Yesterday, I hosted a talk at my department by Jonas Linderoth (University of Gothenburg) entitled The effort of being in a fictional world: Upkeyings and laminated frames in MMORPGs. Its topic was hard core role playing subcultures within the World of Warcraft community, and it illustrated how these players — wanting to achieve a maximum level of authenticity and immersion in their gaming — navigate the nexus between rules/ludology and fiction/narratology. Immersion does not come easy, which is something that the moral entrepreneurs who see nothing but dangers in MMO gaming seem to think. Rather, it takes a lot of hard work to actually “lose grip of reality”.

The presentation made me realize that I really have to look more into Goffman’s frame analysis, which is something that I have been meaning to do for quite some time now. Also, “Hamlet on the Holodeck” by Janet Murray seems to be important reading to anyone interested in cultural and linguistic aspects of digital cultures. There is more information on Jonas Linderoth here, and those who understand Swedish will definitely enjoy his talk WTF r u female IRL?!? from the latest Dreamhack festival.

Norwegian-American cultural sociologist and economist Thorstein Bunde Veblen is most famous for his 1899 book The Theory of the Leisure Class. In that book, he introduced the concept of “conspicuous consumption” and formulated a theory of social distiction through acts of consumption that predated Pierre Bourdieus similiar ideas in Distinction (1979). In this month’s issue of Wired magazine, the article “Accept Defeat: The Neuroscience of Screwing Up“ by Jonah Lehrer discusses a lesser known but very interesting contribution made by Veblen:

In 1918, sociologist Thorstein Veblen was commissioned by a popular magazine devoted to American Jewry to write an essay on how Jewish “intellectual productivity” would be changed if Jews were given a homeland. At the time, Zionism was becoming a potent political movement, and the magazine editor assumed that Veblen would make the obvious argument: A Jewish state would lead to an intellectual boom, as Jews would no longer be held back by institutional anti-Semitism. But Veblen, always the provocateur, turned the premise on its head. He argued instead that the scientific achievements of Jews — at the time, Albert Einstein was about to win the Nobel Prize and Sigmund Freud was a best-selling author — were due largely to their marginal status. In other words, persecution wasn’t holding the Jewish community back — it was pushing it forward.

The reason, according to Veblen, was that Jews were perpetual outsiders, which filled them with a “skeptical animus.” Because they had no vested interest in “the alien lines of gentile inquiry,” they were able to question everything, even the most cherished of assumptions. Just look at Einstein, who did much of his most radical work as a lowly patent clerk in Bern, Switzerland. According to Veblen’s logic, if Einstein had gotten tenure at an elite German university, he would have become just another physics professor with a vested interest in the space-time status quo. He would never have noticed the anomalies that led him to develop the theory of relativity.

Predictably, Veblen’s essay was potentially controversial, and not just because he was a Lutheran from Wisconsin. The magazine editor evidently was not pleased; Veblen could be seen as an apologist for anti-Semitism. But his larger point is crucial: There are advantages to thinking on the margin. When we look at a problem from the outside, we’re more likely to notice what doesn’t work. Instead of suppressing the unexpected, shunting it aside with our “Oh shit!” circuit and Delete key, we can take the mistake seriously. A new theory emerges from the ashes of our surprise.

Modern science is populated by expert insiders, schooled in narrow disciplines. Researchers have all studied the same thick textbooks, which make the world of fact seem settled. This led Kuhn, the philosopher of science, to argue that the only scientists capable of acknowledging the anomalies — and thus shifting paradigms and starting revolutions — are “either very young or very new to the field.” In other words, they are classic outsiders, naive and untenured. They aren’t inhibited from noticing the failures that point toward new possibilities.

Aside from the provocation and controversy, this seems like a perfect ideal for good research: be sceptical, question everything, think on the margins, stay naive, and let theories emerge from the ashes of your surprise.

I was interviewed today by Språktidningen, a Swedish monthly magazine about language issues. The article for which I was contacted will be printed in the January edition and deals with the specialized language in gaming culture, and the difficulties for game reviewers and cultural journalists to make games accessible to a wide audience of people of various generations.

This dilemma is further emphasized in a non-English speaking setting, where gaming discourse not only includes a lot of specialized terminology but also a lot of loan words. I think that gaming language must be seen in the context of sub or youth cultural language. This means that specialized jargon has been developed for reasons other than purely technological. Furthermore, many online cultures related to gaming are quite hierarchal and langue plays a big part in maintaining distinctions in these cases. As gaming is moved into the mainstream, these linguistic patterns live on. My contribution to the article, from the perspective of cultural sociology, revolved around the following points:

Dick Hebdige illustrated in Subculture: The meaning of style (1979) that membership in subcultures is signalled through specific uses of mannerisms and argot. Argot is a French, Spanish and Catalan word for “slang” or “secret language”. Argot is used by various groups “to prevent outsiders from understanding their conversations”. “The term argot is also used to refer to the informal specialized vocabulary from a particular field of study, hobby, job, sport, etc”.¹

“Notions concerning the sanctity of language are intimately bound up with social order. The limits of acceptable linguistic expression are prescribed by a number of apparently universal taboos. These taboos guarantee the continuing ‘transparency’ (the taken-for-grantedness) of meaning. Predictably then, violations of the authorized codes through which the social world is organized and experienced have considerable power to provoke and disturb” (Hebdige 1979, p. 91).

Cultures such as those characterizing gaming, online piracy, IRC chats, hacking, etc. are often hierachal. The status divisions between n00bs and more established members in online culture in general are one example of this. Bowker and Liu (2001) have written about this in terms of gender differences, and Blashki & Nichol (2005) have illustrated how so called 1337 5p34k (leetspeak) has its roots in gaming culture.

Pierre Bourdieu writes in the seminal article on “The economy of linguistic exchanges” (1977) of “legitimate language”, and of how language is connected to “relations of symbolic power”.

“A person speaks not only to be understood but also to be believed, obeyed, respected, distinguished.” (p. 648)

“Linguistic competence (like any other cultural competence) functions as linguistic capital in relationship with a certain market.” (p. 651)