Researching my digital self – whose identity is it anyway?

After hearing the in progress and messy methodological issues of some of my most respected colleagues, I am inspired to get my hands dirty again, eager to move forward with a project I had once felt was methodologically difficult.

After Marci Araki’s presentation on Saturday at the T&T symposium, I was reminded of the never-ending nagging question that my thesis advisor has been annoying me with for the past 2 years – whose identity are we talking about. Ms. Araki’s presentation demonstrated the fluid interchangedness of identity (play) that any gamer or ‘virtual world’ participant experiences when they become deeply immersed in the world they are in, through the skin of their avatar. There was some contemplation of identification between herself and her avatar – how was she to refer to herself, and her avatar when speaking about her experiences in Second Life. Admitting that the in-world experiences were her avatar’s, yet she experienced them through her, but not necessarily as her completely. This idea that the experiences are shared experiences with our physical and virtual selves is originally what my work had been aiming towards defining… the player/avatar relationship. Negating the idea that the avatar is simply a conduit or a vehicle for the player to be embodied within the game space (and I do include Second Life in the scope of games but only in that it is a space of entertainment), there is indeed something bigger happening than a simple navigation tool. However, my conundrum has been a methodological one. How can I get to the intangible relationship between the player and their avatar without delving into psychology literature?

For quite some time, I had abandoned the task, and instead have been working on another part of my digital identity project (namely elaborating and describing – in detail, the process of identity construction in mmog’s). But Marci’s talk, along with the rest of the symposium’s inspiring presentations, pushed me to work on finding a method that would get allow me to work towards finding an answer in how to look at the player/avatar relationship, aiming towards defining “whose identity” it is when I am always talking about “identity construction in mmog’s”.

To begin, I have decided to follow in the footsteps of many of the presenters at T&T, and begin with an autobiographical approach. I have decided to sit down and write a reflexive autobiography of my game play that led me to develop my avatar. From my perspective, my version of events – that will inevitably include non game related events to contextualize the events and circumstances that occurred within the game space. As a separate document, knowing that Velixious, my barbarian shaman for many years in EverQuest does not possess memory, she possesses a history nonetheless. My aim will be to recount her story – contextualize her life within the scope of her events. It is then my hope to be able to take both documents, lay them beside each other, and look at how they intertwine. From there, I hope to be able to define the relationship between myself as a player with outside influences, and myself as a barbarian shaman, with in-game influences that impact identity of each ‘self’ equally.