Nicholas David Bowman, Jaime Banks, Edward Downs 12 My pixels or my friends? Game characters as a lens for understanding user avatars in social networks Abstract: In various interactive digital media, users create representations for themselves – be they images, texts, or interactive characters – that are used mark the user’s identity, function, role, or position in the social landscape. These representations, or avatars, can exist separate from the user who created them. As such, they can be crafted, performed, experimented with, and reflected upon. In this separation, users may experience their own avatars, engaging them more or less as ‘me’ or ‘not-me’ as a function of user and avatar agencies. To better understand these dynamics, in this chapter we draw from current perspectives on a particular type of user-avatar pair – video game players and their graphic in-game characters – to theoretically and empirically contextualize the range of relationships users may have with their digital representations in a variety of social networking platforms, and how those relationships may differently influence social interactions online. Tracing the trajectory of the earliest audience-character scholarship from 1920s scholarship (the parasocial perspective) to emerging findings that gamers sometimes engage their avatars as autonomous social agents, we argue for a relational continuum that demonstrates the full range of non-social, parasocial and fully social relationships that communication technology users can have with their digital avatars. 12.1 Introduction Snot: “Steve, you are the king of Dragonscuffle” Steve: “Peasant! I am not Steve.” Snot: “Forgive me, oh, great and powerful Agathor!” Steve: “As punishment for your insolence, you must now carry my Backpack of Holding” [later] Jeff: “Don’t you feel like you’re kind of missing out on your actual life?” Steve: “See, the problem is that in the “real world,” things often suck. But when I’m Agathor … there is no pain, no wedges, no heartache, only … victory. In the above dialogue – from the US animated comedy “American Dad” – best friends Steve and Snot debate the influence of Steve’s video game supremacy (as the user behind Agathor, the most powerful warrior in the fictitious Kingdom of Krathnor) on his relative supremacy in their hometown of Langley Falls, Virginia. When questioned © 2016 Nicholas David Bowman, Jaime Banks, Edward Downs This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License.