Legal Anthropologist of Gor! — Transmedia Governance of an Online Role-Playing Community

John Carter McKnight

Thu., June 10, 2:00–3:00, Beefeater

A fan community of the works of John Norman, adventure novels set on a barbarian world of extreme male dominance over women, the Goreans mix lifestyle (living fulltime according to Gorean precepts) and role–play (acting online in socially-constructed narratives of Gorean life), both canon (by the books) and “Disney” (casual, or without the ideological extremes of canon). The Goreans form one of the largest communities in the virtual world of Second Life (SL), with estimates ranging from 20,000 to 40,000 active members, and hundreds of thousands of dollars of annual investment. Yet they are relatively unknown, their insularity shielding them from the more politically progressive mainstream of SL and from mass media attention.

This study is based on four months of intensive participant observation, as both a high-caste male scribe and a lowly slavegirl. Part one describes the governance practices of one Gorean city in SL, from citizenship training and acculturation to dispute resolution, to taxation and the regulation of commerce, to the management of ideological disputes and factionalism. A particular focus is the community’s transmedia practices: their use of web forums, the canon of Norman’s novels, authoritative non-canon works, chat programs, blogs, and other tools extrinsic to SL as components of community governance within SL.

The Gorean fan community comes from our world, one of social media, egalitarianism, and little casual violence, yet govern themselves in one aspect of their lives by radically different, and openly oppositional, precepts. Like the novels’ hero, Tarn Cabot, they are of modern Earth, but have chosen to affiliate with the polities and politics of Gor. Drawing on in-depth interviews with Goreans, veteran and new, lifestyle and Disney, part two of the study explores the boundaries of play and identity, of how Goreans navigate between their lives in liberal democracies and their lives in city-states founded on caste and slavery.

Using theories of internet governance, digital community, cyborg feminism and the immigrant experience, this study situates Goreans in the borderlands of the digital and the actual, the liberated and the enslaved, the political and the playful, of their own first and second lives.