Avatar and the Self

When we construct a new self, do we construct a new identity? Avatars are inherently digital extensions of the self. These constructs in video games and web environments have only in the past decade been opened up to a personal customization. Even if it is only a visual recontextualization of identity, avatars pose an intriguing and complex question of identity in a digital era. Indeed, we can even exist as two entirely different species in many massively multiple player environments. The very fact of choice in physical appearance and in more complex simulations, voice, sexuality, gender implies a deeper question, is the avatar a more real representation of self than our flesh?

“Your avatar can look any way you want it to, up to the limitations of your equipment. If you’re ugly, you make your avatar beautiful. If you’ve just gotten out of bed, your avatar can still be wearing beautiful clothes and professionally applied makeup. You can look like a gorilla or a dragon or a giant talking penis in the Metaverse. Spend five minutes walking down the Street and you see all these.” (pg 36 Snow Crash)

In Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, the Metaverse acts as a huge experimental petri dish of self representation. Hero Protagonist has his avatar customized to look exactly like he does in the real world. The obvious undertone is that Hero is fully accepting of his actual skin. In antithesis are the generic avatars, the Clint and the Barbie. These two archetypical examples of American physical perfection have become ironically symbols of white trash and the less wealthy. The standardization and mass production of such images comments on our collective ideas of beauty and how it is lost when generic. Even further down the digital totem pole of the Street are the black and whites. These characters who lack the skill or equipment to create an avatar and are instead grainy representations of the real flesh. These avatars are stripped of details and features, such as skin color, and in this reductions, become pariahs.

In the digital world of the Metaverse, uniqueness not conformity is the cultural peak. This trait is embodied in the rockstar avatars who take craziness incarnate to a whole new level. Furthermore, the separating factors in the Metaverse are not so much racial identity as wealth. In this, the Metaverse reflects the out of control capitalism that dominates the world of Snow Crash. However, most of the wealthiest, most gifted hackers, and strongest personalities forgo the transformative abilities of avatars. Hero, Raven, and others seek to instead created hyper representations of the self. The avatar is not used as a tool of escapism but rather as a means of further self expression.

The question of the avatar is increasingly complex nowadays. In digital spaces like second life, the avatar can work, socialize, play, and love, in essence live a “full” life. Such avatars can become the entire identity of a “real” world person. Creating avatars and the choices made in customizations, thus, intrinsically reflect the image one wants to display of oneself. Although Snow Crash gives us a glimpse into a world of avatars it is not a fully realized one. The questions still remain to the future. With avatars, do we escape, transform, and start anew? Do we accentuate certain features? How much of this new identity is the self and not the culture? Is the avatar more the self than what we can’t change, the flesh?