Games as "Another Space for Democracy"?

Lau's definition of "virtual worlds" develops on the work of Tom Boellstorff, who defined them as "places of human culture realized by computer programs through the Internet" (quoted on page 371). Lau's innovation on Boellstorff is her emphasis on these worlds as "expressions of everyday vernacular practices" related to the users' socio-economic conditioning and over-determination, in which the reality of Capitalist culture is no less real when made virtual. Thus Lau briefly sketches the "early utopian hopes" of the internet, and how these hopes were unsustainable because detached from the material culture that produced both the platform and the users.

But to say that the virtual world is not a utopia is not to leave it solely a tool for oppression. Lau, borrowing a term from Derrida, argues that games can become "another space for democracy," where the break-down of class over-determination can allow for new social structures and models of communication. For Lau, this opportunity is granted through association with the avatar. Lau writes: 

The intensely personal and co-constituted sense of self that emerges with avatar embodiment in these contexts motivates and inspires player avatars to imagine themselves as social and political actors in these worlds; however, the real potential for an alternative public sphere, for spontaneous, sometimes extended political conversation among strangers, also depends on the virtual disembodiment that introduces another level of anonymity (387-388).

By assuming the identity of the avatar, the player can democratically transgress the barriers of off-platform social interactions, making the game a wider democratic space, for this spontaneity and political action. 

 And just as the virtual world is conditioned by the material, so it can be hoped that the off-platform user carries the experiences of the virtual; perspective can symbiotically be influenced by on- and off-platform lived experiences. My question is, what might this symbiosis of on- and off-platform transgression look like? Might the internet activist group "Anonymous" be a fruitive example for consideration? Is the anonymity of the group ("collective" might be a better term) modeled on or otherwise related to the anonymity of the avatar? 

--Brandon James O'Neil,

   New York, NY (All is Well)