THE REALITY OF CELEBRITY AVATARS

So last week, Bruce Willis appeared in Second Life.  Rather, an avatar made to resemble Bruce Willis appeared in Second Life, while Bruce Willis the actor spoke on the telephone, so his voice could then be encoded into an Internet audio stream, which was then, in turn, streamed into the SL location where the Bruce Willis avatar was sitting, so Bruce Willis' voice might emanate mysteriously all around his avatar.  At no point (based on what I saw, at least) did Bruce Willis the person interact with Bruce Willis the avatar, in the sense of moving around in the world, chatting with Residents, building or scripting objects, playing Tringo, using a poseball, and so on.

So, ontological question of the day: did Bruce Willis appear in Second Life last week?

(Disclosure: the Bruce Willis avatar appearance was advertised on NWN.)

Comments

[Trevor F. Smith]

If Bruce tells someone on his staff to send you flowers, did Bruce send you flowers?

[Alexander Lapointe]

Trevor, Yes, because it was his motivation to send the flowers to you, he just delagated the actual task to someone else.

However, with SL there is a bit of a difference. Part of being in world is being at the controls of your avatar, not simply "voicing in" while a puppeteer controls the avatar.

To quote Jeff Barr,

"Part of the experience of being in Second Life is to actually be there at the keyboard. If you are not at the keyboard, you are not truly in the world. I have found that the most interesting part of any presentation is actually interacting with the audience — listening to their questions and concerns, watching their body language (are they captivated, bored, excited, or even asleep) and responding appropriately. Anything less and you are simply broadcasting to them."

Quote from http://www.jeff-barr.com/?p=707

[Laetizia Coronet]

Does Nancy Cartwright actually make Bart Simpson move? No, but she is very much a part of The Simpsons (and yes, they can and sometimes do phone in their vocal contributions).

[Dannyboy Lightfoot]

As General Manager of Silverscreen and one of the team behind Bruce's appearance in Second Life here are a couple of facts about his appearance, followed by my own take on this interesting metaversal conundrum:

1) Bruce was not controlling his avatar, but we were able to show him the av ('Bee Dub') earlier in the day, and to give him a quick tour of the environment in which the Q&A took place.

2) The event was originally planned as a face-to-face interview, with Bruce controlling Bee Dub as far as possible. A change in his schedule about 48 hours prior to the event forced us to switch to a 'phoner', the alternative being no event at all. It was simply not possible or practical to try and engineer for Bruce to be controlling his av remotely at this stage.

In organising this kind of event we will always strive to have any celebrity guests controlling their avs and interacting with the environment and audience as far as possible. Indeed, this is definitely an area where there remains a huge amount of room for improvement, not least as Second Life evolves and familiarity with it grows. However, in the case of this event, we also have to be realistic about what we can achieve working with the schedule of a living legend in the weeks leading up to a major film release.

The acid test for this event was always going to be the feedback from the fans in attendance, each of whom had won a competition offering the opportunity to 'meet Bruce Willis in Second Life'. So far their comments have been uniformly positive, and it's clear that they took away a meaningful sense of meeting Bruce and enjoying a unique opportunity to interact with him directly. That's definitely good enough for me.

[sachi Vixen]

In addition to what Dan said, I was in attendance at the event as the designer of the avatar of Bruce, and Bruce loved his av! He was able to interact with those present. He sang to them, sent a Yippee ki yay to fans in Norway who asked and everyone seemed thrilled to be able to reach out to him. This kind of interaction with real people seems to me to be unique and special to these second life events.

[Seraphine]

Bruce Willis took time from his life to share a few moments with his fans in SL. Hell yeah!

[Patrick]

Bruce is such a good actor, it appeared real to me.