Live online forever through your avatar

Regardless of what game you play online, you’re certain to have an avatar. Whether that avatar is an extension of yourself or not, it does stand to reason that your avatar can grow to outlive you. The question ABC News tackles, however, is something you might want to think about if you intend to invest so heavily in your games: Do you want to live forever?

In the discussion of the topic, some aspects of the discussion point to “Yes,” especially when you look at the avatar as the extension of yourself or of someone you know. According to Nick Yee of The Daedalus Project, an online journal of virtual world demography and psychology, some gamers see their avatar less as the character in that one game than as a set of concepts and ideals they carry from one game to the next.

Read the rest of the article after the jump.

Regardless of what game you play online, you’re certain to have an avatar. Whether that avatar is an extension of yourself or not, it does stand to reason that your avatar can grow to outlive you. The question ABC News tackles, however, is something you might want to think about if you intend to invest so heavily in your games: Do you want to live forever?

In the discussion of the topic, some aspects of the discussion point to “Yes,” especially when you look at the avatar as the extension of yourself or of someone you know. According to Nick Yee of The Daedalus Project, an online journal of virtual world demography and psychology, some gamers see their avatar less as the character in that one game than as a set of concepts and ideals they carry from one game to the next.

Things like this are even more pronounced in the case of Entropia Universe’s Neverdie, a.k.a. Jon Jacobs. He not only makes part of his living online, as he bought a space station (now Club Neverdie) with real money for use in the game. He also now has that connection with his online self as a result of his girlfriend’s death. The game’s developers built a shrine in memory of IslandGirl, Neverdie’s real-life girlfriend, who died of flu complications in 2005.

The connection between our virtual selves and our real selves also come into play when we talk about the personal and emotional investment we place not only in our avatars, but also in our interactions with others online. For gamers who have that strong personal connection with their virtual self, they do spend money on the game, but they also spend time making friends and being a part of this second world. The ABC feature says that the future for our avatars, though not necessarily ourselves, may lie in their becoming an inheritance after we die.

They didn’t ask one question though. If an avatar is made up of the concepts and ideals and individual style of the first user, doesn’t the avatar “die” when someone with different tastes takes up the mantle of the character, since the personality it was born with has disappeared with its original gamer’s death?