I became very interested by this question after hearing about Videoplace. I play World of Warcraft and have played various other MMORPG's. I have asked this question to many online friends and friends in real life (IRL) who I play World of Warcraft with. So far everyone I have asked has said that someone else standing on them bothers them.
If proximity is a signifier of intimacy, then how to people who are dating IRL feel about standing on top of each other in World of Warcraft? I posed the question to a couple that date IRL and play World of Warcraft together. The two of them felt that standing on another persons character does not represent intimacy but rather disrespect. They went on to give me an analogy of a person coming up to me IRL, wrapping his arms around me, intertwining his legs between mine and pressing his face against mine.
This analogy caught me off guard because they were using examples of why it would bother them in the physical world. After all, we're playing a game where you can fly on magic carpets, kill dragons and monsters, and shoot magical spells. World of Warcraft is very far removed from my idea of real life, yet it is still shaped by many social norms in the physical world. Is proximity such a powerful learned cultural norm that we are unable to disregard it in a virtual world? There may be a time when future games really seek out to disconnect people from everything in the physical world, but for now it seems that games still expect real world cultural patterns to persist in a virtual space.
1 comment:
this is very interesting. I did not think of this until i read your post. I to have played wow and i understand how this could be annoying. I did not like it when people stood right on top of me, mostly because I did not feel like I could clearly see myself, and this bothered me. I do also feel bothered when a big group of people, in a raid for instance, all end up on top of each other, it is too caused and can cause group anxiety and confusion. This is a very interesting topic!!!
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