What does your face look like while playing Call of Duty 4? Do you get in “the zone?” Do you start licking or biting your lips? Would you even realize you’re doing that if you did? This video is part of “The Immersion Project,” and you can read more about it on the U.K. Telegraph news site. Robbie Cooper, a British-born photojournalist based in New York, is the guy doing this open-ended project in “both worlds of science and art.”
“Immersion, as Cooper calls this project, came about as the result of a previous experiment, Alter Ego. He had become interested in the virtual worlds of multiplayer online games such as Second Life and World of Warcraft. He started photographing players alongside the digital ‘avatars’ that represented them in those virtual worlds. He found middle-aged male academics masquerading as female dwarfs; office workers as undead warriors; disabled teenagers as fighting robots.”
“In the process, he said, he found himself ‘travelling around all these places in Korea and China where you have got row upon row of people sitting in internet cafes playing these games, staring at screens’, and he became fascinated by their absorption in the unreal. ‘You look them in the eye and they’re really transported. That’s what I like about having them looking directly into the camera. We’re not used to seeing that look directed at us – as if someone’s looking right through you.”
The Gamer Report 