12. My pixels or my friends? Game characters as a lens for understanding user avatars in social networks

Abstract

In various interactive digital media, users create representations for themselves – be they images, texts, or interactive characters – that are used mark the user’s identity, function, role, or position in the social landscape. These representations, or avatars, can exist separate from the user who created them. As such, they can be crafted, performed, experimented with, and reflected upon. In this separation, users may experience their own avatars, engaging them more or less as ‘me’ or ‘not-me’ as a function of user and avatar agencies. To better understand these dynamics, in this chapter we draw from current perspectives on a particular type of user-avatar pair – video game players and their graphic in-game characters – to theoretically and empirically contextualize the range of relationships users may have with their digital representations in a variety of social networking platforms, and how those relationships may differently influence social interactions online. Tracing the trajectory of the earliest audience-character scholarship from 1920s scholarship (the parasocial perspective) to emerging findings that gamers sometimes engage their avatars as autonomous social agents, we argue for a relational continuum that demonstrates the full range of non-social, parasocial and fully social relationships that communication technology users can have with their digital avatars.