ABSTRACT
Games in the cyberspace, featuring myriad occasions of virtual human interaction and competition, steer the gamers into utopic and dystopic spaces and contexts constructed and mediated by technology. Keeping in mind the alarming prognostications that several theorists, Marshall McLuhan, Jean Baudrillard, Paul Virilio, and Donna Haraway, to name a few, have expressed about the transformative power of technology on individuals and culture, one may wonder if gaming does a plastic surgery to sensibilities and perspectives. 1 Through face-to-face interactions and online interviews with gamers, I have tried to gather and analyse perspectives on whether playing simulation and role-playing games bring about changes in their attitudes, ideologies and subjectivities in actual social life. Gamers usually prefer to keep their identity confidential; identity of the avatars (on-screen persona) may not correspond to the identity of the gamer. So, it was not possible to do an ethnographic and gender-based profiling of the gamers; this is a methodological limitation of this study. The age, sex, location (asl) query is not appreciated by gamers who prefer anonymity. The interviews with gamers were conducted in chats within the games. I did not disclose to some of the gamers that I am interviewing them for research. In this chapter, I have used many sites 2 comprising games themed sexual violence, war, alien attacks, homicide, rape, suicide, butchering, dissection, post-mortem, surgery, martyrdom, torture, hunting, and haunting. I treat games as emplotted within thematic frameworks depending on the narrative and the actions in the game. For studying the games I registered as a member, entered the gamescape of other players and became an accomplice 271or a voyeur of activities taking place. However, gamers I met through Facebook wherein the games do not have content based on crime, sex and violence were not overtly insistent on anonymity. 3
