Dangers of Playing with the Virtual Other in Mind: A Psychoanalytical View on Digital Role-Playing Games and the Edge between Facilitating Personality Development and Endangering the Player's Psyche

Axioms Of Psychoanalysis

To track this perspective on the act of playing, the axioms of psychoanalytic theory have to be clarified. Besides a dynamic unconscious as part of the human psyche, we are working with the assumption that individuals internalize in the course of a lifetime – but prevalently in their early years - representations of meaningful interactions. These representations do have a scenic character as they are formed in scenic interactions. In the course of transference, which means externalizing once internalized representations anew, an actual interaction partner takes the counterpart within the old scene. We have a certain readiness doing that, because the “… infant is born with a virtual other in mind that invites replacement by some actual other in felt immediacy.” (Braten, 1993) This kind of role-playing opens up the chance to get in touch with the old internalizations in order to – eventually - modify them. The possibility space for that is given by the immersive character of co-constructed intermediate areas (Winnicott, 1971/2005; K. Stephenson, 2007, 2009, 2010; Stephenson-Mittlböck, 2012; Mittlböck, 2012).