39 :: social play :: 4/27/01
Lydia is in her room, looking at the screen, when she hears Marvin's voice from the doorway. —Are you online?
She is. She'd gone into Yahoo to check her mail and a story on protesters occupying the bombing range at Vieques grabbed her. Her dad is Puerto Rican, so she's followed the Vieques story with some interest as it's developed over the past few years.
—Um, yeah, she says to Marvin.
—You know, he says, —other people in this house need to use the phone line too, occasionally. She knows he's just being a pain in the ass for the sake of being a pain in the ass. It's theatric. Pure play. It doesn't (really) mean anything.
He strolls into her room and sits on the edge of her bed. Both he and her other roommate, Paul, tend to disregard the boundaries of personal space. She barely even notices: their ways of mutually interacting were formulated by dorm housing, an environment where the one room you're given serves as both social space and personal space. Every bed becomes a couch. She and Paul and Marvin now have a neutral room (the "living" room), which has a couch, but they haven't yet unlearned their dorm life habits. Next to him on the bed is the newest issue of The WIRE; he lies down on his side and starts flipping through it idly.
While he's paging through, he asks her: —Any mail from your boyfriend? He means Thomas, who isn't her boyfriend; they've only gone out once and they didn't even kiss. This must be (part of?) why Marvin put so much ironic emphasis on the word. But there was mail from him. I enjoyed getting together with you, it said, should we do it again soon? Maybe for the Niblock show? She wrote him back: yeah, that would be great.
—In fact, there was, she says. She's losing touch with the Vieques article: its information can no longer reach her. When the names of Puerto Rican celebrities jump out of the textual noise—Benicio del Toro; Ricky Martin —she realizes it's time to let the article go.
He keeps flipping through the magazine. —Uh huh. How come he can't just call you on the phone like a normal suitor?
She thinks on this, for like half a second. —I don't know, she says. —He has my number. (She's also tried to get Thomas interested in using an Instant Messenger client, but he seems reluctant; she's not certain why.) —I think he just prefers e-mail. And that doesn't solve your problem, anyway.
—What problem? he says.
—"Other people in this house need to use the phone, you know."
—Oh, yeah, he says.
Now she's going to lay into him a bit: more play. —Since when do you need to use the phone anyway? Calling up the game store to see if any new d20 product is in?
—You wound me, he says. And leave the d20 product out of this. What did it ever do to you?
This could be part of why Marvin and Paul lack proficiency with the basic rules of etiquette: they're both role-playing gamers. They spend lots of time mastering the social rules of various artificial worlds and probably not enough mastering the social rules of the real world. She acknowledges this on an intellectual level but doesn't particularly feel it on a gut level, not enough to turn her off to them. Perhaps, she hypothesizes, because she's spent a huge portion of her life using computers, perhaps she herself has failed to "properly" socialize. She kind of enjoys the exposure to the games-and-comics world: it seems complexly obsessive in ways that strike her as alien, but tantalizingly so. Her e-mail handle, unseen_girl, is in fact drawn from some comics that Paul showed her, about a science-fictional band, the Bulldaggers, inhabiting a world called Bugtown (which is also, somehow, inhabited by some real-world musicians: Conrad Schnitzler, the Residents). The Unseen Girl is a sometimes member of the Bulldaggers: she plays the instrument "tapes." Her contributions are contributed from a distance. This seemed appropriate for the way words are put into the net.
"Sometimes member" also describes her relationship to the fictional worlds that Paul and Marvin spend their time in. Boys, boy worlds. But in a way she loves them.
