Miroslaw Filiciak, "Hyperidentities: Postmodern Identity Patterns in Massively Multiplayer Role-Playing Games"

(In The Video Game Theory Reader)

- "Computers subtly model our way of thinking about the world."
- Affinity between postmodern theory and computers/digital games
- Rules of MMORPGs as analogous to the rules of real life in (post)industrial societies
- MMOs as a communication as well as entertainment medium
- An "experimental arena" for postmodern situations/identities
- We can manipulate, multiply our selves
- Filiciak makes a shifty claim that 9/11 has caused more people to stay at home and thus play online games... evidence, please?
- Character creation: freely creat oneself (especially one's appearance)
- Avatars as a first-person "I"
- MMOs allow us to adapt our selves to meet social/cultural expectations (ie: beautiful, thin, muscular)
- Transference (unconscious) of real-world characteristics to avatar
- Game success/advancement encourages long-term investment in one avatar
- Filiciak greatly overemphasizes the freedom of players in a game and the liquidity of player/avatar identity - these are always already produced within a very specific, rigid system of rules, just like in the real world
- No one self is more "true" or essential
- The self is determined in relation to others
- Masks -> avatars
- "Man cannot be anybody other than what is required by his environment." (Laing)
- Constant construction of the self
- Filiciak overstates the fragmentation of contemporary existence and institutions
- Identity as a rhizome -> hyperidentity
- Games offter the opportunity to play with identity
- A pleasurable, often wilful blurring between reality and the subjective reality of experience
- Menial tasks in-game can be fun (and this is written before World of Warcraft!)
- Fetishization of the screen
- Being visible on-screen = being real
- Internet discourse is akin to public rhetoric (speeches, etc.), we are always aware of and performing for an (imagined) audience
- Filiciak can't seem to decide if MMORPGs are a metaphor for the self, a "playground" for experimentation, or an actual space for the articulation of the self (I've weighed in on the differences between these three possibilities in an essay on Foucault's aesthetic self-creation and expansive gameplay)