Showing: Intensities

In massively multiplayer environments such as Second Life or World of Warcraft, role-playing becomes a common form of escapism. Naturally, there is also a backlash to such escapism, a reaction to the inauthentic nature of fake identities and staged experiences. There is the sense that the true self can only be realized once the staged identity falls apart: once one sheds their contextual trappings, information about the true self can emerge. All of the pretenses and false meaning are ultimately petty and insignificant compared to the study of what lies beneath. Only when the self has nothing left to show does it become truly deserving of observation. There are no identifiable characteristics with which one can easily dismiss an anonymous user’s motives: only the motive itself remains.