But, in a way, people who use the internet have two identities. There's their real life ID, and their online ID, a 'mask' if you will. On some websites / online games, such as World of Warcraft and Second Life, these are shown using things called avatars. The website I'm going to be using today for an example is one I frequent and moderate on, Gaia Online. It can be found using the link below.
www.gaiaonline.com
But before I start, I thought I'd just quickly let you know what the site is. It's a forum based site with some games on, a virtual currency and other minor features, such as profile and avatar creation. It's main drawpoint however, is the avatar system that is used to create a virtual 'you' which is basically your display picture. That's the main difference between Gaia and other forum sites, such as minecraftforum.net. Gaia - Avatars. Minecraft forums - Display picture.
Ok enough of that. Back to the avatars. Avatars are a good way of showing yourself online, or showing off online, depending on your ego. A lot of people use them to create a 'fake persona', a mask to hide behind when on the internet. This can be a good persona [something simple, for example having the avatar of a vampire and acting like one instead of a human] or a bad persona [i.e - A 54 year old male pretending to be around 13 to draw in young children].
To show an example, a picture of myself is on my About Me for this blog site. I'm an average sized 20 year old female with brown hair and brown eyes. Now, below is an image of my avatar, Madsam123.
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| Madsam123 - One of her many forms. |
Pretty different right? The last time I looked, I didn't have blue hair, red eyes and plasma wings spouting from my back, but thanks to Gaias avatar system, I can project myself like that. I could make the avatar look like me, but where's the fun in that?
Members of Gaia online recieve a default avatar when they first sign up. So, from the word go, they already have a persona to hide behind. Of course, there isn't much difference between the starter avatars, so to make up for this Gaia created 'Gaia gold', the virtual currency on the site.
Gaia gold can be obtained in so many ways it's ridiculous. You can run around the flash spaces and locate it by shaking trees and hitting rocks, you can sell items, you can play the websites unique MMO called zOMG! or the other games avaliable, or you can simply post, that gives you gold too.
Using the gold, you can visit the NPC [Non Player Character] stores, where there is a very wide selection of virtual clothing avaliable to purchase. Most of it is unisex, but there are some male / female only items which are currently being converted.
But it doesn't end there. If you can't find what you're looking for in the stores, there is also the user run marketplace and the exchange, where people are always selling items that can't be bought directly from the store. These items normally come from the sites cash shop, where you can use real life money to get Gaia cash, which can then be used to purchase even more clothing. One thing I like about Gaia is there is no such thing as exclusivity, everything sold in the cash shop is [eventually] avaliable on the marketplace to be bought for gold.
According to Venturebeat, paying Gaia users generally spend about $30 USD per month to purchase Gaia Cash, which is then used to buy virtual items such as evolving, chance, collectible, and limited edition items.
The best thing about an online avatar though is that you can be practically anything you want to be. Want to be a vampire? Go ahead! Be a vampire! Want to be a Nazi crow with a chainsaw? Well we have the means to let you become one! And the best thing is no one knows who you really are unless you show pictures, but then that counts as spam in many of the forums and is frowned upon in the gaian community.
But thanks to this 'online identity', people can also act like they want. Trolls [I spoke about them in my previous blog] use members avatars to judge how rich they think someone is on the site, whilst ego boosted cash cows [A user which is known for just throwing their real life money to a site for any little cash update they bring out] deem that they are higher than everyone else, no matter how rich you look. Then there are those who judge your knowledge on your real life age or how long you've been on the site, but ageist people are around in real life too, so they don't really count as an online only experience.
Gaia Online also allows you to make a profile where you can write up about yourself, add pictures or videos or if you're advanced in coding, create a portfolio. Not really knowing much about BBCode, I'm not the type to do such a thing.
The profile comes with standard questions where you can fill in simple answers, such as Interests, Hobbies, Music, Movies etc, along with an About Me section. I filled all of my profile in with true facts about me, whilst others use it to just post a quote from a song or a movie, then spam up the area with gifs [small, moving images that are normally 3-5 seconds long] and photographs of themselves, demanding that they are the prettiest thing in the world.
But this freedom comes with a price. For every profile that is created, there is always at least a handful of fake ones. Problem is, how do you weed out the bad from the good? Well, you can't really. It's almost impossible to tell online when someone is faking something, be it a traumatic experience or what they look like [unless they have a picture somewhere of course, then you can call shenanigans on it.].
But creating an online identity to some is like creating a second life, a life you could never have. Madsam123 is my second life, I could never wear the clothes she does, or have plasma wings on my back, even if they were real. I could never change my hair and eye colour to whatever I desire, but she can, which is why I do it. She's my online dress up doll, but at the same time she's what other people see as me when I type.
To close my blog on Avatars and identity, I'll leave you with this, something I quickly whipped up using a website called tektek [Click on the image below to increase it's size.]. It's a fan made site where you can get access to every item on Gaia, no matter how rare, and create your dream avatar on. A lot of people use it to show Gaians what they want to achieve on the site, others use it to just mess around on. I've used all of these avatars in the past for personal usage, but it just goes to show that online, you can be whatever you want to be.
Bibliography
Avatar made and saved on - www.tektek.org
Information on Cash Cows from - www.urbandictionary.com
Venturebeat - http://venturebeat.com/2010/11/23/teens-virtual-world-gaia-online-lays-off-15-to-20-staffers/
More Information about Gaia Online found at - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia_Online or at www.gaiaonline.com
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