Law & Games Seminar

Interesting thoughts on avatars and anonymity from Bert-Jaap Koops, a Professor of Regulation & Technology at the Tilburg Institute for Law, Technology, and Society in the Netherlands: You and Your Avatar: Having Second Life Thoughts on Anonymity and Identity.

It’s interesting to pair Prof. Koops’s thoughts with Alter Ego: portraits of gamers and their avatars:

Cooper doesn’t just get people who play games for the fun of it, but also an old-school MUD developer (his “avatar” is a block of text from his game), several gold-farmers and miscellaneous other cheats; game developers and models for in-game avatars, and so on. The breadth of gamers interviewed by Cooper is really awe-inspiring: rich and poor, western and Asian, able-bodied and disabled, young and old. It’s not all terminally shy, heavyset guys playing skinny little women (though there are some of those) — Cooper has plenty of people who defy the stereotypes, too. The net effect is to demonstrate the common cause between all the players, no matter what their background: they are all living virtual lives.

Also: it doesn’t hurt that these are beautifully shot portrait photos.

Link, Link to thumbnail gallery of photos 1, Link to thumbnail gallery of photos 2