A few years back, I was part of an online gaming community where along from the usual gaming experience we could make guilds with our friends and converse with them, something like a group chat but within a game. I remember being so immersed in it that I used to spend hours playing and chatting with my virtual friends. Apart from being connected via the guild, we had a Facebook group as well where you could connect with the actual individual behind the game avatars. Like a cliché Hollywood movie, we had all sorts of characters in our guild: a cool guy, a young attractive blonde girl, a girl who secretly admired the cool guy, a guy who rarely spoke, a guy who was always talking, a couple of kids, and a few extras that had little to no role.
So, the cool guy, let’s call him Mr X and the attractive girl, Miss Y, became good friends - they used to talk all day, be it in the game or on Facebook. Gradually, Mr X developed feelings for Miss Y and got pretty serious about her. He was a friend of mine too. So, one day I get a text from him saying that he needs to talk about something important, long story short; Miss Y turned out to be a 40-year-old, married woman, with a child who used her model friends’ picture for her fake Facebook profile. After her confession she left the game, we had to lie to the other members about her sudden disappearance because it did not feel right to tarnish the beautiful memories we all had of our time, not just as an online community, but our very own virtual family. What happened to Mr X after that? I’ll leave that to you to wonder.
Recently, I came across a TED talk by Jim Blascovich on Digital freedom: virtual reality, avatars, and multiple identities. He talks about how humans have the ability to mentally take themselves somewhere other than where they are physically present; in fact, we do it all the time. We even keep on developing more psychologically immersive media to help us do it better, from books to radio to television and now virtual technologies. Broadly, virtual worlds encompass imaginary spaces that may be described by words or projected through images and which are so realistic that individuals may feel as if they were immersed in them. Many of us develop fluid identities in what we call the virtual world.
These platforms ranging from emails, chat rooms, social networking to massive multiplayer online games (MMORPGs) and augmented virtual reality make up a whole ecosystem that provides people with both social and anti-social opportunities. There are various cases where individuals formed romantic relationships in games (MMORPGs) or found comfort in an online friend whom they may have never even met but still prefer over the ones that exist in their real lives. Contrastingly, there are cases where paedophiles and child molesters pretend to be someone else to lure innocent children through the Internet.
You might have come across or heard about games such as Sword Art Online, World of Warcraft, The Sims etc. where people create in-game avatars, now these identities or avatars are often a projection of our selves or even a more glorified, ideal version of us. For instance, a person who is obese or overweight might create an avatar that is thinner and more physically attractive or like Miss Y, who was pretending to be a beautiful young girl in her twenties. Users enter virtual worlds through their avatars, which are specific digital representations of their virtual selves. Furthermore, they can supplement the physical characteristics of their avatars by creating their profiles and incorporating textual as well as visual information. From a participant perspective, the potential for immersion is a particularly revolutionary aspect, enabling individuals to engage in various complex activities and social interactions that resemble the real world. Users not only create specific virtual identities for themselves, but also project their fantasies and aspirations on their ideal selves to these digital entities. Whom we decide to be on the web is entirely up to us, because we have the digital freedom to do so on these modern-day platforms. Thus, multiple personality disorder becomes nugatory in the virtual world.
Various Hollywood movies such as The Matrix, Avatar, and Inception feature the dynamics between the real and the virtual world. One can also find references from the entertainment industry of how future technology has the potential to make our lives both better and worse in the days to come. One that I am especially fond of is the very popular show on Netflix called ‘Black Mirror’ where each episode is an independent story, essentially portraying the dark side of human nature and how in the future, technology can make us even more sinister. One particular episode worth mentioning is called ‘Playtest,’ in which a man takes up the job of a test subject in a company that creates virtually simulated horror games. What he thought would be a simple job for easy money gradually turns into his worst nightmare, as technology slowly takes over his mind leading him to dissociate from his reality to the point of no return. If that sounds too terrifying, let me balance it with another example. A beautiful, yet equally heartbreaking, tale of a lonely man, the movie ‘Her’ is about finding love in the most unexpected way, where the protagonist develops romantic feelings for an intelligent software program. Yep, you read that right! In fact, you can find real-world examples too, such as the man in China who married a robot that he built himself! However, to date, only a few empirical investigations have been conducted to explore intimate relationships in virtual worlds.
We live in an era in which technology has the potential to blur the boundaries between reality and fantasy, or the real and the virtual. Through their avatars and associated profiles, virtual world residents can establish their virtual identities, which can be moulded according to their desires and expectations. No longer confined by the physical realities and existential limitations, virtual environments provide individuals with a clean slate on to which to construct their desired virtual identities, offering radically new possibilities for identity redefinition and self-recreation. Hence, the concept of reality is drastically shifting the paradigm to a world where the virtual world is no less real than what is now considered to be the grounded reality. The focus then is to examine the psyche of individuals who use such platforms to escape from reality into an infinite realm where they can be anything and everything they wish to be. Additionally, what could be so abhorrent about their realities that leads them to escape to an alternate one? And lastly, what implications would such a drift have on their personal identity and well-being, especially of those who might have floated too far away?
Anam Khan
