Gameology: Commentary and Resources for the Game Studies Community

I totally agree with you, Toby, in your skepticism about whether people would find single avatars appealing, given multiple avatars' abilities to let us act out different parts of ourselves. (Of course, universal avatars wouldn't prevent folks from creating more than one.) As a gamer, I find the idea of universal MMOG avatars pretty much impossible, though kind of hilarious: the idea of my WoW night elf hunter bumbling around in Tabula Rasa or The Agency cracks me up.

This reminds me of discussions about universal profiles in social networking sites - the idea that a person could create just one profile for themselves and port it between Myspace, Facebook, etc. (There's a group that's behind this, but I can't remember their name.)