Steven Warburton has an interesting blog post about Loving your avatar: identity, immersion and empathy. In it, he traces the relationship between a typist and their avatar as the typist invests more time and energy in their online presence. At one point in the graph he observes that may want to create an alternative of second avatar. I responded with the following comments:

Let me second the kudos for the fascinating work. I would love to see this expanded upon with some detailed empirical research. (Perhaps you have some details on it.)

Key data points I would be interested in:

How long have you been in Second Life?
My primary avatar was created in March 2006

How long have you been in virtual environments?
I've been active in MOOs since 1994, so my adoption rates may be very different from people whose first experiences with virtual environments were Second Life.

How many avatars do you have?
This can be a misleading question needing proper clarification. I have one avatar in SL Main grid. Yet I also have an avatar in some alternative grids.

For those with multiple avatars, why do you have multiple avatars?
I only have one avatar, but I know various people that have multiple avatars. There are a few different reasons that I know that people have different avatars. One is to keep their work account separate from their personal account, similar to how people have different email accounts. Another reason is related to activities. One person I know has an ageplay avatar, which given some of the politics around ageplay, he keeps separate from his regular avatar. Others have avatars for business reasons, such as keeping their funds for their in world business separate from their personal in world funds. Another key reason, for multiple avatars, right now, is the 25 group limit. People create multiple avatars to collect notices from groups beyond the 25 group limit.

How many shapes do you have per avatar?
Right now, I have three, my default avatar, a child avatar and a cat avatar.

How much time have you spent customizing your avatar and shapes?
Not much

How money have you spent on skins, shapes and objects?
Not much

All of this gives information about what has gone into construction of the avatars. The next set of questions would flesh out people's relationship with their avatars.

Do you find your avatar difficult to control or manipulate?
No

Do you view your avatar as an extension of yourself?
Yes

Do you view your avatar as having its own identity (social and cultural capital)?
I have a mixed reaction to this, which was one of my first reactions to the study. My Avatar does have its own identity with its own social and cultural capital. Yet I consider that to be a subset of own identity and social and cultural capital. Just as my avatar swings between professional and playful modes, so does my real life identity. Perhaps there are questions worth exploring about integration between our real life identities and our Second Life identities.

So, that gets to some detailed reactions to Steve's work. I would love to hear other detailed reactions.

One response that I got was concerning exactly what we mean by ‘avatar’. I use one login at Second Life, yet with that login, I use three different shapes. Is each shape an avatar, or is the login what defines an avatar, with the phrase ‘alt’ what should be used to differentiate between different logins? What happens if my primary login and my alt login both use the same shape? Is that one avatar or two? To the extent that an avatar is defined by the shapes used, at what point does adding objects constitute a different avatar? For example, if I have a cat avatar, and I add wings, making it a flying cat, is that a different avatar, or the same. Then, there is the issue of alternative worlds.

Currently, Aldon Huffhines exists in the Linden Labs main grid and the Central Grid. I have worked hard to make the appearances as similar as possible. Is that one avatar or two? What about in another grid where I have a different name? What about if we start linking systems like OpenCroquet or Forterra’s Olive platform?

This takes me back to social networking issues and data portability. Ideally, I would love to be able take my profile as described in one social network and port it easily into another social network. When ported my avatar (if that is the right word) from Second Life’s main grid into the Central Grid, I went through a cumbersome process of copying the definition of my avatar, value by value from Second Life into Central Grid.

To explore this even further, recently I’ve been talking with people interested in art therapy and psychodrama about the potential of virtual worlds like Second Life. I suspect many of us could gain new insights into who we are by participating in groups exploring our own avatars in Second Life; the choices we made in how we represent ourselves and how that changes as we look at and think about what these representations say to us.

So, Steve’s post is a great starting point for thinking about the relationship between ourselves and how we represent ourselves in virtual worlds. Yet as a starting point, it opens up many, many questions that are worth exploring.