Do you own your online avatar? If you do, how much of your own online image is yours? Is your avatar part of yourself, or just a representation? Does the use of avatar change the way people behave towards one another? Can we make an avatar ‘legally’ responsible for its actions inflicted on others in a virtual space? Should avatars be independently identifiable by a regulatory body, or be subject to strict identity requirements like Soulbound tokens?
The answer to these questions can challenge our current understanding of ourselves, our relationship to others, and even our relationship with laws and a regulatory space, or platform.
The already extensive use of avatars across multiple sectors of experience demands an interdisciplinary approach to develop the understanding of avatars’ cognitive, social and political effects. Game studies has extensively explored our relationships to our avatars in terms of identity and socialisation in digital worlds, and this knowledge and vocabulary can inform how we understand avatars beyond games, in an increasingly digital day-to-day life. To advance this knowledge we will be using psychology, neuroscience, game studies, sociology, and legal and political theory to jointly understand how our self-projection and projections from others affect the way we organise and function as a society.
The group aims to build connections between departments, and with external stakeholders, through both initial workshops and pilot studies, and larger empirical work exploring how interdisciplinary perspectives on living avatars can affect and inform our increasingly digital lives.