Massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) are shared virtual worlds where thousands of players live alongside one another — questing, trading, forming guilds, and taking on challenges no one player could manage alone. Most have a trade chat, a public channel where players buy and sell in-game items.
Anyone who has spent time in one knows what can happen there, as it often takes on the archetypal shape of the Wild West. Merchants hawk their services, travellers look for a party to ride with, and somewhere in the virtual saloon an outlaw surfaces. The outlaw fills the online room with slurs, cruelty, extremist politics, conspiracy theories, and a contempt that would be unthinkable face to face. The sheriff (if there is one) is seemingly absent.
Some clinicians see online spaces like this and conclude that games are volatile or hollow; they’re flat, lifeless screens that pull people away from depth, relationship, and soul. I understand that view, and yet I’ve come to see it differently.
The outlaw is not always who a person is. Sometimes, it is what takes hold of them when the law is out of town. Jung (1934/1969) used the word “complex” for a charged, autonomous pattern in the psyche; when one is activated, it speaks through a person more than the person speaks through it. He also recognized, long before today’s nervous-system language, that many psychological complexes originate in emotional shock, overwhelm, and trauma (see Jung, 1934/1969).
Strip away the persona, as anonymity does, and what often remains is a complex in full possession, in the psychological rather than spiritual sense. In other words, behind the keyboard, an old wound takes the reins.
In my clinical practice, I’ve found that games rarely invent what my clients bring to them, and rather they reveal what was already there. The same game that includes a toxic public square also asks strangers to trust a healer with their lives, and has players crafting free equipment for newcomers only a few virtual feet away from the chaos. Like the wider culture they mirror, these worlds hold both cruelty and care.
Additionally, it’s worth noting that not every game culture is the same. Some MMORPGS can feel more like a village hearth rather than a frontier, where newcomers are welcomed and compassionately guided, or where there is a sense of fellowship and shared purpose by many in the game.
The persecutor within
For people harmed by others, the most relentless persecutor is often not in the public channel at all. Dr. Donald Kalsched, a Jungian analyst, has spent much of his career exploring why. He describes how, when experience is more than a person can bear, the unconscious recruits archetypal forces to protect its most vulnerable core — what he calls the “imperishable personal spirit” (soul) that exists within everyone (Kalsched, 2021, p. 444). These psychological defences organize into what he names the Self Care System, which is a core complex in the traumatized psyche (Kalsched, 2013; 2021).
This is the same kind of structure that possesses the outlaw in a trade chat, but is now turned inward. Kalsched observes that the Self Care System regulates how much feeling and memory reach consciousness, and to do so, this trauma complex attacks the capacity to feel itself (Kalsched, 2021). In this way, the protector becomes a persecutor and inner or outer tyrant: one that mocks need, punishes hope, is symbolically violent, and insists it is safer to never rely on anyone, because dependence and vulnerability are what once led to harm. Since this also operates beneath awareness, the trauma complex keeps guarding long after the original danger has passed, like a sentry who never heard the war was over.
Some of my clients have been harmed by others who discharged their own pain and sense of existential helplessness onto them. Kalsched’s work helps me understand why that harm doesn’t stay outside and the persecutor moves in. The persecutor’s voice shames before anyone else can, predicts and projects rejection, and turns a small mistake into proof of worthlessness. The emptiness, then, is rarely a product of the game itself; it is in the inner world the persecutor has hollowed out.
Games are often where this inner world becomes visible. One misstep in a group, and the inner voice can turn crueller than any stranger in the trade chat. Games can also become the trauma complex’s refuge: a place to feel competent and in control without risking emotional intimacy. While I respect the person’s ability to survive overwhelming trauma, I also recognize that walls built for protection can become suffocating.
Is there depth and soul in MMORPGS?
Kalsched (2021) argues that trauma can hijack the imagination, bending it toward fear, grievance, harming others, and generating a world rigidly split into extremes. Yet imagination can also work the other way, toward meaning and repair. Drawing on James Hillman, Kalsched describes the imagination as the place where the human soul lives. If that is true, then games, as vast works of shared imagination, cannot be soulless by nature. So, the real question is which imagination is at work in them?
In shared group content, someone must hold the line. The tank stands between others and danger, while the healer keeps a group alive through steadiness and good will, rather than force. For someone whose inner protector has only ever known how to attack, these roles can offer a felt experience of protecting without wounding or helping without being consumed. When a client with a developmental trauma history tells me about the night they kept their group alive, or the newcomer they patiently guided, I listen closely. Something in them is rehearsing what the persecutor never learned: how to guard or tend to others in a compassionate attuned way.
The energy of the wild frontier and the hearth exist in the same world, and in the same person. Games don’t decide which one we become. However, social and online video games like MMORPGS can show us with incredible clarity which side of our psyche is holding the reins.
