Day 174: Identity Tourism

I promised at the end of yesterday’s post that I’d talk a bit more about how I’m utilizing Identity Tourism in my own research.

It’s easiest to start by explaining what Lisa Nakamura means by Identity Tourism, so here we go. Here’s just a tiny passage from my book on WoW and Identity:

Start Excerpt:

I chose here to cast these identity formation practices as fitting under the umbrella created by Lisa Nakamura in Cybertypes when she coined the term “identity tourism.” Identity tourism was:

. . . [using] race and gender as amusing prostheses to be donned and shed without “real life” consequences. Like tourists who become convinced that their travels have shown them the real “native” life, these identity tourists often took their virtual experiences as other–gendered and other-raced avatars as some kind of lived truth.” (p. 14)

Nakamura continued, “ . . . the identities users choose say more about what they want than who they are.” (p. 54). I wish to make a step away from the specifically racial implications of what Nakamura asserts, so I also refer to when she wrote:

While these spaces could be categorized as “games” [speaking of MOOs and chat rooms] are also theatrical and discursive spaces where identity is performed, swapped, bought and sold . . . when users create characters to deploy in these spaces, they are electing to perform versions of themselves . . . (p. xv)

There is certainly a way in which Nakamura’s identity tourism can be read as essentially raced, just as there is a way it can be read as a pessimistic lens for studying online identity, a heuristic where the other is being perpetually marginalized. I do not intend to argue here that race isn’t central to Nakamura’s work, and I, likewise, see it as an imperative to carefully research race in cyberspace.4 At the same time, I firmly believe, as a lens, Identity Tourism is a powerful tool for viewing game generated toons (or avatars, or characters) even if the race element is, for the moment, dislocated from being the primary focus. I wish to instead stress two key elements of Nakamura’s heuristic:

• The metaphor itself is pitch perfect; across my research, players talk about WoW as a place to “get away” from their IRL They are on “vacation” as “others,” though I wouldn’t stress the capital “O” Other in my own analysis. The game is also awash with lands filled with different virtual races, and travel itself is a key element in the gaming world. If ever there has been a space where a person can vacation as other, games are that place. I can, by holding alt+tab while composing this very document, transport myself from my office to a desert in Tanaris where I, as a tiny goblin decked in blood red armor who just happens to be able to turn into a dragon, dig for relics from an ancient troll empire that (virtual) time has buried in the (virtual) sand.
• Nakamura very clearly, very eloquently articulates the nature of performing identity online; gamers are not specifically equal to their toons, but that performative element—the fact that practices by the gamer author the toon or virtual identity—is currently under-theorized and under-studied, as it is happening in more and more spaces to varying degrees.

Utilizing Nakamura’s work in this way—taking the focus away from race and gender and looking instead at the framework of practices of performing identity and crafting an online self allows for an enriched view of the concept.

End excerpt. Back to life. Back to current writing.

There are great elements of Identity Tourism and some not-so-great elements. The first is that, as I’ve said so many times before, the metaphor is pitch perfect for studying video games. That’s what we are when we play games online; we’re tourists. That’s a world in which we might go and live for quite some time, but we’re visitors there. We will never be true locals. We can’t actually be goblins or orcs or robots or what-the-what exists in these game spaces (though people do bring those identities into the real world through things like cosplay). So we’re tourists. And thinking about how a tourist operates can give a person who is a skeptic about game worlds an entry point. It’s like when you go somewhere as a visitor and you encounter new cultures and new things. You run around eating all the recommended food, seeing all the sites, trying to live by the old chestnut of “when in Rome.” You’re not looking for a new place to live. You’re not becoming a local. You’re absorbing and enacting.

That also gets to the negative aspect. I always hear Iggy Pop (who I met once at a weird poetry reading in the middle of nowhere) when I think about people who are new to game worlds:

Oh, the passenger/He rides and he rides/He looks through his window/What does he see?/He sees the sign and hollow sky/He sees the stars come out tonight/He sees the city’s ripped backsides/He sees the winding ocean drive/And everything was made for you and me/All of it was made for you and me/’Cause it just belongs to you and me/So let’s take a ride and see what’s mine

The end of that lyric is what strikes me about identity tourists, particularly in games. They feel the experience was made for them.

But there’s a quote from one of my favorite new TV programs, Westworld, that fits here, too. “The maze wasn’t made for you.”

So sometimes we have to wonder if the identity tourist sees a world that was made for their tourism or if they, like William (the Man in Black) are hunting for the center of a maze that is meaningless because it’s NOT made for them.

Also, there’s the fact that you can only be a safe identity tourist if you’re white and male and straight. Otherwise your otheredness still weighs on you even when you’re wearing another mask. This, for example, is my identity. I am Cherokee. That influences how I feel and how I see and how I speak and how I know and how I explain. I can pretend. I’ve pretended to be a number of things in my life (I like to use my imagination, to tell stories, to play games). But I am always Cherokee. Unlike whiteness, that identity cannot dissolve away so that I can feel bulletproof.

The difficulty that studying identity and diversity and race and class and gender in gaming brings up is that we can, to the fullest degree it is a real thing, be identity tourists. But the layer of separation is an artifice. It’s not a security barrier. It doesn’t shield. We are still always othered if othered.

The interesting thing to me is how we are othered, and more importantly I want to see the situations where we aren’t. What happens to the white person playing Never Alone? There isn’t, in theory, any dissonance because the danger there isn’t felt any more bodily than the danger of being shot in Overwatch or beaten to submission in Mortal Kombat. But the threat IS different, and the danger is a different kind of real.

What will happen when there are enough stories that de-center whiteness in games? What will happen when the othered protagonist can be a real protagonist and not a retread of a white character painted up to look like something exotic?

I’m hoping to find out. Who wants to ride with me? There’s plenty of room for passengers on this trek.