through active, imaginative work. Every feminist, for instance, can now
become an Octavia Butler, Joanna Russ, or Ursula K. LeGuin.
Gaming in rich settings that represent a complex society like our own
has the potential to address the serious issues that scholars like Lisa Naka-
mura and Jodi O’Brien (1999) raised with regard to freedom in the virtual
realm. O’Brien’s great concern was that virtual space seemed to demand
recourse to the body, always bringing social relations back to binarist sexual
referents. But what if a roleplaying game subverted the dyad entirely from
the first page? My own autoethnographic evidence testifies to immense
possibility even in relatively restrictive video games, and thus the promise
of more politically insightful games like Eclipse Phase is that much greater.
There can be little doubt that no game is perfect, and feminist scholars may
find much to criticize in Eclipse Phase itself. But the game is best under-
stood as both a beginning and an incitement. Similarly, as Fernández,
Nakamura, and others have noted, there is immense danger in seeing “the
virtual” in purely emancipatory terms—this maneuver obscures the very
real ways that power works in the world. But it is my modest hope that
games like Eclipse Phase, politically astute as they are, can actualize the bet-
ter angels of the virtual world.
Katherine Angel Cross is an undergraduate student and research assistant at Hunter Col-
lege, City University of New York, presently studying sociology and women and gender
studies. She is also coeditor of the feminist critical gaming blog The Border House.
Notes
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