Paper short abstract:

In this paper I explore how inhabitants of the online world MovieStarPlanet deal with the always imminent threat of being "hacked" by strangers and friends. I argue that avatars are key sites of playful posthuman self-formation, yet always volatile and potentially subject to social exclusion.

Paper long abstract:

Children in Norway increasingly inhabit online worlds, where they craft avatars and hang out and play games with friends. In this paper I draw on ethnographic fieldwork among 8- and 9-year-olds to explore the fragility of avatars in an online world called MovieStarPlanet. I show how avatars constitute key sites of playful self-formation, and how the simultaneity of present and future selves contributes to the close bonds users develop towards their avatars. The children's attachment to their avatars is often accompanied, however, by the always imminent threat of being "hacked", or having one's user account taken over by others. Users of MovieStarPlanet can never be certain who is in control of other avatars, and trust therefore has to be continuously negotiated among friends as well as strangers. I show how certain in-world mechanisms, such as the opportunity to "block" and "report" users who do not conform to the rules, indicate an egalitarian value system based on the ideal that all users should have equal opportunities to participate. These values are often undermined in practice, however, as children use "block" and "report" buttons in subversive ways to exclude others, regardless of whether they have in fact broken any rules. Although the emergence of online worlds appears in some ways to fulfil the promise of an egalitarian utopia, I argue that online sociality also entails the creation of new forms of social exclusion.