Putting a Face on Things - Putting a Face on Things - page 17

are we responding, the winged pixie we see animated on the screen or the person who
runs her?
In a 2006 Harvard Business Review article written more as polemic than reportage,
Paul Hemp asked that very question in querying why companies do not market to
avatars. 26 “Avatar-Based Marketing,” as he named the concept, would speak to our on-
line alter egos. Hemp brought up a legitimate point. If, as the media equation suggests,
we take each other's online persona as real entities, then who exactly are we address-
ing? Is it the player behind the screen or the synthetic figure in front of our eyes?
The answer is both, but to varying degrees. Strong identity markers, such as gender,
race, and size, all carry great virtual weight online (see figure 2). Experimental and eth-
nographic research on this subject find that virtual identity markers work analogous to
how they work in the real world. Avatar images, as well as gestures and voices, trans-
late cultural information that we believe in: if we see a black avatar, we comprehend
this as a black person and treat that avatar accordingly. In their paper “Virtual Race,”
Dutch psychologists Wigboldus and Dotsch ran a virtual world test where users en-
countered white young male avatars and Moroccan young male avatars. 27 Players had
similar responses to the Moroccan avatars as they did to Moroccan young men in real
life—negative in general.