Abstract
Online game playing has attracted much attention of scholars in recent years, entailing a lot of debates on the conflicts between the virtual and the real, the physical body and the digital body, as well as between human and machine. Significantly, all of these conflicts make the issue of identity/identification
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more complicated and important than ever before. This study employs the avatar, the virtual character in online games, as a research object. It aims to explore the changes in the issues of identification and identity in the information era; it upholds the perspective of embodiment; it develops an interdisciplinary structure; it scrutinizes the concepts of the body, sex, and gender, in online gaming; and unifies its finding through the prism of synchronicity. Synchronicity, as one of the most significant findings of this research, is considered and utilized as a school of thought emerging from the technical capacity of embracing multiple spaces at the same time. It embarks on rethinking and reframing the relationship between time and space. Synchronicity, in conjunction with the embodiment principle, forge the “missing link” zigzagging among multiple theories from different disciplines. The approach to this research on the avatar is from cultural and gender studies. It is theoretical and text-based, rather than empirical. This work is interdisciplinary, but is framed within these two discursive domains. Through the construction of an interdisciplinary argument, this dissertation shows that a combination of media, cultural analysis, feminist theory and phenomenology of the body is capable of integrating an understanding of the avatar across several disciplines. By focusing on the interaction between the player’s body and the avatar, as well as the performance, switchover and the “choosability” of gender in online gaming, this research confirms the epistemological shift from materiality to embodiment. This shift is highlighted and theorized in the synchronicity environments, for instance, in online game playing. In this vein, through an phenomenologist elaboration of three synchronous bodies which are emerging and co-existing in the course of online game playing, I define the body as an assemblage activated by the life dynamic. The body is not necessarily flesh, but should certainly be capable of embodiment. In such a context, for an individual player, gender is an option which entails gender performance, and even gender switchover. As a result, gender can be neither or both feminine and masculine. Based on these observations, this dissertation argues that the individual level of identification has both been enlarged and empowered in this information era. This dissertation also makes a contribution to feminist methodology. It shows the potential of feminism as both a research field and a perspective. I understand feminist theory as a research perspective that can be applied to many possible objects of research, more than a specific academic discipline or research domain. Feminist theory as an academic perspective is inherently interdisciplinary, and foregrounds not only the immanently embodied nature of human being, but also notions of multiplicity and difference.
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