Borders and Bodies in City of Heroes: (Re)imaging American Identity Post 9/11

Abstract

In Virtualities, Margaret Morse (1998, p. 126) problematizes the idea of the cyborg posited by those in ‘future-oriented subcultures who have wholeheartedly embraced technology’ because ‘the actual status of the cyborg is murky as to whether it is a metaphor, a dreamlike fantasy and/or a literal being’. In particular, Morse (1998, p. 125) cites the problem of inhabiting both an organic and a virtual body: ‘Travelers on the virtual highways of an information society have at least one body too many — the one now largely sedentary carbon-based body resting at the control console that suffers hunger, corpulence, illness, old age and ultimately death’. In arguing for the irrelevance of what she terms the organic or ‘meat’ body, which she asserts ‘just gets in the way’, Morse privileges the virtual body. However, given recent advances in gaming technology, such as the Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game, such claims about the virtual body merit reconsideration. Although text-based computer games such as Adventure and Zork and pen and paper role-playing games such as Dungeons and Dragons date back to the 1970s, Ultima Online, which popularized the genre in the late 1990s, is generally considered the first modern MMORPG. With subscribers numbering from hundreds of thousands to millions, these online communities provide a unique opportunity to explore the bodily discourses circulating in online environments.