When someone goes about making an avatar they put a great deal of effort into the look, style, and overall appearance of their avatar. What they may not already know, but will soon find out is how subjective they will become toward their avatar. As they experience events in a virtual world with their character they will begin to have feelings they haven’t felt before because they will become attached to their avatar and start feeling empathy for them. As if they are the very avatar that they created. We can now do something that we were never able to do in the past; Live our life through a virtual character. This has brought on a whole new level to gamers and non-gaming individuals alike. On a recent episode of True Life on MTV a girl is feature that does this. She lives her musical career through a game called Second Life. In fact her avatar resembles her so much that i would doubt that people could recognized her in real life as well as in the game. She plays concerts and has fans in the online virtual world. She is so subjective to her visual persona (avatar) that she couldn't for a very long time play music to a "real" crown. Notice real in quotation marks because the crowds in second life are real people sitting at home just no physically in her presence. Now this idea of subjectivity has been around forever. It all started with people seeing their own reflection in water, then came mirrors, and later photographs, paintings, movies and so on. There has always been an interest for people to see themselves in full view anyway that they can. Today’s avatars may not be an exact replica of an individual, but everyday were getting closer and closer to the real thing. They allow people to imagine and create new forms of virtual personification, ultra ego identities, and an awareness of themselves as visual objects. But unlike all the past ways people related to an image, and Avatar can be interacted with and lived through. Therefore people identify with the image and show subjectivity like they have never before.

KissofGlamour

More Reading and where my research came from:

http://www.aaai.org/Papers/Symposia/Fall/1997/FS-97-02/FS97-02-021.pdf

http://74.125.95.132/search?q=cache:GrPBOhceaIgJ:www.kathycleland.com/Thesis/Chapter1.html+subjectivity+and+avatars&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=10&gl=us&client=safari

http://www.mtv.com/ontv/dyn/truelife/episode/episode.jhtml?episodeId=134376