Date My Avatar

Dear Readers,

To some degree, now that I have a presence on the Internet again, I'm a victim of its changing passions, swells, and eddies. Today, a young actress named Felicia Day made her and her compatriots' song project "Do You Wanna Date My Avatar" into quite a Twitter phenomenon. Never one to turn down a good research opportunity, I had Augury pull it and watched the video, however scratchy from the rough pull process. It's fascinating.

For one thing, it's comedy. Probably. Yet it gets across the reality of the fake characters that people play on the Internet and in your "online" games. They have real lives, are real people, and they are not quite their players. These entities are real, and we must treat them as such. They have unique reverberations through the world, lives and funerals, somewhat connected to this world, but not totally real.

They are a true dualistic thing, a spiritual world to your material world. For centuries before you, people lived in these spiritual worlds in their churches and in their minds, and these worlds were real to them, often more real than reality. So, too, with MMOs and MMO avatars. People connect to them, absorb in them, become them. They date in them. The toon becomes the real.

So who is the Dante to lead us through this Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso? What anachronist will rise to explain the reality of these worlds to the people who live in them? And what anachronist will tell you of the time stream where these characters you have made are real? Where by odds and probabilities, nature has created real people who live and die by the motions of your mice on their countless Mountain Dew-stained pads?

That's right. There could be a place where your nightly raids have very real implications. Or, on a lighter tone, where your avatars' love is real and true? I wish I could tell you if it really exists, but it would be dangerous.

Always,

Dr. John Skylar
Chairman
Department of Anachronism
University of Constantinople