These are extracts from an article by Sherry Turkle in Cyber_Reader.
The article talks about identity's within virtual games. She uses three example of people who played online games and their identity within them. I found it incredibly interesting looking at these three very different people and their use of these online identity's.
The firs person was a girl called Jess who's mother 'denies her existence' so she used the game to work out her own issues about her mother and have the conversations she was never able to have in real life. The second person is a guy who is completely isolated by health. He is more of the stereotypical vision of a game player, someone who gets to live a life the way her would like, complete with virtual girlfriend. And the last a guy who was able to get over emotional issues during collage but stopped gaming when he left and went on to get a good paying job. He says the game 'kept him form having suicidal thoughts.'
This article looking at these three people gives an interesting incite to the way that people use online inanity's and virtual self's in these kinds of games and virtual reality's.
It's interesting to read about how people can create online identities for positive reasons and as form of escapism, such as the boy who's gaming reality kept him from having suicidal thoughts. There are so many immediate negatives we normally associated with creating virtual fake online identities that positives such as these examples could get aren't heard of as much.
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