Frameworks and Realities 9
but to a massive network attached to an even greater organism called the
Internet. “Share culture” became the norm, and people were now hyper-
connected, posting detailed intimacies of their real lives for the (online)
public to
see.41
The walls between the “virtual world” and the “real
world” are as porous as Swiss cheese, and what Edward Castronova
once called the
“membrane”42
that separated the two worlds has nearly
vanished. The worlds now overlap in many ways, and whether they are
playing a game or not, people find themselves sharing personal details
about their lives with strangers across the globe, as though that is how
things have always been. The norm of social and information transpar-
ency has taken root, and who we are online has become who we are
offline.
The Language of World Resonance
Spaces of play, or game worlds like those discussed in this book, often
vie for separation from “reality” to be enlivened. Our reality, which I
will often refer to as “the reality of everyday life,” is, for most of us,
the dominant and “most real”
reality.43
This reality truly competes with
nothing, as we all are investing in it through our everyday interactions,
thoughts, and experiences (and to some degree our physical bodies, as
they belong to the solid world, which is part of what defines our concept
of the “real”). This energy is spent to actively construct and to believe
that this reality is the “real” one, the important one, and the one that
truly matters. Who I am and what I do in the reality of everyday life
are more or “better” than who I am or what I do in spaces of play, or in
games, where the rules are different, and where (supposedly) less is at
stake—despite the fact that entire game worlds might rely on my actions
or yours, whereas our actions in the reality of everyday life are often
inconsequential, and even meaningless on a grand scale.
This means that because we all become invested in seeing the reality
of everyday life as the most important plane of existence (that is, it’s
where our focus and energy should always be located), we must always
use it as a sort of “checks and balances” system for any excursions into
other (or alternate) realities. Ideally, at some level, we may even seek to
completely dismantle other realities, or to chain them back to the values
and framework of the reality of everyday life, ensuring that it and only it
remains the most important reality, and also that there is truly no escape
for us from it. This may sound bleak, but we labor in this way to feel as
though our actions in “real life” have meaning, so it’s important in many
ways to help us continue participating in the system of the “real world.”
