The Role of Avatars in Gaming

An avatar is a representation controlled by representing a person. Usually we refer to them in the literature mostly as agents, but not NPCs, non-playable characters. There's a lot of theorizing that came out of social psychology in terms of when we were trying to understand how people interpret television. Albert Bandura started doing this research where he'd show kids clips of videos and then he'd see what the kids imitated based on what they saw on television.