Let’s start with a simple statement: Online video games allow us not only to take on multiple identities, but take them on simultaneously.
Okay, truth time. You probably wouldn’t know it, but I’m not exactly an online gaming nut. In fact, until a few months ago, I thought RPG stood for “really powerful gun”—a holdover from my misspent youth playing Doom and other violent computer games. Turns out, an RPG is actually a Role Playing Game—a type of video game usually played online in which people take on the role of a specific character in order to achieve some sort of goal.
In his book What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy, James Paul Gee sets out three different identities that RPG players may embody at any time.
Virtual identity—this is the identity of the character you play in a virtual world. An example of a virtual identity is a healer character in a video game. This virtual identity is the character you “become” when you play online.- Real-world identity—this is quite simply you. This is who you are in the non-virtual world, for example a poor student spending time playing a video game.
- Projective identity—this is your identity as the virtual character. It exists somewhere between your virtual identity and your real-world identity. The key here is that both of these identities interact in order to create a projective identity. This is you creating a character of a healer, whom you want to emulate.
So that’s all well and good, but what does it mean?
We want to focus on the projective identity as a site of conflict between what we are (real-world identity) and what we want to be (virtual identity). Since the virtual world allows us to create our own persona based on the ideals, beliefs, aspirations we hold, the projective identity provides a way for us to try out our identities in a place with few or no real-world consequences. This is what psychologist Eric Erikson calls a “psychosocial moratorium” which Gee considers a valuable tool in the learning process. This goes back to the idea that the Internet is anonymous, therefore allowing experimentation without punishment.
This type of multiplicity of identities is more than just a conscious decision to change behaviour based on the company you keep. It is a subconscious way of shaping identity and testing out the values and beliefs we’ve grown up to consider common sense.
Who would have thought that the oft-maligned video game could have such an impact on these profound formative questions?
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