Pseudonymity
I am at a severe disadvantage in philosophical discussions, which makes me wonder why I participate in them… but let that go for a bit. My disadvantage lies in complete inability to build theories and hypotheses from the top down rather than the bottom up. (Not just to build, either, but even to understand.) I can’t do birds-eye views. Born a worm, I guess, with a worm’s lowly eye.
So my contributions to philosophically-oriented blogthreads, when I make them at all, tend to be lived-experience anecdotes, and questions that spring from them. Data. I’m good at data. I’m good with data. Unfortunately, Real Philosophy, from the little I know of it, doesn’t much go in for a data-centered approach. Too limiting, or something.
Nevertheless. AKMA’s latest on pseudonymity and its dangers cannot help but remind me of my participation in role-playing games, a pastime substantially based on pseudonymity. Granted, it is a pseudonymity that breaks often, and for many participants is superficial or considered entirely ludic; nevertheless, pseudonymity.
The usual mud cast at RPGs, just as at many other games, is that unacceptable behaviors leak from the RPG context into non-RPG interactions. Last night, an RPG character of mine (“Rat” is her name) killed and wounded a number of creatures (small-r rats, mostly—Rat hates rats) with her slingshot and her knife. Certainly a dim view would be taken of my emulating her behavior, even with small-r rats.
AKMA’s take is a little different, however (for which I am profoundly grateful). He asks what is to be made of me for harboring such pseudonymities as Rat the street urchin. I use the plural advisedly, of course, as all half-serious gamers must; my game pseudonymities have included
- Fechan the witch, who went quite thoroughly mad, devastating considerable territory and not a few lives while not in her right mind
- Magdalena the accidental vampire
- Fiera the take-no-prisoners were-panther
- Juskinah the loyal desert nomad
- Shams: poet, historian, and singer
- Afletana the prim priestess
Not to mention Rell the healer and “Brother” Smith the taciturn druid, for those who think I play only women. Slice it how you will, that’s a lot of pseudonymity.
I hear an objection from the gallery: you’re just playing, Dorothea; that’s not real pseudonymity of the type under discussion. Perhaps. I’m not sure the line between ludic and other pseudonyms is so easily drawn as that. Is it coincidence that at the same time leaving graduate school shattered my self-concept, Juskinah transgressed badly, lost a number of special abilities the gods had given her, and likewise had to pick up the pieces of her self? (For second-edition D&D aficionados, she lost her ranger status over a no-question-that-was-THOROUGHLY-and-unnecessarily-evil action.)
In hindsight, it does not feel like coincidence. Why should it? Insofar as my RPG characters derive their selves from mine, they ought to exhibit my habits of thought and emotion; they ought to end up echoing bits of my life. Just as pseudonyms have been blown for employing the verbal and rhetorical tics of their owners.
They don’t necessarily stop there, though, as Rat and her deadly sling demonstrate. Because the context is ludic, because actors and acted-upon are deliberately un-real, I can take risks with their actions and their identities I cannot (or dare not) with my own, and explore the result. Minus the ludic context, this is the identical reason many pseudonymous folks put forward for their pseudonymity. Ain’t that curious.
So what are we to think of me? The RPGs-are-Satanic crowd would doubtless say that the irredeemable evil in my soul simply makes itself known in RPG hack-and-slash, completely ignoring the many impressively decent things my various characters have done. (Last night Rat, to take a relatively minor example, threw herself in front of two stunned and helpless comrades to take rat-bites they would otherwise have suffered. Bites from rats, in RPG-land as everywhere else, carry significant risk of disease. Gamine Rat knew that full well.)
AKMA might dismiss my RPG characters as “inauthentic,” not really part of the Dorothea identity, since they and their context are clearly fictional (and perhaps because I have no trouble discussing them in third person). He would, as I cannot, ignore the overlap between their lives and mine, their concerns and mine, their personalities and mine. I have been as mad as poor Fechan; it’s just lucky I didn’t have her tremendous power to damage others. I actively try to emulate one or two of my characters, when they behave in ways I ought to; how weird is that?
The best conclusion I can come to just now is this: if we are to count the costs of pseudonymity, something I have no trouble admitting is necessary, we ought to consider that perhaps it confers benefits (beyond the merely exculpatory) as well. It can illustrate parts of us we are not aware of (good and bad), help us deal safely with parts we wish we didn’t have, let us model behavior we would like to transfer to non-pseudonymous contexts.
Plus it can be a lot of fun, of course. Not to be sneezed at, fun.
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