Identity and Identification

Players play virtual worlds in order to be themselves.

Well, perhaps not quite all of them do, but it’s true of those who play for fun. Even in game worlds, some people will be there for specialist reasons (play-testing, customer service, spying from some competing game); none of these individuals would necessarily have any inclination to become immersed, and those that do would be professional about it. There will also be a few people who are in the process of “getting” what a virtual world is about; these will mainly be insufficiently immersed newbies, but occasionally there are individuals who never “get” what virtual worlds are about but play nevertheless (generally, to the irritation of everyone else). Most of the players will be there because of the freedom to be themselves that the virtual world offers, though.

People who don’t play virtual worlds (but have tried them) find other ways to be themselves. It has been argued that one of the reasons more men play virtual worlds than women could be because in modern society men have less opportunity to experiment with their identities in real life ¹. For players, though, virtual worlds afford an unmatched ability simply to be.

Let’s look at this a little more analytically, and see if there’s anything that designers can do to make this salute to identity any easier.

We should begin by noting that identity is not the same as identification, although the two are related. Identification is the modeling of the self on some ideal. For players of virtual worlds who might sense the possibilities of identity exploration without really understanding how to invoke it, the provision of ideals can help. This is why many virtual worlds have a class system.

The idea is that the individual takes on board those aspects that define the ideal, because these are what the individual admires. They provide a target—something to shoot for. If a proposed role model exhibits other features that conflict with an individual’s sense of self, that role model is not suitable as an ideal. It’s therefore easier to identify with an abstraction rather than something concrete, because abstractions present fewer features; you can flesh out what isn’t mentioned without hitting contradictions.

This would imply that the lower an ideal’s detail, the better. Sure enough, many virtual worlds have dozens of classes for players to peruse. The disadvantage of this approach is that the fewer qualities an ideal presents, the less rounded it is, and therefore the flatter it makes those people who aspire to it seem. An ideal with a single outstanding feature leads to players who are defined by that single outstanding feature, that is, who are one-dimensional. One-dimensional characters don’t make for riveting movies, and neither do they make for enthralling virtual worlds. Many virtual worlds with character classes therefore also have character races, to provide another dimension (although there tend to be specific class/race combinations that work better than others, so in practice the choice isn’t quite as wide as it may appear).

Whereas identification is about projecting your self-image onto some ideal, identity is about projecting it onto yourself. The former can help the latter, but has neither its extent nor its fidelity. If it goes too far, it can be counter-productive. Identification is allowing yourself to be defined by an image ²; in excess, it can therefore lead to a conflict between personal identity and that perceived of the ideal. A painting doesn’t change, but an artist must. If a virtual world commits a player to identifying with a fixed set of ideals, there will be problems when those ideals are no longer appropriate.

Identity is a product of thought, manifested by expression (actions, words). It has to be flexible, so it can wander, focus, be reborn. It also has to be true. A false image may be projected for the benefit of other people, as a way to influence them; individuals can’t lie for long to themselves, though—that is, if they can see themselves. In the real world, this can be difficult.

Virtual worlds provide people with a mirror. In a virtual world, you can see yourself. You only see what you show to the mirror, which may not be what everyone else sees, but it’s more than enough. With identity, the question is how much you like your reflection; with identification, it’s how much you believe it.

Virtual world designers have some control over this. They get to provide the ideals; they get to make the mirror. As I said earlier, though, they can’t do this systematically. You can’t draw a graph with an “identity” axis and place players at various places along it. The best you can do is to assess the likely consequences of their progression to greater maturity. To do that, you need to know the course that progression takes.