ABSTRACT
The usual way of exploring a role-playing computer game is through an avatar, so that virtual person might as well be a cultural archetype, often representing a real person such as a social theorist or intellectual adventurer. The principles of such research impersonation are here illustrated through the case of sending an avatar based on a nineteenth-century clergyman and social scientist through The Secret World, an intellectually deep massively multiplayer online role-playing game with explicit theological roots. Central to its mythos is the quasi-Protestant tradition of horror literature associated directly or indirectly with New England by such authors as Nathaniel Hawthorne, H. P. Lovecraft, Edgar Allen Poe, and Stephen King. This case study has the radical result of identifying a powerful anti-religion, yet this chapter also suggests many ways impersonation is a useful technique for less radical research, and illustrates how avatars may connect to the researcher’s own life.
