Leakage on the internet
As children, we easily absorbed the illusion conservation rule and all the other strictures that apply to role plays. As adults on the Internet, that concrete wall that separates the reality frame from the role-play frame becomes a flimsy, permeable membrane. Those hard and fast rules that Giffin described, the ones that are consensually adopted by children to define the boundary between real life and pretense in preschool, are only vaguely understood on the Internet. Sometimes they are clear, or at least they seem so. At other times, these boundaries are subject to considerable leakage.
Clear examples occur on the multiuser games in which players are sternly cautioned to stay in character at all times. One player might choose the warrior role and start the adventure with many strength points but few points for wisdom, soul, or cleverness. The game itself directs players toward certain behavior patterns based on their choices, and anyone choosing warrior is not just expected to conform to that role, but is pushed toward it by virtue of the capabilities the character possesses.
In other cases, the membrane is more permeable and Internet participants move fluidly between the real and unreal frames of the environ ment. A very intricate example of a case in which participants moved this way was described by researchers at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who studied synchronous chat sessions.30 Lucia Ruedenberg-Wright, one of the researchers, used Lucia as her nickname on the chat channels and started interacting with Thunder, a systems operator. Thunder first toys with channel names, inviting Lucia to join him on channels with playful names such as -),/, +bagelnosh, +hsonlegab [bagel-nosh spelled backwards], and finally +weed. Thunder adds a description for the channel that ultimately becomes the site for the play: ***The topic is:sssssssssss hmmmm wheres all that smoke from? +weed. Lucia joins the channel +weed and within moments, more join in. Kang, fah, Rikitiki, and others eventually find the channel called +weed and push their way into it. The role play, suggested by the channel's description, begins.
Thunder passes a joint to Lucia, and Kang adds the comment, "they might be sushpishus, huh?:-)," deliberately mispelling "suspicious" to stay in character. After several interchanges, Thunder starts playing with the keyboard to role-play the marijuana party, given the limitations of ASCII. He first uses ":-Q" to represent a man smoking a joint, and then :| to indicate a man holding his lips together to keep the smoke in his lungs. Finally, he creates a complete scenario, read as smoke joint, inhale twice, let smoke out, then experience pleasure, using the following symbols:
The rules that governed this IRC performance were conceptually similar to those that control the preschoolers' role-play games, though obviously far more complex. This role play required enormous creativity to maintain the illusion, but the strictures were there. Anyone joining the channel was expected to pretend to be stoned, and use all the creativity they could muster to do it.
The researchers identified not just two frames, the real and the unreal, but five. The first was real life, which is the same as preschoolers identify. The second was "let's play IRC," a frame characterized by reduced accountability and a willingness to talk about almost anything. The that apply to this frame are not well established or consensual, the way they were for the preschoolers involved in the pirate role play, so misperceptions and miscommunications are common. Sometimes the talk can be serious, sometimes playful, sometimes deceitful and treacherous, and it is often difficult to know which is which.
The third frame is "Let's have a party." Now the players begin to flirt and play word games, but the metamessage is that we are here to have fun. Nothing serious. This is when Thunder experiments with the channel names and keeps changing them. Lucia is not able to type fast enough to actually join him.
"Let's pretend" is the theme for the fourth frame, and it begins to dictate the rules for a virtuoso simulation of smoking marijuana. The players still occasionally slip back to real life, or to "let's have a party," but there is a tentative emergence of certain rules for this chatting session, ones that require the players to join in a role-play game. Finally, the fifth frame of "performance" begins. Thunder and Kang experiment with keyboard versions of the marijuana smoking exercise, and Thunder culminates the performance with the ASCII characters just given. Lucia serves as the audience, congratulating the performers for their artistry with limited tools.
On the Internet, we have some enchanting opportunities to engage in such light-hearted role-plays, ones that would not work well in real life. The troubling aspect of this form of play, however, is that the line between real life and role play is sometimes fuzzy and may not always be consensually understood or agreed upon. Unlike the children playing pirates, participants in an Internet role play may not know what the ground rules are, or when people are switching from frame to frame.
Consider, for example, the "Let's play IRC" frame. As I mentioned in a previous chapter, social chatters are constantly subjected to two questions: Are you male or female, and how old are you? Even when a person's nickname suggests one gender or the other, people often inquire anyway. At one point early in this chatting session, Kang said to Lucia, "lucia=female as i suspect?" Later, Kang types a strategic probe to learn Lucia's age, first in lower case, and then, a bit more persistently, in all caps.
Lucia finally replies "SINGLE ALL MY LIFE," coyly deflecting the question. Kang comes back more directly, with "how long has your life been so far?" but Lucia ignores the query. She could, of course, have been male, and she could have answered anything to the age question. While Rang thought they were in the "Let's play IRC" frame, Lucia could easily have decided to jump to the "Let's pretend" frame and given any answers she chose.
The fundamental issue here concerns our understanding of the rules of the Internet social environment, and whether we consider it to be subject to the same rules as real life, the rules of childhood role play, something in between, or something entirely different. If everyone is playing a role and everyone knows about it, then there is little problem. But what happens when you jump to a role-play frame in which your online persona is markedly different from your real-life self, and the others do not? This is where role play begins to blend with the less benign forms of deception.