Identity In Role Play Gaming: "Design Authority"

I am not a gamer, nor do I have any desire to play video games, so the rhetorical concepts that are found in such a genre have never struck my fancy until reading "Identity Performance in Role Playing Games" by Danielle Nielsen.  With the normal issues of gender, sex, race, and other divisions among people gaming provides the experience for people to escape these binaries, although on one hand it seems quite sad that it takes a "virtual" world for this experience to happen it's also quite nice that there is a "place" in which people are experiencing neutrality.

Nielsen describes this experience as "design authority", the place in which a player gets to design their avatar and the strengths and weaknesses associated with that avatar is not judged by gender, class, race, sex, etc.  How interesting that it is within the game world that these barriers are being shut down and even more so that the possibility of people first experiencing in the game world then can practice it in the "real" world.  This isn't a certainty as he does say that women are still targeted in the game as he states, "but the truth is there is a vocal minority in the gaming community that targets female gamers for an extra level of harassment."  What's interesting is that these "women" players could actually be just the avatar identity and the actual player behind the avatar could be male, and that a woman can actually escape this by choosing a male avatar.

The process of creating a character, the choices that one has to go through leads one into self-exploration that I never even considered with games.  These avatars can be expressions of how we see ourselves, how we want the world to see us, a way to hide the "parts" of ourselves that we fear "others" judge us on, and I would argue or a way to express a part of us that we weren't entirely aware was there until given the choice to explore it.  It seems as though, the virtual world of gaming is definitely a place that could bring up identities within people that they never knew was there and I argue that the next step is to bringing this awareness to the players so that they can better self reflect upon these decisions giving them more power and understanding of their "self".

Authorial identity in the gaming world is a place of experimentation and possibly even a place that a person gets have an experience that otherwise wouldn't be had in the "real" world because of the stigmas created around specific identities, but what does this do for the authentic self and truth online?