AVATARA: A 2003 Virtual World Documentary

[neoratz]

a friend showed me this documentary tonight and i was really wowed by it. i can't believe they made a documentary like this in 2003, virtual worlds had to have been much more complicated to interact with and create in! i felt like they touched on a lot of things we are still talking about today... the blurring of real life and virtual life, the notion that digital art can't last, and the avatar as an extension of the self, it all still feels relevant 19 years later. i thought it was really funny when they touched on the problem of room sizes and avatar sizes, where a lot of the rooms were built for 1 style of avatar and anyone using avatars outside of that style threw off the scale. i still have this problem in other games like Whirled, where some avatars are just too tiny for rooms!

i also found this in the description, a collection on the internet archive for virtual world preservation! how cool is that?!? https://archive.org/details/virtual_worlds i'll definitely be exploring this another time.

so, i am wondering, have any of you seen this documentary? do you have any thoughts?

[creaturefeature]

cool

[Melooon]

I missed this one! THe visuals are fantastic!! The interviews are.. a bit bland, although its interesting hearing voices from the people who inhabit this strange digital world. BUT omg the visuals are great - I may have to study this for my next game

Thank you for posting it!

EDIT: "There was a huge doughnut avatar; just turning the avatar would bonk like 10 people at a time" I take back my bland interviews comment!