ENGL 505B

At least by a day or two. Heh. I think what troubles me is the almost necessary double edged sword here. Our social nature makes us morally responsible for our actions and words to some degree. In the real world, this is obvious. Just try and tell one of your trouble students how you really feel about him or her one day and see if the rest of the class and your colleagues won't turn on you, even if they agree with you. I'm also thinking of a particular email scandal on the grad list serve recently... This kind of responsibility is good, and its dissolution in the virtual realm, because avatars create a distance between the agent and the actor, is potentially bad.

But notice I said potentially bad. Because half the fun and most of the point of a virtual environment is just like that of the literary world; to explore situations that we don't normally have experiencial access to, sometimes thankfully so. However, there's nothing fundamentally wrong with reading Crime and PUnishment or Lolita and sympathizing with Raskolnikov or HH. Nor is there anything fundamentally wrong with a well adjusted moral person role playing a mass murderer character in a game. Or even a terrorist. If that character is just that - a character. I like the word avatar beacause it implies a relationship back to an agent at the keyboard, someone responsible for its actions. If I'm playing a terrorist character in a virtual environment thats ok, but if I'm advocating for terrorism through a terrorist avatar the odds are that that behavior extends beyond the limits of the game and breaches into the real world, where that sort of behavior has consequences...

This is a big issue and I'm only one little guy, so I'm letting this go now...