Persona Attatchment

It is easy enough to say that people who experience life through their avatars really just need to get a real life. This kind of simplistic dismissive thinking is not unusual in complex ethical situations where people would rather avoid having to think about the complexity of the issue by dismissing it as silly. And, to be fair, there are probably a lot of people who experience life through their avatars who really do need to get a life. But, the extreme cases are easy and don't get us anywhere. At the other extreme, someone who does not have any kind of an alter ego, whatsoever, might be colorless and boring. We might say, about that person as well, that they really need to get a life. The hard part is that vast territory between the extremes. So, in order to make avatar attachment seem a little less bizarre, I am going to compare with another similar kind of attachment that we are all comfortable with. That is persona attachment.

Everybody has a persona. It is the version of yourself that you present to the world. You may even have different persona that you present in different situations. You may, for example, have one persona on dates while another persona at work. You may not think you have a persona, but when is the last time you got out of bed and went straight to work? When is the last time you farted, picked your nose, or belched loudly in front of other people? When is the last time you talked to a friend the same way you talk to your cat? Yes, like it not, you have a persona.

Your persona is not real. It is a construct you created through which you interact with the world.... not unlike an avatar. And if somebody injures your persona in some way, you probably take it very seriously. Some public figures have very highly developed persona. For example, celebrities and politicians often have a public presence that may be quite different from their private presence. You often see this dichotomy in behind the scenes stories that attempt to tell what a given person is really like. And if you damage someone's public persona they may be quite hurt or offended. In fact, you may even get sued.

We consider harm to the persona as seriously as we consider harm to the person. In fact, in many cases it is only the persona that is harmed and the person is not really harmed at all. In other cases causing harm to the persona causes harm to the person as well. So, we are comfortable with the idea of having a fantasy construct representing us in the world. And we are comfortable with the fact that, if you attack the construct, the person behind it may very well attack back.

My question is - how is this any different from an avatar? People say that an avatar is just pixels on a screen. And, as some level, that is true. However, pixels on a screen have a more real presence than the persona we present to the world. At lease you can point to or recognize an avatar. A persona has an entirely ethereal existence and yet we are comfortable being attached to a persona while we think avatar attachment is a little weird. Go figure. Maybe we are used to one so it doesn't seem bizarre, while we are not used to the other so it does.

Avatar Attachment

Yes, people actually do begin to experience life through their avatar. I think most people who have spent any amount of time in a virtual world would agree with this statement without question because it agrees with their own subjective experience. However, for people who have not spent an appreciable amount of time in a virtual world, its sounds bizarre. And yet, by examining a few analogous situations, it becomes much more plausible, if not entirely clear.

First consider compassion. Let's say that something bad happens to somebody you don't even know. You feel badly for this person. Nothing has happened to you. Your world has not changed. You don't even know the person to whom the tragedy occurred. And yet you still feel bad. You are experiencing woe by proxy. So, the idea of feeling 'for' or 'through' another person even when nothing actually happened to you is not an alien concept.

Next consider empathy. A close friend of your has a personal problem of some kind. They hate their boss or just broke up with a significant other. You feel, to some extent, what they feel even though nothing happened to you. You are, once again, feeling by proxy. Now lets say that this personal problem occurred to someone very close to you, say a relative or a child. The feelings can become quite intense. In fact, your empathic feelings may be more intense, in some cases, than if the thing had occurred to you. Just how intense can these feeling by proxy become? They can become quite intense as the next example will show.

I don't want to get too graphic here but a more shocking example is necessary to make a point. Let's say your cat runs out of the door while you are getting the morning paper. It runs into the street and it immediately obliterated by a passing car. You are in shock! The emotional impact on you is incredible. And yet, nothing actually happened to you. You mights say that you are feeling pain for the cat. But the fact is that it all happened so quickly that the poor cat probably did not feel anything. And yet your attachment to your pet causes you great emotional strife.

You may try to counter at this point by saying that a cat is a living being while your avatar is just pixels on the screen. This is true but it is only a temporary respite. Let's say that you just bought a new car. You saved up a long time and got exactly the car you want. It expresses your inner being like no other car could. And as you come out to get in your car one evening you notice that somebody left an ugly door bang on your driver's side door. You are in agony. Even though you can easily have it repaired and the car did not feel any damage, you feel as though you were scratched.

Because people attach to other people, pets, and even property we have endless ethical views on behaviors that affect others through these attachments. So, if people attach to their avatars shouldn't there be ethical positions on how avatars are treated? The answer is probably yes. But that doesn't get us very far. Should avatars be treated the same as the person behind the avatar? Or does the avatar provide a level of buffering that would reduce some of that obligation? Somehow answers to ethical questions just seem to lead to more questions.

Your Avatar and You (Or Your Avatar Is You)

People come into the virtual world of Second Life by creating an account and selecting a default avatar. The avatar is a little person who represents the user 'in world' just as a nickname or screen name might represent you in a chat room. Initially, the avatar is selected from a set of default avatars, but people begin, quite early, to customize and personalize their avatars. There are a wide variety of ways to do this. There is an Appearance Editor which you can use to change the appearance of your avatar. This is done by changing the shape, skin, hair, eyes and so on. Eventually, most people buy shapes and skins created by professional artists using more sophisticated software than the Appearance Editor. People will choose new cloths, shoes, jewelry, tattoos, and hair styles to further customize their appearance. They will join groups indicating their interests, list favorite places, and write blurbs in their profile further defining their character.

Over time their avatar will begin to develop a personality and now we begin to move into a tricky area of psychology that is not very well understood by most people. Some people will make heroic efforts to have their avatars look and behave in a way that is consistent with who they are; or at least who they think they are. They will say that their avatar looks like them in real life and acts they way they do in real life. Both of these claims are highly questionable. But they are firmly held beliefs by a lot of people.

For other people, their avatar takes on a look and personality quite different from how they are in real life. The avatar may represent who they would like to be. Or it may be an experiment into another life style, personality, or social class. Creating an avatar is a little like 'dressing up'. You get to create a novel impression, on that diverges from the every day you.

And yet others will have a whole cadre of avatars. Each with a different appearance and personality. Having multiple avatars with different personalities is hard for many people to understand until you consider a simple analogy. When a writer write a piece of fiction, they create characters to carry out the story. Each of the characters has it's own look, behaviors and personality. If the story is long or intense, the writer may get to know these characters quite well and say things like "character x would never do that" or "I tried to evolve character y into a new role but just couldn't do it". This is exactly what happens when one creates multiple avatars. They take on a life of their own just as fictional characters tend to do. And the writer/creator's job becomes one of getting to know the character more than it is of defining the character.

As the avatar evolves an even more perplexing psychological phenomenon begins to occur. The person at the keyboard actually begins to experience life through the avatar. This complex and very poorly understood phenomenon is called 'avatar attachment'. It is way to big of a topic to begin in this entry. So, I will leave the description of this phenomenon for the next post.

An Important Skill

The ability to create interesting characters is important even if you never plan to write a single line of fiction. I mentioned, in the last post, that this ability can be used in Second Life as well. I have dozens and dozens of unique characters that I have created as avatars in Second Life. This is great fun. It is good practice. And I have learned a great deal in the process. Where else, but in a virtual world, can you be some body else and see how some body else might experience the world. I have one character, for example, named Lowlife, who, as you might expect, comes from the lower end of the socio-economic ladder. His dress, boots, long hair, groups and profile comments all enhance his believability. The startling thing is that people talk to a guy named Lowlife in an entirely different way than they talk to a guy named Doctor. It is an extraordinary glimpse into the variety of experiences that different people have. If you find your way into Second Life, visit the third floor of Cosmos Academy and see a small subset of the many characters I have created.

However, this ability to create characters goes far beyond fiction and virtual worlds. You can also create characters in order to make a narrative argument. We saw a good example of this just recently in the presidential debates. "Joe the Plumber" was a fictional construct created to make a narrative argument about the effect of the two candidate's tax plans on the middle class. Unfortunately, for the McCain campaign, they were exposed because they tried to claim the fictional construct was real and the press exposed them. Had they just put him forth as an archetype character they may have gotten a lot more mileage out of it.

But, we can take this even further. You may want to sit down for this. YOU are a fictional construct also. People like to think they are 'real' or 'natural'. But, unless you are standing there naked and growling when you get hungry, you are a construct. We do not present ourselves to the world in our natural state. We construct persona and interact with the world through those constructed persona. What you decide to wear in the morning is part of that constructed persona. How you behave around friends is part of the image you are trying to create. The fact that you may behave differently around friends than you would around co-workers suggests that your construct is fairly complex. If you are not the person you want to be, or if you don't have enough friends, or if you are not interesting enough perhaps you need to work on the skill of creating interesting characters.