POMO virtualities?

Poster says, “Virtual communities derive some of their verisimilitude from being treated as if they were plain communities, allowing members to experience communications in cyberspace as if they were embodies social interactions” (543). As soon as I read this line, I thought about the game of World of Warcraft. Although I have never played, I have witnessed others playing and watched the South Park episodes’ critique of it. In the game players become a character in this world and join guilds and go to battles. Each person within the world has a nickname and talks to others using that name. This allows users to dive even further into this virtual community and treat it as real. They actually lose their identity and come up with another. Seemingly, they go through their days with dual identities, and these identities are very real to them. The guilds and battles then become social interactions of their feigned identities. Their character, and by extension themselves, are involved in this world as if it were reality.
Poster continues that, “Just as virtual communities are understood as having the attributes of ‘real’ communities, so ‘real’ communities can be seen to depend on the imaginary: what makes a community vital to its members is their treatment of the communications as meaningful and important” (543). The bottom line then comes down to how the interactions in this community are viewed. Although W.O.W. is a virtual community, its members develop a meaningful and important understanding of it. Its an interesting argument that since virtual communities have real community attributes, real communities would have virtual attributes. I can almost grasp this concept but still am a little confused. I understand that in life our imagination is at work, but I’m not sure if this is the kind of “imaginary” Poster was speaking of. Or at least if this is the imaginary that real communities depend on??? I can see clearly that virtual depends on the knowing of the real and the presentation of the virtual as the real to pass… but it is hard to understand the opposite? Anyone?

Kelsey. Poster.