Persona Play

Personas are imaginary people we create in our minds, which we use all the time in our social interactions: at work we might appear to be super efficient, but then to our family we might appear to be laid back or angry. We switch persona to try and maximise success in each situation we are in, however we choose to evaluate success at that moment. Success may be measured as getting a good deal, not being killed by a robber, not annoying our friends and family too often, seeing our partner being successful and so on. It is currently popular to create personas of imaginary people, based on market research data, and to use them to help members of design teams visualise the 'average' customer who will eventually be using their product. The logic behind creating them is that everyone in the team is designing for the same persona, instead of each member designing to the persona that they personally visualise. In the normal human way, some people see them as the answer to everything in design, while others see one or a few drawbacks and reject the concept completely.

This full-acceptance / full rejection is what I think of as a 'yes or no' vision of the world, either the world is all yes or its all no, its either this or its that, and cannot be anything else. Reality shows us that pure yes and pure no is almost impossible to achieve in all but a limited number of situations. Yes/no, this/that and similar concepts are hard classifications, in that they are limited in use but very quick to use. "Are you hungry?" to which we can give the hard classification answer "No". If you answered, "Well, a little bit, maybe in half an hour or so." you would be giving a soft, or more real answer, but to keep returning to the full reality just slows things down - we are all human and experienced with life, we know that things do not have to be exactly defined every time we use them. After all, what is hard concept of 'hungry' anyway - does it mean you are within moments of dying of starvation or you have not eaten for twenty minutes or so and my, doesn't that cake look mouthwatering?

Yes and no and hungry are hard classifications, they define a whole bagful of things under one umbrella term to speed the communication process. Soft classifications attempt to generate closer models to reality: "How hungry are you, can I make you something?" Soft generates slow communication, and you need to spend time thinking about what you are discussing. The problem is that it is very easy to get used to hard classification and come to believe that it expresses reality. I am hard classified as a 'man', and therefore you expect certain behaviour of me - perhaps that I love football, beer and ogling nubile women (well, one out of the three is correct). I have to be the persona of man because I am a man.

Religion is very good at creating hard classifications, even if the god they say they represent has other views on the matter. "We define persona of man, and you must mould yourself to match that persona otherwise 'our' god will tell us to make a social outcast of you." But how close does anyone come to the personas that our societies create, whatever the history of their development? And how much do people in power wish to maintain these personas only because it is easier to manage us if we do? Will our god love us more if we go to our temple every week, or will only our priests love us more?

The internet is a great opportunity for us to try and discover more about our own minds, to try out different versions of ourselves. This is not a new concept, people have been joining clubs and forming social groups since before humans became human, in a "Me man, me want to to join hunting group" kind of thing. The advantage that the internet gives us is that we can experiment with different physical experiences, such as fighting, without having to train our bodies to respond, or we can be a zombie, hang out in space bars on alien planets without getting a hangover, or becoming a beautiful angel. This is escaping from the hard classifications that society imposes, or we interpret as imposing on us. Personas are a soft classification method, it says, "look at all this that is me, how else can it be moulded, what else could 'I' be?"

As with any persona we create, it is important as social beings that we give some consideration of the effects our persona has on others. Just as it is socially unacceptable to pretend to be someone good so that we can steal someone's money or ideas in what we like to think of as normal life (another hard classification), it is equally unacceptable to attempt to use a persona fraudulently on the internet.

I have created many persona on different sites, sometimes even unintentionally when I have either created a group where I only expose a part of myself or I have chosen a name that is not my own simply to conceal my email address from potential spam - if I call myself 'Georgie Boy' then no one is going to be able to deduce my email address or track me down in one of the many social groups on the internet. Well, they might track someone down, but it will not be me unless they have the ability to illegally hack the internet structure at some point, such as the server my persona is logged on. Persona are created that easily, and only takes the mere suppression of a part of our personality. As a result of this suppression, to fully involve ourselves in the intended activity, other parts of our personality that normally do not get exposure expand to fill the vacuum.

Many people using instant messenger groups drop that part of them that keeps their behaviour acceptable in public areas, using it as an opportunity to express their frustrations or hidden desires to hurt others using words and what blocking actions the software allows them. I have no love of engaging in an environment of social abuse, as its humour quickly palls, but there are plenty of opportunities for me to discover other aspects of myself. Hosting a number of groups in which I have an interest allows me to practice being 'the expert' and 'the founder', a persona of responsibility and wisdom. Role-playing on forum-based resulted in a number of new persona, including 'frivolous' and 'dungeon master'.

Like in any social situation, there is often some fear when you first try out your new persona, especially if you have suppressed something significant in your personality - will your persona be accepted, successful? Will you be able to maintain it convincingly? Often the persona we create are very close to our own, and these are quite easy, but on one multi-player space empire game I decided to create a female persona. I was worried whether I could pull it off, but many of the people I know where worried that I should want to try - as if there was any real difference between what I was attempting and an author writing a female role. Again this is a problem of hard classification, I was not being the class 'author' therefore I must be in some other hard class, such as that of 'transsexual' or something.

Female or male, young or old, watching how the other people treated me was fascinating. How in my normal life can I have the opportunity to be something that my body image does not present without breaking the dress code morals of my society. Yes, I can imagine what people in Lublin would think if I went around dressed as a woman. It is much easier to shock other people with a persona, especially as you are less sensitive to the demands of the role, but the dual freedom of unaccountability and the freedom of action in an area that is normally off limits can be exhilarating.

Some of the persona quickly become boring, particularly if they fail to garner acceptability. Others become like old friends, an alternative body you can jump into to help you get away from the humdrum aspects of your normal life. If you make a mistake, well, you can always abandon a persona and create a new one, to try a different tack on the same group of people. Some of the skills you practice in-persona can also be utilised in normal life, extending your possibilities and perhaps surprising your friends. If this is a form of escapism, one has to wonder what society has done to us that we feel the need to escape it, so any criticism from people who see it as silly or threatening should really be questioning what kind of society have they helped to create that leaves a segment of that same society wishing to leave it.