as that which keeps the appearance of freedom.

In his two works on mindrape, A Rape in Cyberspace and My Dinner With Catherine MacKinnon (And Other Hazards of Theorizing Virtual Rape), Julian Dibbell points out that in an online setting, the player’s identity is ambiguous. The player-character exists somewhere between the virtual and the actual—not quite one because the character and their virtual environment are both fictions, and not quite the other because for each fictitious player-character there remains an actual player who has made a real investment of identity in their online persona. This ambiguity is borne out by the reactions of those who have experienced mindrape, in their understanding of both the violation and the fiction of its context. Hideo Kojima’s Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty (MGS2) points out, from a single-player setting, that the player-character’s identity is similarly ambiguous. The character Raiden is the player—he has the player’s name, gender, and blood type on his dog tags to prove it (Document, Ending 4). Yet, he also asserts h

Early on in the Tanker Chapter, Raiden follows the Colonel’s orders in a straightforward military video game commander/commanded relationship, where every action ordered seems the right one. Raiden’s trust in the Colonel begins to fray once Raiden realizes that FOXHOUND had an unwitting squad of marines sent on a suicide mission just to cover Raiden’s entry into the plant. Raiden balks, almost, when the Colonel changes the mission from rescuing hostages to finding the President. Still, Raiden is motivated to murder and risk his life because of a nuclear threat wielded by Solidus and the terrorist group Dead Cell, so there is little reason to disobey the Colonel.

The initial purpose of Milgram’s experiment was to find the point at which most people would meet the second condition and disobey the authority wielded by the experimenter. Milgram, and virtually everyone he asked among psychologists and before presentations of his results, predicted that a small, “sadistic fringe” might complete the 30-switch series, and the vast majority would break away from the experiment somewhere mid-series, once they felt they were doing undue harm to the learner (Obedience, 27–31). In actuality, 63% of the participants completed giving the series of shocks in Experiment 2, even though some obviously felt that what they were doing was wrong (Obedience, 34). In Experiment 18, where the subject delivered the quiz while another “subject” (a second actor/accomplice) delivered the shocks, 93% of the subjects sat through the same scenario as a participating spectator, without withdrawing from the study—hardly a sadistic fringe (Obedience, 122). The actual studies of obedience seen here serve to undermine the thought experiment that predicted much higher rates of disobedience. Put differ

Some topics in this essay:
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