Alter Ego: Portraits of Gamers Next to Their Avatars

The real humanity of virtual worlds, or what imaginary public personas reveal about private personhood.

In 2003, British photographer Robbie Cooper was shooting the divorced CEO of a company, who shared that he used virtual world games to play with his children, a meeting them every evening in Everquest, where they would play and chat about mundane things like school and their mother. It was a way for him to connect with his kids, to whom he had little access after the divorce. Cooper recalls:

His description of the banal but emotionally important exchange, taking place in the vivid fantasy of the game, got me thinking about the nature of the game itself; it’s a world of surface appearances and symbols. Within that, their interaction had been reduced to text; it was a technological extension of psychological models — the imaginary, and the symbolic structure of language.” ~ Robbie Cooper

(Cue in yesterday’s fascinating peek at iconic writers’ thoughts on symbolism.)

So Cooper spent the next three years traveling the world, from France and Germany to Korea and China, to photograph virtual world players, placing their portraits next to their avatars. The results — poignant, powerful, remarkably eye-opening — are gathered in Alter Ego, a fascinating and, at its core, profoundly human glimpse of our quest for selfhood, identity, and social belonging. Micro-essays by each gamer offer a layered look at how we assemble our personas in a way that transcends the physicality of our bodies, our genetics, and our circumstances.

Equal parts provocative and humbling, Alter Ego offers a timely meditation on the construction of our social and personal identities in an age when the line between the real and the virtual is, increasingly, not nearly as simple as the distinction between atoms and bits.

via Flavorwire

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The Science of Smiles

What Charles Darwin has to do with babies in the womb and a surprising secret to longevity.

In March, entrepreneur and health advocate Ron Gutman gave a fascinating TED talk, synthesizing a wealth of studies about smiling. Now, TEDBooks, one of 7 innovative platforms changing the future of publishing, is releasing Smile: The Astonishing Powers of a Simple Act — a fantastic short Kindle book, in which Gutman expands on his popular talk to examine the last 200 years of science on smiling, facial mimicry and mirror neurons, the tell-tell signs of fake smiles vs. authentic smiles (something that goes back to Darwin’s photographic studies), and even how smiling affects our longevity.

Lots of smiling can actually make you healthier. Smiling can help reduce the level of stress-enhancing hormones like cortisol, adrenaline and dopamine, increase the level of mood-enhancing hormones like endorphin and reduce overall blood pressure.” ~ Ron Gutman

For a deeper exploration of the science of smiles, don’t forget Marianne LaFrance’s Lip Service: Smiles in Life, Death, Trust, Lies, Work, Memory, Sex, and Politics.

In 2011, bringing you Brain Pickings took more than 5,000 hours. If you found any joy and stimulation here this year, please consider a modest donation.

Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter and people say it’s cool. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s best articles. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.

Kathryn Schulz on the Psychology of Regret and How to Live with It

Three keys to making peace with regret, or what maritime travel has to do with curbside meltdowns.

My friend Kathryn Schulz, who penned the excellent book Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error and who is, in my opinion, one of the finest, bravest, most thoughtful journalists working today, recently gave a TED talk about regret. As the new owner of ink that makes me very happy, what got me to pay even closer attention was Kathryn’s extended example of her own tattoo as a lens for examining the psychology of regret, a vehicle for her characteristically potent formula of universal wisdom channelled through personal anecdotes and hard data.

Make sure you watch to the very end, it’s well worth it.

If we have goals and dreams and we want to do our best, and if we love people and we don’t want to hurt them or lose them, we should feel pain when things go wrong. The point isn’t to live without any regrets, the point is to not hate ourselves for having them… We need to learn to love the flawed, imperfect things that we create, and to forgive ourselves for creating them. Regret doesn’t remind us that we did badly — it reminds us that we know we can do better.”

For a related TED treat on imperfection and vulnerability, don’t miss Brené Brown’s wonderful talk on wholeheartedness, then add some of these essential books on the psychology of happiness to your reading list.

In 2011, bringing you Brain Pickings took more than 5,000 hours. If you found any joy and stimulation here this year, please consider a modest donation.

Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter and people say it’s cool. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s best articles. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.