The Suffering Avatar: Vicarity and Resistance in Body-Tracked Multiplayer Gaming

Abstract

This chapter examines acts of co-immersion in a multiplayer full body-tracked video game, focusing on what I term as ‘hyper-intercorporeal’ encounters between two or more avatar-players in real-world and computer-generated spaces. Drawing on an incident of accidental avatar disfigurement that occurred inside a location-based VR zombie shooter game called City Z (2017–), I will scrutinize the wider ethical complexities of vicarious suffering in gaming contexts. Revisiting the ‘psychotechnic checa’ (torture cell) as a cautionary historical example of the potential to weaponize enveloping aesthetics, I will progress to consider whether the postdigital enmeshment of real and simulated bodies in virtual gaming environments requires a revision of notions of avatars as delegated forms of consumption or ‘interpassive objects’ (Pfaller, Robert. 1996. Um die Ecke Gelacht. Kuratoren Nehmen uns die Kunstbetrachtung ab, Videorecorder Schauen sich unsere Lieblingsfilme an: Anmerkungen zum Paradoxon der Interpassivität. In Falter 41/96.71) that feel on a player’s behalf. An avatar-self in gaming shifts the focus of body-ownership over a virtual proxy from a desire ‘know’ an other’s bodied experiences, to a vehicle for strategic gameplay and to heighten affective responses in situations where our avatar is subjected to ‘physical’ threat. I argue that perceptually embodied avatars challenge the idea that the simulacrum of an avatar’s suffering is at a safe remove from the player, examining the reactions of player-avatars immersed in survival horror games. I will consider how unintended glitches and moments of system failure might provide a critical space to interrogate illusions that elicit our bodies’ acquiescence to unconsciously receive virtual scenarios in the order of the hyperreal. I further contend that jarring glitches provide opportunities to salvage unintended and increasingly vital spaces of recuperation from the psychological exhaustion, vicarious suffering or compassion fatigue.