Alone Together (41 page)
Authors: Sherry Turkle
Laboratory research suggests that how we look and act in the virtual affects our behavior in the real.
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I found this to be the case in some of my clinical studies of role-playing games. Experimenting with behavior in online worlds—for example, a shy man standing up for himself—can sometimes help people develop a wider repertoire of real-world possibilities.
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On this subject, I have also said that virtual experience has the greatest chance of being therapeutic if it becomes grist for the mill in a therapeutic relationship. In Adam’s case, there is no evidence that online accomplishment is making him feel better about himself in the real. He says he is letting other things “slip away”—Erin, the girl he liked on the word game; his job; his hopes of singing and writing songs and screenplays. None of these can compete with his favorite simulations, which he describes as familiar and comforting, as places where he feels “special,” both masterful and good.
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I found this to be the case in some of my clinical studies of role-playing games. Experimenting with behavior in online worlds—for example, a shy man standing up for himself—can sometimes help people develop a wider repertoire of real-world possibilities.
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On this subject, I have also said that virtual experience has the greatest chance of being therapeutic if it becomes grist for the mill in a therapeutic relationship. In Adam’s case, there is no evidence that online accomplishment is making him feel better about himself in the real. He says he is letting other things “slip away”—Erin, the girl he liked on the word game; his job; his hopes of singing and writing songs and screenplays. None of these can compete with his favorite simulations, which he describes as familiar and comforting, as places where he feels “special,” both masterful and good.
Success in simulation tempers Adam’s sense of disappointment with himself. He says that it calms him because, in games, he feels that he is “creating something new.” But this is creation where someone has already been. Like playing the guitar in The Beatles: Rock Band, it is not creation but the
feeling
of creation. It suits Adam’s purposes. He says he is feeling “less energetic than ever before.” The games make him feel that he is living a better life. He can be adventurous and playful because the games present “a format that has already been established, that you don’t have to create. You’re creating something as you go along with it, but it’s a format that provides you with all the grunt work already, it’s already there, it’s set up, and you just got this little area—it’s a fantasy, it’s a form of wish fulfillment. And you can go and do that.” And yet, in gaming he finds something exhilarating and
his
.
feeling
of creation. It suits Adam’s purposes. He says he is feeling “less energetic than ever before.” The games make him feel that he is living a better life. He can be adventurous and playful because the games present “a format that has already been established, that you don’t have to create. You’re creating something as you go along with it, but it’s a format that provides you with all the grunt work already, it’s already there, it’s set up, and you just got this little area—it’s a fantasy, it’s a form of wish fulfillment. And you can go and do that.” And yet, in gaming he finds something exhilarating and
his
.
Adam describes his creativity in Civilization as “just the right amount of creating. It’s not like you really have to do something new. But it feels new.... It’s a very comforting kind of thing, this repetitive sort of thing, it’s like, ‘I’m building a city—oh, yes, I built a city.’” These are feelings of accomplishment on a time scale and with a certainty that the real cannot provide.
This is the sweet spot of simulation: the exhilaration of creativity without its pressures, the excitement of exploration without its risks. And so Adam plays on, escaping to a place where he does not have to think beyond the game. A jumble of words comes out when he describes how he feels when he puts the game aside: “gravity, weight, movement away, bathroom, food, television.” And then, without the game, there comes a flurry of unwelcome questions: “What am I going to do next? What are the things I really ought to be doing? . . . Off the game, I feel the weight of depression because I have to write my resume.”
Although Adam fears he will soon be out of work, he has not been writing songs or a screenplay. He has not finished his resume or filed his taxes. These things feel overwhelming. The games are reassuring, their payoff guaranteed. Real life takes too many steps and can always disappoint.
Adam gets what he wants from the games, but he no longer feels himself—or at least a self he admires—without them. Outside the games, he is soon to be jobless. Outside the games, he is unable to act on goals, even for so small a thing as a trip to the accountant. The woman he considers his most intimate friend has moved on to a different game. Adam’s thoughts turn back to the people with whom he had once played Quake. Their conversations had been mostly about game strategy, but Adam says, “That doesn’t matter. There’s something about the electronic glow that makes people connected in some weird way.” Adam feels down. His real life is falling apart. And so he moves back, toward the glow.
TEMPTATIONWe are tempted, summoned by robots and bots, objects that address us as if they were people. And just as we imagine things as people, we invent ways of being with people that turn them into something close to things.
In a program called Chatroulette, you sit in front of your computer screen and are presented with an audio and video feed of a randomly chosen person, also logged into the game. You can see, talk to, and write each other in real time. The program, written by a Russian high school student, was launched in November 2009. By the following February, it had 1.5 million users. This translates into about thirty-five thousand people logged onto Chatroulette at any one time. Some are in their kitchens, cooking, and want some company; some are masturbating; some are looking for conversation. Some are simply curious about who else is out there. In only a few months, Chatroulette had contributed a new word to the international lexicon: “nexting.” This is the act of moving from one online contact to another by hitting the “next” button on your screen. On average, a Chatroulette user hits “next” every few seconds.
My own first session on Chatroulette took place in March 2010, during a class I teach at MIT. A student suggested it as a possible paper topic, and in our wired classroom, it took only a few seconds for me to meet my first connection. It was a penis. I hit next, and we parted company. Now my screen filled with giggling teenage girls. They nexted me. My third connection was another penis, this one being masturbated. Next. My fourth was a group of young Spanish men in a dimly lit room. They seemed to be having dinner by candlelight. They smiled and waved. Encouraged, I said, “Hi!” and was mortified by their friendly response, typed out: “Hello, old woman!” My class, protective, provided moral support and moved into the frame. I felt, of course, compelled to engage the Spaniards in lively conversation—old woman indeed! No one wanted to “next” on. But I needed to get back to other class business, so the Spaniards were made to disappear.
Chatroulette takes things to an extreme: faces and bodies become objects. But the mundane business of online life has its own reductions. The emoticon emotions of texting signal rather than express feelings. When we talk to artificial intelligences in our game worlds, we speak a language that the computer will be able to parse. Online, it becomes more difficult to tell which messages come from programs because we have taught ourselves to sound like them.
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At the extreme—and the extreme is in sight—when we sound like programs, we are perhaps less shocked when they propose themselves as interlocutors. In science fiction terms, as a friend put it to me, “We can’t identify the replicants because the people, inexplicably, took to acting like them.”
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At the extreme—and the extreme is in sight—when we sound like programs, we are perhaps less shocked when they propose themselves as interlocutors. In science fiction terms, as a friend put it to me, “We can’t identify the replicants because the people, inexplicably, took to acting like them.”
As I have been writing this book, many people who enjoy computer games have asked me, “What’s my problem? What’s wrong with Scrabble or chess played online or against a computer? What’s wrong with the new and artistic world of computer games?” Nothing is wrong with them. But looking to games for amusement is one thing. Looking to them for a life is another. As I have said, with robots, we are alone and imagine ourselves together. On networks, including game worlds, we are together but so lessen our expectations of other people that we can feel utterly alone. In both cases, our devices keep us distracted. They provide the sense of safety in a place of excluding concentration. Some call it the “zone.”
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Psychologist Mihaly Csíkszentmihalyi examines the idea of “zone” through the prism of what he calls “flow,” the mental state in which a person is fully immersed in an activity with focus and involvement.
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In the flow state, you have clear expectations and attainable goals. You concentrate on a limited field so that anxiety dissipates and you feel fully present. Flow would capture how Rudy, eighteen, describes the pleasure of computer games: “I like the game best if you get sucked in. That’s why I like playing single-player, not online, because you can get sucked into a character. There’s this whole different world you can pretend to be in, pretty much. That’s why it’s different from a movie. When you’re watching a movie, you’re watching all the things happening, but when you’re playing a video game, you’re inside of it, and you can become the character you’re playing as. It feels like you’re there.”
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In the flow state, you have clear expectations and attainable goals. You concentrate on a limited field so that anxiety dissipates and you feel fully present. Flow would capture how Rudy, eighteen, describes the pleasure of computer games: “I like the game best if you get sucked in. That’s why I like playing single-player, not online, because you can get sucked into a character. There’s this whole different world you can pretend to be in, pretty much. That’s why it’s different from a movie. When you’re watching a movie, you’re watching all the things happening, but when you’re playing a video game, you’re inside of it, and you can become the character you’re playing as. It feels like you’re there.”
In the flow state, you are able to act without self-consciousness. Overstimulated, we seek out constrained worlds. You can have this experience at a Las Vegas gambling machine or on a ski slope. And now, you can have it during a game of Civilization or World of Warcraft
.
You can have it playing The Beatles: Rock Band. You can have it on Second Life. And it turns out, you can have it when texting or e-mailing or during an evening on Facebook. All of these are worlds that compel through their constraints, creating a pure space where there is nothing but its demands. It is flow that brings so many of us the experience of sitting down to do a few e-mails in the morning, just to “clear the decks” for a day of work, and then finding ourselves, five hours later, shocked that the day is half gone and no work has been done at all.
.
You can have it playing The Beatles: Rock Band. You can have it on Second Life. And it turns out, you can have it when texting or e-mailing or during an evening on Facebook. All of these are worlds that compel through their constraints, creating a pure space where there is nothing but its demands. It is flow that brings so many of us the experience of sitting down to do a few e-mails in the morning, just to “clear the decks” for a day of work, and then finding ourselves, five hours later, shocked that the day is half gone and no work has been done at all.
“I have to do my e-mail,” says Clara, a thirty-seven-year-old accountant, looking down at her BlackBerry during a lunch break. “It’s very tense,” she says, “but it’s also relaxing. Because when I’m doing it, that’s all there is.”
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In her study of slot machine gambling in Las Vegas, anthropologist Natasha Schüll argues that Americans face too many choices, but they are not real choices.
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They provide the illusion of choice—just enough to give a sense of overload, but not enough to enable a purposeful life. To escape, gamblers flee to a machine zone where the goal is not to win but to be. Gambling addicts simply want to stay in the game, comfortable in a pattern where other things are shut out. To make her point, Schüll cites my work on the psychology of video games.
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From the earliest days, video game players were less invested in winning than in going to a new psychic place where things were always a bit different, but always the same. The gambler and video game player share a life of contradiction: you are overwhelmed, and so you disappear into the game. But then the game so occupies you that you don’t have room for anything else.
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In her study of slot machine gambling in Las Vegas, anthropologist Natasha Schüll argues that Americans face too many choices, but they are not real choices.
12
They provide the illusion of choice—just enough to give a sense of overload, but not enough to enable a purposeful life. To escape, gamblers flee to a machine zone where the goal is not to win but to be. Gambling addicts simply want to stay in the game, comfortable in a pattern where other things are shut out. To make her point, Schüll cites my work on the psychology of video games.
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From the earliest days, video game players were less invested in winning than in going to a new psychic place where things were always a bit different, but always the same. The gambler and video game player share a life of contradiction: you are overwhelmed, and so you disappear into the game. But then the game so occupies you that you don’t have room for anything else.
When online life becomes your game, there are new complications. If lonely, you can find continual connection. But this may leave you more isolated, without real people around you. So you may return to the Internet for another hit of what feels like connection. Again, the Shakespeare paraphrase comes to mind: we are “consumed with that which we were nourished by.”
“I’m trying to write,” says a professor of economics. “My article is due. But I’m checking my e-mail every two minutes. And then, the worst is when I change the setting so that I don’t have to check the e-mail. It just comes in with a ‘ping.’ So now I’m like Pavlov’s dog. I’m sitting around, waiting for that ping. I should ignore it. But I go right to it.” An art critic with a book deadline took drastic measures: “I went away to a cabin. And I left my cell phone in the car. In the trunk. My idea was that maybe I would check it once a day. I kept walking out of the house to open the trunk and check the phone. I felt like an addict, like the people at work who huddle around the outdoor smoking places they keep on campus, the outdoor ashtray places. I kept going to that trunk.” It is not unusual for people to estimate that when at work, but taken up by search, surfing, e-mail, photos, and Facebook, they put in double the amount of hours to accommodate the siren of the Web.
Our neurochemical response to every ping and ring tone seems to be the one elicited by the “seeking” drive, a deep motivation of the human psyche.
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Connectivity becomes a craving; when we receive a text or an e-mail, our nervous system responds by giving us a shot of dopamine. We are stimulated by connectivity itself. We learn to require it, even as it depletes us. A new generation already suspects this is the case. I think of a sixteen-year-old girl who tells me, “Technology is bad because people are not as strong as its pull.”
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Connectivity becomes a craving; when we receive a text or an e-mail, our nervous system responds by giving us a shot of dopamine. We are stimulated by connectivity itself. We learn to require it, even as it depletes us. A new generation already suspects this is the case. I think of a sixteen-year-old girl who tells me, “Technology is bad because people are not as strong as its pull.”
Her remark reminds me of Robin, twenty-six, a young woman in advertising who complains that her life has been swallowed by the demands of e-mail. When I first meet her, she has what she describes as a “nervous rash” and says she is going on a retreat in western Canada to “detox from my e-mail.” When I run into her three months later, there has been no retreat. She has found a doctor who diagnosed her rash as eczema. She explains that it can be brought on by stress, so surely e-mail had its role to play. But there is a pill she can take and a cream she can apply. And if she does all of this, she can stay online. It is easier to fix the eczema than to disconnect.
For many people, the metaphor of addiction feels like the only possible way to describe what is going on. I will have more to say about this later. For now, it must be given its due. Adam, whose only current passion is playing Civilization, says, “I’ve never taken opiates, but I imagine it’s an electronic version of that. I guess television’s that way too, but this is an opiate, or a numbing kind of thing. And you can find yourself satisfied in doing that.”
At first Adam describes Civilization as enhancing. “There are diplomatic wins, conquests, victories.” But he moves quickly to a language of compulsion. His achievements in the game—from instituting universal suffrage to building cultural wonders—seem dosed, dispensed like a drug designed to keep him hooked. Game success is fed to him in a way that “makes it hard to stop playing.” He says,
You just gotta keep having more popcorn, more potato chips. So what keeps the taste going? Well, I gotta achieve these little various things. . . . One city is building another riflement ... or you want universal suffrage. But, once you get universal suffrage, there’s like . . . [makes a booming noise] “Universal suffrage has been built in Washington,” and they show this great bronzed image.... You get this reward of this image that you normally don’t see. It’s a very comforting kind of thing, this repetitive sort of thing.
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