Psychology of Avatar

In day- to- day life, we have developed what Carl Jung called “personas” or personalities for ourselves. There is one personality that remains internal, and another that is the face we wear for the world. Sometimes, our persona is disrupted by people’s judgements, events outside of ourselves, or unexpected human emotion. In the workplace, it is vital that we escape the intricacies of our human emotions in order to focus on work and escape intrinsic emotion. It is also important to have a personality to share in order to create and dynamic, fun, and productive working environment. With business avatar and interactive avatar, it is possible to create your own digital persona and communicate about business issues, thus combining work and fun through online communication.

We all have different sides to our identity. Social psychologists would call them our "social roles" that surface in the variety of situations and relationships that make up our lives. Psychoanalysts would describe them as the constellation of "introjects," "internalizations," and "identifications" that comprises our intrapsychic world. On a daily basis, we juggle and shift between several rather distinct selves, sometimes without being fully aware that we are doing it. How, when, and why these different facets of our identity manifest themselves is the story of our lives. These can be carried over into the digital world with avatar analysis.

AOL Instant Messenger was the first popular instant-messaging program to use avatars, picking up on the idea from PC games. However, users of AIM and many other IM services commonly refer to avatars as buddy icons.

Avatars in non-gaming universes are used as two-dimensional or three-dimensional human or fantastic representations of a person's self. Such representations can explore the virtual universe with which they are in using their avatar, add to it, or conduct conversations with other users, and can be customized by the user. Usually, the purpose and appeal of such non-gaming universes is to provide a large enhancement to common online conversation capabilities, and to allow the user to develop a portion of a non-gaming universe without being forced to strive towards a pre-defined goal.

Another advantage is that in the GMUKs of cyberspace, you can tell a lot about people by examining their collection of avatars and how they use them. Each avatar reflects a distinct aspect of the individual's personality and lifestyle - whether it is a mood, an interest pattern, a social role, one's attitudes and values, or a wished-for state of being.

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