Alter Egos: Avatars and Their Creators

Robbie Cooper

Robbie Cooper (b. 1969) is a British artist working in various media, including photography, video, and video game design.

KEY CONTEXT In Alter Egos: Avatars and Their Creators, Cooper interviewed people about the characters they play in online video games like World of Warcraft, and set photographs of the players next to their avatars for comparison. In an interview, Cooper said:

I think people use avatars in different ways. We noticed in Asia players were much more focused on creating an avatar that they liked looking at, rather than thinking about what other people were seeing inside the game world. So a lot of guys played girls for that reason. Another player in Korea played a little girl character because he was selling items and it helped in bargaining. He modified his behaviour in the game to try and maintain the illusion that he was really a little girl. Other people really throw themselves into the role play element, or consider their avatar to be an extension of their real world selves.

We think of the explosion of digital communications technologies as being a very recent occurrence, and yet the progression to where we are now in some ways began in the mid-1800s. The invention of the telegraph allowed people to send messages through wires in the form of a series of dots and dashes that were translated into words by a telegraph operator.

Read the following excerpt from a novel written by Ella Cheever Thayer in 1880 called Wired Love: A Romance of Dots and Dashes. In what ways are the “two worlds” of the telegraph operator described by the narrator of this novel similar to the “two worlds” of modern-day users of the Internet, such as the people represented in the photos in Alter Egos?

Miss Nattie Rogers, telegraph operator, lived, as it were, in two worlds. The one her office, dingy and curtailed as to proportions, but from whence she could wander away through the medium of that slender telegraph wire, on a sort of electric wings, to distant cities and towns; where, although alone all day, she did not lack social intercourse, and where she could amuse herself if she chose, by listening to and speculating upon the many messages of joy or of sorrow, of business and of pleasure, constantly going over the wire. But the other world in which Miss Rogers lived was very different; the world bounded by the four walls of a back room at Miss Betsey Kling’s. It must be confessed that there are more pleasing views than sheds in greater or less degrees of dilapidation, a sickly grape-vine, a line of flapping sheets, an overflowing ash barrel; sweeter sounds than the dulcet notes of old rag-men, the serenades of musical cats, or the strains of a cornet played upon at intervals from nine P.M. to twelve, with the evident purpose of exhausting superfluous air in the performer’s lungs. Perhaps, too, there was more agreeable company possible than Miss Betsey Kling.

Therefore, in the evening, Sunday and holiday, if not in the telegraphic world of Miss Rogers, loneliness, and the unpleasant sensation known as “blues” are not uncommon.