Flipping out: avatars and identity

This chapter focuses on the avatar as the mediating device between real and virtual spaces. The avatar has become the key technology through which this interplay is organized and experienced by organizing our relationship between spaces, which are simultaneously "real" and "virtual." It facilitates this relationship through multiple functions; it is a mode of identification, a vector of the user's agency, and an in-world representative of the user. The role of the avatar is analyzed using the concepts of focalization, localization, integration, and programming. Together, these concepts form an operational framework for understanding the complex form of the avatar, which can take on a multiplicity of forms, both within the screen environment and in the "real world.".