Avatar

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The word avatar has a number of definitions, for example, it may mean the incarnation of a Hindu deity, especially Vishnu, in human or animal form; an incarnate divine teacher; an embodiment or manifestation, as of a quality or concept; a temporary manifestation or aspect of a continuing entity; or an icon, graphic or other image by which a person represents themselves on a communications network or in a virtual community, such as a chatroom or multiplayer game. In another sense, it may be taken to mean the various representations, identifications, and internalisations that make up a person’s intra-psychic world and which are the elements of their overall sense of self.

As Ralitza Petit (2011) points out, until the late 1980s, the word avatar was used solely in the context of Hindu myths, particularly in discussions of embodiment and incarnation. Derived from from the Sanscrit word for ‘descent’, avatar or avatara in this Hindu context refers to the manifestation or appearance of an alternate body by means of which a Hindu deity descends to earth, a body that frequently merges human and animal forms.

The idea has been transferred to literature, film and online gaming so that avatar is now taken to mean the counterpart to the human body within such media. This can be seen in the context of the processes of exosomatisation, extending the body towards extra-bodily, mediated experiences that are nevertheless still embodied. Thus, in digital online environments, the avatar becomes the human body’s visual counterpart. In this way, the avatar has become as essential to the state of ‘digital-virtual’ being (avatarial embodiment) as the ’embodied’ self is to being-in-the-‘flesh’ (corporeal embodiment).

As Klevjer (2006) expresses it, in the context of the computer game, the avatar,

“exploits the digital computer’s unique capacity for realistic simulation, and acts as a mediator of the player’s embodied interaction with the gameworld, The relationship between the player and the avatar is a prosthetic relationship; through a process of learning and habituation, the avatar becomes an extension of the player’s own body. Via the interface of screen, speakers and controllers, the player incorporates the computer game avatar as second nature, and the avatar disciplines the player’s body.”

(Klevjer, 2006: 10)

The avatar gives, “the player a subject-position within a simulated environment, a vicarious body through which the player can act as an agent in a fictional world” (Klevjer, 2006: 10).

Avatar, body, subjectivity and spatiality

As Petit (2011: 93) explains, the human body, understood instrumentally, has been taken as a privileged device for measuring space throughout the history of architecture. This conception can be found in antiquity, in the work of Vitruvius, the Renaissance, in the work of Leonardo da Vinci and Leon Battista Alberti and in modernity, in the work of Le Corbusier. The avatar, alternatively, presents a new paradigm of referencing. More than a physical or psychoanalytical measure of space, an avatar in an online environment becomes the originating code by means of which the body’s spatial context is not only evaluated but created.

Petit notes that in the Humanist tradition no two human subjects are identical. Nevertheless, by focusing upon the relative similarity in uprightness, height range and the predictability of human bodily movement, architectural practice has assumed that the human figure permits an anthropocentric understanding of space that is effectively universal. This presumed universality lends to architecture a certain stability, through anthropomorphic systems of measurement and legibility. The avatar reverses this humanist logic, Petit contends.

Thus, Petit (2011: 95) argues that the space of virtual worlds is specifically constructed by and around its constituent avatars. This is unlike the modernist conception of a universal space by which the subject is surrounded and received. The avatar, by contrast, is crucial to the definition of a virtual space in the process of representing that space to the player. Spatial representation is established through the supremacy of the avatar. Spatiality, thus conceived, does not exist independently of the avatar.

Picking up on this difference in the relationship between ‘body’ and ‘space’ in humanistic and digital environments, Bob Rehak (2003: 103) notes that the video game avatar, which is presented as a human player’s double, merges spectatorship and participation in ways that fundamentally transform both activities.

In discussions of virtual reality (VR) and online gaming, the relationship between player and avatar is assumed to be a transparent, one-to-one correspondence. However, Rehak insists that the heterogeneity of players and their avatars should not be elided. They exist in an unstable dialectic. Players experience games through the exclusive intermediary the avatar, an ‘other’ whose ‘eyes’, ‘ears’ and ‘body’ are components of a complex technological and psychological apparatus.

Just as one does not unproblematically equate a glove with the hand inside it, one should not presume that the subjectivity produced by video games or other implementations of VR transparently correspond to, and thus substitute for, the player’s own subjectivity. This remains the case even though it is precisely this presumption that appears necessary to secure and maintain a sense of ‘immersion’ in ‘cyberspace’.

To obscure the difference between players and their game-generated subjectivities is to elide questions of ideological mystification and positioning which are inherent to interactive technologies of the imaginary (Rehak, 2003: 104).

References

Klevjer, R. (2006) What is the avatar: fiction and embodiment in avatar-based singleplayer computer games [Dr.Polit. thesis]. Department of Information Science and Media Studies, University of Bergen. Available at: https://folk.uib.no/smkrk/docs/RuneKlevjer_What%20is%20the%20Avatar_finalprint.pdf (Accessed: 14 July 2022).

Moore, H. L. (2012) ‘Avatars and robots: The imaginary present and the socialities of the inorganic’, Cambridge Journal of Anthropology, 30(1), pp. 48–63. Available at: http://www.jstor.com/stable/43610889 (Accessed: 10 March 2021).

Petit, R. (2011) ‘The Ego Inc’, Perspecta, 44, pp. 92–101, 200–201. Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/41662950 (Accessed: 9 March 2021).

Rehak, B. (2003) ‘Playing at being: psychoanalysis and the avatar’, in Wolf, M. J. P. and Perron, B. (eds) The Video game theory reader. New York, NY: Routledge, pp. 103–127.