I began to play Second Life as a passing hobby while healing from my surgery, and I am a cyborg named Hibiki. I began playing Left 4 Dead as a hobby with my roommates, where I am a survivor named Louis. I play WoW to connect with friends from across the country and enjoy the world of Azeroth, in which I am a Blood Elf Hunter named Lacierda. I move between these characters instantly, leaving behind a set of rules and inheriting another. My world is divided into avatars, and I couldn’t be happier.
The avatar is the extension of the player in the game/world they decide to become a part of. In this case, I will use the example of Second Life. Due to my illness I was bedridden for a lot of time back in September. I was sick and unwell, but thanks to my computer I had access to a world where I wasn’t sick or unwell, I was just fine. Second Life filled a small gap within me, and I gave back tenfold with social commitments and promises towards social excellence. Second Life, and indeed most social games, demand a level of respect in order for the players to understand each other. In a world where your only representation is a 3D model you “speak” through, you need to be aware that you, and the people on the other end, are agreeing to disbelieve in each other for a while. Sharing stories of your day, talking about out-of-game topics and even using voice chat all crack the edges of that, but in the end you still refer to that person by their avatar name, remember them by their avatar shape. They’re as human as Gordon Freeman.
As I grew into a gamer, I began to get into my avatars. Even avatars with voices or stories assigned to them like Mario or Sonic began to impress upon me a sense of self; I didn’t want Sonic to die/drown cause I would then be dead. Through that thin paranoia I became a more aware gamer and player, and soon my gaming skills increased. My mind would look for clues to stay alive, to keep moving in the world.
Jumping forwards through the world of the silent protagonist (A concept where the hero of the story does not speak, in order to aide in the immersion of the gamer into the game world), I became Link from The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Suddenly I wasn’t a hedgehog with a ‘tude, and people in the game world were speaking to me. They would ask me questions and I would mentally answer, though Link would say nothing but his occasional “ki-ai” shout. This presented me with even more opportunity to get into the character I was playing. I had to put words in their mouth, and take their action into the third dimension. I had choice. Sonic has no choices. If you don’t finish a level in ten minutes you die. Link could stand still for hours if I wanted to, he could smash pots till the cows came home, and the world would continue to exist.
I was drawn in even further with games like Half-Life, where the previously mentioned Gordon Freeman never spoke a word of protest as everything he met tried to kill him. Even more interesting is that in Half-Life there are no cut scenes, Gordon is free to move through the world while people talk to him and around him. I never felt outside of the situation, looking in. I was using Gordon’s eyes to see the world, and his legs to move through it. The movie “Being John Malkovich” is an excellent example of what it’s like to play a well made silent protagonist game: You are that person, but not forever.
As a gamer I grew attached to the idea of being the character. It was light role-playing, solo role-playing, but it was and still is fun. Soon a world was opened up to me though that allowed me to become a character with other people intent on the same end: the World of Warcraft. I was using proprietary images and animations and a very set out list of rules in the game world to facilitate my presence in a true virtual world. This was engrossing and terrifying all at the same time. Suddenly my actions mattered to other people, even if it was only in terms of the game. Instead of being Gordon Freeman and breaking crates, or using my partner Alyx Vance as cannon fodder for comedic effect I was Lacierda Delanoria, and I had to obey a set of social rules and graces I agreed upon entering the world. My avatar became so much closer to becoming a true, virtual “me”. But as I ventured into WoW, I was still developing other selves too, and the use of a handy function called “Play in windowed mode” allowed me to develop across many platforms at the same time.
Here was a situation where I could be using Trillian, Steam, WoW itself and browse my e-mail all at the same time. I was able to effectively multiply myself over multiple systems with little effort, thanks to my development in the information age. The author Sherry Turkle writes “Windows have become a powerful metaphor for thinking about the self as a multiple, distributed system,”(1) which perfectly jives with my mode of existence. However, her thoughts go on to state that the result of this world of windows is a “decentered self that exists in many worlds,”(1) and I disagree. As I use WoW and all of these other programs simultaneously I am not losing my center, much the same way a computer’s processor doesn’t live in each separate part of the computer, or a server doesn’t exist in the real world somewhere. I become the hub: a pathway for information to flow in and out of and through me I filter the data, decide which “me” needs to have the information, generate the information and output it in microseconds. Sure, from the other end, if you had windows open that merely showed the result of what I was doing all you’d see is four completely different conversations by four seemingly different people; But taking a look at my screen reveals me alt-tabbing through the windows, typing, moving, clicking the mouse and facilitating these outputs with extreme accuracy and efficiency. My avatar wrangling skills are honed to a level beyond what I think Turkle would believe possible at the time of her writing.
The most recent technological step for the development of the avatar was the ultimate ability to control and manage all physical features of your avatar and how they affect the virtual world they’re in. The program Second Life facilitates this by allowing us that control. In Second Life, users (called “residents”) can create an avatar that looks like anything they want. The possibilities are limitless, thanks to the ability to create your own items for use in-world. A visual and audio 3D representation of one of my selves that I can fully manage is the closest we’ve come to true virtual representation. I use Second Life for recreation, but I take my avatar very seriously. I am recognized by my name, but my appearance is fairly static despite the ability to change at any second into anything I please. Because of the level of attachment a player puts into their Second Life avatar, they are prone to take incredible care of it, which in turn, is taking incredible care of themselves. It’s a feedback loop that previous virtual worlds had but not to this level. If the avatar looks good, and is talking to fun people or doing fun things, then I the user feel good as well. This two edged sword means if the avatar feels bad, then so do I. As we approach the event horizon of avatar creation (where the singularity is an avatar indistinguishable from a real person) we come dangerously close to a world Turkle foresaw: a world where we really are investing emotion, time, energy and life force into a virtual self, and where that energy can be destroyed as easily as invested. It’s already hard on people when their virtual girlfriends leave them, or when in-world drama spills into this world, I can only imagine what it will be like in 10 years when the world of the avatar approaches perfection.
The avatar is usually reserved for worlds where we create the character, but after being raised a gamer I see that any game where I affect the world puts me in control of an avatar of some kind. Throughout my investigations I’ve discovered all forms of avatars, how much we invest in them, and how much we honestly care about them. The avatar is a part of nearly every American’s life now, from a username in an IRC chat, to a fully realized Second Life creation, to Gordon Freeman. The options are endless, and the future is full of promise and danger but the avatar is undeniably putting the paintbrush of the virtual world in the hands of the user, and letting them play.
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