Playing Dress - Up : Costumes , roleplay and imagination Women in Games 19 th - 21 st April 2007 University of Wales , Newport

In their canonical texts of game studies, both Huizinga and Caillois, each in and of his respective time, relegate dress-up dismissively to the sphere of girls’ play. Little has been written to-date on the subject; in this paper, we survey the literature on analog and digital dress-up. We argue for a deeper examination and legitimization of dress-up play as a means to infuse greater gender balance into both game studies and game design. In the West, adults are typically discouraged from playing dress-up, except in relegated and sanctioned contexts, such as Mardi Gras or masquerade parties. Practices such as Japanese “cosplay,” renaissance fairs, Live-Action Role-Playing games (LARPs), and coperformative events such as the Star Trek Conventions, DragonCon and Burning Man suggest a growing pattern of cultural practices around adult costume play. In the digital sphere, while massively multiplayer games tend to focus on team-based combat, players pay equal attention to clothing and fashion (often masked by the more masculine terminology of “gear”). The design and acquisition of virtual fashion is among the most popular activities in metaverse-type social worlds, such as Second Life and There.com. Cultural precedents for dress-up have been studied by performance anthropologists such as Victor Turner and Richard Schechner, who examined how the costume in ritual and theater create an embodied alternate persona for the wearer. We also see precedents of today’s MMOG gender transgression dress-up play in historical movements, from 18 Century court culture to notorious cross-dressing Dadaists Marcel Duchmap and Man Ray. In social and cultural contexts, dress-up not only provides an opportunity for expression, but also occupies a unique intersubjective domain as players, whether physically or virtually costumed, can together create alternative worlds simply by “putting them on.” Dress-up also provides the opportunity for transformative play, for in dressing up and taking on new roles, we learn more about ourselves. Playing Dress-Up Ludica Women in Games, University of Wales, Newport, 2007 Page 2 Overview When we step through the screen into virtual communities, we reconstruct our identities on the other side of the looking glass. Sherry Turkle, Life on the Screen (1995) In this paper, we discuss the importance of dress-up play, as both a formative childhood play pattern, and a growing and increasingly important form of adult play, in both physical and digital cultural practices. With a few notable exceptions, dress-up play has scarcely been acknowledged, let alone explored within the rubric of game studies, even though it is a growing dimension of digital games. Even pre-digital scholars of play have all but ignored this vital play form. Johan Huizinga’s now-classic exhaustive study of the play element in culture, Homo Ludens, is primarily concerned with domains of play and culture dominated by males—sports, competition, warfare, legal and political structures, etc. In one section he describes the use of costumes in the context of ritual, where they helped bring the wearer into a playful state of ... ....Dionysian ecstasy and dithyrambic rapture. The player, withdrawn from the ordinary world by the mask he wore, felt himself transformed into another ego which he did not so much represent as incarnate and actualize. (1955) This is a fitting description of the modern concept of the “avatar,” a term based on the Sanscrit word for a god’s embodiment on Earth, and adapted by Chip Morningstar to reference a player’s representation in a multiplayer world. (Damer 1998) Huizinga sees the “...almost instinctive, spontaneous need to decorate things...” (presumably this includes oneself) as constituting a “playfunction.” Ironically, he describes fashion as primarily a male domain of play, reaching its height during the Baroque period and exemplified by the periwig, which, he asserts, was then appropriated by women. He follows this by describing the return to a more naturalist orientation indicated by the reappearance in portraiture of the 19 Century of men with natural, long hair. (1955) Outside of the context of ritual, Huizinga apparently sees fashion as a predominately male enterprise. In fact, he makes no mention of female dress-up play throughout his exhaustive study. While certainly progressing the cause of girls’ play further than Huizinga, Caillois sets the stage for a somewhat skewed vision of female play culture. After enumerating a litany of exciting roles that boys may play, from policeman, to cowboy, to aviator, to jockey, girls are relegated to the roleplay of motherhood afforded by dolls. (1958). In the literature of both analog and digital play, in fact, very little is written about costume play, even in the sphere of child development. Developmental scholar Jean Piaget makes only brief and passing mention to it in the context of “make-believe” play among children. (1951) Although Sutton-Smith devotes an entire chapter to Rhetorics of Identity in play, he alludes only briefly to costume-play in the context of festivals (although he never explicitly calls it out by name), and to fashion not at all. (1997) More fruitful is the work of his fellow anthropologists in the study of ritual and performance, which we will discuss in more detail shortly, that addresses some of the complexities of roleplay in the context of ritual and theater (Turner, Van Gennep, Bell, Schechner, etc.), as well as research in the sociology of fashion, which also has bearing on this subject. In this paper, we will argue that dress-up is a central play pattern that has deep roots in human culture, and which, with the rise of multiplayer digital games and virtual worlds, is playing an increasingly prominent role in both digital and non-digital play practices. One reason for these oversights may lie in the preoccupation among game scholars of what Caillois defined as “ludus” over “paidia” play activities. Caillois defines these terms on a continuum: At one extreme an almost indivisible principle, common to diversion, turbulence, free improvisation, and carefree gaiety...that can be designated by the term paidia. At the opposite extreme, this frolicsome and impulsive exuberance is almost entirely absorbed or disciplined by a complementary, and in some respects inverse, tendency to its anarchic and capricious nature: there is a growing tendency to bind it with arbitrary, imperative, and purposely tedious conventions...I call this second component ludus. (1958) The roots of this ludic bias in game studies are largely a product of its bias within the subject matter. Video games, on the whole, tend to be organized around game structures and mechanics that are Playing Dress-Up Ludica Women in Games, University of Wales, Newport, 2007 Page 3 more ludus than paidia. This may be due in part to the inherent nature of programming code, which demands logical structure and therefore lends itself to strict rule sets; it may also be due to the prevalence of male designers in the field who may tend to favor more ludic, goal-oriented forms of play. As a result of these factors, as well as the historical absence of dress-up play from formative analog games research, with a few notable exceptions, dress-up has been largely ignored in the scholarly study of digital play. From a feminist perspective, we can look at dress-up, which has historically been associated with female play, as fulcrum for the creation of more gender-inclusive games, as well as a bridge to more gender-balanced approaches to game studies. Dress-up and fashion have served as an entry-point for women and girls into computer games, dating back to the “pink” game movement of the mid1990s, as epitomized by the enormously successful Barbie Fashion Designer, and more recently by games such as The Sims, massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) such as EverQuest and City of Heroes, and metaverses such as Second Life, in which dress-up and fashion play a significant role. Some of our research suggests that the computer may also serve as an entry-point for men into dress-up, for whom its convergence with technology may dispel some of its more feminine connotations. In this paper, we will explore the various social practices of dress-up play, both digital and non-digital, in attempt to open this as a topic for deeper exploration. This paper serves as a birdseye view, and it is our hope that the questions posed here will be seen as a jumping off point for more detailed explorations of this topic by other designers and researchers.