by Kassadee Marie, HSM team writer

When you read a book or watch a movie or television show, you are likely to enjoy it more when there is a main character portrayed that you can identify with. This involvement pulls you into the story, and you stay to the end because you become invested in the outcome. You care what happens to this character and find yourself crying with them at their sorrows and laughing with them at their joys.

In my case, I identify with a young, average-looking female, who doesn’t make too many stupid mistakes in the course of the story. Although my preferred genre for movies and television shows is romantic comedies, I know (as we all do) that if the the young girl goes off by herself in a scary place, she’s toast. And going off with her boyfriend to make out isn’t going to end any better for either of them. (This is a character I do not identify with. If you find me in a scary situation, I’ll be huddled with everyone in a circle around me.)

This same feeling of identification can be felt when playing a video game with an avatar, such as a third-person shooter like The Last of Us or an RPG such as one of the Final Fantasy series entries. Which, as an aside, is why I wish more games had female protagonists available to play. I would enjoy these games more and therefore purchase and play more games, if I could identify – at least on some level – with the character I control in the game. When there is a female character available, that’s the one I choose to play as.

Some of us identify even more strongly with our avatars on Home and such games as IMVU and Second Life. This may because we each designed them to represent ourselves, either as closely as possible to the way we look or to the way we wish we looked – a fantasy self, true, but a self nonetheless. My Home avatar is taller and thinner than I am, with a better figure, but she has my dark brown hair, brown eyes, and dresses the way I do, which is almost always conservatively. She also “speaks” the way I do, for the most part, with correct English, proper spelling, and punctuation for inflection.

People have written stories with entire plot lines and histories for their characters on games like World of Warcraft, where role-playing with others can be part of the entertainment when playing the game with a group of friends. This is especially true when they are grinding through dailies or completing a dungeon they have been through many times before. While their characters have an entirely fantasy life, these people are imagining what it would be like to actually live as that character and they usually have the character act and react the way they, themselves, would in any given situation. They may be braver, brighter, more physical, or a different (imaginary) race, but they are still themselves.

Sometimes there are those people who are aware that a lot of individuals – if not most – identify with their avatars, and take advantage of this to troll others. You will find this type of person dancing their avatars on others or kneeling closely in front or back of them on Home and these types of games. Sometimes they make fun of what another person’s avatar is wearing or what they own. And you will find them insulting others, not just their level and skills, but the equipment – weapons and armor – or other accoutrements such as animal mounts, on those types of games. Often in these cases on Home, and perhaps IMVU or Second Life also, they design their avatar to not resemble themselves at all. Perhaps this is to divorce themselves from what they are doing. It’s probably easier for them to troll others, if they are not associating themselves with their own avatars. Would a straight guy “twerk” behind another male in the real world?

Sony, and other game console producers, individual entrepreneurs on Second Life, game developers, and third party developers on Home are very aware that most people identify with their avatar on some level. Isn’t this why we buy upgrades to our games for them? Isn’t this why we buy pets and mounts on WoW? Or “horse armor” on Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion? Isn’t this why we buy them clothes and accessories on Gaia Online? Or personal spaces, furniture, clothing, pets and a multitude of other things on Home and Second Life? Not to mention other RPGs, fighting games and sports games where you can make purchases for them. We spend real money on them, not just in-game money. However well-off or not we may be in the real world, these are the things we would like to have for ourselves and we take pleasure in their ownership and use, even though they are virtual items for a virtual “us”.

You may be one of those people who seems to believe that most other people over-identify with their avatars. You laugh at the money they spend on them or that they post pictures of their avatars. But before you universally condemn us, think a moment. You may identify more with your avatar than you realize, if you’ve ever been startled when something suddenly happened to your avatar in a game, or had chills down your spine in a scary looking place in a game, or if you replied with a thank-you to a compliment about the way your avatar is styled or dressed.

Of course, it is possible to over-identify with one’s avatar. Some signs of this are the feeling that one needs to be online every day as long as possible, missing meals or even showers, and falling asleep more than occasionally while playing. (Because we’ve all nodded off while having so much fun that we didn’t want to leave, even when we were tired.) If the virtual world becomes more important to someone than the real world, there’s a definite problem. If a person prefers their fantasy existence to their real existence, they should be doing a lot of self examination and making changes in their life.

Just as we identify most with stories and characters that we can identify with, so that lure is especially powerful when we get to create the character ourselves. This is undoubtedly a major psychological hook to nearly all virtual worlds.

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