Vice Reporter Wants to Interview People Who Play Avatars Who Look Like Their Real Life Lovers

Cecilia D'Anastasio is a reporter with Vice Motherboard who's written some excellent posts on avatar identity, such as this one on a Second Life user named Veronica Sidwell, and she wants to interview some folks for a future piece with an intriguing hook: "I'm writing a piece on people who design and play avatars that resemble their exes and significant others," she tells me. If that sounds like you, e-mail her at cecianasta at gmail dot com, connect with her on Twitter (below), or IM her SL avatar, Cecianasta.

"Having spent a great deal of time playing avatars and interviewing people about their relationships to their avatars, I've become fascinated by what we put into and take out of time spent in digital bodies," Cecilia tells me.

Tweets by @cecianasta

"I don't think that time is insignificant. How we behave as avatars says a lot about how we view ourselves and the people in our lives."

As you might guess, I strongly agree. And yes, she already knows about the husband that Eshi made. Looking forward to her next story!

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Comments

[Ciaran Laval]

Cecilia impressed me the last time she covered Second Life, she seems to be a good journalist and treats issues with respect.

[Puck]

I knew I wasn't the only widow who made an avatar of her husband, as I met another widow who had done so before me. It's nice to know there are others. I haven't brought him on in a few years, but it's a comfort to know I can if I want to. I can't have him in RL any more, but he's there for Puck now if she needs his company.

[JohnC]

It's going to be a big deal in the near future, re creating virtual representatives of your deceased family and relatives. For now it's quite innocent, but the better it get's the more crazy it could become.
Me and a friend actually considered doing it as a service, most likely someone does already. But the more you think about it the more bad vibes you get. This software I have,
https://www.youtube.com/watchv=3IGxo4rHzM4&nohtml5=False
Just grab a photo and a sound byte.
A kid could use it, just export the head as a mesh, upload it to SL, and there you go, perfect representation. In fact you could preempt future disasters by collecting photos and conversations before hand. Shudders at the thought.
Reminds me of that scene in Minority report where he repeatedly watches holograms of his wife and kid.
But then again it's just an advance on keeping a photo I guess, just depends on how far you go with it.

[Caoilin]

There was a Battlestar Galactica spinoff show called Caprica a few years ago (only lasted one season), part of which took place in a very well developed virtual world. One of the story lines was that a company was working on how to essentially recreate a deceased person in the virtual world based on the persons "lifestream" of all the online information about the person.