Girlfriend Experience: having your own real-life avatar

A lot of people use avatars in their digital lives. Avatars can be any character, as long as it represents you in the digital world. But what if you would have an avatar representing you in real-life? Mediametic decided to create The Girlfriend Experience, ‘a multiplayer game allowing you to enter into a real-life person and use this person as an avatar.’

On friday the 5th of December and saturday the game can be played at specific times (see website). The Girlfriend Experience will be physically located at Pixxelpoint 2008, Kulturni Dom, Nova Gorica, Slovenia. It’s not extremely clear, but as far as I know anybody in the world can play the game and control his own real-life avatar. All you need is Skype and a headphone plus microphone. Check out the available avatars on their website.

I’m really curious how people will react to this. Digital avatars give us a power to be anonymous and we fully control what the avatar says and does… but with an avatar that knows reason and logic, things are a bit different. We suddenly have a conscious, plus we realize that our actions can have a physical and psychological effect. The way we behave can make the avatar sad, angry or extremely happy.

This is really an interesting psychological experiment, which is fun at the same time.