Compared to the numbers that populated them even a few years ago, virtual worlds and Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games have grown at an astonishing rate. Every day, more and more people choose to spend time within a sort of consensual hallucination, trading spending time reality for residence in a virtual one. The film Second Skin touched on these issues, especially that of those who spent addictive amounts of time immersed within these games. The general consensus towards those that effectively reside in virtual worlds is that of bewilderment, not understanding how anyone could spend so much of their life on something that isn’t tangible.
The movie resents an interesting perspective on this idea. Think about the mental image that comes to mind when I say the following: MMORPG gamer. I imagine that most of us out there picture what has been depicted as the stereotypical gamer, backed up by real world experience and even media evidence, such as the people depicted in this movie. Whatever image comes to your mind, there is usually one thing that universal among them: social outcast. For whatever issues or handicaps they may have (even physical ones) these people feel more at home in a virtual space than the actual world. They prefer an idealized existence rather than our tangible, realistic one.
Now, why should you care about this? Well, as Casanova states in the movie, “What does this say about our society that people want to leave it in masses like they are?”. Have we made it so unbearable for these people that in order to feel like they belong, they need to escape to a place where there appearance, sex, and personality is whatever they want it to be? What’s even scarier is the amount of people that some may view we have driven away. World of Warcraft has over 15 million active players. Granted, a large majority of them are only casual players, and granted that some people, like in every addiction, have brought this upon themselves. But how can we explain the addiction of everyone else? Is it their fault, or ours?
I think that your last question really depends on the situation. If you're talking about someone like Andrew in the movie, who is handicapped and cannot truly interact and socialize due to his circumstance, I don't think that it is really anyone's fault necessarily, it's just the nature of the situation. Reality dealt him an awful hand that makes it nearly, if not completely, impossible to do the everyday things that we take for granted like walking and talking. Virtual realities allow him to escape the confines of reality and let him have what he cannot have here.
ReplyDeleteAlso, as far as people entering virtual realities in order to escape from judgments and prejudices that take place everyday in reality I would argue that the same judgments take place in virtual reality the only difference is the brunt of the prejudice is aimed at a character, not the actual person. The character almost acts as a shield in a way. So really is virtual reality any different than reality in this aspect? Not really, its just not as personal.
Andrew makes a good point, because prejudice does shift but not vanish in virtual worlds. One of my students changed to a non-human avatar in Second Life and was assailed or ignored, whereas her college-girl avatar was, at worst, subjected to mild flirting by males. Another woman who decided to become overweight was simply ignored by others, as though she were not longer visible to them.
ReplyDeleteAs for the escapism, what concerns me is how companies seem to engineer their products to make addictive play the best way to do well. Casual play does not reap the same rewards. I've nothing against a bit of escapism, but to do so for most of one's day is disturbing.