frog blast the vent core
19.6.07
  In-world


I've had a mess of ideas percolating on the back-burner (is that technically a mixed metaphor?), but the past two months or so have been chaotic, with little opportunity to write. This too will pass.

In the meantime, swing by the New York Times Magazine for a brief photo essay pairing real-life players with their online avatars. The photos themselves aren't surprising to me; I've used visual or textual avatars for about 20 years, starting with local Bulletin Board Systems in the late '80s, and I recognize the broad range of goals and strategies with which people negotiate avatar space. More striking to me is the essay's normalization of in-world construction of identity. Avatar space is here contextualized as a generic human activity, performed by players from varied nationalities and backgrounds. The essay even takes care to balance hardcore with more casual gamers, those devoting only a few hours each week to their in-world experience.

Avatar space involves a highly specific subset of games, affording a doubling of identity not found in online poker or a frat-house match of Halo 2 (nor, for that matter, in real-world sources like board games). That's not to say the idea is outre, of course: avatar space has been cyberpunk canon for decades, and The Matrix was a smash pop-cultural success. Nintendo's Mii channel and Sony's upcoming Playstation Home even amount to "next-gen" normalization (through mass-commercialization) of avatar space, but as a context for all console gaming rather than a technique of engagement with specific titles. Nevertheless, it's refreshing to see the Times Magazine represent avatar construction and inhabitation as a perfectly normal - and surprisingly diverse - human activity.

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Currently playing: UT 2004 (PC), Indigo Prophecy (PC), Dragon Quest VIII (PS2), God of War (PS2), Resident Evil 4 (Wii)


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