Are we our avatars?
How does online technology shape community and identity, and do we have a chance to be more vital online than in real life?Like the Brooklyn Dodgers of the 1940s and 1950s, whose celebrities lived and worked in Brooklyn and were beloved of the neighborhood, the woman who voiced The Operator of the groundbreaking Alternative Reality Game/marketing phenomenon I Love Bees is allowed a more personal relationship with her fans.
"When I meet people at ARG events," said Kristen Rutherford, "I ask them what their gamer tag was before I ask them their name."
Rutherford is a hero to a small but intense community of Alternative Reality Gamers who grew to love and depend on her character when Microsoft launched I Love Bees as a marketing campaign for the game Halo 2 in the summer of 2004.
"To promote Halo 2, a narrative was created that would draw people down a rabbit hole," Rutherford said at today's Identity and Virtual Space: Are We Our Avatars? salon at Farmlab in downtown Los Angeles. "The reward is the story, and my character provided a lot of the exposition."
Rutherford spoke about the online gaming community as a dynamic hive, in which individual members, in the service of unfolding the I Love Bees story via telephone booths across the country, worked with unseen partners to complete the puzzle.
"And when people meet The Operator, after this experience they had, they still tell me personal things about themselves," Rutherford said. "The experience was that important to them."Rutherford says the narrative, even though it was a months-long advertisement for a video game, didn't shortchange its audience.
"It says, 'We won't make you feel stupid for believing in us,'" Rutherford said. "It's the only form of entertainment I know where I don't get the feeling of being talked down to."
The salon was moderated by Stephen Johnson of G4TV, a tech and pop culture network owned by Comcast.Sean Percival, author of “The Second Life Travel Guide," a handbook of virtual locations in the ARG Second Life, discussed avatars, digital representations of users in online forums and games, saying that a non-sophisticated avatar is every bit as ridiculous in the virtual world as highwater pants is in junior high.
"People can see you coming form a virtual mile away (with a "newbie" or "noob" avatar)," Percival said.
What was striking about the discussion was that it assumed a familiarity with fabricated identities and the need for keeping them. Second Life, in which one's avatar can buy and sell goods with virtual money that is paid for with an actual human being's credit card, and in which "islands" can be purchased by real-world corporations as advertising hubs, seems like a subscription-and-broadband-based do-over for a life less intriguing.
Percival is known as Sean Voss "inworld," as the Second Life community is known. He said that, unlike many gamers, his avatar looks similar to him.
"But I've talked to my share of men whose avatars are women, and vice versa," he said.
Toward the end of discussion, Percival admitted that participation in alternative reality communities might be compensatory.
"There are people here for romantic reasons," he said.
See also: Farmlab, G4TV's The Feed, Kristen Rutherford, Sean Percival
Labels: ARG, authors, books, events, farmlab, G4TV, kristen rutherford, los angeles, sean percival, second life, stephen johnson, tech hysteria
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