Choose Your Avatar!

The New York Times posted a few pictures from the book Alter Ego: Avatars and Their Creators. The concept behind the book is to show real people and the characters they create to represent themselves in video games. It's a real insight into people to find out how they would choose to look.

How would you choose to look? I think it's valuable to know what you look like to yourself in an idealized form. Do you look the same? Are you covered with armor? Are you sexier? Would you just accept all the defaults that were given to you?

It's worth thinking about, these characters accomplish a lot, most more than the people that control them. Imagine if the confidence and skill people had with their characters translated into their lives. If you could create a visual image of yourself when you were at your most creative, what would it look like? Could you become that character?

In truth, are you yourself or your avatar?

Comments

[a person]

In video games, the choosing of an avatar often has nothing at all to do with how the person would choose to look. Character appearance in Warcraft, for example, has to do with what skills and abilities your character will have, as well as what classes they can play. I'm a beautiful woman but I play a corpse in warcraft. And it is male. But the reasons are NOT because that is how I see myself!

As far as the book goes, it's a cute idea, but it's not really relevant to how people see themselves. Your exercise, however, has merit because there are no restrictions.

[David Wahl]

I agree about the limitations of video games and probably shouldn't have implied that every video game avatar is used as a representation of the person playing it.

Some of the characters in the book are from Second Life which is actually more in line with that thought than Warcraft.

I actually used to play Dungeons and Dragons and always played a halfling. I'm six foot five and that's not how I see myself, but I definitely think my choices say something about me. (Mostly that I wanted to play a chaotic evil thief...)