Avatar – What It Is
What It Is – Part 1
I’m not exactly sure that the Sims is the best way to talk about avatar construction. In the Sims, the avatar does not represent you, and you are not interacting with other human beings. When I was playing the game, the avatars I was using were not me, I didn’t feel like they were me. They were dolls, people I control. In all honesty, I feel more connection with the faceless, nameless player character in the original Myst than I do with the dolls from the Sims. Indeed, I play in large online games where people take on the personalities of existing fictional characters – interactive crossover fanfiction, essentially – and I feel more like my representation of, say, Two-Face from Batman is more “me” than the little dolls I’m playing with in the Sims, because I am active in making up the story, I’m creating that interpretation of the character. Maybe it’s just me, I don’t know, but the Sim characters fail to evoke any sense of connection, any more than my Barbie dolls ever did.
To me, an avatar is about control. It’s not really an avatar unless it is your avatar, something that you can control if only in the mildest degree. Again, to use Meadows’ examples, I feel more connection to Mario than I do to my Sims – in some ways, I become the plucky Italian plumber fighting back giant plants and mutant turtles to rescue my beloved Princess. I do not become this ordinary pair of ordinary yuppies living their boring, ordinary lives.
I’d like to take the time to go off on a little tangent now and discuss Myst, one of my favourite games of all time, and its unusual way of tackling the avatar problem. In Myst, you are indeed in control, you wander around and solve puzzles… yet you never, ever see what your avatar looks like. Up until the fifth Myst game, the Stranger (as the fans like to call the avatar) was never given a gender, a name, a face, or a timeline. Surfaces in Myst are conveniently non-reflective; your perspective exists in such a way that you never see your own shadow. The only expression of selfdom that you have in Myst is your interaction with the environment.
And what interaction! Myst was an entirely open-ended game. Though there was indeed a plot to be followed, the points to this plot could be uncovered in almost any order. You were given a choice of four worlds, or Ages, to explore beyond the first island (so, five in total), and though what you could explore was limited by the technology of the time (the game was essentially an interactive slide show, so you couldn’t wander completely freely) you could tackle the islands in any order you wished. Thus, while you encountered the same clues regardless of where you started, the order in which you encountered them was different, and so the pieces of the picture that you put together was different. Finally, there were a number of choices near the end that would drastically affect the final outcome of the game, including how the characters in the game would ultimately react and interact with you. In the end, though your character had no face and no name, their personality was filled in by the way the player interacted with the world. In many ways, it was easy to imagine that this wasn’t some character, some superhuman imaginary person, but you yourself who had found the mysterious Myst book and been teleported into a new world. Many of the players of the game reported that Myst felt almost real, that the combination of (for the time) technically lavish environments with this deep interactivity made it feel like you were really there.
Interestingly, I felt that when Uru: Ages Beyond Myst came out, the game lost some of that initial charm. No longer was it a first person perspective where you could imagine yourself wandering about – there was a visible avatar mediating your experience. No matter how you sliced it, there was this little pixilated you (or someone else, if that was how you wanted to roll) walking around, interacting with characters and objects. For me, it actually became more difficult to put myself in that place.
More difficult that is, until I started interacting with other players.
For some reason, when two players interact, I found that it increased the strength of the metanarrative – that now, because two people were accepting the reality of this unreality, I could somewhat better imagine myself in that role. I remember spending one day on the Age of Ahonay, a strange world consisting of four rotating spheres, the first of which was populated by little creatures called Quabs. After solving the puzzle on Ahonay, I returned back to my neighborhood hangout, and typed in “Hey, everyone, I just got back from Ahonay! Brought you all some Maryland-style Quab soup!” Most everyone there knew that I was not only a Marylander, born and bred, but that I was the ridiculous sort who puts Old Bay on everything and loves crabs… and so it became true in our headspace. There was no physical crab soup, but everyone could imagine that I had caught these little creatures, cooked them up and made them into delicious soup for the group.
Not sure where I was going with that tangent. But! Onward.
Part Two
I find the metafiction of this incident quite interesting – from a postmodernist’s perspective this whole thing is a perfect example of how fictionality blurs and can even destroy reality. What was “real” here? What wasn’t real? It’s impossible to tell.
Part Three
See my previous comments about Myst concerning how a first-person avatar can in some cases be more effective than a third-person avatar, as it gives the player freedom to truly imagine themselves in a role (kind of like the difference between a book and a film – a book gives a person the leisure to truly imagine the characters; a film does not)
Part Four
To me, ultimately, what an online avatar should be is an expression of the self – just like your clothes or your taste in music or the objects you decorate your house with say certain things about you, what sort of avatar you use says something about you. The fact that I, in my various online games, prefer avatars of either completely ambiguous gender or opposite gender (I almost NEVER use female avatars); that I prefer to give the impression of general intelligence; that I like characters who are either partially or wholly mechanical in nature (cyborgs, giant robots, etc) says something about me as a person (what, exactly, I don’t care to speculate about). An avatar is, ultimately, an expression of selfdom.
