Flipping Out: Avatars and Identity

CHAPTER 3 Flipping Out: Avatars and Identity Thomas H. Apperley, Justin Clemens The University of New South Wales, Kensington, NSW, Australia In July 2016, the world was suddenly abuzz with news of Pokémon GO. It seemed almost impossible to find anything in social media news feeds that wasn’t directly related to the Android/iPhone app. Real life was the same; everywhere, there were people wandering through schools, parks, and public spaces, caught up in the capture of virtual menageries. From Tokyo to Tacoma, there was a palpable transformation in the behavior in vast numbers of otherwise totally unrelated peoples, who, armed with mobile phones, swept through such spaces, scoping and swiping as they went. Everywhere, stories of assaults, thefts, and accidents assailed us from social media, as the Pokémon swarm stormed through the world, following the virtual summonses issuing from millions of tiny screens. Whatever one’s opinion of the game, its players, and its consequences, there seems no question that Pokémon GO constitutes an event in the transformation of both publics and public spaces by video games. Pokémon GO is the latest project by Niantic Labs, a company that emerged from the aftermath of the 2015 reorganization of Google. Niantic has a track record of making games and apps for mobile devices, which are based on real-world maps. The precursor game by Niantic, Ingress (2013), had involved crowdsourcing a gigantic database of playable locations that eventually became the database on which Pokémon GO operates today. If Pokémon GO is merely the most recent and most successful augmented reality game that has been developed so far, it expressly builds on hardware and software networks that have been in development for some time. What is particularly notable for our discussion here is the central role that the avatar has in the smooth operation of Pokémon GO and how a particular deployment of the avatar concept facilitates this mass shift in behavior. While Pokémon GO is indeed just one augmented reality game among others in a genre that has a long history (Moore, 2015a,b), Pokémon GO focuses on the avatar as the mediating device between real and virtual Boundaries of Self and Reality Online ISBN 978-0-12-804157-4 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-804157-4.00003-7 © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. 41 42 Boundaries of Self and Reality Online spaces.Traditionally, augmented reality games seek to blend the digital world with the material, using real-world environments as a part of the backdrop for digital gaming. In Pokémon GO, by contrast, the avatar itself becomes the key element through which this interplay is organized and experienced. In doing so, it also transforms the status of established realities by inducing its private users to remake public spaces according to the contingent exigencies of a video game globally connected in real time. Like all apps, the first step is the download.When the app is opened for the first time, it invites the player to customize a manga-esque avatar by choosing a gender, hairstyle, and the color of the avatar’s pants, shoes, jacket, hat, and backpack. Only once these decisions are made can play begin, whereupon the avatar appears on a location-based map, which has richly detailed roads and streets, but lacks buildings. These have been replaced by “PokéStops” and “Gyms.” The newly created avatar sits at the center of the map, marking the player’s own location in the detailed network of roads and pathways displayed on the screen. The game then delivers the instruction to “walk to move your avatar,” which is elaborated in the Niantic support website: To move your avatar on the map, you need to change your location by walking in the real world. Your avatar represents your location, and as you move, you’ll see your location move on your screen. Once you start moving in the real world, you’ll be able to ind Pokémon, PokéStops, and Gyms. Niantic Labs (2016). Let us underline the astonishing reversal that these instructions at once presuppose and effect. The avatar is no longer simply an index for locating us in virtual space, but has become the technology that organizes our relationship between spaces, which are simultaneously “real” and “virtual.” It is crucial to emphasize that this new use extends traditional understandings of what an avatar is and does.An avatar is usually understood as the graphical representation of the real user in a virtual space, if for some scholars the avatar concept also extends to describing the user’s alter ego or character in the sense of how someone may self-represent online may be different from their “actual” selves (Coleman, 2011; Miller, 2011). Graphic or visual avatars may take either a 3-D form, as in digital games like Assassin’s Creed, virtual worlds like Second Life, or a 2-D form as an icon in Internet forums and other online communities. One such example is the social media platform Twitter, where the picture that appears beside a tweet is called the user’s “avatar.” Flipping Out: Avatars and Identity 43 Simply put, avatars are now almost everywhere, not least because in this time of ubiquitous computing, pervasive media, and the so-called “Internet of things,” an unprecedented amount of everyday life is now spent connecting with computers and smart phones. This means that the impact of technology on every level of existence goes far beyond any one individual’s experience and, for that matter, powers of analysis. As the German media philosopher Gernot Böhme notes: “Technology has become a sort of infrastructure of human life itself, a medium of human life. What it is to travel in our contemporary lifeworld, what communication is, what work is, what perception is, can no longer be determined independently of technical structures” (Böhme, 2012, p. 18). One of the primary consequences of such a development is that what we could broadly denominate the phenomenological domain, that is, any individual’s experiences of the world, from perception to psychology and beyond, now becomes misleading and incomprehensible without an attention to the imperceptible restructuring of the conditions of life itself by technics. Along these lines, Böhme speaks of “invasive technification,” thereby emphasizing the disruptive violence of contemporary globally integrated technological civilization into the daily lives of individuals, cultures, and societies. For his part, the French thinker Bernard Stiegler speaks of “technologies of the spirit” under “hyperindustrial capitalism,” whereby: By taking control of processes of adoption at all levels, and, in the irst place, at the levels of the primary and secondary processes of identiication that constitute psychic individuals, hyperindustrial capitalism brings about the destruction of processes of individuation at both the psychic, as well as collective levels. Through the employment of contemporary forms of hypomnémata, which, as information and communication technologies, are technologies of control, and not of individuation, service capitalism generalizes a process of proletarianization in which the producers have lost their savoir-faire to the same extent that consumers have lost their savoir-vivire. Stiegler (2014, pp. 33–34). As Stiegler further suggests, “the stakes” for our new era of technology therefore “concern the constitution of a new milieu of psychic and collective individuation.” Insofar as contemporary technologies “change the telos, that is, the rule of ends,” they accordingly “require a new libidinal economy” (Stiegler, 2009, p. 35). For Stiegler, the technologies of our time are, without any real countervailing intervention from established political systems, and often with their covert imprimatur, directing asocial processes of dissociation (including desocialization, de-symbolization, and desublimation), in 44 Boundaries of Self and Reality Online turn inspiring what are essentially plagues of anxiety, depression, and other affective disorders. Whatever one makes of such analyses and rhetoric, it is noteworthy how little the accounts make of the key role that avatars play in this radical extension or expansion of technical operations into the everyday. To take a handful of immediate instances of this phenomenon, neither Böhme nor Stiegler note the various and intense modalities under which avatars operate, thereby de facto taking for granted the dissemination and uptake of the new technologies. Significantly, and whatever the general pertinence of his claims, Stiegler himself lays aside the question of the avatar in favor of a catalog of technical developments including WiFi and Bluetooth systems, and a phenomenological description of, inter alia, mobile telephony.To give a single further example: in a series of recent interviews with some of the most influential discussants of contemporary technology, including Johanna Drucker, Ulrik Ekman, N. Katherine Hayles, Stiegler, and others, there is not a single mention of the role played by avatars (Simanowski, 2016).Yet it would prima facie seem that, whatever we would want to say about the incontrovertible determining centrality of communications technology in everyday life, something like the avatar—for almost all users, the first and most effective point of contact with the new technologies—would have to be at stake. Both hardware and software designers are well aware that the success or failure of applications, platforms, devices, and techniques are significantly determined by the appeal and ease of use of the interface. In such a context, the avatar serves a range of indispensable multiple functions: it is a vector of the user’s agency within a particular platform, an in-world representative of the user that facilitates access and action between on- and offline spaces, and a mode of identification. This means that the avatar is not just an interface in a neutral or descriptive sense, but a crucial modality of human integration into the nonhuman circuitry of new technology. As such, the avatar directly addresses what the Italian philosopher Paulo Virno calls “human generic characteristics,” that is, a certain underdetermination by nature, which requires supplementation by technical and cultural inventions, and is coterminous with the essentially sign-oriented environments that humans build. For Virno, one of the consequences of the current situation is that “today’s industry — based on neoteny, the language faculty, potentiality — is the externalized, empirical, pragmatic image of the human psyche, of its invariant and metahistorical characteristics. Today’s industry therefore constitutes the only dependable textbook for the philosophy of mind” (Virno, 2009, p. 145).What we wish to do here, then, is to Flipping Out: Avatars and Identity 45 examine how avatars are at once designed to exploit human biological underdetermination for hyperspecialized tasks (e.g., the “swipe” touch screen, the new relation between the opposable thumb and perception enabled by games consoles, etc.) while also forcing a constant turnover of skills and ongoing reeducation for each individual.What “identity” is, in the sense of a sense of self, a project or a community, necessarily becomes more obscure and abstract in the age of avatars. As we have already noted, the current ubiquity, the “pervasiveness” of networked digital media, including mobile phones, tablets, and laptop computers, among much else, entails a concomitant proliferation and dispersion of avatars of all kinds. Now if many of the more “culturalist” commentators seem to avoid any dedicated discussion of the role of the avatar, it is nonetheless the case that while many aspects of the avatar have received intensive attention from the technology industries and new media scholars, the focus of the work to date has tended to be on the technical efficiency of the interface, rather than understanding the full social implications of its use. Scholarship in game studies has often approached the avatar in this technical sense, regarding it as a device that allows the player to act in and upon the game world. For example, the avatar is discussed as a “cursor” that marks the location of the player in virtual space (Fuller & Jenkins, 1995, pp. 57–72) and as a vehicle for moving through virtual space (Newman, 2002). Other work seeks to balance the technical understanding of the avatar with a more sociocultural analysis of the way that the avatar is represented, both in terms of character (Frow, 2012, pp. 360–80) and in relation to the depiction of race and gender (Fordyce, Neale, & Apperley, 2016; Shaw, 2015). Certainly, the avatar concept is used in many different types of digital games from mobile apps like Pokémon GO to big-budget blockbusters like Fallout 4, and includes both avatars that are fully customizable down to the minutest detail, such as in Dragon Age: Inquisition, and those that are noncustomizable, as in games that include iconic multimedia characters like Sonic the Hedgehog or Kirby. In accordance with the well-known tendency whereby digital media begin to affect already existing conceptions of human social interaction (e.g., the common parlance in which the human brain is spoken of as if a “computer”), the contemporary conceptualization of the avatar has recently shifted outside of “purely” digital games to include how we understand social media more generally. Daniel Miller uses the term “avatar” in his ethnography of Facebook to understand the difference between the private individual and the public performance of their persona as mediated through 46 Boundaries of Self and Reality Online social media. For him, the avatar is a performance of the self to a public audience, which creates a sense of “co-presence,” but that is separate from the private self (Miller, 2011, p. 66). Similarly, for Coleman, the “avatar provides a shorthand for the experience of the networked subject,” a subject in which identity, behaviors, and community are impacted by the global adoption of networked communication technologies, a subject for whom the notion of the “unmediated encounter” is no longer possible (Coleman, 2012, pp. 79–98). She argues that avatars include many modes of representation used to facilitate “a continuum of exchanges between virtual and real spaces” (Coleman, 2011). Coleman’s expanded definition seems entirely appropriate for Pokémon GO, and in the remainder of this chapter, we will explore the concept of avatar in this broader sense. In drawing upon such studies of the phenomenological, psychological, anthropological, sociological, and even ontological consequences of avatars, we would like to suggest here that there are three inseparable aspects of the avatar that require further thought. The first crucial aspect we wish to note is that avatars should not be defined or cataloged according to the range of forms that they assume, but as an indissociable fusion of (technical) function and (user) action. Although “avatar” is the name today loosely given in popular culture to the custom altered creatures familiar from video gaming, in its strictest acceptation, an avatar is any interface technique that serves to bind computing hardware to an extra computer body; hence, whatever focuses attention, signals location, and enables the elaboration of intentions within a screen environment should also be considered an avatar. The avatar is therefore not only an in-world representation of a user and a functional operator, but a programmer or re-programmer of its user too; that is, an avatar is essentially a pedagogical device working through interactive, granular modulations or dosing of affect. In this second aspect, it is absolutely vital to see how the operations of the virtual–actual avatar–user interface entail real-world behavioral modifications as well. If an avatar is designed to function simultaneously as a vector of the user’s agency within a particular platform, as well as an in-world representative of the user and as a mode of identification, avatars are also designed to exploit human cognitive plasticity (or biological underdetermination) in order to refocus them for hyperspecialized tasks (e.g., via touchscreens, forging new relations between the opposable thumb, perception, and reaction, etc.) while also forcing a constant turnover of skills and ongoing reeducation for each individual user. Flipping Out: Avatars and Identity 47 In this sense, we believe, thirdly, that the psychological consequences of such modifications for the users cannot be understood outside of the affordances (and, so to speak, the unaffordances) mandated by the avatar’s relation to the “real world,” on the one hand, and the “technical world” of the software/hardware nexus, on the other. In a word, what we are seeking to do in this chapter is to negotiate between the broad-brush discussions of the implications of the new technologies for any “ontology of the present” and the technical discussions of the production and role of avatars. As we will argue here, without appropriate modes of user integration into these circuits, the uptake and deployment of such technologies would remain partial, a fact not lost on the great media and software companies themselves. It is with respect to this ideal integration of user and technology that the avatar has been developed, if not perfected. Digital games are the logical starting point for an examination of the operations and implications of the avatar. Precisely because games have a certain “nonnecessity” to their consumption—very simply, while we need our word processors for work, it is a rare workplace that will pay for its employees to play Candy Crush Saga (King, 2012)—part of their appeal depends on the effectiveness with which they can continue to motivate users to play and thus maintain their own integration with the game. Moreover, digital games are the technologies through which the avatar was introduced into our everyday media use and the first pedagogies of the management and integration of exchanges between virtual and real spaces took place. To this end, we will begin by outlining a general methodology for our approach: the FLIP complex, illustrating the account with detailed examples from several games, including Pokemon GO, Resident Evil 4, and Crossy Road. Our approach, FLIP, stands for Focalization–Localization–Integration– Programming. FLIP is a key operational complex that can take on a truly staggering multiplicity of forms, both within the screen environment and in the real world, too. For purposes of the current chapter, we would like to sketch out, in a preliminary and rather abstract fashion, some current limits and tendencies of the FLIP complex (see Apperley & Clemens, 2016, pp. 110–124). The FLIP model maintains that avatars are the central interface element for contemporary communication technologies (i.e., there is no interface that does not contain, however minimally, an “avatar function”). However, while avatars can take an extremely wide variety of forms and affordances (as we have briefly outlined above), that variegation does not vitiate the 48 Boundaries of Self and Reality Online fact that avatars perform an essential cluster of functions (i.e., not necessarily the usual idea of a representational in-world figure). In fact, these variations are, in almost every case, determined by a relation between the hardware and software, and between projected functions and users (i.e., a double determination, first, at the level of the software–hardware nexus, and second, at the level of the device–user nexus). This double relation is itself reflexively targeted by design as the crucial instrument for the incitement and integration of user affect as a melding of cognitive intentionalization and identification (i.e., to hook users into certain modes of attention to the virtual space of the game, to enforce certain call-and-response movements on the user’s part, and to encourage the continuation of this stasis). The production of this particular bond of cognition–affect–action then enables further behavioral modifications that may not have very much to do with the provisions of the game itself through the de facto continuance of these cognitive and practical actions into other zones (i.e., through the articulation of different platforms that deploy comparable sets of attentiveness and movements). Let us pause momentarily to see how this works with respect to a single example, drawn from the work of Angela Ndalianis. If we began this chapter by invoking the mass public swarms of Pokémon Go users, we now turn to what seems, on the face of it, a more established, solitary, and private experience of the avatar. In the course of a phenomenological description of playing Resident Evil 4, Ndalianis writes: While video gaming shares this haptic visuality with the cinema through the player’s sensory and afective connection to the ictional world, it also involves a literal haptic connection through the player’s interaction with the controller and, in turn, in the way command of the controller translates onto the body of the avatar who then participates in a haptic experience of the virtual space that surrounds it….the actual act of the union of player and her avatar. Ndalianis (2012, p. 44). Let us first underline the postconvergent aspects of digital gaming, that is, its inherently multimedia references. For Ndalianis, who is here concentrating on a particular genre of game, that of “horror,” which, if given a cinematic allusion here, itself has a much older (in this case, literary) history; this transmediatic genre is part of the appeal of the game in the first place. Yet the genre is now refashioned in and for an entirely new set of technologies, for Ndalianis is using a Wii console, which works according to a fiction of a “whole body” integration with the technology. As Ndalianis elaborates, the game console is “what facilitates the unraveling of action onscreen but it also serves the role of umbilical cord, connecting the body of the player Flipping Out: Avatars and Identity 49 to the body of the game space and to its affective potential” (Ndalianis, 2012, p. 48), so Ndalianis also speaks here, given the generic horror context that is the object of her study, of the affect of the “moral occult,” which serves to bind extra-generic intensities (e.g., sudden percepts) to specific generic expectations (e.g., narrative suspense). This is surely one of the core strengths of such games, which indiscriminate expectation, perception, and movement in their productions of affect.As Ndalianis is at pains to emphasize, the forging of a human–tech union is what is at stake and is dependent here on the success of the merging of the moving image of the avatar with the body of the gamer (Apperley, 2013). With the Wii console in particular, “my arms and body now have a central role to play as my movements in real space are translated across the body of my avatar” (Ndalianis, 2012, p. 50). This last point requires further discussion. The Wii, which seems precisely to enable the direct translation of “real” corporeal action into the game world, has a further paradoxical effect. Rather than simply injecting the body of the gamer into the world of the game, the game world itself extrudes virtual pseudopodia (what Ndalianis, mobilizing a symptomatically maternal metaphor, calls “the umbilical cord”) to engulf the gamer’s body in a form of virtual phagocytism. The player’s body thereby becomes not simply the master of an avatar, but an avatar of itself. An avatar is a digital phagocyte. This is essential to the logic of the FLIP complex: the becoming avatar of the real body itself, even in supposedly “real-world” situations, whereby real movements of the body themselves become accommodations with the demands of the avatar. On the basis of our brief exegeses of Pokémon GO and Ndalianis’s account of Resident Evil 4, we can now further detail that the problem of avatar function and design involves the following linked rubrics: 1. “User-friendly”: that is, large infant gestures, simple color-coded controls, etc. Much technology is now a priori targeted for maximum ease of learning and use across maximum diversity of populations. 2. Despite the familiar rhetoric of “proprioception” and “synaesthesia,” targeting, affecting and rearticulating the eye–hand nexus is the crucial operator of control, even when the entire human body comes to be integrated à la the Wii or even Pokémon Go. 3. The avatar is placed in an arbitrary but absolute (algorithmic) relation between the “controls” and the “two worlds” thereby coupled (the design space of the game with the body of the user in real space). 4. A “game world” is itself a total design space (that is, tends toward being algorithmically complete) that seeks to transform the “real world” in accordance with its requirements. 50 Boundaries of Self and Reality Online 5. Each user must enter each new game world in a graded fashion (the avatar is here a probability threshold modulator). 6. Each world grade engages new sets of user retraining through repetition of basic movements (including serial dosing of affect in a graded hierarchy of internally ratified accomplishment). 7. Every world, if it seeks to provide a kind of immersive totality, also marks itself as necessarily partial (there are many other worlds) and interruptible (for a variety of physical reasons, from the call of nature to the demands of other worlds, such as work schedules). 8. Every user movement is, de facto and de jure, tracked, recorded, and harvested (big data), in order that the data generated is reinvested in the design and production of the avatar itself. If these propositions can indeed hold for games as otherwise different as Pokémon GO and Resident Evil 4, let us now attempt to triangulate our approach by examining the structuring of avatars in an entirely different game from either of these, Crossy Road (2014), developed by the indie Australian game design team of Hipster Whale. The game can be played on phone, tablet, and associated devices with touchscreen technology. The game’s name alludes to the title of another famous game Flappy Bird (dotGEARS, 2013), which caused an international incident when it was pulled from App Store and Google Play in early 2014 by its own developer, Dong Nguyen. Flappy Bird is a notoriously difficult game in which the user attempts to negotiate a deliberately retro “8-bit” avatar. As the name Crossy Road alludes to Flappy Bird and thus also overtly alerts prospective users to what they might come to expect in terms of an “endless runner” game with retro graphics and minimal transformations in action, it also adverts to the history of gaming. Its prime precursor is the old arcade game Frogger (Konami, 1981) in which the player uses a four-directional joystick to control the movements of a frog across a busy road and a logswept river.The semantics of the title Crossy Road thereby propose a knowingly “infantile” sensibility with a highly nourished set of semiotic references to the history and contemporaneity of video gaming. Although one need know absolutely nothing of this history in order to play the game, which is openly designed to appeal to “all ages,” it is nonetheless significant that this net of allusions enables further sets of connections to be made with other games, both internally and externally to Crossy Road itself. The various avatars prove crucial to making these links; at the time of writing, the game has the capacity for no less than 155 different avatars. These include: the “Hipster Whale,” a blocky whale which shares its name with the company Flipping Out: Avatars and Identity 51 that produces the game, sports a goatee, cap, and black-rimmed glasses, and carries a coffee cup in one flipper and a camera in the other; “Daddy,” a blue-suited dude with a black quiff; the Easter Bunny; and so on. There are additionally all sorts of frogs, fowl, cats and dogs, and fabulous creatures and characters from the North, South, West, and East. Cute, funny, culturally diverse, and intriguing, these avatars can be acquired by random variable in-game rewards by express purchase (mostly 99 cents each from the app store) or unlocked by secret in-game operations. As with many other games, these avatars are crucial to its monetization; if you don’t want to spend real money, you can watch targeted in-games ads for other games, which provide credits that can be used to purchase most (but not all) of the avatars. “Gotta catch them all!” is one of the tags for Pokémon Go, and such acquisitive exhaustiveness is also one of the behaviors that Crossy Road attempts to induce in its players. There are also opportunities for real-world merchandising, including T-shirts and plush stuffed versions of some avatars available. Other avatars are straight out of contemporary pop culture, such as Doge, a Shiba Inu breed accompanied by subgrammatical phrases such as “Wow!” “So Amaze!” “Very respect!” Another avatar is Pew Die Pug, which refers to the massively successful YouTube Swedish gamer Felix Arvid Ulf Kjellberg, whose online handle is PewDiePie, itself allegedly formed by the sound made by in-game sci-fi guns (“Pew!”), and whose own favorite dog is the pug. This set of avatars is open (indefinitely more can always be added), diversified (insofar as each appeals to a dense global network of forms, characters, and themes that exceed any traditional language, culture, and nation), and exclusive (some have to be bought; some require the cheats; some are available only for a limited time). If the basic structure of the game remains the same throughout—the avatar must continue to cross the road or river without getting hit or without pausing too long (the tardy get taken by an eagle)—certain sets of avatars are correlated with particular kinds of landscape and terrain. There is a “spooky” series, which includes a Mummy, a Wolf, the Mad Wizard, the Dark Lord, the Gravedigger, Ghost, Zombie, and many others. The accompanying terrain is dark and ghostly. There is a Korean series, which includes (among others) Daddy, Psy, the Korean BBQ, and the K-Drama Actor. The landscape is a densely packed Korean urban space. There is a Brazil series, which includes (among others) the aforementioned Brazil Chicken and the Capoeira exponent, but also a Carnaval dancer, a Jaguar, a Blue Macaw, a Marmoset, and a Football Player. The accompanying landscape looks something like an idealized Rio de Janeiro. 52 Boundaries of Self and Reality Online In addition to these aesthetic shifts, some avatars automatically perform certain characteristic actions, which again make no difference to the game structure, but offer little fillips of perceptual differences: the Yeti throws snowballs at cars, the sci-fi adventurer Epoch blows up trees, and so on. The audio effects also vary with characters. If Pokémon GO demands often strenuous physical adventuring as integral to its play and Resident Evil 4 requires the submission of the entire body, otherwise immobilized in a small space, Crossy Road is a game that can literally be played anywhere, as long as one has a screen. Its extreme structural simplicity nonetheless offers the proliferation of avatars as a kind of aesthetic supplementation, whereby the basic repetitions of tap and swipe are articulated with affects created by tiny perceptible differences between the avatars, which themselves, as multiple, function semiotically to create cognitive links of recognition to all sorts of other phenomena nominally external to the game. Having outlined these three extremely diverse instances of the affordances and operations of contemporary video game avatars, what, if anything, binds them together? Are there any conceptual formulas able to account for their unity as avatars and their diversity as operations? What sort of account can be given of their appeal and their import? In “The Question Concerning Technology,” Heidegger famously argues that technology is a form of gathering (Heidegger, 1977).We can extend his analysis here by asserting that contemporary postconvergent communicational technologies are a gathering (or, if you prefer, an assemblage) and the transformation of an existing symbolic economy into a new kind of material bond. This is one of the things that Heidegger means by his assertions that “the essence of technology is nothing technological” and that “the essence of technology is enframing (Gestell).” For Heidegger, such a gathering and establishment of the frame of life by technology is not only a kind of ordering that renders certain kinds of commands otiose by inscribing them directly into possibilities for behavior and cognition, but is also a way of revealing. In its form of revelation, technology creates what Heidegger calls a “standing reserve” for which “regulating” and “securing” become the most determining general effects. If we believe that such remarks hold for understanding the role played by avatars in modifying human behavior, that the avatar, as the primary interface with global networked digital technology, is a key way in which human behavior is now regulated and secured beyond the diversity of inherited and already existing forms of social and spatial governmentality, Flipping Out: Avatars and Identity 53 we need also to add a note regarding the interpellatory qualities of this figure, that is, the way in which such games make an appeal to their users. “Interpellation” is a term derived from legal discourse, where it at once means a form of summons, an interruption, and a constraint.We believe that this complex indicates what is crucial about the avatar: that they simultaneously summon their users, interrupt the continuum of everyday life, and constrain certain behaviors. In social theory, the term received a new impetus from the theories of the French philosopher Louis Althusser in his famous essay, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” (Althusser, 2001). In that essay, Althusser makes a distinction between what he calls “Repressive State Apparatuses” (the police, courts, prisons, etc.) and “Ideological State Apparatuses” (the family, churches, schools, etc.). Whereas the former operate primarily (not exclusively) by forms of physical violence, the latter function primarily (again, not exclusively) by forms of inculcated behaviors, whose paradigmatic operation is precisely that of interpellation (see also Coleman, 2012, pp. 79–98; Dyer-Witheford & De Peuter, 2009). Althusser’s emblematic instance of interpellation is being hailed on the street by a policeman: I shall then suggest that ideology ‘acts’ or ‘functions’ in such a way that it ‘recruits’ subjects among the individuals (it recruits them all), or ‘transforms’ the individuals into subjects (it transforms them all) by that very precise operation which I have called interpellation or hailing, and which can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing: ‘Hey, you there!’ Assuming that the theoretical scene I have imagined takes place in the street, the hailed individual will turn round. By this mere one-hundred-and-eighty-degree physical conversion, he becomes a subject. Why? Because he has recognized that the hail was ‘really’ addressed to him, and that ‘it was really him who was hailed’ (and not someone else). Althusser (2001, p. 118). While this is not the place to enter into the arcana of the discussions surrounding Althusser’s theses, it is first of all worth noting that he does not use the term “ideology” as if it simply meant a motivated or inculcated form of misunderstanding (e.g., forms of unexamined belief) that further evidence or training would enable a person to see through or would be able to break from. On the contrary, there is no simple outside to ideology; we are all of us subject to its determinations. In this, Althusser’s concept is compatible with Heidegger’s notion of modern technology as enframing; it sets the terms for us all in ways that it is impossible simply to break with 54 Boundaries of Self and Reality Online and whereby the terms of conflict and apparent dissension are themselves positions established in advance by ideology. One can be at once correct in one’s beliefs (e.g., about how the world works), yet remain entirely ideologically saturated insofar as one’s behaviors continue to conform to, to answer to, the policeman’s call. Preprogrammed multiple positions are therefore at the heart of ideology, which works not according to a reduction to orthodoxy, but precisely by the subject recognizing itself in its address by an authority figure, which opens for it a topology of acceptable behaviors. Ideology in this sense establishes variable sets of comportments without requiring any particular psychological state or disposition for its continuing effectivity. That said, it is also worth noting that Althusser’s title and orientation are now substantially outdated: “Ideological State Apparatuses.” Digital gaming clearly cannot be reduced to an ideology, even in the expanded sense Althusser gives it; it is no longer the state that is primarily at stake here, but deracinated multinational capitalist corporations acting expressly at a global level; finally, the word apparatus can only be insufficient to name the unthinkably complex actual and virtual systems that are our current media environment. Moreover, Althusser’s celebrated formula for ideology, that is: “a ‘Representation’ of the Imaginary Relationship of Individuals to their Real Conditions of Existence” also needs to be modified under pressure of digital gaming. What we would now like to say instead is that, first, the position of the policeman in Althusser’s fable is better occupied by the avatar. Why? Because to enter the virtual world of any game whatsoever, one needs to uptake and accommodate oneself through the medium of the avatar. In doing so, one is integrated into the digital game world as if summoned (one can see the chiasmus or crossover between “worlds” as part of such a summoning), and, in doing so, one interrupts one’s “real life,” while necessarily constraining oneself by learning the game’s affordances. Second, this makes the avatar the key operator for the integration of the actual relationship of users to their virtual conditions of existence. Avatars are interpellation machines that bring analog users into algorithmic worlds, thereby enabling not only a reorganization of the analog, but new transitions to be made between otherwise disjoint spaces. Let’s conclude by summarizing our key propositions. The avatar is currently the crucial aspect of the technical requirement to restructure each user’s perception–cognition–action potentials each and every time a game is played. Each playtime leaves traces of the history of the player’s own Flipping Out: Avatars and Identity 55 coming-to-be-able-to-play-in-playing—data itself harvested for vast bigdata probability sets—which suggests that the affects the player experiences are the alibi for the extremity of what they are doing to themselves in playing. What is this paradox? The more one becomes master of a game, the more one must become an automaton that fuses with the algorithmic requirements of the game itself. In the era of video games, we are no longer in a dialectic of symbolic prohibition–transgression as motor of action, but submitted to pure algorithms for which nothing need be prohibited. The avatar is the key device that effects this transition between zones, encouraging its user in turn to cross over virtual and actual spaces previously separated in reality. This is what we have called the FLIP complex of the avatar. Each avatar focalizes the user’s attention through its deployment as the way into the game. Each avatar localizes its user by establishing virtually the actual sphere of acceptable movements, even if this localization requires extensive physical movement. Each avatar integrates its user into sets of behaviors that are correlated with the game’s virtual operations. Finally, each avatar requires the reprogramming of its user, even if, as with Crossy Road, in a minimal fashion. Avatars, as FLIP elements functioning within a global assemblage of technology that today regulates and secures the actions of billions of human beings, are the central means by which individuals are interpellated as subjects into their virtual worlds. REFERENCES Althusser, L. 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