Wednesday, March 6, 2013

Intermediate

Avatars are supposed to be a way that we can enter a new world, a new outlet into something, a way to imagine ourselves, or something somewhere else. Avatars although seem to be in this intermediate world, they are just a representation so they are not the really thing, I am not really Harry Potter in this video game, and I cannot actually preform skills, but I am not completely myself either because I am drawn into this new world and become immersed in what I am doing for an hour that has nothing to do with my real world.

It is the same with a book, you can escape for a second into another world that you are reading about, but you are not really there feeling those things or being those people, but you are not yourself either. It is hard to define since you don't exist in either place for the time being, you take on a middle quality and do not know how to define where one is in space.

Avatars seem to have this middle quality, a sense of not belonging and not being completely of one world or the next. They are only a representation of something else, they are not the real thing, although they can fool you for a while and definitely take you outside of yourself. In my video game I am in the world of Harry Potter for an hour each week, but at the end of that hour, I turn off the game, put down the controller, and go back into the real world. I don't have the ability to make potions or spells, and there are no death eaters and voldemort coming after me. The world of the Avatar does not carry into my world, and my world does not exist in the world of the Avatar either.

This in a sense also makes the Avatar world a middle or intermediate world, since it cannot exist or be carried over into the "real" place, such as hogwarts, but it also cannot come back into your own world, such as me going about my normal day as a college student. My video game and Avatar are stuck in this in-between and only exists if I choose to play the game. This is like a lot of things and places in life when one experiences something that does not fully put them in one group or the other, but somewhere in between and they don't know how to act or respond, and at some point they seem to have to choose one or the other, and not stay in between. That is the difference in an Avatar it can move between and stay in the middle, while other things in life have to pick a place to belong. 

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