Healthy sarcasm of in-game virtuality
(first please read part I, II, and III)
The conjunction of people’s basic needs and the gameplay is essential when viewed in the context of building virtuality as something bigger than just entertaining therapy. Only when the digital environment can support our socio-biological instances, post-social individuals will have a chance to leave society in quite a radical manner.
The first step in such a direction is made by issuing various in-game currencies, valuables, and virtual collectibles. They hint at a principle possibility to arrange living without a need to hold offline relationships. This is different from what professional gamers do today. They deal with gaming as with any other non-virtual activity, gaming is just a job for them. However, a different subordination should emerge between the offline society and online dis-society.
This is not about a ratio between time periods spent in a game and out of it. This is about a fundamental priority of a virtual space in terms of livelihood. The in-game environment should occupy a privileged position in a post-social routine. In other words, the widest possible array of activities should obtain an “in-game” prefix. A business should become an in-game business, healthcare should be executed by special in-game entities, interactions with governmental bodies should be settled through in-game practices.
By the way, the post-social paradigm does not imply the elimination of States, as it is represented by many cyberpunk utopianists. States and governments as integral parts of society will keep evolving under the plans of social elites with the tacit support of the silent majority. The post-social conditions are not for the masses. Dis-society is for individuals only. And as we know, the true individual is a very rare species of hominids in proportion to the world’s population. We are talking about just a parallel post-social space, not for nothing.
Politics, culture, labor, leisure, as well as all the other aspects of social life, should get their digital competitors in post-social gameplay. Pay your special attention: not analogs but competitors. The very nature of dis-society is very ironic towards everything people take seriously in their “real” social interactions. Every true individual is a nihilist at his/her essence. That’s why virtual politics can be nothing but a full of humor grotesque reflection of what social elites represent as “important solutions” under the cowardly egoistic mental patterns of a political mindset.
The conceptual rivals of all social phenomena will appear in post-society as a result of rather mental inertia than actual necessity. We shouldn’t forget that all post-social individuals are gamers, they always play. And thus, they cannot perceive conventional hierarchies without sarcasm.
They can hardly be upset about politics once changing a political regime in virtuality is as easy as changing clothes in reality. Frustration and anxiety have no place consequently. There is no time for depression and self-pity when numerous heroic quests are coming your way. Both suicide and homicide can be nothing but bad memories in a space where killing is legal and death can be personally experienced multiple times.
Eventually, little humans from the living-on-credit precariat whose reality is sterilized by society against risk, adventures, and death appear capable of experiencing a highly autonomous existence full of danger and responsibility. Virtual gameplay provides them with a digital alternative to ISIL, mercenarism, mafia, nazism, and many other antisocial but extremely challenging movements without the necessity to sacrifice themselves in fact.
