Digital Monsters

Digital

Monsters

Dr Vivian Asimos

Contents

Title Page

Chapter 1 Introducing the Monsters of the Digital Worlds

Chapter 2 Massively Created Monsters

Chapter 3 Virtual Monsters and Monstrous Video Games

Chapter 4 Monsters That Become Real

Chapter 5 Everything is True, Even if it Isn’t

Final Thoughts The Future of Digital Monsters

References

Index

Copyright

Chapter 1

Introducing the Monsters of the Digital Worlds

My face is only lit by the soft blue glow of the screen, continued through the constantly renewed promise that, after this story, I will sleep. But with each story, the dark encroaches closer and closer, until it feels the closeness of a screen is the only comfort. The radiators click with the soft noise of the slow cooling of the boiler resting for the night. Each noise makes my eyes dart around the ever-darkening room in sudden fear the horror from the screen is suddenly there, lurking somewhere in the darkened corners of the room.

But the fear continues to creep even after the new dawn. Walking home at twilight, the trees linger a little closer, replaying the narratives which suddenly feel more telling and closer to home. I glance twice at moving shadows.

And I start to believe that monsters are real.

Monsters have captured the human imagination since human imagination came into being. From vampires to werewolves, every culture carries its own monsters, bringing them into different times and locations with the movement of peoples and societies. Monsters are an intricate part of the human experience. Monsters haunt us because they are us. It is easy for us to see monsters as unimportant simply because they are not real. But monsters are real.

Now, I do not mean monsters are real in the sense that, when I am walking along the forest path, I truly expect some Lovecraftian nightmare to suddenly jump out at me from the seemingly encroaching dark forests. But there is a reason why they scare me – there’s a reason the monster still haunts me, even though I may think of them as not physically around me. Let’s start, for example, with a simple case of zombies. Zombies, despite their current position in popular culture as slowly shambling reanimated dead, have their origins in Haitian Vodou, a religious practice that is an amalgamation of Christianity and traditional African beliefs. The Zombies in Haitian Vodou are people animated and enslaved to serve for another as a labourer. At the heart of the fear of zombies is a fear of re-enslavement by a people who had suffered tremendously under the yoke of slavery. In the shadow of slavery, the zombie is real. It carries with it the real memory of a cultural scar.

Monsters carry in them cultural memories and social anxieties. And digital monsters are no different. If I asked anyone who participates in the creation and retelling of horror narratives online if they believed in the existence of their monsters, I would be laughed out of whatever virtual room I had been in. However, we can phrase the question differently: does your monster have an effect on the way you understand yourself and your world?

This question is at the heart of everything. Because monsters can be real in a different sense to a physical real presence to their form. The oft conceived binary difference between reality and fiction is problematic, and has the resulting idea that something fictional is not worth detailed discussion, especially academically. But this is a false dichotomy – something can be both fictional and real simultaneously. Monsters are often in a middle ground between the two worlds, and are especially troubling the dichotomy in the digital world. But most importantly, monsters are real through the effect they have on the cultures and societies which tell them. Monsters are real in their impact on the storytellers and story-cultures.

Like their dislike of the dichotomy of reality and fiction, monsters demonstrate the limits and boundaries of the societies and cultures which they belong to. And most importantly, the monsters are the direct result of our categorical systems failing. We, as humans, enjoy categorising the world around us. We see things as belonging to certain systems. As we grow, we learn the word dog. And animals that look different all belong to the word dog. Similarly, we point at other people and see them as belonging to word like me or like them. We point at things that are alive and call them alive, and these things are set apart from the things we point at and see as dead. We have these mental boxes we sort things into, all labelled and filed away in neat boxes. Every culture and society has a way of ordering their life and understanding. Monsters demonstrate their disruption.

We can sometimes see this in their physical form. Take, for instance, the griffin. The griffin has the back half of a lion, and the front half of an eagle. The form of the griffin is neither bird nor big cat, breaking our categories of what animal it really is. It also breaks our geological categories. It is of both land and air, breaking our understanding of where certain animals reside and understandings of what these geological locations mean. Similarly, the centaur breaks the categorical distinctions between human and animal. The monstrous form demonstrates a break with what we are accustomed to and destroys our categorical considerations.

Monsters can also break categories in the way they interact with the world and others in it. The vampire, for instance, is not monstrous in its physical form, but it is monstrous in how it exists and interacts with the world. It breaks down the categorical distinction between life and death – two social categories which should never cross. Not only are they the living dead, but they take the living and strip them of life force – blood – bringing them closer to the side of death. They begin the breaking of boundaries and categorical distinctions in their existence and their actions. Werewolves are not only breaking the physical form boundaries by shifting between animal and human – two categories typically left uncrossed – but also in their actions. They force the transgression onto others through their bite.

Jeffrey Cohen, an essential founder of what became Monster Studies, wrote of the monster as a harbinger of categorical crisis. Monsters demonstrate these categorical breakdowns, and they demonstrate to us the inherent fear we have in our cultural categories breaking. If there is a creature that breaks our understanding of the strict separation between the worlds of life and death, what does that mean for our understanding of our own lives? How we associate with those who have passed before us? Our understanding of religion and family, and many other cultural institutions, will shift. The foundations of which we built our understanding shifts.

Whether or not a vampire physically is present in the world is different than whether or not it’s real. Monsters are real in the effect they have on us, the categorical breakdowns they represent, and the anxieties and fears they unveil. They demonstrate to us the drawn boundary lines we paint and just how faded that paint can be. The greatest solace monsters like vampires and werewolves can give us is the comfort that they are not physically present. Our categories can maintain their false boundaries if they are not physically real. But their conceptualised form demonstrates just how scared we are that it will all fall apart around us.

The digital monsters are no different. They are the new monsters – the new vampires and new werewolves – that demonstrate the faded boundaries between new categories and new understandings which have arisen over the years of virtual growth. It paints new categorical fears. But the structures and anxieties are also sometimes the same. The digital worlds are not all that different than the non-digital.

The Anthropological Approach

I have spent the last several years of my life studying monsters from the point of view of an anthropologist. As an anthropologist, I see monsters as cultural artefacts, like clay pots and tapestries. And like other cultural artefacts, studying monsters gives us a look into the cultures that create the monsters and tell their stories. Digital monsters are our contemporary myths, folklore and legends, and these stories tell us about how the online world thinks, feels, and acts.

Anthropologists are annoying, and we define our primary method of research by its annoyance. We sit and list endless questions about every aspect of everything – we try to revert back to infancy, to point at anything basic and ask what and why until who we are speaking to are simply sick of us. And then we ask someone else. And during this whole time, we sit back and we watch. We observe what people are doing, and then we try and do it too. We do what is called participant observation. Anthropology, at its heart, is a collection of questions about simple things in life: why we wear what we wear when we wear it; what we say when we say it and how we say it. We prod questions immensely with little apparent end in sight – always anchoring everything to something we can see or hear from the community itself. We go into a community like children who are