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QJ.NET interview - Alter Ego: Avatars and Their Creators

Posted Aug 15, 2007 at 8:57AM EST by QJ Staff

Listed in: Featured Articles, Interviews Tags: mmorpg rumors, Rapid Reality, Robbie Cooper, Tracy Spaight

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What is Alter Ego? MTV, CNN, The New York Times, and various MMORPG sites have introduced us to the concept: Alter Ego is an intriguing concept book presenting the phenomenon of the contemporary avatar - the virtual characters we gamers create to play online.

In Alter Ego: Avatars and Their Creators, you see pictures of gamers from all over the world (including leading figures in the gaming world) alongside their avatars. Add to that a short and interesting biography, and you have a visual testimony of who and what we are as gamers.

Now QJ.NET takes a closer look at the book: from its successful launch and its reception, and going back to its creative roots. We also get a glimpse into the minds and visions of Robbie Cooper (the project originator and photographer) and Tracy Spaight (the project writer / researcher).

QJ.NET: Alter Ego: Avatars and Their Creators is presented as "a cool concept book." But the messages in the biographies seem timeless. Now, months after your first round of interviews and reviews in the press, how has the concept been received?

Robbie Cooper: It's been received very well. When I first started talking about it to people, it was quite hard for people to get their heads around. It's quite important for people to understand that these are games where the game-world is there all the time. And people log in and out of it.

Now that people are generally more familiar with the idea of virtual worlds, it's much easier to explain. And when people see it they relate to it. Magazines are still contacting me and the publisher to run serializations. Three museums have gotten in touch recently to put on exhibitions. It's an idea that's become mainstream during the time I was shooting it.

Tracy Spaight: Alter Ego poses questions about identity and community. "Who am I" and "how do I find my place" are timeless questions. What's different is the medium in which this quest for self is being played out.

The technology of virtual worlds allows for types of interaction - and forms of association - that are quite novel. People who didn't grow up with computers or the Internet are curious about virtual worlds. The images and stories that make up Alter Ego are easy for people to relate to, even if they've never logged into Second Life or EverQuest. They speak to the modern condition.

"... a socially awkward,
hygienically challenged teenage male
that gets the shakes ..."

QJ.NET: Some of the people in this book are quite attractive - even sexually attractive. Have people expressed surprise that we MMO gamers are normal - and even attractive?

Robbie Cooper: I'd love to say no. But yes, they have. [Laughs.]

Tracy Spaight: When most outsiders think of gamers, the mental image that comes to mind is a socially awkward, hygienically challenged teenage male that gets the shakes if he gets more than twenty feet away from his computer. Everyone has met someone like that, but the average gamer is pretty much like everyone else. According to the ESA, the average game player is 33 years old, has a job, is involved in their community, and is basically "normal," whatever that means.

QJ.NET: Your book has Ailin Qin, a lady who makes over a million real dollars from Second Life. There's also Lucy Winkett, a precentor - a cleric - of St. Paul's Cathedral in London. Were these and other biographies accidental finds? Or was there also a conscious effort to present a diversity of people?

Tracy Spaight: We sent a request for subjects to major gaming news sites, forums, and blogs in an effort to find interesting people for the book. We received literally thousands of emails, many of them filled with colorful, humorous, or off-the-wall stories about life in virtual worlds. Many of the people in the book were serendipitous finds, but a few of them (like Jeremy Chase or Lucy Winkett) were folks we'd read about online.

Robbie Cooper: We avoided presenting the same type of person too many times. Even so, we were restricted in our search in that we were dependent on people contacting us. I met one person online, for example, who told me she played these games because she had been facially disfigured in car crash. She refused to be photographed. I bet there are thousands of more stories out there that we never came across.

"I used to be a satanic priest,
but then I got a girlfriend."

QJ.NET: The biographies are sometimes heartbreaking in their honesty. Do you find that people are open about their gaming lives or their personal lives or both?

Robbie Cooper: It's interesting that a few people chose to role play their answers. And yet also included, somehow, real information within the role play. For me the best statement of all was "I used to be a satanic priest, but then I got a girlfriend." David said it with no irony whatsoever. Beautiful.

Tracy Spaight: Many of the people I interviewed have invested hundreds of hours in creating their online identity. They poured their creativity into designing their avatar's appearance or writing an elaborate back-story about their alter ego. Their avatar is an expression of who they are or who they want to be. They were eager to tell their story.

QJ.NET: Can you give our readers some insights about how you chose which biographies and pictures to include in the book?

Robbie Cooper: Bruno at Chris Boot, the publisher, edited them. But we were aiming to try and represent the diversity that is undoubtedly there.

Tracy Spaight: There were some pragmatic considerations that came into play. If the person lived in Mongolia or Saskatchewan, we couldn't always fly out there to interview and photograph them. But once we'd reached a critical mass of subjects, Bruno helped us select the right images and stories.

QJ.NET: The final variety and diversity of biographies are astounding. Did you end up having to cut a lot of biographies from the final book? Will there be a sequel?

Robbie Cooper: It would be great to do a sequel. I would like to return to this, in a while, and in the meantime do something that is closely related.

Tracy Spaight: It would be interesting to tackle the project again in a few years, as virtual worlds become more and more mainstream. We've only scratched the surface.

MMORPG players and their MMORPG avatars - Image 1

That ends the first part of this interview. Yes, there's a second part because this interview is extra-long. Both Robbie and Tracy shared some fascinating and details about the work that went into the book, from trying to get into a prison in China to taking photographs all over the world (and working around the schedule of a jittery Korean lady). So look forward to Robbie Cooper's explanation of avatars and "seeing the elephant": go to QJ.NET interview- Alter Ego: Avatars and Their Creators (Part 2).

Buy: [Alter Ego: Avatars and their Creators]

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