I’ve recently become aware of Old West muds and moos that predate the historical roleplaying I’ve observed in Second Life by five years. Moos and muds are text-based virtual worlds that became popular in the early 90′s; Second Life is sometimes referred to as a “graphical mud.” So far I’m aware of two different Old West muds – 4 dimensions and Maddock.
The 4 dimensions mud reads very much like a history lesson — its text is descriptive out of necessity. In this Wild West mud, users are encouraged to roleplay – and even fight one another. Here is the description when you first enter the Old West mud:
By now “civilization” and science have changed the world considerably. There were horses and carts during the medieval era too of course, but now there are trains driven by steam engines. Robin Hood and his merry men used the longbow, which was a formidable weapon, but the ranged weapons in the Old West are much more powerful firearms, like Winchesters, revolvers and shotguns. And during no time period, before or after, has the horse had such an important role in everyday life as here.
Maddock is a fictional town in the Montana Territory set in the 1870′s. Similarly to Sigil, there has been an attempt to historicize the roleplaying within this virtual world. Their website serves as an incredible resource, documenting the (fictional) history of Maddock, events, and profiles of roleplayers, including Isolde Balcombe.
Although not exactly roleplaying, Virtual Powwow and living museums in Second Life offer a starting point for future discussions of the educational uses of historical roleplaying in virtual worlds. It may also bring together the seemingly disparate topics of this blog, including Wild West and Native American roleplaying in Second Life, visualizing history, and educational roleplaying games. The powwow itself can be contextualized within two pertinent discussions: the shifting of knowledge from experts to amateurs, and innovation vs imitation. Continue reading →
As previously mentioned, Native American roleplaying in Second Life is a very popular. In order to understand the Sigil Tribe, I’m exploring active Native American RP sims. Last night I visited La Tribu for the first time, a French-speaking Native American roleplaying sim. (Some background: I don’t speak French, so the entire time I was toggling Altavista Babelfish translating what was being said and responding. Thankfully I’ve found an in-world translation HUD that should make this much easier.) Although my French was embarrassing and my computer froze, deleting the chat logs I hoped to archive, I found a level of sophistication in the sim that’s alluring.
When teleporting to the sim, I was given a free visitor’s outfit that’s meant to historicize my character with appropriate clothing. This is a common practice in historical roleplaying sims – however there’s a social stigma associated with this clothing, it instantly identifies you as a newbie. (In a similar vein – in Sigil one of the first things I had to do was purchase a virtual horse. It was a status symbol that, once I had one, allowed me to speak to others more freely.) With tacky pants and paw print tattoos on my chest I explored.
My initial impression of La Tribu (from what I could gather with my limited comprehension of French) was that it has very rigid gender roles. My guide frequently described the activities of virtual natives in terms of gender – men do this, women do that. A first hand account from a citizen historian confirms my reactions by writing:
We are standing on top of a small hill, where a little cascade of waterfalls runs into a few, deep blue pools. This place is for women only. “Men are only allowed up here if the women invite them.” Women are not oppressed in this small French speaking tribe I’ve been invited to visit. They each have their own teepees, with which they are free to do whatever they wish. The teepees are loosely arranged in the vicinity of the common campfire, around which household chores are performed.
I have to brush up on my French, but I hope to explore this further in the near future
Before discussing historical roleplaying sims in Second Life any further, it’s important to introduce a side of Second Life that I’ve failed to acknowledge up to this point – sexual roleplaying. As one of the first subcultures to embrace Second Life, sexual roleplayers have influenced the entire Second Life culture – with BDSM references throughout the virtual world. The Wild West simulation of Sigil was started by a group of Gorean (also known as Gor) roleplayers who wanted to take a break from sexual roleplaying. As I’ve noted before, women in this Wild West roleplaying sim were sexualized – reflecting general trends within Second Life. Several other historical roleplaying sims have similar origins, including several Native American virtual tribes that I’ll introduce in the near future.
Nick Nobel, an undergraduate student at Trinity University recently wrote a paper on Sex in Online Games that begins to introduce this subculture better than most articles I’ve found. He described Gor as the following:
Gor is based on the futuristic science fiction novels of John Norman, and focuses primarily on the psychological relation between the “master” and sexual “slave.” [...] Gor was not sadomasochism, for it does not center on violence, but psychological domination and submission.
When beginning to articulate the relationship between individuals in current historical roleplaying sims, the master/slave relationship is important to keep in mind. I’m still researching the degree to which Gor influences and informs historical roleplaying in Second Life, and learning how many people in these sims identify themselves as Gorean. It offers an interesting twist to already complex power structures within history – for example Native Americans roleplayers and their relationship to Wild West roleplaying cowboys. In this world, does the D&S relationship directly correlate, or is it merely coincidental? Are cowboys dominant and natives submissive?
The most recent addition to the Sigil Archive introduces Native American roleplaying in Second Life, specifically the Sigil Tribe. There are several Native American roleplaying tribes in Second Life, including one that speaks entirely in French. I’ve uploaded a set of guidelines, as well as tribe rules that were used by the Sigil Tribe. Here’s an interesting snippet from one of the documents:
The Whites. We don’t like them. But we arn’t savages and out of control either. Whites are good for trade and weapons so we have to keep a balance to get guns and supplies. One thing though is we believe in a life for a life and this could be an issue is someone from the tribe gets themselves killed in town. Any Armed Whites coming into our lands is fair game and most likely won’t survive an encounter unless they choose to leave naked and humble. White woman often were playthings for single braves and found their womanhood a bit battered from the encounter but rarely were they killed. Children often were adopted if their parents were dead and made full members of the tribe so no mistreatment of our adopted children. All soldiors entering our lands are killed outright unless there is a treaty made. They travel in groups so once again for safty sakes don’t ever travil alone. Alone and armed is a fast way to die. Don’t expect the white men to talk first if you’re armed. Don’t go into town armed, an armed Indian is fair game in town. Going unarmed means you’re there to trade in peace.
Note: Any grammatical or spelling errors haven’t been changed from the original documents.
In her 2005 presidential address to the American Studies Association, Karen Halttunen delivered a speech that would be published in American Quarterly the following year, entitled “Groundwork: American Studies in Place.” She discussed the “disneyfication” of American place-making; the replacement of reality with an idealized vision that engenders racism and sexism. What occurs in disneyfication is the substitution of place with an idea – one that is idealized, homogenous, and limiting. Disneyfication is problematic in that it only presents a simplified version of reality. The name obviously comes from Disney, whose presentation of ideas to children has traditionally been an idealized, optimistic representation of the world that doesnt engage the realities of the world. This amounts to the filtration or censorship of ideas – ideas that fall outside a utopian vision of reality are eliminated.
I’ve been witnessing the disneyfication of historical roleplaying in Second Life. Since the closing of the first Wild West roleplaying sim, Sigil, a number of new RP sims have been created to take its place. It’s difficult to keep track of these sims – they briefly appear and then, just like Sigil, completely vanish. Their significance is not in the number of simulations that have followed, but the manner which they conduct business. Many of these new environments resemble historical amusement parks or shopping malls more than they do roleplaying environments. A good example of this is Sand Ranch, where the streets are lined with small shops selling “authentic” avatar clothing, as well as stylized clothing that can make you look like a Country singer. The historical accuracy of these environments isn’t necessarily intended nor desired – their goal is to create a profit.
Rob MacDougall recently posted a pre-history of roleplaying games that thoroughly describes its origins in far greater detail than my previous post on early war gaming and Wild West roleplaying. Studying Wild West roleplaying simulations in Second Life I’ve continuously asked myself where this pattern of behavior came from, and why people represent themselves in specific ways while roleplaying. Rob wrote the following:
There was a vogue for simulation gaming at this exact moment much bigger than the wargaming hobby we all think we know. Yeah, there were the wargamers. But there was also, at just this time, a surge of interest in using simulation games, role-plays, and similar exercises in education. A little digging in education libraries turns up literally hundreds of simulation games for use in elementary, high school, and university classrooms—and they all date from the same era.
I have a big heavy tome in front of me. Two tomes, actually: the Handbook of Social Education Simulation Gaming, published 1972. It contains hundreds of games and goes into considerable details about the rules. Some are just “educational” versions of board games: you know, like “Congressopoly†and things of that nature. Some are un-games: free-form roleplays of a sort I associate more with therapy than gaming. But a lot of them and these are clearly the ones the author of this particular handbook was most excited by [what] sound an awful lot like what we would call RPGs.
Educational roleplaying games? Educational simulations? Rob is onto something that I’ve been uncovering in my own research as well – an interest in roleplaying and simulations within education in the very early 70′s. What I find interesting is how he is studying board and “pen and paper” roleplaying games and simulations – while my own research focuses on computer simulations and roleplaying. I’m not sure the medium matters as much as the concept of using this within the classroom. Remember that in my brief outline of the origins of the Oregon Trail computer game, I explained the original version was released in 1971 – right at this same time. Coincidence? Probably not.
The question I’ve been building to the past several weeks combines this early history of roleplaying games, the Oregon Trail computer simulation’s goals of teaching history, and Wild West roleplaying in Second Life. How can history teachers use Second Life and roleplaying within virtual worlds to teach history? As I (and others, such as Rob) uncover a greater-detailed history of educational roleplaying and educational uses of simulations my gut reaction is that the use of Second Life in this manner seems completely logical. Just as the Oregon Trail computer game adapted educational simulations to the teletype machine, we can do the same with Second Life – in an environment that I would argue overcomes many traditional shortcomings of educational computer simulations.
Tombstone is a Wild West RP sim in Second Life that popped up shortly after Sigil became a ghost town. Here is a short video I put together (this was my first cinematographic attempt in SL). Take the music with a grain of salt – I thought it would be funny. Unfortunately there weren’t many active people role-playing when I was there – but I was able to capture a nice walk-through.
In 1913 H.G. Wells published Little Wars, a set of rules for playing with toy soldiers. His book would be the first in a new genre of gaming, commonly referred to as war gaming. In the 70′s, war gaming was adapted by TSR for the popular release of the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons. TSR’s second role-playing game, Boot Hill, was a Wild West RPG released the following year. While the Old West role-playing I witnessed in Second Life’s Sigil seemed very random at first glance, it proceeded a 30-year tradition of Wild West role-playing.
Eric Hotz has assembled an incredible online resource of Wild West Game Rules. The page acts as both a directory of Wild West role-playing and wargames, and also links to rules if they’re available online. There are so many games available that I’ve only begun to read about each one individually – their instructions even offer maps of how towns should be oriented and characters act. Eric owns a store called Whitewash City that sells 3D Wild West Paper/Card-Stock PDF models to use within these games. The image above is a town created using his kits.
The incredible variation in representations of historical architecture parallels the inaccuracies I’ve witnessed within Second Life – an uncompromising tendency to blend ideas of the past with modern-day architecture to create something holding salient historical traits but often out of context.
As previously mentioned, 
