Virtual, But Real?

Above all, online games make the border between reality and fantasy faded away. It does not mean the psychological confusion or disorder caused by playing of videogames for many hours and days, but the long-term change in the relationship between technological developments and perceptual, cognitional system we possess. In order to explain this phenomenon, we need to explore online games in the history of cyberspace as “virtual reality.” It is because, in the history of digital network or the history of the Internet, online games are the most concrete example which enabled a “hyperreal” (virtual but more realistic) experience in the everyday life level.

Cyberspace and Virtual Reality

The concept of virtual space like “cyberspace” was first coined and used in William Gibson’s science fiction, Neuromancer and its following series. According to Gibson, cyberspace is “a consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation” as well as “a graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system.”1 The cyberspace rendered here was so persuasive and probable that the idea was very widely used in popular culture, especially visual arts like film, and that even a video game was made as the same title. Maybe, nothing explains the features of cyberspace better than online games. There are more than similarities between Gibson’s cyberspace and online games: without the experience of consensual hallucination through the real-time exchange of graphic data and with the circulation of capital and information, online games were not actualized, even unimaginable.

In company with the fashion of cyberspace, the concept of virtual reality (VR) was at the center of the state-of-the-art technological imaginary in the late 80s and the early 90s. Despite its ambitious plan to make a verisimilar simulation of reality, due to VR’s technological limits, it seems to be vanished from the mainstream technological landscape. Nonetheless, the concept of VR influences online games in different ways: particularly, its conjunction with cyberspace, enabling user’s (or player’s) immersion in the 3D environment and human-computer interface, might have critically contributed to the current environment of multiplayer online games.

Online Games as Virtual Communities

The origin of online games in the present form, however, should be looked for from the “virtual community.” Howard Rheingold used this concept in order to describe an emerging imaginary community (a kind of agora) formed by the Internet connection. The virtual communities “where people use words and programming languages to improvise melodramas, build worlds and all the objects in them, solve puzzles, invent amusements and tools, compete for prestige and power, gain wisdom, seek revenge, indulge greed and lust and violent impulses”2 was especially called MUD (Multi-User Dungeons, Domain, or Dimension).

It is generally accepted that, among many genres of online games, especially MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-playing Game) is directly descended from MUD. Considering two forms of online interaction, “role-playing,” not to mention multi-player environment, seems working as a core factor connecting them. According to Dennis D. Waskul, in playing a role-playing game, “although the game is purely fantasy, players must act, interact, and react by imagining how they would handle the same circumstances if they were their fantasy personas and the situations they encountered were genuine.”3 The most peculiar dynamic of role-playing game is caused by identifying gamers themselves as game characters, i.e. fantasy personas. Put differently, due to the fantasy projection of player in role-playing games, players experience seamless transformation between two different worlds, and “rigid distinctions between fantasy, imagination, and reality – between person, player, and persona – prove untenable.”4

There are, of course, a large number of types of online games: FPS (First-person Shooting), RTS (Real-time Strategy), MMORPG, and the like. But, why is MMORPG problematic? It is not because MMORPG is the most popular and the best selling genre of games, but because it is constructed and changes as if a real world: game takes place in a persistent (or perpetual) world. In this environment, regardless of whether individual gamers are logged in, the conditions and of game continue to exist and evolve, providing so realistic environment that each player can experience hyperreal social life. The player’s experience includes realistic communication (chatting), production (making goods), commerce (item trading), community (guild or clan), ethics (cheating), romance (cyber marriage), and so on. Whatever the player wants to do is possible in the MMORPG world. Even the thing not allowed in the real world can happen in the cyber world in spite of moral reproach: killing another player (actually, killing the player’s avatar or character). Of course, the MMORPG provides the largest and most viable real-time, 3D environment where the characters’ stories are never ending and no final purpose is given, i.e., the open-ended platform.

While more people spend longer time in playing online games like MMORPGs in virtual space, the boundaries between fantasy and reality become more ambiguous. Then, playing games becomes more than play itself. What keeps gamers do play the games now is no more technological hallucination of VR but another reality produced and reproduced through the game play. The game reality announces another symptom: virtual (synthetic) economy where all the economic activities – production, distribution, and consumption – are possible.

1William Gibson, Neuromancer (New York: Ace Books, 1984), 69.

2Rheingold, Howard. The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 149.

3Dennis D. Waskul, “The Role-Playing Game and the Game of Role-Playing: The Ludic Self and Everyday Life,” Gaming as Culture, Ed. J. Patrick Williams, Sean Q. Hendricks and W. Keith Winkler (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2006), 30-1.

4Ibid., 31.