MMO Monday: ALTER EGO – GAMERS & THEIR AVATARS

Maybe next time you’ll think twice before propositioning that sexy Elementalist for some in-game cyber sex. 

Photographer and video artist, Robbie Cooper shows us the flip side of the MMO world.

In 2003 I was photographing the CEO of a company, when he told me that he used virtual world games to play with his children. He was divorced and had bad access to them, so he would meet them every evening in EVERQUEST where they would play and chat. I askedhim what they talk about? He told me they discussed thinks like homework, school, their mother; the normal stuff of humdrum reality.

His discription os this banal but emotionally important exchange, taking place in the vivid fantasy of the game, got me thinking about the nature of the game itself; it’s a worldof appearences and symbols. Within that, their interaction had be reduced to text; it was a technological extension of psychological models – the imaginary, and the symbolic structure of language.

I spent the next three years, on and off, travelling to placed like Korea, China, France, and Germany to photograph people who use virtual world games. By recording the appearance of the real person alongside that of their navatar, I wanted to compare each person with the identity that they’d created to interact with others online.

SOURCE: Robbie Cooper