I will ofcourse be consulting my excellent advisor on these issues, but he’s away from his mail till Monday (which greatfully gave me a few extra days to give him a good handful of text)…but I thought…you know…since it seems like people actually read this blog, that I might as well ask for some advice.
I’m sitting here trying to recap an incident from The Sims Online (TSO) and it’s really making me feel uncomfortable. The incident is that a TSO player ran around calling the maid (which is a NPC) a really nasty C-word that I hate…and was therefore suspended from the game. Which is so interesting, don’t you think? You get thrown out for cussing at code…but not another human, unless the human reports you…wonder if the maid had complaints? But I’m drifting…yet again! I really…REALLY feel uncomfortable using this C-word, is there some better creative way for me to explain this? I suppose I could just write profanity…but it seemed specific that it was the C-word that caused the whole problem…so I guess my problem is that I feel truly unprofessional in writing it in a thesis! Won’t people be offended when reading it? And will it be a terrible crime for me to just write ‘profanity’ instead of going into specifics? Is this distorting the truth in some way?
And here’s another thing! I decided a few months back that I certainly could not use the names to the avatar’s I met on my virtual world travels so I’ve been doing this Player 1, Player 2, Player 3 thing…and well…urgh…it’s tedious and boring. How can I ever reflect the personality of it all with such a dull characterisation? When you start pumping out sentences like “Player 20 hadn’t met Player 8 before, and so we…..blah blah blah!”, it all becomes so completely unpersonal. Sooooo! Would it be awful for me to just make up my own names for the avatars? Just have a little “Names have been changed to protect….” at the beginning? Ofcourse…that’s a lot of names I have to think of…but that’s a distraction I don’t mind.
Ofcourse…I could look all this up! But I thought I might just throw this one out there!
As a reward for reading through my tumble weed of confusion:
A Sims Machinima Bloopers Video
Wonders Never Cease
I love this stuff!!!
Remember What The Dormouse Said 
I’m not sure I’m technically qualified to give you advice, but I’m offering it anyway :)First, though, I wanted to ask if you knew for certain that the player using the profanity was suspended for cursing at an NPC or just for uttering a curse in a public place? If it’s the former, then that is truly interesting.Anyway, on to your questions…I think you can use “profanity” as a euphamism, unless it was that particular C-word that was at issue. If the word itself is not important to the story, then I think you can swap anything in there.As far as making up names for players, I think you’d be ok in assigning them fake names. More than this, it makes the stories more interesting. I’d pick substitute names that evoke the same sensibility as the actual names. Just make sure the readers know you’ve changed names on purpose. If I recall correctly, Julian Dibbell did this in his book “My Tiny Life.”
Haha, what a great new world we have – I love the notion of having to change nicks to protect research subjects.As for the profanity – go ahead, it’s neiher unprofessional nor offensive to quote it in your study. Your role as a researcher is not to censor your findings.
Well…your advice is more than welcome here Tony!! As for the maid story…I was on a track to find the alleged victim of the suspension…but communication failed, and I have my suspicions that it is false. The interesting thing is that almost everyone I met in TSO knew of it…so it’s kinda become a TSO urban legend type thing! And it fascinates me how it’s become more of a cautionary tale rather than an outrageos protestable tale!
And ofcourse, i1277, always an honour to have your opinions aired on my blog as well! I deeply appreciate it!