Virtual Solicitude: An Existential Ethnography of Being-with in Video Game Worlds

While much phenomenological work has been undertaken concerning questions of techno-virtual-being-in-the world, very little ethnographic work has applied a Heideggerian hermeneutic to the question of virtual “solicitude,” or the type of “Dasein-with [that] remains existentially constitutive for Being-in-the-world [and] must be Interpreted in terms of the phenomenon of care; for as ‘care’ the Being of Dasein in general is to be defined” (Being and Time, 1927). The literature concerned with Heideggerian accounts of virtual inhabitation and video game play have either failed to recognize the constitutive nature of Being-with, a type of sociality, to Being-in-the-world or have foreclosed the possibility of fostering authentic social relationships within virtual worlds by virtue of virtual technology use itself. The present work seeks to rectify this prior dearth in the literature by countering these latter claims of socio-existential inauthenticity in technologically mediated virtual worlds by way of an existential ethnography of video game play.