Pulse
2 May 2022
In a previous article on the VR Church, I briefly alluded to the ministry of Pastor D.J. Soto who firmly believes that the future of the Church is in the metaverse. I mentioned that in one of his VR worship services, Soto baptised an anime girl whose real identity is the male YouTuber who calls himself Drumsy.
Another advocate of the VR Church, who styles himself as a digital missionary, is Rev Bill Willenbrock, a long time Lutheran pastor. Willenbrock often preaches at a virtual cathedral complete with long halls and magnificent stained-glass windows. The congregation comprises a colourful gathering of avatars – a giant banana, a man in a shirt and tie, a mushroom, a fox and a few armoured knights.
Both Soto and Willenbrock are not in the least bit perturbed by the anonymity of their members or troubled by the serious questions about identity in the virtual world. In fact, Willenbrock maintains that anonymity in virtual reality is a great advantage because it enables people to feel more confident about sharing deeply personal issues.
This view however belies the complex issues surrounding online or virtual identities. In an article published at the CNN website entitled ‘Identity in a Virtual World’, Michelle Jana Chan explains that:
In a virtual world, online identity is potentially much more flexible than real identity, allowing easily changes in race, class, gender, age, socio-economic background, and even species. It offers freer self-definition, including multiple identities and shared identity, within worlds lacking behaviour guidelines or prescribed etiquette.
In her book Virtual Reality and Identity Crisis: Implications for Individuals and Organizations, Archana Tyagi points out that ‘identity in the online world is still poorly understood – both by the general public and scholars’. This despite the fact that the internet and digital media have become ubiquitous in our world.
Theological, ethical and social questions concerning online identity, especially in relation to avataric representations of users of VR, have to be explored even as the metaverse continues to capture the imagination of our society. For, as Tyagi has rightly pointed out, ‘Identity plays an inherent role in defining our social interactions’.
AVATAR AND IDENTITY
The word avatar is derived and adapted from a concept in Hinduism which in Sanskrit means ‘descent’. It is used to describe a Hindu god coming from heaven and manifesting itself in bodily form in order to intervene in the affairs of the world.
In 1992, Neal Stephenson commandeered this word for the first time in his novel Snow Crash to describe a digital representation in a virtual environment. Since then, the word avatar has been widely used to refer to different types of representation of an individual, including names and online profiles.
Avatars have been used to represent people in digital media in its various platforms: internet chat, video games, social virtual worlds, multiplayer online role-playing games and virtual reality.
According to the American sociologist and specialist in the culture of gaming and online communities, T. L. Taylor, avatars enable users to ‘intersect with a technological object and embody themselves, making the virtual environment and the variety of phenomena it fosters real’.
Avatars provide what some scholars have called a functional representation that seeks to facilitate engagement in the virtual environment. As Jess Fox and Ahn Sun Joo explain:
Avatars provide an essential, functional representation with which the user can enact virtual behaviours such as navigating virtual space or engaging virtual objects or other avatars.
They add that ‘Avatars may also be adopted as a conduit for identity expression’.
The personality that an avatar brings to expression may well be consistent with that of the user it represents. In this case, Taylor explains, ‘The bodies users create and use in virtual spaces become inextricably linked to their performance of self and engagement in the community’.
However, in selecting an avatar the user can also demonstrate group affiliation and the latter’s social identity and interests. For example, supporters of Woodlands Warrior Football Club may ‘dress’ their avatars in the club’s jersey, which proudly displays its logo.
In this case, the individual’s identity is moulded by the collective identity of the group.
Avatars may also enable marginalised groups to express themselves in ways that are not possible in the real world. As Fox and Ahn explain:
Marginalised individuals who cannot express who they are in the real world, such as gay adolescents living in oppressive surroundings, may create avatars through which they can express their true selves.
However, avatars can also present identities and traits in selective ways, or, they can become sophisticated versions of the traditional mask, hiding or misleadingly disguising their creators.
In any case, in the fluidity of virtual environments the use of avatars compels us to look at the whole issue of identity and its various interpretations.
As MIT Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology, Sherry Turkle, has perceptively put it in her 1995 book Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of Internet: ‘Traditional ideas about identity have been tied to a notion of authenticity that such virtual experience actively subvert’.
TRUE AND DISCREPANT SELVES
There is a real sense in which avatars can be considered as the ‘extended selves’ of their users. Studies have shown that there is a tendency for users to select avatars that correspond to their conception of themselves, that is, to select avatars that are similar to themselves.
In this case, the avatar selected can be said to be the expression of the ‘true self’ of the user and not an ‘alternate self’ which is radically different from the user’s offline identity and persona.
However, the avatar can also at times be discrepant from the true identity of the user. This can happen in a number of ways and for a variety of reasons.
For example, the avatar can be a distorted and somewhat misleading representation of the user when it is used to reflect an idealised, rather than actual, version of the self. In this case, the avatar is used to project an enhanced self of the user so that he could either protect himself from negative evaluation or impress the people he is interacting with.
This is the feature of the virtual space that some people find alluring. Virtual spaces afford users the opportunities to portray themselves in a selective manner, determined solely by how they seek to impress others and how they wish others to see them.
As Turkle puts it: ‘When we step through the screen into virtual communities, we reconstruct our identities on the other side of the looking glass’.
In some instances, users may be limited to a small assortment of characters to choose from. But in other virtual environments, avatars can be constructed or customised from head to toe, or from horn to claw, depending on the bodies the users select.
Some people find this thrilling because they are able to create a better version of themselves online – something which they may have repeatedly failed to achieve in real life. As Fox and Ahn point out, ‘The mere process of customisation empowers the user to make specific decisions on how they wish to appear to others.’
From the philosophical perspective, this selective representation of the self conforms to the postmodern concept of the fragmented self. Eschewing the ‘modernist’ idea of the self as a unitary entity, postmodern thinkers have presented the self as an amalgamation or collage of many disparate selves.
The avatar or avatars offer a means by which these fragmented selves – which are never static or immutable – can be embodied and represented in the endless process of self-construction.
But the avatar can also be used to display a radically alternate identity from that of the user either for the purpose of concealment or deception.
Thus, the avatar or avatars could display alternative ethnicity, gender, sexuality, nationality and personality. These alternative representations or ‘alts’ are often radically different from the offline identity of the user and from each other.
This brings us to the problem of impersonation and deception.
In their book Virtual Reality Church, Darrell L. Bock and Jonathan J. Armstrong discuss to the problem of ‘sock puppetting’.
This refers to the scheme where ‘one person controls several online profiles and impersonates multiple people in order to manipulate a conversation or social situation’. Brock and Armstrong give the following example: ‘… one person might pose as an offended student as well as the student’s irate parent in order to gain increased leverage’.
Even more nefarious and worrying is the whole problem of avatar and identity theft and misappropriation. In a paper published in the Emory Law Journal entitled ‘Hey, You Stole My Avatar!: Virtual Reality and Its Risks to Identity Protection’, Jesse Lake discusses some of the conundrums related to VR identity thefts.
Lake argues that although identity theft is not new, ‘VR will further exacerbate the issue of identity misappropriation because VR enables users to interact with a level of unprecedented intimacy’.
She explains how ‘[v]ictims of these frauds manifest on both sides of the transgression’:
On the one hand, there will be avatars whose identities are stolen and used to defraud other VR users. And on the other hand, there are users that are defrauded by stolen VR avatars. As with any crime, the damages of such actions depend on the circumstances of the crime.
All this will lead to the further erosion of a precious social capital that is already so scare in the real world: trust. As Lake starkly puts it: ‘The possible types of these misappropriations can be endless and, if left unaddressed, would lead to a collapse of trust in the VR world’.
CONCLUSION
In the real world, cues to personality and identity can be gleaned from different aspects of the individual such as their behavioural traits and habits.
In the avatar context, however, only the identity claims are available.
Each avatar is carefully and deliberately customised to display only those aspects of personality or a certain identity that its creator wishes to present. This makes it impossible to go ‘behind’ the avatar to discover the true identity of its creator.
The avatar context is a relatively cue-lean context compared to the real world, and this makes it more prone to misrepresentations and deceptions.
While the use of avatars in the metaverse will no doubt become more common, these important questions about identity, with their profound legal and social implications cannot be ignored.
These questions are also pertinent to Christians who, like Soto and Willenbrock are excited about the potential that the metaverse and the VR Church hold for ministry and outreach.
We began this article with the fact that at least one baptism has been conducted virtually. Theological implications notwithstanding, while it seems that the VR Church bodes well in terms of outreach, ministry may be another issue altogether. The inherent incongruence between the use of avatars and an embodied Christian community walking authentically alongside one another cannot be easily swept aside. Therefore, we ought to temper our excitement with prudence when it comes to the VR Church.
Dr Roland Chia is Chew Hock Hin Professor at Trinity Theological College (Singapore) and Theological and Research Advisor of the Ethos Institute for Public Christianity.