How can we access avatars from an object-oriented perspective?
From
“Captured” (2021), an immersive installation courtesy of Hanna HaaslahtiObject Oriented Ontology (OOO) is the only Western philosophy that treats non-human beings as equally important as human beings. In it, some common hierarchies we have been using to categorize the world are questioned, proposing an approach of profound non-violence towards ourselves and other things.
Things can be reduced to measured data, patterns, appearances or components in a purely scientific sense, but they also contain their own unique existence and value (aura), which cannot ever be fully conceptualized. An avatar, for example, is a digital asset made and animated with software with their own modes of play, (co-)creation, participation and animation. For this reason, OOO is an interesting framework for us to consider for how to access and understand avatars without reducing them to the components that best serve our human goals.
Most of our technologies celebrate human supremacy with dangerous consequences to other things, as evidenced by the current age of global ecological catastrophe. Moving into digital space, avatars are trapped in the same hierarchical governance structures where humans segregate themselves as superior. Avatars exist as the digital exoskeletons and lower-level puppets of those animating them to enter these imagined environments. In many ways, “personhood” as a category is reserved to the thinking humans only, with avatars as mere projections of our egos in digital space.
Leveling the playing field
Could humans shift beyond the idea of being in control and consider themselves as a thing among other things like OOO proposes? As unreachable as it may seem to adopt as a way of thinking, OOO offers a healing philosophy, a possible way out of the ego-crisis which will only exacerbate the global eco-crisis.
What if we valued the egos of humans and of avatars equally in our self-examinations? Each avatar has its own unique user history and form, existing as the memory of all the encounters that have shaped it. Some avatars are old and elaborate, resulting from many years of intensive gaming and companionship to humans. Some are default skins, cosmetic appearances that can be changed with the seasons. An avatar is a file in a computer hard drive that was crafted with a certain software and hardware environment, meant to operate in quite specific and limited digital conditions. When a file is deleted, you can restore it until other data is written over it. Without a backup file, it is gone. No avatar bodies are piling up to rot, no ceremonies and celebrations to remind us of their afterlife.
Many years ago, I was interviewing World of Warcraft (WoW) players, interested in documenting their relationship to their avatars. One of the players told me about an infamous funeral raid, which took place in Azeroth, the game world where the Warcraft series is set.
On March 4th, 2006, members of the Horde organized an open memorial in-game service at Winterspring to collectively say goodbye to a beloved WoW player who had suffered a fatal stroke earlier that week. Funeral guests lined up to pay respects to the avatar Fayejin, standing alone and motionless in the shoreline–now without the player that used to animate it. Suddenly a competing guild appeared from the forest, resulting in an ambush where all the mourning avatars were killed. The plot could’ve been out of Game of Thrones, or so tells us the lore on forums (to some debate).
The Winterspring avatar massacre remains a complex example of how humans implement their social habits and codes of ethics in artificial worlds– and how simple in-game rules (kill as much as you can) throw out the respect for human bonds and social rituals for a group of bullies.
Ports in the storm
To better understand these virtual social habits, I conducted ethnographies in WoW itself (dealing with the annoyance of being targeted for my “noob” avatar while my interviewees were left unscathed because of their leveled-up characters). I noticed that many male gamers had female avatars, some of which for over a decade. One interview stands out to me: Ironi, a then member of the Paragon guild who’d been in WoW for many years who had the exact opposite of my avatar: the result of many years of intensive gaming. Like a bodybuilder’s body, the avatar was pumped up with emblems, accessories and details that the other horde members could understand and respect, but would not mean anything to an outsider like me.
As we were strolling through a geometrical forest in a less rendered corner of Azeroth, seeking a quiet location where cyberbullies couldn’t attack me, Ironi explained his reasons for playing WoW. He described it as the only thing in his life that gave him a sense of stability and continuity. He knew what to do and who he was in WoW, but he did not know how to live his life in IRL.
Bang! I was killed again.
This time I did not respawn my avatar, and instead released my gaze from the screen and looked outside my window. There was nothing to see in the dark night outside, cold city streets were empty, wet and hostile. The everyday chaotic world outside did not present me with any simple heroic missions my ego could rush into completing and solving as in WoW. I was free to do whatever I wanted.
I wondered: If humans’ egos weren’t so needy for dominance, control and success, would we require yet another artificial battle world to stake as our own? Would we continue to lay waste as the stewards of both worlds — real and imagined?
From fantasy to fidelity?
I would like to contact Ironi now and ask him what he thinks of Metaverse avatars that are eventually supposed to simulate their human. To me, Ironi belongs to the first generation of avatars, an inhabitant of a fantastical, lore-filled universe (an immersionist view), while second-generation avatars seek to replicate and recreate accurate digital representations of their humans (an augmentationalist view).
One difference between these two approaches is related to the rise of more crystallized digital identity politics in recent years. While the first-generation avatars were about being something else, the second generation avatars are about being you, forcing a rigid symmetry between human and their avatar. While Ironi was a representation of a player remaining otherwise anonymous and unlocated, Metaverse avatars demand more from you, learning until it can capture your entire being as source material. And when you someday come to an end, these avatars will go on without you.
I have to accept that I will never have any direct physical contact with a digital avatar, since our realities are incompatible. No dust will ever fall on an avatar’s shoulders. Even if I could be completely digitally constructed and animated as an avatar, I would not have any direct physical access with the digital myself. Screens, keyboards and headsets are the only physical access mode to avatarhood, to a thing without tangible sweat, tears, pain and hunger, lacking the fundamental physicality of human existence. Like a shadow, an avatar is a trace of someone’s presence and actions, conditioned by the environment where it takes shape. A faithful friend that can be sold to the devil (or Metaverse?) for a bottomless wallet, as the famous tale of Peter Schlemihl tells us.
We all need help from other things to be ourselves in this world. An avatar lends imagery to a universal human problem — the relation of me to myself. Accessing an avatar and other human and non-human companions like my cat, I can expand my consciousness. In a sense, this is a form of exploitation, using things to console my own solitude. As a mental parasite, I attach myself to them and move beyond me into the world (or worlds). While we are together, I come to know them both without dispelling their mystery. Do they feel my presence? Where do we go together? These questions are why I keep returning to these trips with them. They take me to places where I could not go alone.