This paper draws on the notion of the ‘project,’ as developed in the existential philosophy of Heidegger and Sartre, to articulate an understanding of the existential structure of engagement with virtual worlds. By this philosophical understanding, the individual’s orientation towards a project structures a mechanism of self-determination, meaning that the project is understood essentially as the project to make oneself into a certain kind of being. Drawing on existing research from an existential-philosophical perspective on subjectivity in digital game environments, the notion of a ‘virtual subjectivity’ is proposed to refer to the subjective sense of being-in-the-virtual-world. The paper proposes an understanding of virtual subjectivity as standing in a nested relation to the individual’s subjectivity in the actual world, and argues that it is this relation that allows virtual world experience to gain significance in the light of the individual’s projectual existence. The arguments advanced in this paper pave the way for a comprehensive understanding of the transformative, self-transformative, and therapeutic possibilities and advantages afforded by virtual worlds.
Within dramatherapy and psychodrama, the term ‘de-roling’ indicates a set of activities that assist the subjects of therapy in ‘disrobing’ themselves from their fictional characters. Starting from the psychological needs and the therapeutic goals that ‘de-roling’ techniques address in dramatherapy and psychodrama, this text provides a broader understanding of procedures and exercises that define and ease transitional experiences across cultural practices such as religious rituals and spatial design. After this introductory section, we propose a tentative answer as to why game studies and virtual world research largely ignored processes of ‘roling’ and ‘de-roling’ that separate the lived experience of role-play from our everyday sense of the self. The concluding sections argue that de-roling techniques are likely to become more relevant, both academically and in terms of their practical applications, with the growing diffusion of virtual technologies in social practices. The relationships we can establish with ourselves and with our surroundings in digital virtual worlds are, we argue, only partially comparable with similar occurrences in pre-digital practices of subjectification. We propose a perspective according to which the accessibility and immersive phenomenological richness of virtual reality technologies are likely to exacerbate the potentially dissociative effects of virtual reality applications. This text constitutes an initial step towards framing specific socio-technical concerns and starting a timely conversation that binds together dramatherapy, psychodrama, game studies, and the design of digital virtual worlds.
Taking as its basis Nancy's essay ‘Why Are There Several Arts And Not Just One?’, this paper makes a case for understanding games as constituting art works bearing a specifically ludic form. It draws on aesthetic theory and philosophy – particularly Kant, Heidegger, Gadamer, and Nancy – in order to theorise the particular aesthetic potential inherent to this form, and the challenges it poses to existing concepts of art and aesthetic engagement. The paper will argue that the player's relation to a game, in contrast to the aesthetic relation as theorised in post-Kantian aesthetics, invokes an active, purposive disposition – and, moreover, that it is this active, purposive disposition itself that is brought forth into presentation by the ludic work. The conclusion reached is that the ludic aesthetic work establishes a gameworld as a sphere of existential praxis for the player, within which she lives a being-in-the-gameworld, which, in being inscribed into the unity of the game as an object distinct from the player, is itself externalised as an object of her aesthetic contemplation.
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