Second life avatar11/3/2022 ![]() ![]() The term was first used to describe full virtual bodies in the 1986 online role-playing game Habitat, although Neal Stephenson’s groundbreaking 1992 cyberpunk novel, Snow Crash, is widely credited with bringing “avatar” into mainstream culture.Īn avatar can be an accurate representation of one’s actual self, or a fantasy self (an elf, a dragon, an Amazonian angel), or even an ideal self – the person you might like to be, in a world free of the usual constraints. When people began interacting online, many chose small static thumbnail images to represent themselves, and this naturally extended to computer games. Practically since the invention of games over 4000 years ago, human beings have employed tokens to represent the players – including the classic board game, Monopoly, where one may choose any number of small metal pieces to mark one’s “place” on the board. Just as Vishnu inhabits and animates his human host on the terrestrial plane, a person can build a digital representative through which he or she can interact in the virtual sphere. “Avatar” comes from a Sanskrit word describing various incarnations of the Hindu god Vishnu on Earth. We have a modernist-style house, which is sparsely, though tastefully, furnished, and an adorable virtual feline named Miss Kitty who scampers around with her toy ball and “purrs” when we pet her. I joined Second Life (as Jen-Luc Piquant) a couple of years ago when my spouse – whose dashing avatar is named Seamus Tomorrow – gave a virtual physics lecture as part of the Meta Institute for Computational Astrophysics (MICA), a nonprofit group that held public events in Second Life until the program ended earlier this year. ![]() The richness of our virtual experience depends on our establishing a strong bond with our avatar. Dig a little deeper into the human psychology of self-representation, and avatars are just a technology-enabled extension of the self. ![]() True, there might be the faint whiff of narcissism hovering about such activity, but only at the most superficial level. Happily, several seem to be sufficiently intrigued by the notion to do so.Īnd why not? It's just a more elaborate version of the little Jen-Luc Piquant mood avatars that I use at the opening of each post. I've amassed quite the short list of impressive, articulate potential guests - assuming they're willing to build an avatar. My gig will be the second Wednesday of every month, starting October 10, and I hope you'll join us -if not in Second Life itself, at least via BlogTalkRadio. And we certainly hope to grow a wider audience, both within Second Life for the "live" events, and via the audio available via BlogTalkRadio: there are some terrific discussions archived at the VSS site, and even more to come. But those who do use it regularly are diehard fans. Despite boasting some 15 million users, Second Life has never quite achieved the same mainstream market penetration as, say, World of Warcraft and many other MMOs, perhaps because the user interface is, frankly, kind of awkward and clumsy (and the rendering program can be maddeningly slow to load). In fact, I've signed on to host my own monthly hour-long discussions for VSS, joining Tom and the other VSS host, MSNBC's Alan Boyle. Listen to internet radio with Virtually Speaking Science on Blog Talk Radio ![]()
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