Yesterday, I visited an exhibition in London entitled Alter Ego. It consists of photographs of players of virtual worlds, alongside screen shots of their avatars. Some of them look very similar, others suggest similarities in a "have you notice how dogs often look like their owners?" kind of way, and some are radically different.
Unfortunately for me, I had believed the publicity from The Independent on Sunday and the gallery's own web site, and understood that the exhibition ran from 2nd October. Actually, it didn't open until the 8th, and because I went on the 7th they wouldn't let me in. I did nevertheless manage a sneak preview. If you want to see the kind of thing I saw, the BBC has some images accompanying an article about the exhibition (they're the same as on the gallery's home page, but more user-friendly). In real life, the panels are about A3 size (16 by 12 inches), perhaps a little bigger. I recognised avatar types from EverQuest and Star Wars: Galaxies , and I'm pretty sure at least one was from Second Life, too. There's a skateboard game also featured that isn't a virtual world, perhaps on account of how Sony are the exhibition sponsors.
What I didn't see were any non-3D modelled images. There was nothing from Ultima Online, and no text. There may have been some of these in places not visible from the (glass) door, but I suspect there weren't. Whether this was because the artist, Robbie Cooper, deliberately chose not to use them or whether it was that he didn't know about them is another matter; if the former, he'll have to be fairly selective for his planned visit to South Korea to take more pictures.
One of the most memorable pictures is of Jason Rowe, a player with muscular dystrophy. I've actually come across Jason before, in some footage shot by Tracy Spaight for his planned Real People, Virtual Worlds documentary. Sure enough, a quick check of the web site shows a photo of Tracy, Jason and Robbie taken in July. Small world!
Other reviews of the exhibition by people who also haven't yet seen it are at Londoneasy, Artguide and (bizarrely) DealsOnHotels.
So, some TN-type questions for you:
Is the fact that some people look like their avatars when others don't a good thing or a bad thing?
If any of those screenshots are from non-Sony, non-Linden worlds, what's the copyright situation?
Why do the real people appear on the left with their avatars on the right?
Is this art?
Richard
Disclosure: I gave Robbie lots of consultation on this (and hung out with him at EQ Fan Faire Chicago last year while he took portraits), so he definitely knows about text-based and isomorphic games -- and knows I thought they'd make interesting additions to his project. Evidently he thought better, and he's the artist.
That said, I'm glad to hear the final collection didn't fall too hard for the oooh-see-how-obviously-the-avatars-compensate-for-real-life-deficiencies cliche. And I'm sure Robbie will get into the 2D stuff in Korea, if only for the cultural contrast. He's a smart guy, and a good artist (I'll try to dig up the URL for his website).
Meanwhile, what's the beardy, academic perspective on this? What does research tell us about the relationship between real bodies and their online counterparts? Nick Yee? Anybody?
Posted by: Julian Dibbell | Oct 08, 2004 at 12:52
Each portrait set has some brief comments about the person or persons in the portrait. The one I found interesting was the couple who lived apart in the real world, but shared a house in their virtual world. Every night they would login and interact in the virtual world, rather than just telephoning each other.
-Scott
Posted by: M. Scott Boone | Oct 08, 2004 at 13:55
Its funny because I always say the key to a happy relationship is to maintain separate residences but I never considered such a scenario as this.
To live separate in the flesh but interact in a gaming environment with weekly dating would be fantastic.
Its gravity vs weightlessness. There is an enormous tug in having to react to someone in real time. Long term relationship tasks like bill paying, cleaning, in laws, sharing space, painting walls can incur stress. A lot of this is removed when separating living spaces.
It is hard to imagine introducing stress into a happy gaming relationship. How many times has breaking a mez led to divorce?
Maybe if developers start coding the ability to leave dirty socks on the floor we can see the divorce rate sky rocket in games.
Link for couples relieving stress through gaming:
http://www.telewest.co.uk/ourcompany/pressreleases/gaming.html
Posted by: Oulous | Oct 08, 2004 at 17:49
Julian> What does research tell us about the relationship between real bodies and their online counterparts?
ALmost nothing. This question is screaming out to be a PhD thesis: a large-scale survey of gamers and their conditions of life. Purpose: to test the clihe you mentioned, that the avatar is generated out of a deficit. I think the deficit is in the person's environment, not the person. But it needs to be tested.
Posted by: Edward Castronova | Oct 12, 2004 at 09:42
BBC> "Mostly people go for either human, or a variation on humans, like a dwarf or elf or humanoid alien," said Mr Cooper. But the more control players have over how the avatar looks, the more there is some sort of reflection of the real person.
The difficulty I'd have with this exhibition, if I didn't know MMORPGs so well, would be in assigning authorship -- which kind of relates to Richard's copyright question. My first avatars were pong paddles, space-ships, and pizza-shaped discs. (Lately, I've been "Jakob" in UT.) Even Second Life and SWG, which offer very rich avatar customization, do constrain your appearance options significantly. Without knowing the potential parameters of each game, it is hard to know what to attribute to the psyche of the player and what to attribute to the psyche of the game designer.
Text descriptions give much greater flexibility, don't they? An old line from Pavel Curtis that we all know:
But obviously, it isn't that simple. I think Nick and TL and Betsy have all been working around this area to some extent...
And Constance had an interesting thing on Joystick101 about genderbending in Lineage a while back, that relates to choice of appearance issues: http://www.joystick101.org/story/2004/3/16/71734/5569
(link seems to be broken, tho)
Posted by: greglas | Oct 12, 2004 at 10:51
I second Ted's thesis suggestion. It seems almost a given that what we will find as these environments become more complex and capacious is that the deficit was merely in the environment/body. Ask yourself the sort of meta-turing test question - by your interactions in-world with the boy on the respirator, are you able to sense that there was anything 'wrong' with him? I doubt it.
Posted by: Philip Rosedale | Oct 12, 2004 at 12:23
A quick word on the copyright topic. This past summer, I learned a great deal about copyrights as they relate to photography. If one draws an analogy between the exhibition and taking photographs in the real world, any copyright questions become relatively simple. It is well-established that one can obtain a copyright in a photograph. Courts have recognized the photograph-taker's artistic contributions as they relate to the view, the angle, the subject matter, the lighting, the development, the retouching of the photos, etc. I see no reason that taking photographs of virtual characters should not carry the same opportunities for copyright and exploitation. All the more so here where the photographs are obviously part of an artistic exhibition. If I were Robbie Cooper, I'd obtain a copyright on the collection. Why not?
Posted by: Alan | Oct 12, 2004 at 12:44
Alan> If one draws an analogy between the exhibition and taking photographs in the real world, any copyright questions become relatively simple... I see no reason that taking photographs of virtual characters should not carry the same opportunities for copyright and exploitation.
Be very careful of drawing analogies to the real world here. I don't want to get into this too deeply (I think it would take a long legal article to answer Richard's question fully), but just as an initial hurdle, do you think the EULAs for most MMORPGs would allow a "photographer" of avatars to assert a copyright interest in a screenshot of their game?
Posted by: greglas | Oct 12, 2004 at 13:36
greglas(quoting Pavel Curtis)>I cannot count the number of `mysterious but unmistakably powerful' figures
My personal favourites are the green-eyed women with red hair that tumbles down to their waist who move with the grace of a dancer.
See Katlynn, Kailehan, Lysia, Leniel and their clones in virtual worlds everywhere.
The cliche is not confined to virtual worlds, either.
Richard
Posted by: Richard Bartle | Oct 12, 2004 at 15:18
I finally got to see the exhibition properly yesterday, then spent 2 1/2 hours with the photographer (Robbie Cooper) discussing it (and virtual worlds in general).
The pictures (and there are about 100 in total) are split between photos of the players and screen grabs of their avatars. The latter are mainly from EQ, SWG, SL and There, but there are one-off representatives from Soul Caliber, Hitman, some motorbike game, some Barbie game, and a couple from Tony Hawke's skateboarding. I'd have been happier if they'd all come from virtual worlds, but sponsorship is sponsorship...
The pictures are all the same size, 20"x24"; this is slightly larger than A2, so my guesstimate of A3 was rather out... They're displayed in portrait orientation most of the time, but landscape when there are several people involved. Some of these group pictures include speech, which is something still photographs don't normally do.
The screen grabs were blown up to much larger than screen size, which meant different things for different images. One image, for example, had .jpg blocks nearly a centimetre across, which suggested to me that when the screen grab was taken the avatar was in the background (which therefore told me something about the player behind the avatar). Others were so pixel-perfect that even the anti-aliasing was barely visible, as if they'd been generated at high resolution direct from the polygon mesh by the developer, rather than being taken from the screen. One image wasn't a screen grab at all - the Soul Caliber one. This was concept art from the publisher, which was very much like I'd seen before ages ago at a different exhibition at the Barbican Centre. This was one of only two examples of a male player with a female avatar.
Some of the person/avatar pairs said more than others. The one I found most interesting was a young woman called April who played as Jaynex. She claimed to have lacked confidence before she got into virtual worlds, and to have gained confidence as a result. She'd begun on EQ, but had gradually become frustrated with it and had moved on to SWG. There, she'd created an avatar that she'd made look exactly like her. Some points about this:
1) The avatar does not look exactly like her. It may look like how she sees herself, but there are some striking differences, most notably hair and eye colour.
2) She had to leave EQ because her EQ self no longer matched her. In other words, the avatar wasn't a good fit any more. How many other people stop developing because they're locked into their avatar, rather than starting a new avatar (or changing the way their avatar looks)?
3) She may have the same look (in her mind) as her RL self, but she doesn't have the same name. She still doesn't feel that's her.
April follows the hero's journey model fairly well, but it looks like she still has a little way to go before she's done. She's not master of the two worlds yet.
The pictures are for sale, by the way, although I don't know if any have been sold yet or for what money.
I'm certainly glad I got to have a look round the exhibition, anyway, rather than rely on my original impressions-at-a-distance.
It was clear from talking to Robbie that the exhibition had more thought behind it than cynical MMORPG players might think. He spent months experimenting with different ideas before he settled on the final format. He knows a great deal about virtual worlds, too.
He's planning on doing a tabletop book along this theme, but realises it probably wouldn't sell enough copies to justify the cost of its publication. He reckons it would take him 3 years and $75,000 to put it together, so if you have any suggestions where he might get sponsorship he'd like to hear from you...
Richard
Posted by: Richard Bartle | Oct 16, 2004 at 09:40
I'm interested by the idea that an avatar could be more of a reflection of the psyche of the game designer than the player. Authors are often quoted as saying that when they write a book they feel like they are uncovering something that was already there. Will Self has said that he gets over his fear before writing by telling himself that every story has been told, he can only ever write his version of an old story.
There seems to me to be a correlation with designing a game world. That is not belittling the art of a game designer at all. The restrictions within which a gamer has to design his/her avatar are surely partly necessary for the narrative of the game- not just technical limitations. Infact the environment with the greatest freedom to design- SL, has no game element, and no narrative.
Robbie Cooper
Posted by: Robbie | Oct 30, 2004 at 04:44