Social Imaginary

The most important theme of this book is the idea that computer games have changed the sense of self in terms of the  “social Imaginary.” The social imaginary is where we find rules of sense making that we use from day to day and maintain the society we live in. The factors that most affect our specific historical experience of the social imaginary are the communications media through which we share and distribute ideas in a social register, such as, computer games. In turn, these media technologies establish “imagined communities.” Kirkpatrick describes these communities as, “ a place where social activity and interactions take place in imagined spaces they share with others- detached from an actual place” (Kirkpatrick, 2013, p.9).  These communities are part of the network society, where new experiences of space are produced. Computer games allow gamers to, “use technology to re-fashion their immediate environments, infusing them with new symbolic contents and alternative structures” (Kirkpatrick, 2013, p.20); in doing so, it changes society’s way of communicating. 

This new way of communicating is described in Jan van Djiks essay, Social Structures, as he explains that there is a new time-space distantiation. Traditional society is based on direct communication between people, but modern societies, with more technological advancements, widen time and space and detach people from their direct social environment (van Djik, 2010, p. 157).  In these new social spaces, they create virtual communities, which are “associations of people not tied to a specific time, place and physical or material circumstances, but are created in electronic environments with the aid of mediated communications” (van Djik, 2010, p.166). These virtual communities only have one thing in common, which is the interest that brought them together. Overall, the emergence of computer games have change the way in which people interact, as a shift from face-to-face interaction, to online interaction with imagined and virtual communities has occurred.