We Make Our Avatars, and Thereafter Our Avatars Make Us

The title of this blog entry was one of the best lines at the conference, and it came from an informant interviewed by Celia Pearce, director of the Experimental Game Lab at Georgia Tech, who has been doing interesting work on the game play of older women. I tend to complain about a youth-centric bias in research on digital culture, so it's always nice to see Celia as part of the lively exchanges that take place in academic conferences. I was very pleased to hear that Celia's book Communities of Play: Emergent Cultures in Online Games and Virtual Worlds will be in the Spring 2009 catalog from MIT Press along with my Virtualpolitik book based on this blog. Her work on the "Uru Diaspora" is definitely worth checking out.