On the Simulacra of Cosplaying

My favorite spot of interacting, experiencing, and being simulacra and the hyperreal has been, for the past two years, at DragonCon. Several hotels host events in which any kind of fictional character can come to life, and to be in that midst is mesmerizing. One finds oneself interacting with other people as if they are the incarnation of whoever they are cosplaying as. DragonCon is itself a simulacra, just as Baudrillard describes it: “It is no longer a question of imitation, nor of reduplication, nor even of parody. It is rather a question of substituting signs of the real for the real itself; that is, an operation to deter every real process by its operational double, a metastable, programmatic, perfect descriptive machine which provides all the signs of the real and short-circuits all its vicissitudes.” Imitation in the form of cosplay is probably one of the ‘rites of passage’ of DragonCon, and if you haven’t cosplayed you have not had a proper experience. The cosplay experience, is in itself what I would consider the purest form of experiencing a simulacra, since you get to be a live embodiment (or empty copy) of a fictional character. This is where it crosses into the hyper-real and into that infinite simulation of signs being exchanged for other signs, where the point of reference is non-existent. Of course, the source (the RTS game League of Legends) exists as a setting, but it does not exist as something more than a fictional world. This is just like Eco’s description of the recreation of original environments (the example about the Alice In Wonderland environment).

There are two levels of simulacra: the environment and the embodiment. The two together would create the *authentic* feel of the world of Runterra. Nerdy summoners (the name for people who play LOL) can wish for a recreation of a simulacra environment of the Fields of Justice, but until someone creates this simulacra, they will be left with experiencing it only partially – via the embodiment aspect. However, cosplaying has its own limitations, and that when it gets into some weird places. The cosplayer does not at any time become the character, but can only act in ways they perceive the character would act or not act at all. Beyond a visual embodiment of the simulacra, there is no real substance beyond it. It then attains Baudrillard’s 4th phase of the simulacra image: “It bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum.” And, “ultimately there has never been any” character; “that only simulacra exist; indeed that” the character “has only ever been his own simulacrum.” Still, the illusion is attractive, which is why thousands people attend DragonCon, and become an interactive part of that illusion: "I just shook hands with Captain Adama!" or "I just shared my rum with Captain Jack Sparrow!" or the more awkward "I think R2D2 was hitting on me..."