What Is So Virtual About Identity, Anyway?

Though the names are changed to protect the victim, Avatar Identity Theft Prompts Review of Gaia and Virtual World Rules is a story worth reading for anyone interested in personal identity - in any context. The story is all too familiar - identity theft - except in this case, it is a thirteen year old girl who lost her identity. Her avatar. Her embodiment in a virtual world.

That the author of the article was able to sway the virtual world of Gaia is nice enough, but also as the author points out - it is an aberration. Most of the time, the creators of virtual worlds seem to lose a lot in their structures of handling information. Because the creators lose a lot in those structures, a lot of the identity of users is lost to the creators of the world. The emotional investment that people put into avatars is usually lost on people who create and manage virtual worlds - nowhere near the deities that some people believe created our own world - God. God is allegedly a nice enough person, listens to everyone and has a plan. Some believe that mankind was created in God's image. If that is true, one must wonder how much we cheap copies are if we can run worlds without the same omniscience attributed to God. It should give one pause to consider that - and bear in mind that I'm not a person who believes in an entity such as God... rather, I believe everything is part of a greater whole.

What value is the whole of a virtual world? It is all subjective, we know that - but the point I am making is that the value of a virtual world is subject to each individual user's perspective as well as the collective of the user perspectives. There is nothing virtual about that - synthetic, perhaps, but not virtual.

The article does a great job of pointing out how the young woman explored different aspects of herself - apparently with some supervision from her mother - and how she invested time and energy to do so. She was, up until her avatar was hijacked, safe to explore her personality and imagination. That seems rather lofty for what some consider to be video games - but how different is that than taking on a different name than one's own for participating on a web forum, or commenting on a blog? Doing it in 3 dimensions is really not any different, except perhaps an increased attachment to an image an individual creates to portray to others.

Someone explain to me how an avatar is virtual. Synthetic, yes. Virtual? No.

Enter the age of the AV-mancers. The animators of stolen avatars. Is that legal? Is that moral? You tell me.