Hillis cites a few different ways that people use their avatars as a “middle voice”, making their avatars a piece of who they are. In this essay he says that according to Thomas Hobbes, avatars are like the characters that authors write about in books. The author knows the character like he knows himself. I agree with this to some extent, but not everyone who creates an avatar is an author. Sure, Hobbes’ probably doesn’t want us to take this literally, but maybe a person who creates an avatar creates them because they don’t know anything about who their avatar is; it’s not symbolic of them at all, it’s a curiosity that exists, and through the avatar, one can learn about that type of person of lifestyle that they have heard about in real life, and have never actually hung out with someone like that or met them. I think this could go for groups as well, to join a group as an avatar to learn about the customs and culture of that group. Because what everyone else sees on the outside of an avatar, no one really knows if you are a part of that culture or not. Maybe you’re the quiet one in the corner of the cyber room, or maybe you’ve googled ways to be able to interact with the other members. Maybe this becomes fascinating to you and you decide to stay around as that character in that group longer than you had anticipated. But the point is, this wasn’t a part of you at all and you couldn’t just sit down with a pen and paper (well, actually, a keyboard and a monitor) to begin writing about these characters that are assumed to be a part of you. As Hillis notes, this is one possible way that people use avatars, but not all people use them in this way.

I agree with Roy Pascal when he says that the author of a book or text can use his characters to submerge himself in them, and that the author is also not subjective, or at least according to the readers. Most authors (at least it seems with books that I have read by the same author) write books that have the same theme and the reader expects the author to live up to the same steamy details, horror, or comedy that they had read before. This is after all how authors become popular. An avatar, at least in Second Life, can be a completely unexpected character, can become something else, change it’s total identity with the exception of a name. If an author was to write about that character, it sounds more like a soap opera where the ghost of someone else possesses an actor. The name is the same, but the character is totally different.

What happens when an avatar changes his or her identity with the expectation that he or she is the same as before? Once established in a group, I would expect that the avatar makes friends, online appointments to meet with them, chat, and engage in whatever rituals they usually engage in. At this point, the author of the avatar who made up this story for the avatar actually becomes the character for the duration that they are online. This is like Hillis’ comparison to avatars being more like a attendees of various masquerades, trying on different masks for the reaction of other people also trying on different masks. (This can also include fetishes and curiosities, although fetishism is more of a representation of the self than a curiosity.)

There is no way that an author of a novel can become their characters. Once the book is published it is out of their hands. The only comparison I can make, again, is that it is expected that the author produce similar content time and time again, just like an avatar is expected to return to his or her cyber life as the same character time and time again.