Alter Ego is a book – but also the name of a photography project – by Robbie Cooper. From 2003 to 2006 he travelled around the world, meeting online gamers to portray them… with their avatars.
The seed of this idea was planted in 2003 when Cooper was shooting pictures of the divorced CEO of a company: the man confessed he used online games to stay in touch with his children, meeting them every evening in Everquest, where they would play, spend some time together and catch up. As Cooper recalls: “His description of the banal but emotionally important exchange, taking place in the vivid fantasy of the game, got me thinking about the nature of the game itself; it’s a world of surface appearances and symbols. Within that, their interaction had been reduced to text; it was a technological extension of psychological models – the imaginary, and the symbolic structure of language“.
Alter Ego offers a gallery of portraits of real people and their avatars: a real striking experience during which we find ourselves looking for connections between the two, but we also immediately recognise the distance that divides them. In the end it’s clear that there can never be a clear separation of identity: an avatar is a representation of the real-life person but also enables a player to be someone else in a virtual world.
Each person photographed with his or her avatar, also wrote a few lines explaining the relationship between the two characters; this way the book is a real work of journalism and a sociology essay. And, as Cooper explained in an interview, it’s a varied world: “I think people use avatars in different ways. We noticed in Asia players were much more focused on creating an avatar that they liked looking at, rather than thinking about what other people were seeing inside the game world. So a lot of guys played girls for that reason. Another player in Korea played a little girl character because he was selling items and it helped in bargaining. He modified his behaviour in the game to try and maintain the illusion that he was really a little girl. Other people really throw themselves into the role play element, or consider their avatar to be an extension of their real world selves. Very often the role play story that players gave their characters seemed to echo something about the person. So one player who created a vampire character had actually spent years acting out the same fantasy in goth clubs. One of the people he’d associated with during those years took it to the level of sleeping in a coffin! Others found the role play element in the game world so compelling that it made the humdrum reality of their normal lives seem dead by comparison. One of those referred to the real world as the ‘BBW’ – the big boring world. To cut a long story short, it takes all sorts to make a world, and it takes all sorts to make a virtual world too“.
