The new pact: How online worlds forge a new form of alliance between players and designers

Abstract

Today’s Pop Culture is tomorrow’s classic. Entertainment is often able to reflect a society’s questions and anxieties of the day. We will discuss how and why today’s Digital Generation has replaced their grandparents’ heroes and their parents’ anti-heroes by their very own avatars. How and why the empathy with heroes that has traditionally been utilized by movies has been gradually overtaken by the personalized and immersive experience of games as lived through the eyes of an avatar? How multiplayer activities are now establishing new social paradigms where these avatars help us all deal with the natural schizophrenia of everyday life by allowing us to explore our possible selves. The Social Networks boom has demonstrated our appetite for connections with others; and games our appetite for second lives, our desire to involve ourselves and master complex worlds. Perhaps, tomorrow new public Agoras will be created from a new generation of Virtual Worlds built using the grammar that video games have forged over the last 40 years.