Pinocchio goes to church — the religious life of avatars
Once hanging from Gepetto’s threads, Pinocchio has freed himself from the dependency of his former master. The avatars of virtual worlds such as Second Life are far behind the wooden fellow, still dependent upon their masters’ mouse clicks.
Avatars act as social beings, interact, socialize, flirt, and go to church. Some even build their own church. In a community without geographical borders a prayer meeting may gather participants without concern for temporal and spatial limitations.
In virtual worlds, individuals explore new experiences of holiness. An avatar is the representation of the individual self, controlled like a marionette, like Pinocchio, by invisible threads. Behind the avatar is the agent or puppeteer, who commands the expression of the avatar.
The project Pinocchio investigates
- how the religious experience of the avatar is related to its driver, and vice versa, and
- if and to what extent the avatar, like Pinocchio, can emancipate himself from the puppeteer and live a life of his own.
Entrepreneurs create spaces and activities, and avatars participate in the activities or hang out in the spaces. The experiences of the avatars (holiness, motivation for commitment, fulfilment, confirmation, sense of meaning) are channelled back to the agent.
The aim of the project is to analyse the motivation of avatars and their agents (participants as well as entrepreneurs), assuming that both groups are seeking experiences of holiness, with an added motivation among entrepreneurs from positive evaluation by other avatars.
One part of the project focuses on avatars aiming at description, understanding, and analysis of differences and similarities between holiness experiences in virtual and physical worlds.
Another part of the project focuses on entrepreneurs in order to describe, understand, and analyse their motivation and inspiration. Of special interest is how entrepreneurs relate to, and evaluate, the experience of participants when developing these spaces and activities.
