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Why don’t women play MapleStory?

We do.^[1]

So then, why the dissonance? At its pettiest, this is little more than the hasty presumption of maleness even for strongly female-coded (computer-programmatically and otherwise) characters. Nothing to write home about. But the behaviour in MapleStory runs the gamut from this to the express (and rather revealing) belief that women effectively do not exist, or even outright harassment.

There’s little room for doubting that some gender bias exists at least at the statistical level — and we’ll get to the reasons why in a moment. But a mere bias isn’t everything. Not only does it not explain itself, but it doesn’t explain the aforementioned behaviours either.

Garbage in, garbage out…?

One tempting thesis is, to put it rather crudely, that men are trash, and if you don’t have a — typically implicit — way of filtering them out, then they will, sooner or later, manage to stink it up. Everyone else is consequently motivated to escape the thick stench, and what’s left behind is self-explanatory.

The spirit of this thesis was encapsulated in a remark (here paraphrased) I once heard from jensen^[2] in response to something like the titular question: if it seems like there aren’t any women in your mushroom game, then it’s probably because women feel unsafe around you.

jensen’s answer echoes the truth, but only by glancing its surface.

Stupidity vs. idiocy

In honesty, we’re being overly charitable by attributing the titular question to our Hypothetic Man™. It doesn’t occur to him to ask such a question, since the apparent fact of all players being male presents itself to him as the enactment of a mysterious natural law. That’s just how it is. Moreover, this mysterious natural law operates at the level of the individual. A woman is simply the kind of individual who doesn’t do things like, for instance, playing MapleStory.

It’s not that our Hypothetic Man™ is stupid. Maybe he is, maybe he isn’t. Thus we need to distinguish sharply between being stupid and being an idiot.^[3] An idiot (< ιδιώτης) is a private individual. He doesn’t publicly participate in the local cult & culture. Worse, he thinks that everyone else is a private individual too. A characteristic belief of the idiot is that the notion of “idiolect” is a coherent one: a private language is just a language spoken by only one person, right? And it’s literally true that (for example) I speak English.

But of course not. To say that “I speak English” is a mere turn of phrase. More literally, we would say that I speak through English, or even more precisely, that English speaks through me. Words don’t mean things because I say they do,^[4] and in fact, words don’t literally “mean” things at all. Their meanings are nothing over & above their uses in & throughout a body of practice that we call “natural language”. Of course, as human beings, we understand this on an intuitive level. But the idiot insists that he’s human even independently of humanity — an organism sans species. A ruggèd individual, even.

Thus, for the idiot, claims like “women don’t play MapleStory” are immediate; they require no further examination. If women wanted to play MapleStory, then they would. And since they don’t, they don’t.

Sympathy for the idiot

We harbour no ill will towards the idiot, because he didn’t choose the idiot life; the idiot life chose him. The idiot is a product of undersocialisation, and undersocialisation is only possible in a society — or perhaps, “nonsociety” — wherein most meaningful social–personal relations have been replaced or displaced by exchange-relations.

This isn’t to say that women don’t experience undersocialisation. We all do. But because women are at the other pole of this social process (which we’ll get to), they experience it in a basically different way. This leaves men as more conspicuously undersocialised in certain ways, to the point that the direct pathologisation of undersocialisation — “autism”, “sociopathy”, etc., etc. (there’s a new one every day) — mysteriously patterns heavily with gender.^[12] Locating these pathologies in the individual (i.e. pseudomedical idiocy) thereby totally mystifies the real underlying relations, leaving (pseudo)scientists Stumped when they try in vain to find biological (or otherwise ahistoric) explanations.

What does this have to do with 🍄🎮? o.O

MapleStory is an MMORPG, and at least in sufficiently advanced versions of it,^[5] the game itself offers a reasonable plenitude of facilities towards socialisation: humanoid avatars, IGNs, chat, emotes, buddies, parties & PQs, guilds & GQs, minigames, Maple Messenger, some level of local centralisation (classically, Henesys or the Free Market), cosmetics, etc.. Nevertheless, with few exceptions, none of these things are “required” (in a loose, ludic sense).^[6] MapleStory thus, consciously or not, enables idiocy by its very design.

Indeed, MapleStory goes even further by sanctifying money as part of the game itself: mesos, /trade, the FM, etc.. As we approach the FM, we all become idiots, because the market presents itself as a brute fact which we interact with impersonally. An Onyx Apple just is worth (say) 2.3M, and although the market might be at a small enough scale that you (singular) can influence it via mass buying or selling, this influence is still a fundamentally impersonal one. Thus the conventional idea of interacting with the FM is to extract a maximum of “power” (in the ill-defined MapleStory sense) from it for as little input as feasible.^[7]

This logic of “a maximum” extends to optimisation in general. If it can be quantified & unidimensionalised like mesos — even if only with the assistance of so much pixelated mental gymnastics — then it’s already virtually value, and therefore subject to optimisation, “buffs”/“nerfs”, the “metagame”, etc.. For more on this, see the previous entry.

And sex-gender?

These activities — marketeering, optimisation, general idiocy — can be identified with one pole of a spiritual binary. Much like the scientist at least pretends to be independent of the experiment — as “disturbing” the latter would vitiate the results — the pure spirit of masculinity is all rationality, no emotion; all agency, no “external” influences; all mind, no body; in other words, 100% idiot.

But spirit alone tells us nothing.

To oversimplify a rather heavy-duty concept, capital needs to replenish its supply of labour-power, and this cannot be done by putting together a bunch of commodities. A house, some bread, and a thick roll of toilet paper does not a human being make. The necessary activities are invisible to capital because they produce no commodities, and therefore no value. It must therefore sunder these activities off into a kind of “unvalue” sphere of life, where people perform “unlabour” (but not labour, since labour produces value). The technical term for this is value-dissociation.^[8]

Capital only operates on labour, which is quantifiable, and therefore exploitable in a straightforward way. Unlabour is not; it’s human social activity plain & simple, which resists analysis, optimisation, and strict planning. There needs to be another way to assign bodies to these tasks, and that way, as we know it, is the male/female binary.

The woman finds herself, by definition,^[9] at the unvalue pole of value-dissociation,^[10] and is therefore normatively(!) uninterested in market extraction, optimisation, idiocy, etc. to the degree that these things don’t impose themselves as directly practical matters. Or else she is anyway, and thereby “becomes a man”^[11] in the same way that the woman-scientist, the woman-politician, et al. do.

By contrast, the man finds himself, again by definition, at the value pole. His undersocialisation is therefore acceptable, since he has no social responsibility outside of the sphere of value, and within the sphere of value, idiocy is unproblematic and even encouraged. The woman’s suitability for non-value-producing “unlabour” is predicated upon her partial non-idiocy. She remains pinned down to the realm of overt interpersonal (i.e. not idiotic) relations, since value cannot directly be used to allocate her to the requisite unlabours.^[13]

GenderStory

By enabling a lean towards the pole of idiocy, MapleStory fulfils the prophecy bestowed upon it as quasi-microcosm, one of many rightful pixelated heirs to the “real-life” movement of value, complete with the surface-level appearance — and doubtless, surface-level reälity — of men ruining it for everyone (themselves included).

This implies not merely banal sexism, but also that, if the institution of sex-gender itself is to be “properly” maintained, then it must be at least notionally true that “women don’t play MapleStory”. Thus our Hypothetic Man™’s attitude towards female Maplers and towards the very idea of female Maplers’ existence is not the unmediated reflexion of some kind of “natural” statistical truth. Rather, it’s the channelling — through the conduit of an individual — of a deep-seated social force responsible for the warping of the game into something that forcibly expels femininity in order to maintain femininity (and therefore also masculinity) as such.

This is why jensen’s remark echoes the truth, in spite of having a strong moralising component. Men are trash not because of some moral flaw, but because being trash is a condition of the continued existence of sex-gender (femininity included). In part, value-dissociation subsists via the mediation of these behaviours which alienate women — or more precisely, sufficiently female-socialised persons — in the adequate sort of way. The result is that it appears as if a self-fulfilling prophecy is unfolding before our eyes: men act chauvinistically in the belief that no women are present anyway, and this, in turn, supplies its own condition of (quasi-)womanlessness. This logical incestuousness is the mark of any properly self-sustaining social relation.^[15]

What’s the alternative?

Short of abolishing labour and therefore sex-gender etc., it’s at least instructive to compare MapleStory with another MMORPG released in the same year: Toontown.

In Toontown, socialisation is not optional. The core gameplay is intrinsically coöperative-strategic. In MapleStory, “partying” often really means that we’re each doing our own thing, but in the same map and with some quantitatively-enhanced rewards. This applies to grinding, questing, much bossing, and even PQs on occasion. By contrast, Toontown requires its players to constantly engage in collective strategy-formation on the fly.

Toontown also lacks any kind of market, which has the added benefit of really rendering idiocy useless.

The result is that Toontown’s population is at least half female, possibly more (although I personally like to think it’s pretty even).

This isn’t to say that MapleStory should be more like Toontown. If anything, MapleStory should be more like MapleStory, as I’ve frequently argued in the past. Nor is it to say that Toontown is somehow “superior”, as if the games were directly comparable. Nonetheless, MapleStory and its players could stand to learn a thing or two, and to adapt those lessons to a logic adequate to MapleStory.

Conclusion, please.

Your wish is my command.

Beware the logic of idiocy. The answers to questions that involve anything inherently social — like sex-gender, for instance — can never be found in individuals, even when convenient just-so stories lure us into the logics of great man theory, conspiracies, moralising, and/or naturalisation (= ahistoricisation). Any true explanation is adequate to its explanandum.

In this case, the intersection of MapleStory’s logic with the logic of “real life” — more specifically, value-dissociation — allows the latter to operate in & through the game as just another appendage. Like when a source swells and generates new rivers, the drainage basin remains in place, and the water cycle continues uninterrupted.

Breaking the cycle lies beyond the scope of Korean pixel game vintage 2003. Nonetheless, the game can easily be made to lay more stress upon socialisation, with the added benefit that this makes the game more fun (imagine that!). Moreover, the out-of-game implementation — chatrooms, forums, websites, bugtrackers, etc. — can be made more accessible & welcoming. And, whilst we’re at it, acting less like callous idiots never hurts.

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Footnotes

1. [↑] I considered ending the essay right here. Unfortunately, I seem to have made the mistake of writing the rest of it anyway. This is my sincere apology.

2. [↑] MapleLegends IGNs xRook, smeowk, and, most appositely, misandrist.

3. [↑] I’m aware that idiot is a very common term of abuse in English, and that this undermines any ill-fated attempt I might make to repurpose it in a technically-precise way. But what are you gonna do, stop me? 😤

4. [↑] Except when I say idiot. Muahahahahahhah

5. [↑] In GMS terms, guilds were released in v16 (2006-01-23), which is a reasonable benchmark. So when I say “sufficiently advanced”, I’m including quite primitive versions which the reader likely never even played in retail (to say nothing of non-retail versions such as RevivalStory).

6. [↑] The logical conclusion being ironman (not ironwoman, “naturally” enough).

7. [↑] None of this is to imply that MapleStory is somehow “capitalist”. I argue against this in my half-hearted defence of multiclienting. Although really, a moment’s reflexion is enough to see why it cannot be so. MapleStory PCs have no “land” nor “livelihoods” to lose, and so their labour-powers cannot be commodified. You can pretty much just play MapleStory, and noöne can proletarianise you. Imagine that.

   The bare nonexistence of those basic categories that would make terms like (for instance) proletarianisation meaningful implies not only that MapleStory isn’t “capitalist”, but much more strongly, that we cannot locate any socioëconomic formation within MapleStory at all. This is almost like a fancy way of saying that videogames aren’t real life.

   And indeed, the point isn’t to locate anything within MapleStory. Rather, we’re concerned with the relationship between the game and the world of which it’s a product, without making either category subsume the other.

8. [↑] “Value-dissociation” (< Wertabspaltung) is due to Roswitha Scholz. My analysis differs substantially from hers, but the differences aren’t relevant here.

9. [↑] We evidently haven’t the space for me to explain why sex-gender (considered as a single phenomenon) is nonbiological. If you like, you can harass me about it, and I’ll politely explain it to you.

10. [↑] My use of the word pole (derived from the magnetism sense, not the wooden rod sense) throughout this essay is in a very specific technical sense. There’s no time to explain! Go Google^® “social relation” or something!

    All you need to know is that the social relation and its poles don’t exist at the individual level per se. Very strictly speaking, when we say “she is a woman”, this is a mere turn of phrase, and what we really mean is that she, given her current situation, relates particularly strongly to the unvalue pole (relative to the value pole) of value-dissociation. But it’s usually easier to just say it like a normal person, especially since any social relation worth its salt typically keeps most of its relata clamped down pretty tightly anyway.

    Social relations are very real, but also historically-specific. So this sense of “woman” simply does not apply to non-modern sociëties, some of which may not’ve even had an equivalent notion.

11. [↑] Interestingly, there’s no insulting term for this in English, in contrast to emasculate, effeminate, etc.. The woman is, in this sense, merely a man who’s “missing” something — in the modern case, the value pole (no pun intended) — and the man can only become a woman by losing it too.

12. [↑] “Sociopathy”^[14] and especially “autism” are male-coded, perhaps because “autism” is a catch-all for masculine undersocialisations. The results of feminine undersocialisations are more likely to be differentiated or simply not pathologised (suck it up!), because enwomaning has a clear goal, whereas enmanning can acceptably result in idiocy.

    “Borderline personality”, for instance, is female-coded (and therefore mAgiCaLLy “more prevalent” in women) because it’s defined in terms of relationship instability: not especially problematic if you relate directly to the value pole of value-dissociation (≝ you’re a man), but very problematic if you can only relate indirectly via your relationship with a man (including the non-value-producing work you provide therein).

13. [↑] The paradigmatic cases of unlabour are pregnancy, childbirth (ironically, given the other meaning of labour), and by extension, childrearing.

    For this reason, value-dissociation tends to seek biological substrate even though it cannot find it. For instance, a woman who just so happens to be completely infertile for her entire life might seem “erroneously” enwoman’d (“wrong” assignment), but this is only because her — or any individual’s — actual biology is irrelevant to value-dissociation’s ability to more-or-less successfully allocate bodies in a way that enables the continued movement of value.

14. [↑] For lack of space, I can’t explain here why “sociopathy” is male-coded but less so than “autism”. Suffice it to say that it lies at the intersection of proletarianised surplus populations and the penal systems that exist to subjugate them.

15. [↑] Or any self-sustaining thing in general. Take biological individuals, for instance. Which came first: the chicken, or the egg? And if gathering, preparing, eating, & digesting food costs me so much energy & nutrients, then how did I get that energy & nutrition in the first place?