Dissertation: Hyperidentities within MMORPGs
So you actually care what a hyperidentity is?
Well *deep breath* hyperidentity is a term created by Miroslaw Filiciak a Croatian Ph.D student (presumably he’s now a Doctor as the book I was reading containing his essay is a few years old now).
Basically it’s an extension of another concept, hyper-reality, which was concieved by the postmodern media theorist Jean Baudrillard (who pops up quite a bit when it comes to weird sounding theories and philosophies).
Hyper-reality basically means that it is no longer possible, in a media-saturated world, to distinguish between what is real and what is not. Hyper-reality, therefore, is a situation in which nothing and everything is ‘real’; it is a situation in which we have lost the ability to distinguish reality and fiction.
Think of The Matrix, the idea of you think you’re in the real world but you’re not actually and after a while you lose track of what’s real and what’s not.
Hyperidentity is a bit like this but more personal. You lose track of what your real identity is and what your ‘other’ identity is, i.e. in this case, your game identity. You play MMORPGs for so long that you ‘become’ your game identity, which in some people’s case can be hugely different from their ‘regular’ identity.
Now, throw in a hint of Castells (yet another postmodern theorist) who believes that we live in a network society, and when you throw in MMORPGs, that our identity is defined by our relation to the internet instead of the family, the clan, the tribe or nation which is a mahoosive (to use a very technical term
) shift from where we used to be as a society.
And just to round off the recipe, I’m throwing in some Jung and a look at the idea of persona and how it affects us all.
My excuse is I've been away all weekend and explained it to half a dozen people in 3 days as it is 
).
