Transformation of visual culture in relation to the spatial experience of postmodern flâneurs: the impact of MMORGs on contemporary Chinese cinema.

The paper explores the visual impact of massively multiplayer online role-playing games that shares the same pleasures as postmodern flâneurs. As postmodern flâneurs, game players occupy multiple viewpoints as both the subject players and spectacle-spectators. The flâneurs' engagement in the simulated activities of walking, dancing, etc. begs the question of their experience and understanding of the relation between the diegetic imagery of body and the ext ra-diegetic implication of the players' presence in the immaterial domain of cyberspace. I argue that a strategy of de-suturing is employed in the course of the players' completion of the tasks in the virtual reality. This strategy is also seen asfilmic and cinematic, which may give rise to a new tendency in contemporary Chinese cinema. Ming Ming (Susie Au, 2006) will be drawn as an example of this cinematic strategy that transforms the visual experience and literacy of the cinema. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]