Within the tradition of existentialism, the notion of the project is of central importance. Philosophers such as Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre consider projectuality to be one of the defining aspects of how human beings are in the world. In their work, the idea of the project is a necessary component of how individual subjects shape and attribute meaning to their existence. In Sartre’s perspective in particular, one’s existence is characterized by one’s orientation towards the achievement of an overarching existential project (Sartre 1966, 717–722).
In very broad terms, an existential project could be defined as the aspiration to be in a particular way—to be a certain kind of subject. It is through the lens of one’s projectual disposition that things and events encountered in a world become meaningful for the individual: they can be recognized as obstacles to the fulfilment of the project, as tools and opportunities that can be leveraged towards the achievement of the project itself or parts of it, and so on (ibid.). In this chapter, we intend to show that the notion of the project is a fruitful lens through which we can observe the way we inhabit virtual environments, and articulate an understanding of ‘virtual subjectivity’.
From our standpoint, understanding the existential relevance of a projectual attitude in virtual worlds fundamentally consists in answering two key questions. The first concerns the projectual structure of the individual’s being in a virtual context: how does an existential project give shape to the individual’s being in the virtual world? This question will be tackled in Sects. 1.3 and 1.4. The second question focuses, instead, on the existential significance of virtual worlds in general. More specifically, we will explore the relation between the individual’s being in virtual worlds and the existential project that shapes one’s life as a whole: in what way(s) does the practice of taking on a virtual project figure in the overarching project of an individual’s being? Further elaborations on this question and tentative answers to it will be provided in Sects. 1.4 and 1.5.
1.1 The Notion of the ‘Existential Project’
In existential philosophy in general, and particularly in the work of Sartre (1966), the project is considered to be fundamental for one’s being-in-the-world. For Sartre, projectuality is an organizing principle that contributes to the formation and transformation of one’s subjectivity. Approaches that are common in existential philosophy postulate that, as individual human beings, our existence is initially determined by what Heidegger termed a ‘thrownness’ (Geworfenheit) into the world (2008, 174). As a subject, one is always ‘thrown’ into a world, in the sense that one finds oneself characterized by qualities, capabilities, and conditions that one initially has no control over. Examples of one’s thrownness are one’s place and date of birth, one’s gender, the socio-technical contexts one finds oneself in, one’s possible congenital defects, etc. In other words, we can understand one as always being ‘thrown into the world’ in a certain way, characterized and bounded by a contingent set of facts—a facticity—on the basis of which (and against which) one understands and develops one’s existence. This facticity constitutes the basis for what Sartre terms our “existential situation” (1966, 127).
Sartre establishes a distinction between one’s situated existence and a more essential aspect of one’s selfhood (ibid., 147). One can take stock of the contingent facts of one’s existence—for example, that one lives in a certain country, that one stands in a network of relations to the members of one’s family, and so on. Those facts notwithstanding, according to Sartre, one is always conscious that one’s existence is not fully determined by them. One’s selfhood, he writes, transcends the contingent facts that are true about oneself in one’s present situation. One might presently be employed as a university professor, but this does not define who one is completely: one is always free to make something else of oneself. To think otherwise (to convince oneself that one simply is a university professor) would be to live in what Sartre terms “bad faith”: refusing or ignoring one’s existential freedom, and one’s possibilities for self-determining and self-transforming (ibid., 87).
Sartre’s radical approach claims that one could go as far as bracketing every external, contingent fact about oneself, leaving one existentially groundless and in a state of indeterminacy. The themes of groundlessness and indeterminacy are also central to the work of another philosopher, Helmuth Plessner, whose anthropological work in relation to technology will be the focus of Chap. 3. For both Sartre and Plessner, in the face of the impossibility to find any stable grounding for one’s individual existence—that is, any reliable ways to anchor oneself to a specific set of values or sense of the self—the individual develops an existential need to make something out of oneself: to become, through free self-determination, a particular kind of being. For this reason, we can understand human existence as shaped, by definition, by an overarching project that Sartre calls an “original project” (ibid., 717). He describes the existential drive discussed earlier in this paragraph as a “project of being” (ibid., 722). This project consists in how one projects oneself beyond the current conditions of one’s existence towards the subject that one wishes to be. The term used by Heidegger to indicate this projectual disposition (Entworfenheit) also captures the quality of being always ‘thrown ahead’ of one’s present situation (Heidegger 1962, 184, 185).
Of course, if a projectual structure is inherent to the human subject, then one also needs to understand the human being as always projectual. What that means is that the human being cannot ever complete the existential project, as one’s existential setup and one’s drive to self-determine and surpass oneself are better understood as an unfinishable project. Even if a particular project were to be completed, the existential situation would only constitute newly established contingent facts for one to project oneself beyond.
1.2 Subjectivities in Digital Gameworlds
As we already mentioned, according to existential philosophy by and large, in our everyday existence we find ourselves thrown into a certain existential situation, and it is in relation to that existential situation that one forms the project to be a certain kind of subject. We argue, in a similar way, that when interacting with a digital environment, the users engage with a virtual situation. This perspective implies two theoretical premises:
- the first is that digital environments are understood by the users as an existential situation, and, hence, is engaged as a ‘world’, and
- the second is that, in order to experience a digital environment as a world in which one can plan, act, and pursue a project, the users must be situated as subjects in relation to the artificial world in question.
If we take this perspective, then the emergence of a virtual world into one’s consciousness must be recognized as being cognitively, psychologically, and existentially dependent upon the users being ‘thrown ahead’ or ‘projected beyond’ their actual existential situation. In other words, users invest themselves in subjectivities that take that virtual world as their ‘situation’ (Vella and Gualeni 2019).
To date, the field within which most theoretical investigation has been performed into the question of subjectivity and existentialism in digital environments is that of digital game studies. Most explicitly, Matthew Thomas Payne proposes ‘existential ludology’ as a method for theorizing player experience in digital gameworlds. His suggestion is that “if existential phenomenology asks about the possibilities and meaningfulness of human action in the lived world, then existential ludology […] asks similar questions about meaningful play in the virtual world” (2008, 622). For Payne, this means developing a method of game analysis that “works by cataloguing numerous game-play experiences to forward meaningful statements about how particular games evidence recurrent and stable experiential structures” (ibid., 624).
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