drive relationships, not user-name/password-based authentication.

The concept of online subjectivity has already been developed. For example, Sherry Turkle explores the notion, using her experiences as a clinical psychologist to show how virtual worlds empower people to become and explore alternative selves [ 2]. A shy high schooler and social outcast, for example, becomes a virtual prom king, cultivating self-confidence and learning the social skills required to interact with the opposite sex. In a more pessimistic response, Lisa Nakamura observes after her research in MUDs that often when people explore the cultural Other, they are more likely to act as tourists of stereotypes [ 3]. So, for example, the player who takes on the role of a samurai or geisha does not, in fact, learn anything about the Japanese experience, but rather lives in and promulgates Western stereotypes of Japanese caricatures.

Both Turkle and Nakamura are alike in describing online subjectivities, where avatars do not truthfully represent stable real-life identities, but rather where players and their avatars together become other than what they were (whether through growth or degeneration). Borrowing a notion from philosopher and sociologist Michel Foucault, we might compare an online subjectivity to the virtual self as a work of art, where the resulting subjectivity is unique and yet also a performance, an event, a happening rather than a thing [ 4, 5]. As Tseëlon writes on masquerade, another promising metaphor of the player-avatar relationship in virtual worlds, “the performa-

tive model obliterates the distance between the ‘person’ and the ‘act.’ The act becomes part of the stylistic device that produces the substance: performance is identity [ 6].”

In this view avatars are not images or characters radically separated from the “real” players; they are aspects of players’ real-life identities played out on virtual stages, not unlike the way the same people might “perform” at frat parties or wedding receptions or in classrooms and restaurants.

laws, taboos, socially accepted boundaries) to regulate intimate behavior.

This particular combination— diminished physical relations, heightened symbolic interaction, and diminished social regulation—leads to practices of intimacy that perhaps can be best described as aestheticized. In other words, the diminished physical aspect is compensated for by heightened imagination, facilitated both by the symbolic richness and convenient manipulability of avatars and by the weakening of social taboos against nontraditional sexual expressions. Foucault makes a similar argument in claiming that creative sexual experimentation and innovation in the 1960s came about because all the energy and imagination that had hitherto been channeled into courtship in traditional mar-riage-based societies needed new outlets at a time when casual sex was conveniently available [ 8]. Stated more abstractly, the recent history of sex in the West is, among other things, a history of user-generated identity performance, and with it, experience design. Virtual worlds are simply another stage where this process takes place.

Players reenact human practices of intimacy in ways that are appropriate to virtual worlds. This can be seen not only in the obvious areas of online prostitution and cybersex but also in practices of everyday intimacy, such as the closeness of two friends. Second Life avatars often greet each other with a virtual hug, one of the first user-created animations we ever saw in Second Life and one of the most pervasive to this day. Clearly,

[ 2] Turkle, S. Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. Ne w York: Touchstone,1995.

[ 3] Nakamura, L. Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet. Ne w York: Routledge, 2002.

[ 4] Foucault, M. The Care of the Self. Vol. 3 of The History of Sexuality. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage, 1986.

Emergent Practices of Online Intimacy If virtual-world users are cultivating online subjectivities, then it follows that these subjectivities have, at least in the broadest sense, sexualities, because players bring their expectations, desires, and phobias in-world with them; and that these contribute to the performance of their identities. Camille Paglia argues that human sexuality has two fundamental groundings: nature and culture [ 7]. In nature, sexuality is a physical force, chaotic, even ruthless. In culture, it is carefully conditioned, via explicit laws, taboos, and unconscious yet shared sexual scripts. Compared with real life, these forces are also present online, but they play out in different ways: The physical intensity of sex is diminished (which is not to say absent); partners often never meet in physical space. The symbolic aspect is vastly enhanced because avatars, themselves constituted from symbols and rhetorical forms, mediate interaction. Finally, virtual worlds themselves have considerably fewer control mechanisms (e.g.,

[ 5] Wyschogrod, E.. “Heidegger, Foucault, and the Askeses of Self-Transformation.” In Foucault and Heidegger: Critical Encounters, edited by A. Milchman and A. Rosenberg, 276–94. Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 2003.

[ 6] Tseëlon, E. “Introduction: Masquerade and Identities.” In Masquerade and Identities: Essays on Gender, Sexuality, and Marginality, edited by Efrat Tseëlon, 1–17. New York: Routledge, 2001.

[ 7] Paglia, C. Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson. New York: Vintage, 1991.

[ 8] Foucault, M. “Sexual Choice, Sexual Act.” Interview and translation by James O’Higgins. In Foucault Live: Collected Interviews, 1961–1984, edited by Sylvère Lotringer, 211–32. New York: Semiotext(e), 1989.

September + October 2008