Virtual Reality: Leaving the Meat Behind
A bit of a change of pace, here.
Bear with me.
Rummaging around my Dropbox account, I found an academic essay I wrote a few years ago during my undergraduate degree. It is concerned with the physical body and the virtual body, and focuses on the ‘disembodying’ aspect of MMORPGS as well as focussing on the construction of self within the game-playing state,commonly referred to as In Game (IG).
Diana Gromala describes virtual reality (VR) as “a mythopoeic cultural phenomenon” and as an experience “through which notions of subjectivity flow and collide.”
I argued that the same can be said of MMORPGS (massively multiplayer online role-playing games), as both rely on a certain feeling of disembodiment to be physically and psychologically effective.
This disembodiment, “leaving the meat behind” is an experience common to both VR and MMORPGS, and as such has obvious repercussions for the physical body itself, as well as the ideology of the body.
You can read the essay on Academia.edu, and download it from there if you feel like it.
Related articles
- Jedi Mind Trick? Brain Thinks It Inhabits Virtual Body (livescience.com)
- FEATURE: Extending the self: some cold truths on body ownership (sciencealert.com.au)
- Learn to shake your new tail as a virtual animal (newscientist.com)
- Out-of-body virtual scenarios ‘help social anxiety’ (arunbabyveranakunnel.wordpress.com)
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