Exterior System Participation; or, Making Brainfriends Real with Warudo
Dissociative Identity Disorder is a bitch. A dozen or so people are stuck in a single body, fighting for control over it without being able to reach out and restrain one another physically. It's not ALWAYS like that, but it happens often enough. A primary issue with this situation is the difficulties these other people face in attempting to interact with the outside world as authentically to themselves as possible.
It's like we're all stuck in a fleshy robot that requires a cabled connection to pilot it. Each person has their own cable they can slot into the piloting port, but their controls are all filtered through a central controller before their inputs are sent out to each muscle to control. This means their speech and movements can lag a little bit, but it also means their inputs are 'masked' by the central controller's filters.
When En is talking to you in meatspace, he's talking to you through that central computer. You're not getting the 'Authentic En Experience,' you're getting as close to a facsimile as you can get. You can't see his face, you can't see his clothes, and his muscle movements aren't quite what he'd want them to be.
However, we've found a pretty interesting solution that has allowed everybody in my brain to express themselves even more authentically than ever: Warudo.
Warudo is a very intricate live motion capture software which is almost exclusively used by media creators who represent themselves with a 3D character model. A lot of features in Warudo are based around livestream interactions; for example, if a viewer says a particular phrase in the chatroom for that livestream, a fish would be thrown at the streamer's character as a comedic bit.
However, it can also be used like a webcam in a variety of programs like Discord or Zoom. Typically, that functionality finds use from creators who are using these platforms for collaborations with other creators. This particular webcam functionality is how I primarily use Warudo, but rather than using it for media purposes, it's instead used as a replacement for a webcam.
This is because of the ability to use customized 3D models to represent one's self. In our case, we use Warudo to represent Our Selves - which is to say, headmates can create their own character models, import them into Warudo, then interact with people as their genuine selves.
As I write this, I'm in a voice chat with my partner Crow while using Warudo as a webcam. Since I, Roadie, am the one taking control of the body at the moment, I'm using my character model. This immediately lets Crow know that it's me who's in control at the moment, so she can expect to interact with us through me. Each person in this body has their own habits and behaviors, like the way we tell jokes or the kinds of jokes we make, so it kinda helps cues her into what kind of interactions she'll be having with us.
Meanwhile, if En ends up taking the front (as I have now, hello, nice to meet you), then we can just switch to En's scene file. It'll load the character model up behind the bar with its hand on its hip with the exact kind of affect it usually has; a could-care-less queercore punk with a bit of an ego. (At least that's how I imagine myself. If I'm cooler than that to you, then the aura is working)
It's honestly been super beneficial for reducing dissociative symptoms by doing this. Letting headmates make (or choose) their own models to represent themselves lets us just... exist. It's as if we're real people, or at least as close as is reasonably possible for us.
I've even used this technique while attending virtual board meetings. Granted, I occupy fairly radical spaces where this kind of thing is treated as novel or interesting, rather than off-putting and unprofessional. Even so, it has provided me with a vehicle upon which I can help explain and "make real" the experience of plurality for others who don't experience it. It's opened up a few conversations that helped educate people about plurality, and provided them with the understanding that there are basically 12 different versions of the same person stuck in this body. When they see En or Roadie, it becomes much easier for them to pick up on the subtle tells we have - which a couple people have even used to identify us individually, in meatspace! It's fuckin' awesome when people correctly identify who's in control because of a tic or a stim that one of us does that the others don't, which they were able to identify because they saw us do it through our own character models.
As fucked as our society has become, with technology being a major cause of its ills, it's still pretty fuckin rad that I can use free creative software to help my brain hurt a bit less. A cheap webcam, a decent computer and a little creativity is all I needed to be able to express plurality in a way that's been pretty difficult before now.
Technology is dead. Long live technology.