Adamant Bodies. The Avatar-Body and the Problem of Autoempathy

This essay examines the relationship between the player and the avatar, but his question regards how we relate to others’ avatars and players. The avatar, a digital incarnation of the Self, “is the embodied manifestation of the player’s engagement with the game-world”; “it incorporates the player and disciplines his/her body”. The avatar is the means – the position – by way of which the player is able to function as an actant in the virtual world. It is not a fracture with the Self, but an extension to another oneself. But this redoubling (dual actant) interferes in the relationship of the player with Otherness (“the actual/virtual Other as a whole”): social relations in virtual worlds are actually intra-subjective, “wholly played out within the pole of Selfness”. After showing that the visual perspective commonly used to access virtual environments is semi-subjective, the article argues that this does not allow a truly empathic connection with Otherness. Technological mediation frustrates the communication of emotions, and this is strengthened by the limitations of simulated worlds – whereas cinema, for example, has developed sophisticated techniques that, in part at least, overcome this issue. The bodily-enforced experience of computer games seems to have its own specific drawbacks.