I am a guy “in real life,” but I’ve always played female characters in video games. More and more people are saying that this means I’m either secretly gay/trans or a total weirdo. Can I just prefer it? —Gender Players
Dear player,
It sounds like there are a lot of people in your life, players, who think they know you better than you know yourself. I won’t pretend to have insight into your deepest self, but I can offer you some ways to think about your choice:
- Fantasy and fiction provide an escape from your usual perspective and allow you to explore perspectives other than your own. Choosing a droid as your avatar doesn’t mean you’re essentially a robot. Reading a novel that presents the world from the perspective of a female narrator does not mean that you are secretly a woman (or an “idiot”). The pioneers of the Internet hoped that digital spaces would free us from our everyday lives and allow us to experiment with assumed identities behind the veil of anonymity. This is certainly not the utopia we ended up with (instead, we are often pigeonholed by predictive engines and targeted ads). But video games still promise the masquerade ball, a place where you can put on a costume, download a new skin and pretend to be someone else for a while.
- Of course, acting and role-playing can sometimes reveal deeper desires, especially those that the conscious mind does not want to fulfill. If you feel an overwhelming sense of euphoria while playing a female character or dreaming about being the Avatar in real life, then maybe your friends are right and there’s something deeper going on.
- Gender itself, it is often said, is a “script,” a kind of performance that is socially reinforced to make people across the gender spectrum conform to the binary standard. Choosing a female character could simply be an acknowledgment of parts of yourself that you have had to repress in normal life – not necessarily a sign that you are living in the wrong body, but just evidence that your way of expressing gender has changed too narrow. An “avatar” in its original sense refers to the different forms/genders that a deity can take. The characters you choose could be a recognition of your own plurality, an attempt to embody just one of the multitudes within you.
I’m a vegetarian, but I would eat lab-grown meat. Does that make me a hypocrite? – Chicken Little
Since you aren’t disgusted by the idea of meat being grown “in a peach tree dish,” as Marjorie Taylor Greene put it, I’m assuming your vegetarianism is ethically or religiously motivated. Hence the fear of hypocrisy – but I don’t think that’s exactly the right word for what you feel. A hypocrite is someone who claims moral standards that their behavior completely contradicts, and lab meat promises, if we are to believe the hype, to be both humane and sustainable. Like many technological solutions that turn a vice into a neutral choice (clean energy, NA beer), it removes the moral calculation and relieves us of the duty to make sacrifices for a better world or a better self. You can have your happy cows and eat them too.
The hypocrisy you fear is more subtle and insidious. Maybe the idea of eating lab meat seems like a bad deal, like allowing yourself to heap verbal abuse on a chatbot. The technical fact that it “doesn’t hurt anyone” shouldn’t stop you from feeling uncomfortable about your motives and suggesting antisocial desires that would probably be better suppressed. As I’m sure you know, Chicken, it’s possible to take the Frankenmeat thought experiment into darker territory. Would you eat lab-grown human flesh? Would you eat meat that comes from your own cells or those of a baby?
If you only care about the practical consequences of your actions, you are certainly not betraying any of your values. What you Are Betrayal is a certain idea of yourself. I can imagine that you became a vegetarian not because you truly believed that your individual actions would change the world, but because you liked the idea of being someone who was willing to doing difficult things and making sacrifices for higher ideals. Perhaps abstaining made the gauntlet of mindless consumer decisions feel a little more meaningful. Perhaps it has increased your willingness to do other difficult things for moral reasons. If you focus solely on the results of your actions, you will end up constantly looking for ethical loopholes at the expense of your soul. Virtue has its own rewards, even if it is arbitrary and meaningless.
Now that AI can fake pretty much anything, I just assume that everything I see or read on a screen is fake until it turns out to be real. Is that sensible or cynical? -Incredulous Thomas
I think you’re right to have your doubts, Thomas. Their namesake, the apostle, refused to believe in the miracle of the resurrection until he saw the evidence with his own eyes. But what concrete evidence, if any, can convince us of anything in the year of our Lord 2024? Photos lie, machines hallucinate. The social sciences cannot repeat their most basic experiments. Data analytics can be used to some extent to prove virtually anything. It’s easy to feel like something has been lost, that our faith in consensus reality – or any kind of reality – is in decline.