Experiments in Avatar Creation

I’ve never liked avatars of me, I’ve even struggled with self-portraits. Whatever I create is less than representative, unless I can do a 3D scan, and even then I wouldn’t be satisfied. My body and appearance are fluid and I hate to capture my identity in one static image. Kind of like the Platonic forms- We understand what a perfect circle would be, and can identify things we see as circles, but no circle exists that could perfectly encapsulate the purest form of “circle.” Any rendering of me, even a photo, just mimics the essence of me rather than representing me.

A photo depicts only what I looked like on June 8th of 2021 at 4:43 PM. When I choose that photo for my ID card, I commit to spending the rest of the year pretending to be a June version of myself when I show up to school. An avatar evokes that feeling of hollow mimicry even more than the ID photo because at least the woman on the ID card was me for a brief moment. The perfectly symmetrical cartoon “me” doesn’t have a scar on its right elbow from being a dumb 19-year-old, it’s not wearing my old boots that are covered in paint and falling apart, its pinky toe doesn’t curl under the other toes in a weird way. That cartoon never lost anyone it loved or pulled itself back up after being knocked down, it never had to come to accept and love itself. It hasn’t done any of the work I’ve had to do to earn calling myself “me.” I scroll through the different eyebrow options, I curse the lack of variety of elbow scars, select the shiny black boots with no history or miles on them. “Done!” I click, as if I’ve finally conquered the form of the vessel I will spend my entire life inhabiting.

I used Bitmoji and the Sims 4 to create online alter egos. I spent 12 minutes on the Bitmoji and almost 50 on the Sim. The two avatars look similar, and like they are depicting the same person but I don’t feel like either of them really look like me.

I even disliked having to find a photo of me to use as the middle comparison photo! “Does this picture look more like me than this other picture of me??”

Bitmoji had limited options- for example, there were three types of lips you could choose from (basically small, medium, and large.) The Sims had 30 different lips you could choose from and then you could tweak it by dragging your mouse on different areas (more defined cupids bow, how high or low the mouth is on the face, even how much each lip projected from the side view.) Considering Sims is a 3D game, you can adjust features from all angles. But I couldn’t make the front of the face compatible with the side, and every time I tried to change my nose from the side it suddenly looked like a completely different nose from the front. While Bitmoji’s options were finite, and Sims options let you tweak everything, there was still a limit to how exaggerated you could make a feature, noses especially. My nose is important to my ethnic identity and I feel like it can’t look like me without it. The hair was another issue for me- For both Bitmoji and Sims there were straight hairstyles, wavy hairstyles, and very textured hairstyles, but no in between for me. There’s been a push for more inclusivity in hair styles for avatars, but it seems like they’ve forgotten my Jewish curly hair type so I settled for loose waves instead for both avatars.

As for bodies, both let you choose breast size, and Sims really let you get in there and adjust the shape. Again, Bitmoji had 3 sizes. Sims lets you control (to some extent) muscle tone and weight using sliders, and let you control arm size, waist size, thigh size, butt size, foot size. Certainly more body diversity when it comes to Sims but based on how detailed the face options were, the body seemed like an afterthought. You couldn’t truly change the proportions of the body like leg length or neck length, and while you could technically make the Sim curvier, you could only make the hips wider or narrower and it looked pretty weird and unnaturally shaped if you tried to adjust it. What Bitmoji had over Sims was there are height options. All sims are the same height and as an almost six foot tall woman, that just doesn’t do it for me. Another positive of Bitmoji is there is more representation of disability (like hearing aids) but that is the extent of representation.

Here are videos of my avatar customization process for both apps: