Identity in Videogames

Kevin was mentioned Roland Barthes on the Thursday lecture, which is remind me something is that Barthes did a deep semiotic analysis on children’s toys. He thinks that toys function as training tools in the early childhood education period. Children are trained to be a character as the parents are expected. “All the toys one commonly sees are essentially a microcosm of the adult world; they are all reduced copies of human objects, as if in the eyes of the public the child was, all told, nothing but a smaller man… toys always mean something, and this something is always entirely socialised, constituted by the myths or the technique of modern adult life: the Army, Broadcasting, the Post Office, Medicine, School, Hair-Styling, the Air force, Transport, Science(Martian toys) .” (p53). Thus, a girl’s Barbie doll is use to train that girl to be a mother in the future. Therefore, we can see that even a Barbie doll is actually carries a certain ideological function. Because toys and games are not just for fun and self entertainment. The key function is to help the children decide the value of themselves, and also the stuffs that around them. Children can simulate from the toys, and children can simulate themselves from the toys.

From this point of view, in this techno- culture period, the videogame (particularly multiplayer game) identity is socially constructed. Of course, different from Barbie dolls in industrial period, multiplayer videogame operates in a virtual environment. In multiplayer videogame, the people in the actual world enter a virtual, self imagined world. And the magic of the multiple online videogame, the player inside the game can be totally different from the actual world, thus you can try a new different character, and because it’s virtual, the players can have a chance to build another themselves.

It should be said, with the digitization of computer, it provides a virtual environment for humans. ”Virtual” this traditional philosophical term is corresponding to “actual” or “real”, which makes us have a chance to understand this videogame virtual culture.

Keliang L.