Jonathan Boulter, " Virtual Bodies, or Cyborgs Are People Too"

(In Digital Gameplay)

- Figuration of the body in first-person shooters
- Relation between customized avatar and the "real" body playing
- Gaming experience as "a perfect site for the realization and representation of the cyborg"
- FPS deathmatch "communities of violence" as a space of liberation?
- Simultaneous desire and anxiety over technological/technologized bodies
- Contradictions of deathmatch: real/virtual, present/distant
- Cyber-body as oppressive (McLuhan) and/or liberating (Haraway)?
- Multiplication of cyborg self - player/computer cyborg, fictional player-created cyborg avatar
- Game does not sustain cyborg identities (imagined, temporally limited projection)
- Communal space of online muiltiplayer is a constructed and intepreted resonant space
- Heterotopia: liminal spaces of transformation and contestation (of subjectivities)
- Sublime pleasure in temporal limitation (which nevertheless must be erased by a seemingly fully-realized world)
- Erase its own virtuality
- Competing logics of fiction/real
- Sublime transports/translates/projects the self. To where? The gamespace also defines the sublime experience
- Deathmatch as ritualized, sacred violence that binds a community (which exists nowhere and everywhere as a virtual community) together
- Bataille: ecstasy of death creates the self (always temporary ecstasy)
- "Deathmatch can be read as a reflection of larger philosophical truths"
- Rather than singular, deathmatch is an endlessly repeated ritual (repetition as key to cyborg ontology), simulated violence becomes meaningless
- Deathmatch (so read) as simulation of the sacred, postmodern critique of philosophy
- The game requires the real to be a game, and vice versa
- Loss of the real when we enter the game, loss of the virtual when we leave it
- Spectacularized banality (such as realistic physics) which we cannot carry into the real world (hyperreal?)
- Continual fall from, return to the gameworld (sense of loss/trauma)
- Gameworld as the unconscious of the real world (atemporal, deathless) in which desire is expressed/actualized
- Gameplay as a working-through of anxieties about technology, but simultaneously the game proscribes our freedoms, the possibility space