For over-playing teenagers, the association of a videogame workshop and a talking moment seems to be an adequate therapy. The use of the videogame as the mediation object of the therapy allows for the emergence of feelings that might be elaborated through verbalization in a second step. It allows the teenagers to become aware of their own troubles, and consequently helps them to move away from them. Interactions facilitated by the well-disposed group strengthen the identificatory process, especially with the victims of school violence. At least one of the therapists should be very familiar with the videogame’s world, in order to facilitate the narcissistic revaluation process and the identification process.
The polemic that certain web sites give rise to is all the more enthralling in that this tool signals a real rupture in the nature of investments between the new generation and the old. The turnabout in identity transmission positions is one of the avatars generated by the invasion of avatars with the family unit. Freud wrote a few words about the telephone at the time of « Civilization and its discontents ». What would he say about Second Life in our « Crisis in the Culture » ?
The article analyzes the phenomenon of virtual communities (Second Life and Cryopolis) in light of psychoanalytic theory, recognizing in their functioning a preponderance of impersonal and group motifs: paternal, maternal or fraternal complexes or imagines that organize representations and determine behaviors.
Using interviews with members and administrators of these sites, we will show that, within these virtual communities, the place given to authority, to justice, to the conception of reality or to genealogy suggests the crumbling of the paternal complex (or paternal metaphor in Lacanian theory) in favor of the fraternal complex. Finally, we will offer the « digital hydra » as a metaphor for these « communities of connected brethren ». Adolescence, 2009, T. 27, n°3, pp. 667-677.
The authors attempt to demonstrate the impact on an individual of different psychological functions of the creation of multiple avatars in video games, more particularly in MMORPG. The avatars are either fragmented representations of the self that provide, as a whole, an image of the player personality, or they may come as a crude quest for sensations and motor stimulations. These different relational aspects of the avatar will be illustrated using adolescent clinical cases.
Playability can be defined as the adaptation of a system to a playful use. On the computer, playability takes shape through many aspects. One of these factors is the relationship which is formed between the player and his representation in the fictional universe, since the latter represents his modalities of action within the game world. This text proposes to understand the role of the avatar in the playful involvement of the user. First, we define the notion of playability. Then we question the framework that can be used to analyze the links between the avatars and playability in video games. The text ends with the definition of several characteristics of the avatar of video games.
Virtual worlds describe an imaginary world of transcendance where corporalities rejoice in generalized ubiquity and interconnectedness, where artificial organs take on a heuristic function, where one is rapt in spirit and tele-present, transported from electronic nirvanas tp simulated stimulations, where, finally, virtual life echoes with promises of immortality. Our avatars, principle operators of the ecstatic transports of this virtual paradise, demand wider refection about the very notion of body, which is diffracted in its relation to the corporeal imaginary. Through these avatars, we reformulate both the project of the living in that of hyperlife, and that of spiritual transcendence in the technical programming of a consensual hallucination which transcends the frontiers of the corporeal.
The idea of using fictional characters to represents the human is one of the fundamental components of Indo-European culture and finds new expression thanks to the Internet and the development of virtual worlds. The avatar, the digital representation of a real « player », is the talk of the town in recent years mainly because of the success of Second Life, the most famous of these universes.
The way that the avatar is constructed expresses the compromise between freedom of expression offered by the virtual and the emergence of social structures proper to human beings.
Testimonies of video games’ excessive players lead to questions about the human condition: How can forge an identity for oneself and build an itinerary within the « societies of the instant », characterised by uncertainty and disinclination ? The desire for recognition is carried out in new inter-subjective structures which control even the autonomy of individuals. Highlight of the culture of the image and of the interactiveness wherein the body occupies a particular position – missing in the flesh, but at the helm of the avatar, the pixelated body. Insofar as they offer the possibility of living experiences with others, video games appear to be a favourable place in which to fabricate an identity.
The universe of the popular network game World of Warcraft is characterized by the originality of cultural references it uses and recomposes, but also by the virtual use of animist thought. These anthropological components like mana, totem animal, or demons were once vectors of fear and social distance as Freud analyzed in Totem and taboo. They are now commonly used objects for the player’s avatar in virtual reality. In a similar way, science and technology occupy a special status which is in many ways similar to the ancient Presocratic metaphysics.
The analysis of these symbolic dimensions and the ethical considerations involved are keys to a better understanding of what holds the player’s interest in his avatar, and may be tools for adults and therapists.
The avatar may be reduced to a sort of logo or enhanced with a large number of personal details. For its owner, it functions in virtual spaces as a second skin, and for its interlocutors as a set of partial objects. Neither totally real, nor totally imaginary, the avatar introduces him into a new space in which the interlocutor is both present and absent, in a way that can engage either the element of consolation or that of frustration.
Adolescence, 2009, T. 27, n°3, pp. 591-600.
Revue semestrielle de psychanalyse, psychopathologie et sciences humaines, indexée AERES au listing PsycINFO publiée avec le concours du Centre National du Livre et de l’Université de Paris Diderot Paris 7