Living Avatars Research Group

Description

Living Avatars Research Group aims to build connections between departments, and with external stakeholders, through both initial workshops and pilot studies, and larger empirical work exploring how interdisciplinary perspectives on living avatars can affect and inform digital lives.

The extensive use of avatars, from fantasy digital games to the promises of the Metaverse, has the potential to put in question the established theories of how people engage each other in politics and society. By exploring further boundaries of novelty that accompany technological and digital living, the Group’s research is a valuable resource to inform policy and development frameworks.

Do you own your online avatar? If you do, how much of your own online image is yours? Is your avatar part of yourself, or just a representation? Does the use of avatar change the way people behave towards one another? Can an avatar be made ‘legally’ responsible for its actions inflicted on others in a virtual space? Should avatars be independently identifiable by a regulatory body, or be subject to strict identity requirements like Soulbound tokens? The answer to these questions can challenge how people understand themselves, their relationship to others, and their relationship with laws and a regulatory space, or platform.

The already extensive use of avatars across multiple sectors of experience demands an interdisciplinary approach to develop the understanding of avatars’ cognitive, social and political effects. Game studies has extensively explored relationships to avatars in terms of identity and socialisation in digital worlds, and this knowledge and vocabulary can inform how avatars are understood beyond games, in an increasingly digital day-to-day life. To advance this knowledge, psychology, neuroscience, game studies, sociology, and legal and political theory are used to jointly understand how self-projection and projections from others affect the way society is organised and functions.

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Brunel University, Uxbridge and London
Kingston Lane
Uxbridge
UB8 3PH

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