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State of the ArtAvatars in the WorkplaceHow Businesses Are Adapting to the Virtual WorldWalk the halls of any largebusiness over the lastdecade or two and you willhave seen most of the workers “livingon the screen,” joining in the vast andintricate world of modern commercemade possible by the Internet. Lookover their shoulders and you will seethat some of these workers are notjust living on the screen but, in a sense,in the screen. They are immersed inelaborate virtual worlds as avatars, onscreenidentities that can be controlledto produce some sort of movement,gesture, and speech.The idea of the computer avatar—aSanskrit word for the incarnation of agod—was until recently best knownfor its appearances in science fiction(like Neal Stephenson’s 1992 cyberpunknovel Snow Crash). Eventuallyavatars made their way into the realworld (so to speak) in the form of charactersin primitive computer games.Great strides in graphics technologyin the last several years have allowedthe design of far more sophisticatedavatars in far more complex virtualenvironments. Outside the office,online role-playing games alreadycount tens of millions of “inhabitants”of persistent virtual worlds. Forexample, Linden Labs, the developer ofthe popular game Second Life, reportsover a billion user-hours spent so farin its system.For human participants in theseworlds, the boundaries between in -vented and real are permeable. Inmultiplayer adventure games suchas World of Warcraft, for instance,teams often share information bothwithin and without the virtual world.Wikis, other websites, and face-to-facemeetings blend together with avatarinteractions to form a continuum ofphysical, digital, and virtual communication.In Second Life and other onlinemultiplayer games, simulated commercialexchanges even spill over into theordinary digital marketplace, as userscan buy and sell virtual properties andaccoutrements for real money—withreal-world expenditures on virtualassets for these environments nowtotaling over a billion dollars.Although they still appear to a largedegree as animated cartoons, avatarsare sufficiently engaging for some ofthe social interactions upon whichorganizational life depends. Officeworkers who may be widely separatedin physical space can meet up in simulatedoffices, houses, islands, shops,and parks, typically in Second Life. Inthese virtual spaces, their avatars cansimulate visual and bodily interaction,seemingly allowing for a richer form ofcommunication than that provided bymore traditional digital means.Businesses—especially high-techcompanies—have been exploring waysto put these virtual spaces to use.Cisco, for example, has employees whouse Second Life both for internal communicationand for customer education126 ~ The New AtlantisCopyright 2010. All rights reserved. See www.TheNewAtlantis.com for more information.

A Survey of Technology and Societyand training. In recent years, the companyhas held its annual Cisco Livemeeting not only at physical conferencevenues, but with sessions broadcastor held simultaneously in SecondLife. Similarly, IBM recently assembled150,000 employees and stakeholdersin an electronic “town hall” meetingthat included an island in Second Life.These early corporate explorations ofvirtuality continue the abstraction ofwork that has already put so many ofus at the verge between two worlds:the solid and substantial realms ofproducts and offline services, and thedigital workspace, which places itsown demands on workers and impartsits own discipline on work.We know, of course, that technologynever grants its bounty freely. In orderfor businesses to exploit the powerof the groaning new machines of theIndustrial Revolution, workers had tobecome parts of a greater machineand bend their labor to its discipline.The creation of the factory requiredthe forging of the factory worker. Sowhat of us? How will the demands ofvirtuality reshape the workplace andchange the workers?Imagination has always allowed us tospeculate about what others are thinkingand feeling, and even to createentirely fictive lives; and we have longproved eager to recruit technology toits service. We have used art, music,books, movies, television, and now theInternet to thrust ourselves imaginativelyinto the places and lives ofothers. And the rise of social networkinghas only deepened our inventivecapabilities by allowing us to cast snippetsof our own lives—painful, sorrowful,lonely, exuberant, ordinary—into the tumult, inviting others intoour place as we are invited into theirs.Avatars seem to be the logical nextstep, taking the narrative imaginationof fiction, the aesthetic imagination ofcinema, and the self-styling power ofsocial networks, and combining theminto virtual worlds that seek to mimicreal-world interaction.As is so often the case with new digitaltechnologies, young people seem tobe at the fore of the move to virtuality.Companies seeking technically literateand creative workers will increasinglyencounter young minds that areaccustomed to virtual spaces—or, soonenough, minds that have always knownthem. By contrast, corporate managerstend to be more senior and lesstech-savvy; they may encounter newdifficulties in managing behavior thatemerges from the shifting demandsof the same virtual environments intowhich they are attempting to expand.Among the changes in work lifethat virtuality might bring about isthe furthering of a trend begun byhigh- technology companies, in whichemployees working long hours instressful environments are encouragedto intermingle work and leisure—bothby continuing their work outside theoffice and by engaging in so-called“serious play” within. Companies mightthen create virtual environments thatencompass not only analogues to conventionaloffice settings, but a host ofdiversions as well. Workers tasked withSpring 2010 ~ 127Copyright 2010. All rights reserved. See www.TheNewAtlantis.com for more information.

State of the Artconducting serious internal business orcustomer outreach in Second Life mayunwind by playing in cyberspace too.This blurring of the boundary betweenwork and leisure may be good for productivity—butit may also blur the psychologicalboundary between the two,creating challenges for companies whenthe stresses of professional life increasinglybleed into employees’ personallives, and the behavioral norms of personallife bleed into the professional.One potential problem caused bythese blurring boundaries involves theavatars’ looks and behavior. In virtualgames, the design of an avatar hasbecome a way to say something aboutoneself—often to attract attention andshow off. Given the freedom to invent,many users create avatars quite differentfrom themselves: short people havetall avatars; self-effacing people, flamboyantones. Some people change genders,or even species. An avatar gives itsowner a chance to appear different—toescape the social, psychological, andeven genetic constrictions of everydaylife. It is not surprising that despitethe range of “personal” characteristicsavailable, most of the avatars in SecondLife are slim and seemingly athletic.Surely that full range of selfexpressionwould be unwelcome in abusiness setting. Companies are likelyto have their own expectations for theappearance and behavior of employees’avatars: A firm might require that theylook like the models in its advertising,or perhaps like the kind of ideallydiverse workforce you might see in acompany pamphlet. While companieswill surely want to preserve somedegree of personal freedom for theiremployees—at any rate, the corporatetrend toward encouraging employeeself-expression and “serious play”points in that direction—practical andpublic matters of propriety, reputation,and image lean toward limitationson employees’ avatars. In 2007,IBM reportedly became the first majorcorporation to experiment with guidelinesfor the appearance of employees’avatars; it is not too difficult to imaginethe company someday reviving forcyberspace the kind of dress code itsemployees once followed in real life.Businesses have good reason to handlethese matters delicately, however.Employees might well resist restrictiveavatar appearance codes, whichafter all will touch on more than mereornamentation. Extensions of employmentlaw that prohibit discriminationbased on certain personal characteristicscould provide an argument againstlimits on avatar design. Can an overweightworker be required to lookthinner; an older worker, younger?And there is another thorny concern.Virtual interaction might provide newcreative outlets for workers who do notflourish in the corporate workplace forreasons relating to personality, socialskills, or even appearance. Avatarsmight help reveal such employees’ hiddentalents and strengths, but excessiverestrictions could prematurelyquash the possibility.These issues represent just apeek into the uncharted territory ofvirtuality that companies are begin-128 ~ The New AtlantisCopyright 2010. All rights reserved. See www.TheNewAtlantis.com for more information.

A Survey of Technology and Societyning to explore. Current managementpractice arose largely from settings inwhich workers dealt physically withone another and the tasks at hand.With the increasing abstraction ofwork—from physical to digital tovirtual—the world these practicesassume is in many respects fadingaway. Companies will have to learnhow to manage not just people, buttheir representations as well.Avatars may well enrich our opportunitiesfor play, escape, and fantasy. Andas they inevitably appear in the businessworld, they will alter the nature of workitself, moving it further into the realmof image and abstraction. Enthusiastsmay claim that avatars will restore therichness of human communication thathas recently been attenuated by ourlife on the screen. But we should guardagainst a celebratory, even utopian sentimentregarding these digital incarnations,for they alone cannot satisfy ourinnate need for truly human relations:interactions among virtual simulacrado not encompass the fullness of faceto-faceencounters. Among the manyimportant challenges confronting businessesand workers as they adapt to thevirtual workplace will be continuing tofoster fully human relations in a worldincreasingly dependent upon artificeand illusion.—G. Anthony Gorry is the FriedkinProfessor of Management and a professorof computer science at Rice University.Spring 2010 ~ 129Copyright 2010. All rights reserved. See www.TheNewAtlantis.com for more information.