Chapter 16

If a generalization of the gaming paradigm is already underway, what is it that is becoming more general? Is it interactive media, constrained choices, serious games, ubiquitous casual gaming, real-time combat, micro-incentives, or hedonism? What will be generalized with what effect remains to be seen. This chapter considers the generalization of something specific: reflexively modifiable player agency developed out of role-playing games and now appearing in many games and as the central function of Facebook. I focus on explaining what this agency is, how it can and must modify itself, and what it allows and encourages. Through this being, we do not consume media or intake information so much as respond to pulses of coded affect by forgiving affordances that we are educated in using.

Configurable being is a dynamic form that comes from the genre of role-playing games (hereafter RPGs). RPGs systematized high fantasy scenarios with rule sets derived from wargaming. In their translation to computer games, some things have been condensed while others have been greatly expanded. I refer to computer-based games that draw on RPG genre conventions as digital RPGs (DRPGs). In these games, it is not enough to pilot an X-wing or manage a city, as might be the focus of other computer games; instead, to get anywhere, you must be someone, and continually improve that person (Miller 2006). Aspects of the game influenced directly by the character have grown and aspects of gameplay focused on modification of the character have too. Creating or extensively modifying the avatar is a constraint on what may come to pass, but it is also the foreclosure that enables one to be at all¹. Recently on Facebook, a similar development is afoot, with a reflexively modifiable being providing a user agency in a fantasy of busy cosmopolitanism not so distant from the high-fantasy settings familiar in DRPGs.

The words in this chapter’s title, ‘being’ and ‘generalization’, each have a double meaning whose ambiguity is important to my argument. ‘Being’ means both an individual and the very fact of existence. My focus is on a being that takes on the process of existing, and this has precedence over a self that guides conscious action, an identity interpreted by self and others, a character in a narrative context, a body in a virtual space, or a subject position for the production of the human individual. This ambiguity of ‘being’ foregrounds the relation of a digital creature to the mode of existence by which it can appear. ‘Generalization’ means both a proliferation (here, of technology) and a summary concept. As a technology, the configurable being exists in implementations from Dungeons & Dragons to Facebook. As a summary concept, it is a way to recognize this pattern. This ambiguity – between design and concept – connotes the very real intermingling of hype, inspiration, mimicry, and common structural basis.

However, the general concept of such a being is useless without a firm understanding of its form and formation in DRPGs and RPGs before them. Configurable being’s generalization is a story of voluntary adoption, of something that was, or eventually became, useful.

From D&D to DRPG

Though much has changed since Dungeons & Dragons in 1974 (Gygax and Arneson 1974), some connections are worth making. RPGs systematize fantasy and direct player imagination with their aesthetics. However, DRPGs have narrowed the range of role-play considerably and increased the importance of the player’s configurable being. D&D combines wargaming and fantasy fan practices and style, and these competing tendencies for systematicity and imagination remain important in DRPGs.

Wargaming played out the movement, attacks, retreats, and death of soldiers in different historical periods (and in specific historic battles) with carefully observed rules of measurement and probability (executed by dice throws) in a slow, turn-based rhythm on diorama-like tables made up with hills, grass, trees, and other landscape features. D&D formalized an earlier experimental departure from wargaming that allowed smaller armies – with more interesting goals than just killing each other – to engage with fantasy elements (e.g. dragons) rather than strictly historical ones (e.g. pikemen). It preserved wargaming’s statistically determined combat rules, accrual of experience that boosts skills, and emphasis on fighting. It was played in the format of a wargaming session: several hours of play, in relative isolation, with a big table, and a group of players who stayed the whole time.

What wargaming provided to those who were already interested in fantasy was a place where dreams could come to life. It’s a fine pastime to draw dragons, write stories about elf princesses, or build model castles. What D&D offers that’s exciting to players is to animate all these images and passions so they interact with each other and generate new stories. It does this with an engine derived from wargaming. Rules exist in DRPGs because they ‘give people an expectation of how things work and what the consequences may be for taking certain actions’ (Hallford 2001, 150). What will happen if the thieves try to fight the ogre instead of run? The voice of contingency in DRPGs remains randomness, with outcomes determined by thresholds calculated from statistics of characters, tools, and targets. Because of this continuity, an agile character can still dodge an arrow, even if the player is slow and clumsy. In his chapter in this volume, Baerg considers this blossoming of mechanized fantasy as an expression of the ascendant cultural power of neo-liberalism from just before D&D to the present moment.

On the other hand, role-playing also follows some key rules of improvisational theater, such as establishing a setting, creating a story through teamwork, suspending disbelief, maintaining shared enthusiasm, and building relationships between the performers (Mackay 2001; Fine 1983). The game is an exercise in imagination, fueled by fantasy films and literature. This is where the aesthetics come in: names, descriptions, maps, pictures, and acting style saturate the game with expressive art. A key goal of fantasy aesthetics is to entice the imagination to wonder about new concepts in a strange world (Grant 1996, 12): a giant made of stone, a tree whose leaves are fairies, a mountain melting into water.

This kind of game can be understood as a ‘cool medium’ – a medium delivering a low intensity experience to the senses and demanding those watching or listening fill in many details (McLuhan 1994, 22–32). To fill the gaps, D&D players draw on a ‘generic, historically anachronistic fantasy world assembled from ideas culled from dozens of authors in the fantasy genre’ (Mackay 2001, 27). Other games drew on scenarios other than high fantasy, such as comic books, horror novels, or science fiction television. Still, the game requires creativity based on appropriation, homage, and leveraging genre conventions.

Moving to the computer, games of role-playing changed into DRPGs. They were single-player games, with fixed stories where a hack’n’slash style became normal.

At best, the computerized versions could simulate the mathematics of D&D combat and to some extent the strategy and exploration components, but the inherent abstractness and aloofness of the medium seemed to stop true role-playing at the gate […] D&D and its computerized ‘equivalents’ actually have far less in common than most people think. (Barton 2007a)

Role-play in contemporary DRPGs has certainly changed, and MMORPGs seem to offer only minimal provision for it. World of Warcraft (Blizzard Entertainment 2004) for example, inhibits role-play at many levels (MacCallum-Stewart and Parsler 2008).

Despite the clear barriers to role-playing that do exist, it should not be ignored that DRPGs do offer very sophisticated role-playing in a limited scenario and on their own terms. A DRPG is more akin to a gamemaster and a campaign than to an RPG source book, despite the world’s richness and size. DRPGs do allow role-play, but they also determine it, offering only a few body types to players, a limited world in which stories may unfold, respect for some kinds of actions but not others, and certain realities with which players must deal (in combat, for example, there is not enough time to type out complete sentences on chat, and it would be excessively risky to wear something other than strong armor). Even in role-playing, no gamemaster gives a campaign and offers players a fully functional sandbox environment in the woods. Even the most elaborate and frequently expanded MMORPG can be understood as just one long campaign in one gamemaster’s world. The problem, of course, is that it has substituted the range and flexibility of variety (different campaigns, different gamemasters) with the lures of character progress in a single world.

DRPGs retain systematization of fantasy, aesthetics to guide player imaginations that will fill in the low intensity gaps of the game as a medium², and emphasis on reflexive modification of the character who is the agency by which the player acts. But, unlike a session of an RPG (during which the character is usually improved only a little), almost every DRPG is ‘ultimately concerned with building up enough strength, experience, and resources to overcome some uber-powerful foe’, and exceptions (such as Ultima’s early system of virtues instead of attributes) are still quests for self-improvement (Barton 2007b). This is the difference between how players gathered around a table treat a person and how a videogame treats a player.

Capacity for Identity

In the DRPG software environment, identity is an opportunity for play according to particular social rules and pursuant to a kind of education in the embodiment of identity that authorizes one’s being. This section analyzes the capacity system, which is the specific way players exist in, and interact with, DRPGs. Although narrative identity and the player’s appearance have been much discussed, I downplay them in favor of capacity. As shown in the previous section, DRPGs animate fantasy by systematizing it through a statistical system. Despite its appealing stylization, that system is often a bit dull. Usually, one chooses a weapon by choosing the largest possible number of attack points.

In the systematized fantasy of DRPGs, capacity tends to overpower other registers of identity. While important socially in MMORPGs (and almost the only register where race and gender are real), appearance grew up around the capacity system and directs player imagination without making as much difference to gameplay as it probably should. Appearance tends to index capacities (Tronstad 2008) or give limited expression of a character’s properties, in a relation analogous to phenotype to genotype (Smith 2006). Narrative identity results from what the game forces on the player and how the player sets up the character. Turkle’s Life on the Screen (1995) addresses the seduction of identity, but intentionally ignores the powerful forces that direct the formation of identity. These forces are quite strong. Characters tend to be heavy heroes built around the skeletal grammar game interactivity allows (Burn and Schott 2004); certain identities are likely for social structural reasons, not just personal or psychological ones (McGahan 2008); single-player DRPGs have already written the (unchangeable) story of who the player-character is, and multi-player DRPGs accommodate only the range of narrative identities that have been written in advance. Both appearance and narrative identity exist because of capacities of the character to wear clothes, be seen, have a name, chat, honor promises, and act. This is not to reduce these registers to capacity, but to recognize the mutual presupposition between all three. Instead of appearance and narrative identity, I focus on the identity formed through modification of the ability to act.

Capacity is an ability to act in a situation. It is an immanent and locatable power. Games are made of many situations that are unlike one another: navigating menus, organizing saved games, fighting bosses, basking in glorious victory, special levels, mini-games, backtracking, and being lost are all examples. James Newman has argued that, at least in some situations within a game, the only relevant characteristics of an avatar are its capacities (Newman 2002). Newman’s example is Princess in Super Mario Brothers 2 (Nintendo EAD 1988). When she jumps, she can float a bit longer than the other characters. In a game based on jumping, to jump longer is to jump better. The fact that she wears pink, is a girl, or is a princess is irrelevant when trying to hop across a series of falling logs or land on a shooting egg. She is a jumping body character; it makes no difference within what is normally called gameplay that she is a princess. Most situations in a game (such as jumping from log to log) engage only some specific capacities of the avatar. Very often in DRPGs, you are your capacities.

Capacities are configured. This involves a basic unfreedom: the user must always be configuring. But what is configuration? I use configuration to refer to the synchronic manner in which paths of development are navigated. You can take your time to select one option from several that are available and the game executes the meaning of that selection. It’s like pushing a button. The player selects capacities from menus, choosing which available weapon to equip, what kind of magic to further specialize in, or what line of dialogue to speak. These are choices made from a list of options. They are not freeform creative expressions or unchangeable constants. The capacity to withstand powerful blows or run faster than others does not exist in a person by chance, a talent discovered in childhood; working with the game, the player arranges these capacities, usually through very explicit interfaces. Although some games have subtle mechanisms that monitor player action and modify the character based on what you do (such as determining alignment in Fallout 3 [Bethesda 2008]), players soon realize that this monitoring turns even more of their actions into reflexive configuration. Many decisions are permanent or very difficult to change. Because past decisions change what the best available option is in a present decision, players become committed to developing certain aspects of the character. Path dependence favors specialization.

Capacities of a configurable being open onto different worlds of possibility, offer characters different segmentations of perception (and thereby alternative worldings or milieus), and enable different kinds of action. Characters in Freedom Force vs. The 3rd Reich (Irrational Games 2005) who can become immune to combat damage experience damage-taking as optional, something that can be turned on and off. Other characters cannot hide from damage. The wielding system is a ubiquitous example. Almost any DRPG (like some other genres) allows characters to use different weapons, and some are more open-minded about what can count as a weapon (e.g. a dead rat). Some characters, however, cannot wield weapons, and most have limits. Clerics, in many games, cannot wield swords. Some capacities are available for all characters, such as the capacity to gain experience, collect money, equip items from inventory, buy and sell, talk on chat channels, jump, or die. Many capacities of characters can change, whether by permanent change of abilities or by temporary status effects. All open to a world; or, to put it another way, all actualize potentials that are latent in the gameworld. Wielding opens to the world of blacksmiths, weapon enchantments, heavy blunt objects, and training with a weapon. It actualizes the potential of objects to be wielded, or swords to slice and knives to stab.

Sociality emerges from these capacities for perception and action, and this sociality can look rather antisocial. Chat, costumes, gestures, and discussion outside or alongside the game all yield sociality in World of Warcraft that can be understood in the terms used to study social situations in everyday life. People talk, make friends, and do things together. But there is also another sociality in DRPGs: the sociality of numbers. Online games have been studied as sites of human cultural activity, but most players act as characters concerned with sets of interesting numbers (a nightmare version of online dating). The attraction of one profile to another can be more about appealing characteristics than about charming character. In World of Warcraft, it’s important to remember that, as of 2006, more than 40 percent of players didn’t belong to guilds (Williams et al. 2006) and less than 10 percent of players participated in high-level raids (Ducheneaut et al. 2006). Human players engaged in computer-mediated communication (talking that’s key to guilds and raids) are not the only things social in the game; numbers socialize with numbers. Some items and quests only become possibilities for a character with certain attributes (numbers). Some interactions with other players are completely instrumental, following the attributes, level, equipment, and skills that the other player has to offer. Who can you be for me? What can we do together? The capacity system makes itself deeply felt within the game as a social world. In his chapter in this volume, Voorhees describes this facet of DRPG as a neo-liberal multiculturalism wherein the other is valuable because he or she brings something to the table — is a character with useful characteristics.

To recap, capacity (an identity) empowers one with certain abilities to act that define, shape, and contextualize the game’s virtual world. Playing the role of a character has come to mean selecting and modifying abilities to act that shape a player’s world. As it happens, these games of collaborative imagining are also games of brazen careerism.

Meritocracy and Education

DRPGs instate a retrospective meritocracy that interlocks with the mechanisms of a configurable being. Get favorably evaluated, get upgraded. This pattern of the game mechanics can be understood as an institutional policy with social implications. The meritocracy discounts other kinds of characteristics and ways of playing from its channels of progress-making. This system of incentives, persuasion, instruction, and control shapes how beings are configured, ordering how players arrange their ability to act in a game.

Meritocracy is a system of rewarding candidates based on merit. Retrospective meritocracy defines merit in terms of past achievements, whereas a prospective meritocracy selects candidates based on an assessment of who would make the greatest contribution if given a particular resource or position. These terms are particularly useful in disparate impact law, where merit can mask confidential reasons of a hiring committee (Kennedy 1990) or obscure other factors that distribute merit by historical inequality (DeSario 2003). DRPG rules award resources and position to characters based only on what they have done, and rarely by considering what the player might do with a thing³. Nicole DeSario argues that the retrospective meritocratic model ignores the social context that makes individuals appear with merit and obscures the way merit is defined by those deciding about an individual’s fate (DeSario 2003, 507–8). To reward merit, a system must identify what merit is and who has it, ignoring how merit came to be defined and distributed. Standardized tests are a familiar example. Merit in DRPGs, like money in the world, is something that, once acquired, does not stand for ability or future potential, but establishes it. (This contrasts with work experience, which hopefully demonstrates aptitude, though can also substitute for it.) The key cases of merit in DRPGs are currency systems (experience, mana, hit points, money, or reputation quantities) and linearly increasable statistics (skill levels, base attributes such as strength, or armor ratings). The game rewards these merits. This is how it encourages some actions over others, while ignoring background conditions that lead to these actions being taken and while displacing preferences of all kinds into a jargon of upgrades and obsolescence.

Experience points are a prime example of retrospective meritocracy in DRPGs. Experience that builds skill can be found in fantasy literature, or in training montages of kung fu or action movies; DRPGs make it mechanical. In a ratchet system, the character gains experience points at the death of an enemy or completion of a skilled task. Although this seems nonsensical compared with ordinary life, the model comes from wargaming (and thus from war) where seasoned troops can, as a rule of thumb, be considered better than those with less combat experience. Toward the player, the system uses the psychological mechanism of continuous reinforcement: every time the player does a task, the game provides a reward (Loftus and Loftus 1983, 14–26). For the game, this ratchet system (losing experience in a DRPG is rare) pushes the player into new areas with tougher monsters and harder tasks⁴.

The DRPG meritocratic order follows the logic of upgrades and obsolescence. You do not choose based on naked preference, but in the meritocratic terms of improvement. Upgrades replace what came before, promising to fix what was wrong, and to improve it in all ways. New pieces of armor in Secret of Mana (Square 1993) are better in every way than previously available armor. The Unicorn Helm is stronger than the Tiger Cap. Because a single number defines an object, one unit can be absolutely superior to another. There is nothing to regret; quality increases quantitatively. For this reason, high-level characters can rightfully claim to be better than everyone else. Friedline and Collister document the linguistic ‘power role’ of such characters, and high-level players’ ability (not always exercised) to command, shout, and bully other players. They, after all, are an upgraded version of us. The arrangement realizes a dream of seniority: to rank and order within a disciplinary scheme, to position bodies clearly in enclosures (Townley 1993, 528). Such disciplinary experience may be exactly what players enjoy (Silverman and Simon 2009).

Players who do not accumulate experience points, do not save regularly, or otherwise choose wrong are left behind in the trajectories developers have prepared for normative gameplay. This is not to say that all players min-max their characters, just that those who understand the game can see that this is what the system rewards. It is easy to forget that most players with most games go through a period of not understanding, which only ends for some. There is a high dropout rate. Getting past this requires supplication as students to the game.

DRPGs educate the player’s freedom, which is directed towards improving their character’s capacity, in a manner parallel to how games usually guide the player toward victory. Games do not dominate players completely, and players do not have free reign within games; the education, training, and socialization actually found in videogames lie between these two extremes. Although one can make much of the importance of winning to games (Wark 2007), and of the constant threat of failure, this tends to reduce games to struggles of a certain kind, ignoring play’s playfulness and games’ gentle didacticism. The game coaxes playfulness into its terms, by various means. Fallout 3 begins with the character’s own childhood, showing the player how different choices can be made and some of the basic kinds of effect they can have. After a while at the game, players learn even more of what to expect as consequences of their actions. Death is an event that forces the player to the order of game mechanics. Through it, we understand better our active involvement in the game (Atkins 2007). Death may function in power relations as ‘one element among others, working to incite, reinforce, control, monitor, optimize, and organize the forces under it’ (Foucault 1990, 136) to varied effect in MMORPGs (Klastrup 2007). In DRPGs, if you don’t use the right weapon, you learn that you will die.

Games do not manipulate and control players all on their own, but work persuasively (Bogost 2007) and with the aid of a player community which often influences how one plays a game⁵. Between a DRPG’s incitements to act and a player’s experimentation and desires, one learns to act in accordance with a desire, even if the game has partly implanted it, to improve the character.

The function of DRPGs’ meritocracy is to keep the player challenged without making the game completely linear. The character must be continually modified in a basically progressive way, but the linearity is not spatial (as in Mario games). Merit bonds players to their character, by forcing them to learn how to use the identity and develop it in a methodical way for a long time. So long as players are willing to accept the investment of effort the system requires, it efficiently multiplies the player’s possibilities without wasting chunks of storyline. The same content in the game will be experienced differently if the character is a paladin or an illusionist; the game can scale up challenges by making a stronger version of the same monster for a new challenge.

Indeed, it doesn’t take an entire DRPG to take advantage of self-modification’s power for efficient non-linearity – it only takes a few elements. A smattering of these ‘RPG elements’ have been added to games of other genres to ‘enhance’ them, though this often does not make them better (Croshaw 2009). In these games, the character gains experience, can add or improve capacities, and collects an inventory of items; also game mechanics include some of the statistical contingency that comes from wargaming. DRPG elements generalize the model of a configurable being, largely as a way to produce modular narrative as described by Travis in this same volume. RPG elements give games more replay value and encourage players to bond with their custom-made characters, thereby decreasing resale. Game producers fear resale because the sale of used games trades off with sale of new games, which is of course a primary source of income for them. Publishers and developers are trying out different approaches to resist this trend (Hyman 2008). Increased replay value and reticence to sell a game are possible tactics in this battle. But the generalization of configurable being this represents isn’t just happening in games; it also exceeds games.

Configurable Being Generalized

Configurable being is a mode of existence that provides an agency constantly under construction, with capacities opening to different worlds, specifically designed chances at clear steps of advancement, and a supporting aesthetic and system that animates fantasy. Between different implementations, much varies. To lump together every case of configurable being, across many different games, is therefore to make a generalization. Though every case may be unique, generalization is productive because it allows us to recognize commonalities among differences. This double meaning of generalization (as proliferating technology and summary concept) includes our thinking, when we make stylized summaries. We are part of the trend. Yet, whatever we call it, a self-modifying existence is common to increasingly large fragments of our lives (whether we are being called users, players, or customers). What has been learned from games can and should be used to envision more of our world than the odd hours occupied by the actual playing of games.

When I began working on this project, it seemed that configurable being was becoming the norm throughout the web: in online shopping, search, and content-based sites of all kinds. In shopping, collaborative filtering would develop alongside robust profiles on sites like Netflix and Amazon. In search, social search would consider site visits and recommendations from ‘friends’ of the user’s profile (Halavais 2009, 160–80). In other sites, your identity would influence what you could see and do, as it does on Yelp and Flickr. Now Facebook has become more central, at least in the United States, and online identity has been consolidated. As of 2010, there are 500 million Facebook accounts of an estimated 2 billion internet users (‘New Facebook Statistics’ 2010). But size isn’t even Facebook’s real advantage. What it actually provides is capacities for those who exist on its site to perceive and act beyond its own pages. Facebook has overtaken the fledgling identity systems that might have blossomed on many sites, turning each site into another modular set of capacities for Facebook accounts.

Web 2.0 technologies have made possible the consolidation of empowered identity. Web 2.0 has been the fanciful name for the enclosure, intensification, and advancement of hosting, visiting, content sharing, and linking together. Flickr, Digg, GoogleMaps, and Meebo are examples. The basic technologies of web 2.0 are old, but they’ve been repackaged so that everyone can play for free, while only some reap the economic benefits (Scholz 2008). Where hypertext browsers might once have offered other ways to traverse the web, new systems simulate the openness of the internet more reliably, with better interfaces, and more standardization of content. We have preformatted pages with nice layout instead of homepages forever under construction and attractive buttons instead of blue text hyperlinks. Cross-platform APIs and embedded content make user action no longer dependent on the hosting site; users can connect directly to (what they experience as) modular applications. User capacities (such as apps) open to new worlds (analogous to the earlier example of wielding); getting Lexulous for Facebook (Agarwalla and Agarwalla 2008) lets you see which of your friends are top scorers at the game and gives you a chance to compete with them. The social web centers on systems of identity because action on various sites (off Facebook servers) can be viewed on Facebook and can appear as authored by a Facebook identity. This is great for user-generated content, where content that would be mundane becomes interesting because you know the person who made it; amateur producers can use their social network as an audience, and any user can list, like, or share content they anticipate their network would enjoy (e.g. cat videos for cat fanciers). As a result, web 2.0 immerses each user in an individualized perspective, rather than leaving them to drift as they surf strange pages and take on new worldviews on the go (Langlois et al. 2009; Tully 2006).

Introduced in April 2010, Facebook’s Instant Personalization is a customization package for partner sites that carries this theme further. Websites can provide an individualized experience without developing their own profile system. What Instant Personalization does is, first, add some old Facebook features to existing sites (share, like, or comment on partner’s pages) and, second, show activity of a Facebook user’s friends on the partner site (what restaurants my friends have reviewed, what links they have shared). For Facebook users, the feature opens up new social worlds into which their capacities can reach, thus making other sites more interesting⁶. For business, this increases the value of partner sites to Facebook-using visitors and gives sites marketing information on these visitors.

The individual’s identity, and its capacity in particular, is modular, upgradable, and configurable. The most basic capacities are common to everyone, and the system demands a certain minimum of choices be made, even if they make no difference. A wealth of additional capacities exist, as there is more to do with social networking than just browsing profiles and modifying your own. The user builds up albums of photos, tags friends, tweaks privacy settings, posts videos, reads friends’ shared stories, looks through friends’ albums, writes notes, takes personality quizzes with one app, compares friends with another app, and works her virtual farm in another. All this builds up the user as a character. The mechanisms here are different from DRPGs because they are not statistical or probabilistic. They systematize fantasies of having fun and exciting conversations with diverse and beautiful friends (faces are a major part of Facebook’s aesthetics), writing witty prose, or being a respected and appreciated photographer by employing already existing techniques of chat, comments, micro-blogging, photo posts, image tagging, embedded content, and a whole array of apps that connect to the rest of the web. The meritocratic system here works both by accumulation (friends and photos of oneself) and by the very fact that to be someone you must always do something, usually something recent⁷. Users are no longer just a username and password; they must always choose and are constantly encouraged to expand their capacities and participate more.

There are good local reasons for this enforced blossoming of individualism. A password holds individuals responsible for their possibly mischievous actions. When this was a profile’s sole function (most of the history of computing), profiles were not elaborate. When the lifeblood of a system is user-generated content, users must be constantly encouraged to generate quality content in great quantity. Making users comfortable with the environment and concerned about their reputation helps stimulate the community (Jackson-Wilkinson 2009). As of 2010, internet users in the US spent an average of seven hours per month on Facebook (Nielsen 2010). This should mean increased revenue, but how you turn sociability into profit remains an open question. On-site ad revenue (the obvious route) has not proved very effective for social networks. Another approach is to gather information that could be useful for marketing (something Instant Personalization and Facebook Deals offer to partners)⁸. Facebook will no doubt continue to try turning users’ investment in their identities into profit streams, by whatever means necessary. All this is quite contrary to the web’s much-discussed anonymity and marks a break in how the internet is used and, therefore, also in how it should be studied.

To be online is not just to browse. It is to be and to act, with those actions often modifying one’s own being. In web 2.0, just looking around becomes an action and this action is authored by a developing identity. The mechanisms of this being, which continue to be worked out, systematically animate social fantasies not of slaying ogres with magic spells, but of being a busy person with an active social life who stays up-to-date with the rapidly changing world. You do not just imagine this persona or role-play this character; you play the online identity game to act the part.

Generalization of a form of being does not happen by a single mechanism or for a single reason. Most obviously, it takes place when developers intentionally apply the principle from one case to another. It also happens when a particular approach can be deployed to handle a situation, as configurable being can handle modular levels of action in a system; or again, when the method provides customization that attracts customers and increases system use; or when customers expect and strongly prefer it. There is no simple explanation rooted in contemporary culture for the generalization of configurable being. To reduce it to an expression of a diagrammatic summary of macro-social conditions (e.g. capitalism, neo-liberalism, or disciplinary society) would be to miss both the specificity of the technology and the variety of situations where it is put to use.

A technology makes itself useful and is put to different uses. It is not invented once or taken up overnight. There are always local attractors, specific assemblages. Role-playing needed a way to insist on the meaningfulness of characteristics to animate fantasy scenarios with friends. In gaming, DRPG elements proliferate for reasons particular to game design, player culture, and dynamics within the industry. Similarly, configurable being online becomes real on account of forces of sociability, fantasy, pleasure, security, profit, and powerful hype. Despite differences between the exact being one plays, we spend increasing amounts of time in a role that perceives, acts, socializes, and appears through modular and configurable functions. This is not an attack on freedom, but the nature of an opportunity at something that is widely understood as pleasurable and empowering. It is simply an opportunity that is now available to be and to act.

1 There are RPGs where much of the character is determined at the outset (notably some Japanese games and older games). Though my focus is not on these games, they still almost always provide a character that must be modified for the player to progress, and they require player commitment to the character as if the player had chosen them.

3 Two important exceptions are social organizations within RPG worlds, which may make their decisions on whatever grounds, and awards scripted into the RPG narrative that select the character without the character doing anything to merit the magic sword, sacred duty, etc.

4 As games progress, they often require the player to understand the game more deeply and employ more clever strategies. Experience points are not the only force driving the game as an experience of progress, though they are a major one.

5 Gaming capital offers one way to understand how players influence one another (Apperley 2009, 74–8).

6 It is quite possible that the content of our own social network will not always remain so interesting for users. Communities based on shared interest rather than offline personal relations have, with the growing enthusiasm for social networking, receded for now.

7 Facebook needs users (your friends) to provide its ‘social’ service, so meritocracy is less vicious at encouraging hardcore use.

8 Introduced November 2010, Facebook Deals integrates coupons, groupons, charity offers, and promotions into Facebook.

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From D&D to DRPG

Capacity for Identity

Meritocracy and Education

Configurable Being Generalized