Recently there's been some talk about avatars in virtual environments and MMOGs as playing pieces or tokens. Tobold says that "Ultimately your avatar is just a playing piece", while Raph Koster takes the position that "Avatars aren't tokens".
We hold a marginally more complex opinion. Avatars are tokens (or playing-pieces, if you will), but tokens matter. Avatars don't, as Tobold points out, intrinsically represent cultural, social or political viewpoints. What they do represent, we aver, is us: The users/players.
If tokens didn't have that some sort of deep significance for us, there'd never be any arguing over who gets to be the race-car in Monopoly, or who gets a particular color playing piece. If how we were represented didn't matter very much, then arguing over the choice of Monopoly tokens wouldn't have reached anywhere near the sort of cultural entrenchment that it has.
Koster sees the avatar has having evolved a richness that "cause us subconsciously to treat them as people." We'll disagree here and suggest that any token that we use to represent ourselves in virtually any context becomes a matter of some significance to us, whether they're forum avatars, virtual-environment avatars, MMOG characters or table-top miniatures.
Even as children -- and perhaps especially as children -- we attach a desperate importance to our choice of representative tokens. There are plenty of good examples of it, but just watch kids arguing about game-tokens, or how they react to not getting their first choice of Halloween costume and you'll see the drama of it played out (albeit in miniature).
As adults, we're no less attached to our tokens, though they've transformed a little. Now it's our houses, our cars, our gardens, our clothes and our avatars. Things that, down inside, we know represent us to others, and we react strongly to their defacement even if it is only temporary and purely cosmetic.
Isn't it a little daft to see that sort of significance in a plastic race-car?
Of course it is. Everyone knows that the top-hat is the clearly the superior token.
Our choice of tokens says something about ourselves -- even if we choose one at random, that act says something about us too. At some level, we're aware that we're being judged by those choices, and even if that judgment is unconscious, and we respond to that awareness by our selections.
Ultimately it's a consequence and expression of one of humanity's most unique and valuable traits: Empathy. We subconsciously put ourselves in the position of others who might scrutinize our choices. That feedback-loop reinforces the introjected significance of our token selections.
Avatars may be tokens, but tokens and the choosing of tokens are often more important to us than we think, most especially when you can't see the person behind it.
