I published my first academic essay! It’s like being a nascent, nineteen-year-old freelance journalist all over again.
“Sex as Game: Playing with the Erotic Body in Virtual Worlds” came out in Rhizomes 21: Hives and Tribes this past week. Rhizomes is an awesome experimental journal that emphasizes “migrations into new conceptual territories resulting from unpredictable juxtapositions.” Unsurprisingly, my essay is about sex in video games — specifically, how we can read sex in Second Life as itself a game, thereby gaining broader insight into the sexiness of the ludic. It’s actually a piece I wrote my senior year at Bard and have just now gotten around to revising, so I’m particularly proud. An excerpt:
“The nametag floating over Larry Francesco’s head reads “Made in Italy.” His stringy brown hair hangs across the shoulders of his leather suit. Around his neck he wears a small, black bowtie. Here in the Dream Girls night club, where he stands on the outskirts of a crowd of half-naked, dancing avatars, Larry looks strangely indecent in his pants and coat: too fully clothed. He is searching, however, for the same thing as any club-goer, “virtual” or “real”: sex. His hopes of finding a like-minded beauty to transport to a remote, romantic corner of this 3D online world have inspired him, tonight, to hit the town. In fact, that same desire – for the casual connection of interactive erotic encounters – is what inspired him to sign up for Second Life in the first place…
Though the preeminence of Second Life has recently been eclipsed by the rise of social networks, accounts from those who have ‘lived’ in Linden Lab’s micro-universe remain rich resources for thinking about larger issue of online life: sex, games, bodies, play. Experiences like Larry’s, considered in depth below, raise questions about erotic encounters that go beyond the physical. In what ways does arousal blur the boundaries between the real and the virtual – itself always a false dichotomy, as Tom Boellstorff points out in his ethnography Coming of Age in Second Life (Boellstorff, 19, 27)? Does sex between avatars represent a real, if playful, human connection? Or is it, to paraphrase those popular objections Boellstorff refutes, ‘just a game’?”
