One way of viewing much of the work around Avatars-in-Virtual-Worlds is in terms of the various motivations powering it. In this domain, we see the convergence of the very powerful human motivations towards community and towards simulating the objective world. In this paper, I am suggesting that the simulation motivation be applied to the development of Avatars as well as to the development of Virtual Worlds. In addition to those motivations, we may want to consider the motivation to show our home movies and the prospect that our emerging fourth generation of media promises that we can present ourselves more fully than before.
The wish to continue showing our home movies after we are dead introduces another powerful human motivation - the desire for immortality. This universal longing for Eternal Life has recently generated much interest in cryonics and in cloning.
One major theme of the 1990s has been the prospect of preserving ourselves by means of cryonics. Our bodies (or, for the economy option, our heads) would be frozen and thawed out when the cure for the disease threatening us was discovered. The Extropians, a California-based group, aspire to the economy option partly because they consider their brains as their important organ with the rest of the body merely an appendix for keeping it from dragging on the ground. Some have "cut here" tattooed on their necks. They talk of uploading their minds into computers and downloading them again after the crisis which threatened their bodies has passed. The mechanism of uploading and downloading is not specified.
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