WHAT IT IS PART 1: MARIO, SIMS, and WORLD OF WARCRAFT
I played Super Mario a lot as a child (it’s still my favorite video game), and I never thought to consider the Mario figure as an avatar. I always thought of an avatar as something more personalized, that has more to do specifically with the user. Anyone who plays Mario is using the same “avatar” as everyone else. For me, Mario’s character does not count as an avatar because the user has no input on his creation; you just use what is there. The SIMS figures I can more understand as avatar-like because the user creates them and there are a variety of possibilities for individuality and distinctions, but there is still no direct connection to the user.
WHAT IT IS PART 2: THE THREE WHITE GIRLS FROM YOUTUBE
I am not a big user of any Internet communication medium outside of e-mail, so the mention of Youtube identities sort of threw me for a loop. From what I understand about these kind of social sites, I think it definitely makes sense to consider these girls’ Internet personalities as avatars because they created them as their own creative outlets.
WHAT IT IS PART 3: A Point of View
I thought it was really interesting that they started at the most simple point of view (Facebook, Flickr, etc.) I always thought of these as not at all like avatars because I considered avatars as representations that probably do not closely resemble the creator/user. I would have considered someone’s fictitious account to be an avatar, but that does not make any logical sense. This section made me rethink what constitutes an avatar.
WHAT IT IS PART 4: A SIMPLE CHARACTER
This section more closely resembles what I had always considered avatars to be: characters. I have no firsthand experience in games like WoW or Second Life, and minimal knowledge of SIMS or Facebook, but from what I have heard, the basic idea is to create a character and develop it. This has always made sense to me in a the sense of a user building something to serve as an alternate identity, but I never thought of an accurate self-representation as an avatar.
