Trying to Walk a Tightrope Toddling like a 2 Year Old ...

This is what doing fieldwork is like.

For every social situation there are cultural norms only some of which I know and even fewer that I understand.  There is body language that I cannot read; that I unfortunately do not realize I cannot read until after I misread it. 

When in doubt I tend to fall back on the politest action my American brain can conjure...but oh have I learned how bad that can be. Yet what else can I do?

Yesterday, a friend gave me some good advise. "Learn your place," he said, "This is a patriarchal society. If you learn your place within this system and act accordingly you will have more luck."

"I know this before"

I have read so much on patriarchy that it seems silly to me that I should have so many problems... and yet, I was totally unprepared for life in this type of social system. Even considering what I have read, where exactly does an unmarried 20-something year old woman fit in? Then add in that I smoke openly (which only men do - though women here do in fact smoke) and I openly play video games (another dirty little secret for many people).  

I do not want to give the wrong impression.  No one here is mean to me.  Sometimes people frustrate me, but I get the distinct impression that I frustrate others just as often. Living in Asia is like learning to walk all over again.  Even my "common sense" works against me here. Sometimes I am grateful that I look foreign because I know that lowers people’s expectations of me, but I don’t want it to be like that forever. 

"So I ran around naked and shot at people..."

I was sitting upstairs in the common room the other day with 2 residents and a tourist (I live in a guest house at the moment).  I was talking about my Sims game, when the tourist mentions that he once tried Second Life too. (Yes I know that Sims and Second Life are not the same game.) 

He said that he had seen a news-documentary on the game and that the program had said something to the effect of: In Second Life you can be whatever you always wanted to be.  With this in mind he decided to start up an account and then says, "So I ran around naked for 2 weeks and shot at people."

I couldn’t help but laugh, after which the tourists says, "Yeah so I got kicked out of a lot of places and then got bored so I didn’t play anymore."  "I’m sure you did," was all I could think of in response.  At this point the resident (and also a gamer) sitting next to me explained to the tourist that Second Life was more of a social game and he should try a game like WoW or a first person shooter.  The tourist explained that he knew that and that he did actually talk to some people, but then reiterated the tag line from the TV program about "being whatever you want to be."

The gamer sitting next to me, a generation older than the tourist and I, just shook his head, looked at me and then the tourist, and said, "kids these days."

Report on the Sims Experiment

So I have been playing the Sims now for a little while.  Due to my language constraints (and sometimes my own laziness of not wanting to deal with my Chinese dictionary) I have restarted the game now 3 times when I get stuck.  Despite this, it looks like it has been helping based on the, albeit anecdotal, evidence.

For example, I met the friend of a friend a couple weeks ago while out with a big group of people.  (During this time the language used was more English than Chinese due to the varying level of language ability of the group as a whole.) We had a good time and see we added each other as friends on Facebook and chatted through text messages.  We conversed in a mix of Chinese and English, but using more Chinese than English, because I need to practice Chinese and his English isn’t quite fluent.

After about a week of chatting via text we met up and hung out in person.  After only a short time into the conversation he expressed his surprise at my low level of verbal communication ability in comparison to my written ability. My only explanation is that it must be the Sims.

The Sims game uses written Chinese, but like all versions, the avatars do not speak an actual language.  Therefore, when I play I am being exposed to written Chinese, but not verbal. I further believe this to be a result of playing Sims because although I am still taking Chinese classes, the classes do not emphasis writing and therefore are unlikely to be contributing to a disparity between my written and verbal abilities.

In short, it seems that playing the Sims in Chinese was a good idea.  I’ll keep playing and see if this continues to unfold in the vein.

The Universal Language of Nintendo

I was having dinner at a friend’s house a couple nights ago, and of course, I tried to bring up the topic of video games. This was a little difficult, however, for two reasons. The first reason was due to the Taiwanese sense of gamer shame that I have blogged about here before. The second problem was communication.

My Chinese is not yet fluent and neither is my friend’s English. To make things more complicated, game titles (and movie titles and other pop culture references for that matter) are often not directly translated. So even if I knew the words, for example, "world," "of," and "warcraft," saying them in Chinese doesn’t make any sense to the person I am talking to.

My friend, like most Taiwanese I have spoken with, told me that he doesn’t play games now, but that he used to. He tried to tell me about a console he had as a child, but wasn’t sure what the English name for it was, so he tried to describe it using hand gestures.

He held his hands out to show me the approximate size of the machine, which of course isn’t much help since most consoles are roughly of similar size. He then says, "You know when you play you have to..." and then he pantomimes taking a cartridge out of the system, blowing on it, and then putting it back in.

"Nintendo! Of course!" I exclaim while loling, "Everyone knows the original Nintendo."

With this one simple gesture, the two of us found a common history from which to relate to each other. Our conversation had been a little strained before this moment, but the next couple hours were filled with effortlessly reminiscing about the good old days when we didn’t have to work and when saving the princess was the hardest thing in the world.

Bots = People?

I was having an interesting conversation this evening about Team Fortress 2.  The man I was speaking with was describing his experiences playing against bots (essentially a single-player version) versus playing multiplayer against other people when he uttered the phrase, "It is really no different from playing against people."

I interrupted him right there to ask if him if he had actually said that... he had. The dumbfounded expression on my face must have asked every question running through my head at that moment because without further verbal provocation on my part he went on to explain why.

The bots were programmed to be funny and interactive and so it was just like playing with people, he told me. 

I continued to stare at him in confusion.  I just couldn’t wrap my head around this idea.  I have played single player games that I have enjoyed, but never have any of them felt the same to me as playing a multiplayer game against or with other people.

It reminded me, however, of something a friend had once told me.  This friend had spontaneously gquit while I happened to be sitting behind him chatting.  I was aghast and asked him why he had done that after having played with this group of people for so long.  He calmly explained that these were really just characters in the game to him and that he had only stayed with them for as long as he did because they had provided him with the game support he needed. He left in that moment because he didn’t think he needed them anymore. 

I asked him whether he had any friends in the guild, and responded by reiterating the point he had made earlier - these weren’t really people as far as he was concerned and so he really didn’t care if they had any reaction to his sudden gquit.

Both of these people were casual gamers and not particularly what one would colloquially call a "social butterfly." Maybe that has something to do with the attitude.  I certainly did not find anything like this in any of the WoW guilds I played with, but then again all of them were either hardcore or based on irl social connections.  So maybe being hardcore is a positive thing? The more one plays the more social they are.

Do Taipei Expats = FFXI? Part 3: Temporality and Social Risk

I think it was the lack of a long history of shared experiences with my FFXI guild that accounted for some of the social patterns that I witnessed there. When guildmates arranged meetings with each other they were essentially making arrangements with strangers or very new acquaintances.  Therefore, there were little to no feelings of obligation or any real accountability to encourage people to follow through. Whereas in my WoW guild, there were both obligatory feelings and accountability that could potentially follow a person through the game and beyond.

In Taipei, the vast majority of foreigners I have met fall into just 1 of 2 categories: Chinese language student or English language teacher. The students are mostly here for 1 semester to a year, and the English teachers often sign one year contracts. On occasion someone will stay longer or talk about settling in Taipei permanently, but most often a foreigner’s time here is expected to be temporary. This expectation is reaffirmed frequently in the way in which people talk about “back home.”

The temporary nature of this community then is not unlike the FFXI guild. The guild, being a very new community, lacked deep interpersonal connections. In Taipei there has been an expat community for years, but any one given foreigner is likely to be a new arrival and is not likely to stay. So not only does a foreigner here lack roots, but it is known (or assumed) that they will not stay here to establish roots. This may then explain the lack of a sense of obligation to others in the community and a lack of accountability.  Whatever bad blood may come between two people, the likelihood that either one or both will leave at anytime reduces the social risk to both.

Going back home becomes akin to logging off. At anytime a player can log off and walk away from their computer if they are having a problem. This is not to say that this is how people in my FFXI guild always dealt with their problems, but the possibility existed and was sometimes used. Many of the expats I have met keep just enough money set aside to buy a plane ticket home, thus always having the option to leave. This in turn further supports the temporality of the community. 

Do Taipei Expats = FFXI? Part 2: Foundations and Expectations

The first MMO I ever played was FFXI, and being the newbie that I was, I joined with a social guild that had no hardcore aspirations. Even though this guild was social in nature, people still preferred to team up with guildmates rather than join pugs, and so I would occasionally make plans to be online at a certain time to group with guildmates for whatever particular goal we were all after (usually simple grinding).

I quickly learned, however, that just because someone says they will be online doesn’t mean that they will be. In fact, the act of making plans seemed only marginally more useful than randomly logging on and hoping there would be people available.

This was very different from my next guild experience in WoW, where I joined with a long established group of people (the group was centered on a website and collectively moved from game to game).

In this guild, when someone said they were going to be somewhere it was safe to assume that they would be there. If something unexpected came up to prevent someone’s presence, the group would be informed through one of the various communication channels the guild had available.

Given the differences in these two guilds, I believe that was the deeper level of shared experiences (i.e. the longer history) of the WoW guild that led them to be more socially (and emotionally) interconnected and accountable to each other. This is not to say that the FFXI guild did not have shared experiences, but this particular social group was very young and thus had not yet had enough time to establish strong bonds.

This is not unlike the culture of the Taipei expats that I have met. Granted, I have different expectations of different people, established over time as I get to know them; but it is often the case that if I have plans with someone, the chance of them following through is only marginally better maybe.