The Doppelgänger Question

The German word Doppelgänger is by first meaning the"ghostly counterpart of a living person."    They too may also be omens and images in the corner of your eye.  Our avatars in virtual worlds may at times seem our doppelgangers.  For myself, those  moments lie closest to the end on those rarest of nights: have you too ever found yourself playing too long, holding up your edge of an MMORPG party (team) spiraling deeper into the Heart of Darkness?   Leading to those inevitable tiny regrets before dawn.

In this age when our ghosts have become spoons  and online identities become the subject of copyright scrutiny   cradled within examinations of their appearances, perhaps there are fewer chances for our ghostly counterparts,  and perhaps we are poorer for it...

...I was reading Malcolm Gladwell's New Yorker article (Something Borrowed)  regarding Dorothy Lewis, her memoir "Guilty by Reason of Insanity," a  play called “Frozen,” and the British playwright Bryony Lavery.  It is a thoughtful article that touches deeply at the ambiguities of plagarism, of identity, and how those two are challenged by a larger context, a moment, located in a world.  Malcom eloquently described the conundrum in this way:

Creative property, Lessig reminds us, has many lives—the newspaper arrives at our door, it becomes part of the archive of human knowledge, then it wraps fish. And, by the time ideas pass into their third and fourth lives, we lose track of where they came from, and we lose control of where they are going. The final dishonesty of the plagiarism fundamentalists is to encourage us to pretend that these chains of influence and evolution do not exist, and that a writer’s words have a virgin birth and an eternal life. I suppose that I could get upset about what happened to my words. I could also simply acknowledge that I had a good, long ride with that line—and let it go...

I was struck by Lewis' initial feelings of "...robbed and violated in some peculiar way. It was as if someone had stolen... my essence."  I was further  impacted by her pain when the character likeness of her in "Frozen" had an affair with her collaborator:

“That’s slander,” Lewis told me. “I’m recognizable in that. Enough people have called me and said, ‘Dorothy, it’s about you,’ and if everything up to that point is true, then the affair becomes true in the mind. So that is another reason that I feel violated. If you are going to take the life of somebody, and make them absolutely identifiable, you don’t create an affair, and you certainly don’t have that as a climax of the play.”

A question has to do with those ghosts who are your ghosts not by appearance or language but by behavior and action.  If I copy my neighor's gait, slouch and raking, if I mimic you - perhaps you to your slimmest  manners, and I recreate your neighborhood, your office in a virtual world somewhere, and there I place that creature: it looks like a duck, but it moves like you.

Soul-stealing, or the passing of a torch, a ghostly ride of another sort, for you to let go?

Comments

[Endie]

1.

What was the middle one again?

[Nathan Combs]

2.

The middle what?

[Richard Bartle]

3.

I've had people impersonate me in virtual worlds both directly (by saying they're me when they're not) and indirectly (by acting like me so as to make people think they're me, but then denying it - thus making people think they're me even more).

This is different to what you seem to be talking about, though, which (if I read you right) is more to do with ripples of identity that fan out in all directions with our every action. When do we stop following them, when should we stop following them, and when can we no longer discern them anyway? What happens when your doppelganger gets a doppelganger?

I hope you weren't hoping for answers to those questions!

Richard

[ren]

4.

Concerns about digital identity are at the heat of many of my writing on virtual property. There are acres of legal text on what constitutes identity in a digital age, much of this come from the area of law particularly concerned with the commercial exploitation of identity i.e. the entertainment industry.

One key writers in the field is Joseph Beard who wrote the wonderfully titled: Clones, Bones, and Twilight Zones: Protecting the Digital Persona of the Quick, the Dead, and the Imaginary, which looks a most permutations of taking the essence of an actor and using in new and imaginative ways. These include: digitally cloning living actors (example being Robert Patrick’s ‘digital clone’ data from T2 used in Jurassic Park – one performance one fee? Does the actor own their acting anymore?), digitally resurrecting dead ones and synthesising new ones.

A number of writers have also started to take a look at an area of US law that is of particular interest to me (and which I’ve applied to the case of avatars in the past) that of Rights of Publicity. The fun paper in this area is Jacoby & Zimmerman (no not Eric): Foreclosing on Fame: Exploring the Uncharted Boundaries of the Right of Publicity.

Actually this law has already come up in the context of video games, in the case of Pesina v. Midway [948 F. Supp. 40 (N.D. Ill.1996)] it was claimed that the name and likeness of a martial artist hired for use with Mortal Kombat and Mortal Kombat II were used in subsequent games and that this was a breach of the artists rights of publicity – the case was not held, but its interesting that it was even brought.

I’ve argued that I can no reason in theory why someone cannot claim rights of publicity, hence property rights, over their avatar in a virtual world even if it does not look anything like them (see Motschenbacher v. Reynolds (no not me) [498 F.2d 821 (9th Cir. 1974]) – I’d kind of like someone to try to see which right (publicity or copyright) trumps, and whether the EULA is seen as adequate as a transfer of even these type of rights.

So to your question:
nate > Soul-stealing, or the passing of a torch, a ghostly ride of another sort, for you to let go?

Well, in the US, in certain circumstances, depending on what state you are in, then it’s a matter of property rights, so not ‘soul-stealing’ but plain ol’stealing.

What should it be is a different matter, I happen to think that property and personal identity are not things that should mix, at least in this way. Thus I think that in some cases what’s going on is a breach of rights, thought those of a post modern persuasion would argue that what is happening actually is the construction of identity not its dilution.