What Race is Your Avatar?

Do you play video games? If so, what color is your avatar? Does it look like you? Or someone or something else entirely? Do you make presumptions about the identities of other players? Do they make them about you? In short, how does identity and race play out in our virtual worlds? Jeff Yang, organized a panel on this topic last week at South By Southwest called “E-Race: Avatars, Anonymity and the Virtualization of Identity.” Jeff Yang also writes the Asian Pop column for the San Francisco Chronicle. Wagner James Au  was on the panel. In addition to writing about virtual worlds and games on his blog New World Notes, he’s also the author of “The Making of Second Life.”They talk about how we represent ourselves in a virtual world and how this is a safe place to expand our identities.