Tuesday 29 January 2008

Alts and identity

There's a lot of discussion on the SL Educators list at the moment about the use of Alts (multiple avatars) and their role in allowing people to form multiple online identities.

On Liquid Learning, Steve Warburton has an interesting post on the subject, Loving your avatar: identity, immersion and empathy. In it he plots a path of avatar identity and empathy (using a graph of time against investment), suggesting that there are two key break points which prevent some people from getting fully engaged with a MUVE such as Second Life.

Well worth reading.

For the record, and just in case you notice them around, I now have several work-related alts, though I must admit that I only tend to use them rarely. They are:

Lieme Sideways
Cliperty Clip
Kinda Telling
Oscar Mummfuzz
Man Anatra

Labrat Ninetails

Alrightme Ansome

The first 5 have been created for an experiment I hope to run looking at the impact of bots on search engine ranking.

Labrat is intended to be an in-world AI bot driven by libsecondlife and an external PandoraBot, though I haven't done the necessary coding work yet.

Alrightme Ansome was created purely to try out the NMC orientation experience.

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