Avatar Blog

The part of this reading that stuck with me the most is the creativity that avatars give people along with the freedom they give someone to escape the real world. The first example of Jason Rowe, who has many physical disabilities, used his avatar to fit in as a normal person and not be judged based on his physical ailments. I think this is really cool because none of his friends online know that he has any sort of problem because he interacts on the internet just like everyone else. On the outside, Jason seems like a weaker person because of his disabilities, but when playing online with his avatar, he looks just like everyone else and does not have to worry about being any less capable than anyone else.

In the instance of Rebecca Glasure, avatars are very useful to gaining respect in the gaming world. When playing as a female character, nobody gave her complete respect for the player she was simply because they assumed she was a girl and could not game to as high a level as a boy. However, when changing her character to a man, she immediately gained more respect. I think this is very interesting and makes avatars very useful because it can completely eliminate sexism online when used correctly.

I think the example of Cassien Guier from France was very interesting because he was very concerned with making his girl avatar look as fabulous as possible. If he did this to himself in real life, he would most definitely be ridiculed and judged by everyone that met him. However, the use of an avatar allows him to express his inner desires of dressing up in pink and changing his hair styles without actually doing it to his body. This freedom to express one’s own inner feelings is one of the best reasons to use an avatar because other online users do not see the person behind the avatar. All they see is the pixels on the screen. There is no judging the personality of the creator that decided to form the avatar the way they did.

Within the classroom I think that avatars can be used to show the true personality of a person. People are often afraid to voice their opinions, especially when they are at risk of being judged by their peers. For this reason, avatars in the classroom could allow students to create a persona of themselves that they feel properly reflect their personality instead of what other students might gather from what the student does or says or wears.

This concept of using avatars in classrooms could be especially useful in online classes because then the professors and students would really have no idea what each other looked like and would therefore be unable to pass judgment simply on physical appearance. They would only be able to form opinions based on the avatars used to create a self-portrait and the work presented by each student.