#performativeavatars

I am not a big gamer. Mostly because I’m terrible at computer/video games. Everybody beat me at SuperMario, I was great at combat games because I was fast at pushing all the same buttons at once, and Sims and picking up prostitutes in GTA were secret indulgences I cared not to share with anyone at the time. In regard to avatars, I never really had the patience to create one and that is what I experienced with Fuse this week.

Apart from the general annoyance that I am sure most people in the class had with the restrictions in the light of gender and hairstyles, I felt that the options were lengthy when it came to minor things like what size that ridge above your mouth is, or the color of your molars. This is what made me lose my patience, because I spent a large amount of time attempting to actually reconstruct my face:

After reading a lot of the articles about the self-enhancements that people re-create with their avatars, I set out to have an objective view of what my face, but particularly body look like. It was difficult to not have a critical angle, as well as not be “hard on myself” about the positioning of butt or the size of my shoulder blades and it became a rather anxiety-inducing process.

The only imaginative liberty I gave myself, was enhancing my favorite part of my body which are my hands...But quite literally enhancing them so that they are disproportionate to the rest of my body.

I gave up on the reality-to-digital reconstruction when I got to the clothing, but of-course my hands are still incredibly long. Hence, my Fuse avatar is a mixture of the loss of this patience and a reflection upon what I would ideally like for my digital simulation to emanate:

I’ve always wanted facial hair, so that is probably the only thing strictly correlated to myself that I see in this avatar. I feel that when it comes to avatars, if the options that aren’t related to actual human characteristics are vast, that is when I can come to actually representing myself. This is an interesting notion I wouldn’t mind exploring in the rest of the class.

The second avatar I created was on http://www.doppelme.com/. I am not familiar with many platforms that allow for avatar creation so I just typed avatar creators on google and picked a random one. Doppelganger means the apparition or double of a living person, and I find that this website most definitely gave me the tools to have control over what this secondary life of my self would be:

People at ITP say I wear too much black and always look tired or angry, so in comparison to my Fuse AVATAR I find that this one is a pretty accurate representation of me. These are meant to be used on forums or online - I most probably would have used a service like this in 2004, but it’s no longer trendy, and I can’t risk tainting my reputation in this way at this current moment in time.