The question concerning avatars : a review of Rune Klevjer’s doctoral dissertation

Abstract

One of the most captivating aspects of digital games is their ability to anchor players’ presence within 3D virtual environments covering every imaginable setting from the mundane to the surreal. The feedback loop between man and machine is focused through this anchoring of attention and interaction. Whether it’s a token consisting of a unit of French Cuirassiers charging the British flanks in a Napoleonic RTS or the lone heroine battling her way through ranks of non-descript baddies in an action adventure, the intimacy of the link between mind, sign/code and hardware is animated by those on-screen agents that allow the player to influence the game system and environment. The nature of this relationship is anything but self-evident. Once it is put under the analytical lens we are faced with a series of thorny questions relating to the interpretation of ergodic texts and their underlying coded behaviours combined with an inherent propensity to incorporate prosthetic technologies. The role of the token and the avatar becomes easily overlooked by this disposition to internalise their function and look beyond, or through (Aarseth, 2003) them, into the spatial domains they inhabit. Rune Klevjer’s dissertation, titled What is the Avatar: Fiction and Embodiment in Avatar-Based Single-player Computer Games, places the analytical lens squarely on this locus of interaction, boldly tackling the ensuing questions that have so far received only cursory, and somewhat unsatisfactory, treatment in the field of Game Studies.