![]() ![]() The ritual of videogame roleplay-in contrast to the rituals of live action roleplay or virtual reality-contains what I call "moments of similitude," in which the player's actual body and virtual avatar synchronize. ![]() Liminoid rituals are relatively frequent and reversible of such rituals, this essay takes a special interest in the ritual structure of the act of manifesting an avatar in a virtual world. By removing aspects of liminality from the sanctified and transformative rites in which they have most permanent consequence, liminoid play becomes a mode of agency over the form of the liminal. Specifically, liminoid play is meta-play upon the signs of the liminal. I then recategorize Ramsay's version of liminality as liminoid, and develop several nuances regarding the latter. Contra Ramsay, I discuss the liminal in terms of the transformation of relational identity, where Ramsay had focussed on liminality's shaping of time. Here I unpack Ramsay's deployment of liminality as a conceptual framework for investigating gameplay experience, connecting her take on the term with prior ludological applications of it and producing what I hope to be a clearer view of the meanings made of gaming by the different concepts of liminal and liminoid. Each minimization suits the purpose of its particular study, yet omitting the category of the liminoid occludes the distinction between, say, a Battlefield match and an actual baptism by fire and omitting to discuss rites as distinct from rituals occludes an important difference between, say, death and toothbrushing, so a renewed specificity of terms is in order. The former minimizes the role of the liminoid and the latter minimizes the role of the rite. The context for this account is a general broadening of scope for the terms "liminal" and "ritual" in recent discourse, as evidenced by two pieces of writing: Debra Ramsay's "Liminality and the Smearing of War and Play in Battlefield 1" in Game Studies (2020), and a special issue of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B concerning the rituals of humans and animals (Legare and Nielsen, 2020). Keywords: liminality, liminoid, avatar, Rule of Rose, militainment IntroductionĬan we describe the ritual structure of single-player videogaming? This essay begins to remedy the undertheorization of the category of the "liminoid," which has much to offer as we pursue an increasingly detailed understanding of the personal and political power of videogames. In the case of videogaming in a virtual world, this essay theorizes that the fluid antistructure of the liminoid is organized in time around moments of spontaneous communitas, and especially phenomenal similarity, between player and avatar. Limin oid events effect reversible, even momentary, transformations, affording play with and reconfiguration of components of the liminal. It manifests especially in the rite, the type of ritual that accompanies changes of identity. Liminality is a property of the crossing of thresholds of transformation. In response, I argue for a clearer distinction between the related but different concepts of the liminal and liminoid. In "Liminality and the Smearing of War and Play in Battlefield 1," Debra Ramsay deploys Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner's concept of liminality to facilitate a close reading of the ways in which Battlefield 1 figurates temporal disorientation. The Liminoid in Single-Player Videogaming: A Critical and Collaborative Response to Recent Work on Liminality and Ritual by Matthew Horrigan Abstract ![]()
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