Alter Ego Project Seeks Gamers

Writer Tracy Spaight and photographer Robbie Cooper will be interviewing and photographing MMO players for the Alter Ego Exhibition and book in the coming weeks. Alter Ego takes viewers on a journey into the frontiers of cyberspace to explore community, identity, love, and loss within virtual worlds. Alter Ego will:

• Document the growing culture of video games and online worlds in an intelligent, witty, and accessible way
• Explore how gamers use technology to create novel forms of community and identity in cyberspace
• Provide a visually arresting and entertaining journalistic record of life on the cyber frontier

Alter Ego juxtaposes photographs of real people with their avatars and documents life on the screen with player stories, interviews, and screen grabs. The exhibition opens in Amsterdam this November and will visit other cities across Europe, the U.S., and the Far East beginning next year. The book will be published sometime next summer. You can read about the original exhibit at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/3683260.stm.

Robbie and Tracy are looking for players who:

• Look like their avatars
• Play a different gender than their real world gender
• Met their significant other online
• Have a colorful, off-the-wall, or unusual story about their online experiences

The authors have not finalized their itinerary, but plan to begin their trip in South Carolina on September 10th and work their way up the East coast. From there they’ll travel to selected cities in the Mid-West before heading out to California. If you’d like to be a part of the project, please send an email to Tracy at [email protected]. Tell where you live, how to contact you, and why you would make a good interview subject for the book / exhibit.