Do you know how to decode the following acronym-laden sentence? WoW is a MMORPG. If you said “I do,” then by the psychic power vested in me by the state of overconfidence, I now pronounce you young. I say that because the sentence translates to World of Warcraft is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game. In WoW, each player controls an avatar who roams the realm fighting monsters, encountering built-in characters, completing quests, and interacting with the avatars of other players. My personal interest in the game is only this: you can operate your avatar in first-person or third-person view. You can look through its eyes or see it as others do. The split self, “I” versus “me,” is so firmly ingrained in each of us that game designers, to stay competitive, must build in both views.
The me that I know and love is a virtual self, an evolutionarily expedient feature of my brain-created reality. In short, I am my genes’ avatar in the multiplayer role-playing game called life. I’m the brain processes by which a virtual agent, moi, is dispatched to monitor, interact with, and master its environment. And reproduce.