Liminality and the metaverse: An analysis of mytho-liminal and mystic-liminal games and their impact on player identity

Abstract

The article explores the impact of liminality in immersive games on players’ identity from two perspectives: overcoming liminal phases associated with the initiation of a character in games with a narrative-plot architecture that reflects the universal stages of the hero’s “journey”; and overcoming liminality in survival horror games, where players use the virtual world to experiment with their psyche. It introduces and substantiates the terms of mytho-liminal and mystical-liminal games, assessing their positive and negative effects based on data from semi-structured interviews with student groups, totaling 120 informants. After processing the interview data and deriving quantitative indicators, the findings were refined and justified through the lens of research on liminal states, game psychology, and psychological studies on out-of-body experiences in virtual reality. It has been found that the positive effects of mystical-liminal games include the experience of emotions unattainable in the real world, development of coping potentials, working through unconscious conflicts and psychological traumas, and strengthening the moral imperative with a clear distinction between good and evil. The negative impact of mystical liminality manifests in feelings of fear, tension, and discomfort during gameplay, feelings of helplessness and frustration in cutscenes, and cognitive stress due to disidentification with the projective identity when the player’s “positive” avatar is transformed into an immoral character. The positive effects of mytho-liminal games include: enhancement of the sense of subjectivity, awareness of an ideal to emulate, strengthening of the value component of personality, development of creativity and problem-solving skills, unleashing positive potential of latent, unrealized possibilities, development of communication skills, and liberation from social conventions. Negative effects include self-dissociation and depersonalization in both psychological and physical terms, realization of latent destructive needs and deviant behavior, and the substitution of real initiation–finding one’s “self”–with pseudo-initiation through gameplay. This research provides insights into the intersection of liminal and virtual realities, shedding light on the psychological dimension of liminality in video games and enhancing the overall understanding of the liminality role in the virtual context.