Questions of misogyny in MMORPGs are more pressing than ever.īut Clan Fahrenheit and its girl-powered mission become strangely incidental to this story - or at least, Doctorow and Wang suggest that groups of proudly female players are just as likely to be corrupted by the game as their male counterparts. A controversy known as GamerGate erupted this summer and rages on, sparked by a campaign of online harassment against a female developer whose games dealt with social issues.
The group, Clan Fahrenheit, only accepts girls who play as female avatars - a rare occurrence in an online realm where girls are always on their guard against unsavory elements, Liza tells us.Īlthough Doctorow wrote “Anda’s Game,” the short story that forms the basis for “In Real Life,” in 2004, this is a timely tale to tell. An Arizona teenager named Anda Bridge, inspired by a school visit from an older gamer named Liza the Organizer, joins Liza’s all-woman gamer group within Coarsegold Online, a fictional MMORPG with upward of 10 million players. Is this fair? What can be done about it? Cory Doctorow and Jen Wang ask these questions in their brief but layered graphic novel “In Real Life.”Īt first, Doctorow and Wang seem to be spinning a tale of female empowerment. Over the last decade, massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) like World of Warcraft have broken down the barriers between millions of players around the world they’ve also created strange new occupations such as gold farmers - menial workers, mostly in the developing world, paid a pittance to gather in-game items for wealthier players. Now look at what the Internet has wrought.
Anyone who has suffered family fallout over an evening of Monopoly, or lost sleep over a Fantasy Football roster, knows this all too well. Their mini-marketplaces and ersatz economies are just as hard to predict as their real-world counterparts. Games have unintended consequences, good and bad.
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