The virtual reality of young adults

This contribution stems from an interest in and curiosity about understanding how adolescents and young adults navigate the reality commonly defined as ‘virtual’, with a particular focus on video games. The purpose is to ask ourselves, not only on a clinical level but also in a general and cultural sense, what this reality means for them, what it means in their lives, and to avoid attributing our own meanings or interpreting it through our own language. What is the meaning of this ‘gaming world’, considered as a world experienced symmetrically to the ‘real world’? What use is made of it? What role does it play within the relational space, where the relation is both with the self and the other? Creative, exciting, and stimulating, or isolating and defensive? Or both? How can we read the enjoyment of ‘virtual reality’? Is it a functional existential element, consistent with the adolescent movement, or is it something that fuels a defensive immobilization?

Through some clinical insights, the aim is to explore some of these points, starting from the images and experiences that adolescents and young adults brought us, to identify in these images and experiences a creative potential, like a ‘set in motion’, but without excluding the possibility of a deep halting, a blocker towards the external world.