I’m currently reading –and have almost finished– This Is Not a Game by Walter Jon Williams. It’s excellent as always, but what struck me was how he perfectly nailed two aspects of online culture. Let me explain.
The plot revolves around socalled alternate reality games (ARG), a not very science fictional notion at this point, as the Wikipedia page shows: they combine online clues with real world events (staged or otherwise) to create freeform puzzle quests. Dagmar Shaw, This Is Not a Game‘s protagonist, is an ARG designer who creates such quest on a worldwide scale, usually as part of a publicity campaign for a new product or company. At the start of the book she’s stranded in Djakarta because Indonesia’s being torn apart by political riots due to a sudden currency devaluation –again not a very sfnal notion. She still has contact with the outside world and the internet and what happens then is that the hardcore players of her games, the ones dedicated enough to know who stages these ARGs, notice her plight and come and rescue her. Which is done through the usual combination of googling wildly, impractical solutions, PayPal funds and the occasional brilliant but practical suggestion by people who aren’t too clear on the distinction between a game and reality.
And that’s a big part of what’s online life is like. There’s a sense of unreality in online culture where everything that happens in the real world is blog or lolcat fodder, but loses its associations and meaning in the process. It’s what happens when you rightwing bloggers thinking they can know better than the reporters on the ground what’s happening in Gaza or Lebanon or wherever by analysing bad online copies of news pictures, or somebody notices the same angry Pakistani protester at various anti-American demonstrations and you have a brief fad of “Crazy Angry Muslim Guy” photoshops. Everything is treated as a contextless game where the reality of life and people offline has largely disappeared. This is not a new process of course — we’ve all made Challenger jokes — but it is much stronger online than offline.
The more positive aspect of online culture This Is Not a Game shows is how often you can depend on the kindness of strangers, as long as you’re moderately famous or have somebody rooting for you. We’ve seen it in the aftermath of 9/11, when thousands of people worldwide spontaneously organised online to help people both in New York and elsewhere caught in the attacks, or there’s Child’s Play, a charity resulting from two webcartoonists wanting to do something to show gamers are people too and their fans wanting to impress them.
This Is Not A Game: but for so many people internet life is.