The name is absent

It seemed to me that what people are really doing in
computer and videogames is trying to get closer and closer to
fusing themselves with the game. The idea that a game
would plug right into your nervous system made perfect
sense to me, because putting on glasses and gloves is a crude
attempt to fuse your nervous system with the game. I went a
little bit further - if I want to be the game, the game will
also want to be me (King, 2002: 150).

In this respect, it is useful to observe the appearance in Japan of a new
phenomenon named Otakuism which designates the life of computer games
consumers who live almost permanently in the virtual worlds generated by
technology (Mandosio, 2001: 10-11). This style of life has certainly already
been described in novels such as Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote (1605-
1615) and Gustav Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1856). Nevertheless, the
difference today is the crucial development and involvement of technology in
the establishment of these kinds of worlds.

Technology has created what has been named ‘virtual communities’,
social groups, with no corporeal/material contact, that form webs of personal
relationships in Cyberspace. In social terms, technology has simultaneously
united and divided virtuality and reality, creating two societies in one or
dividing one society in two. Virilio expresses this sociological phenomenon,
commenting that:

One is a society of ‘cocoons’ and home offices where people
hide away at home, linked into communication networks,
inert. (.) The other is a society of the ultra-crowded
megalopolis and of urban nomadisιτι.(...) Some people, those
in the virtual community, will live in the real time of the
world-city, but others will live in deferred time, in other
worlds, in the actual city, in the streets (Virilio, 1993: 75).

In recent years the appearance of virtual environments created to live
a parallel existence like Sims (2000) and Second Life¹⁹ have assumed special
relevance. Second Life is a 3D world where the users live and socialize as

¹⁹ Following the line of other machinima productions, January 2007 saw the release of Molotov Alva and
his search for the creator: A Second Life Odyssey (Gayeton, 2007), a film made entirely in the virtual
world of Second Life that presents a diary of a citizen, Douglas Gayeton, who disappears from the real
world to inhabit the virtual environment of Second Life. The diaries can be found at
http://www.molotovalba.com

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