Could Xi give you the ability to become a ‘super-being’ inside Home? You heard it here first! Everyone is talking about ‘avatar enhancement’ and it certainly fits in with the whole butterfly metaphor.
All avatars are enhancements in a way. Here are the six types yours truly has identified:
1 – Straight Avatar
2 – Augmented Avatar
3 – Depraved Avatar
4 – Experimental Avatar
5 – Androgenous Avatar
6 – Uber Avatar
1
Straight Avatar speaks for itself, the avatar closely resembles ourselves and this is probably the avatar most of us have.
2
Possibly though many of us have augmented our Avatars, even just a little bit to satisfy our egos – bigger breasts or pecs, you might not even know you’re doing it. There’s no shame!
3
An intriguing one this, some people like to pervert their avatar into something ugly, either a perverted vision of themselves or something completely off the wall. And why not? Expression has many forms and while psychological implications lurk herein, it’s true, where don’t they lurk? Applaud it!
4
Experimenting with your gender is something well documented in the real world already. Not an easy thing to do, though obviously it’s easier in the virtual world; but it still takes cajones to be so truthful.
Hopefully you’ll see each of these requires increasing complexity of thought. It’s easy to want bigger pecs but there is probably far more behind wanting to change gender, be it psychology, philosophy, or history. It’s a much more sophisticated way of thinking, which leads us to…
5
Ah, what if there were no gender? No sk8erbois or gangstas or cheerleaders or teenie wahinis… life would be soooo much easier but far less fun! It’s been a few years since Mr Iron’s biology class, but as I recall we are male and female simply so we can reproduce. But gender isn’t important in a virtual world – it’s a throwback to a previous self, as the coccyx is a memory of where we evolved from. We cling to it people, because it is what we know, it is all we know. In a virtual world though an androgynous avatar would have all the best features of both – a man’s strength, a woman’s compassion, a man’s instinct to protect, a woman’s emotional intelligence. It would be neither, it would be greater. Currently we can’t pick and choose but that would be the final stage of avatar development.
6
Suppose you could find a way of actually circumventing the boundaries that have been created for our avatars, then you could enhance yourself above and beyond all others. You could increase functionality across the board and it is no exaggeration to say you would become a pseudo god. As Tom Waits said, ‘In the world of the blind, the one-eyed man is King.’
So what are you? What would you like to be?
