Talk:Sam West
The author did an excellent job of getting his main points across. By focusing less on the personal avatar, and more on the fantasy avatar, his true feelings about the process took a greater emphasis. And his honesty was also clear, seeing that he was unsatisfied with the first result. This really hit on the idea that avatar creation cannot fully capture the human form. I thought it was interesting how he used the "parents" approach in building both of his avatars. This approach would seem to me more difficult than simply choosing characteristics of the self, because you end up trying to analyze more people. In that respect, I am applauding his dedication. The true greatness of his evaluation was in the fantasy, where he realized that there's so much more to the human body than just physical characteristics. Each one of us is different in our own unique ways. I liked how he didn't start his fantasy avatar with a goal in mind, and how he let the process itself dictate where he was headed. This demonstrated a lot of faith that "playing around" would eventually lead to a good goal. I also appreciated his "Thanks Tom Hanks" section. I found the humor to be great and having seen the movie, I can definitely see where he was coming from. The author did a great job of getting his points across, and how we tend to customize ourselves not so much by appearance but by what we like to do for fun.
-Anderson Phelps
I think the author was complete and honest in his reflection. I came across some of the same issues in the creation of my own avatar, including the selection of parents for the image. Other people, myself included, attempted to select parents that were similar to their own features, with the assumption that a blend of those features would create the proper traits in the final avatar character. I am impressed with the idea to select parent traits that mimic your real life parental traits. After all, it was their traits that made yours, not the other way around as I had been thinking about it. I also very much liked the part of the reflection when the author mentioned a disconnect from the final product that he created. This is similar to another student who's reflection I read, Michael Wasserman, who discussed the disconnect as well. He commented that the avatar is only an image and so much more of our characters and identity is defined beyond our pure looks, and instead through our actions. I like the way the author here relates that to the movie Big with Tom Hanks. In this movie, despite the main character being transformed into an adult body, he still had the identity of a child. His looks portrayed a set of assumptions out into the world, however his actions portrayed a completely different set of behavioral assumptions. This relates to the avatars in the sense that we cannot completely mimic our own identity without the complete picture, without the actions that the avatar is going to live out.
-Tommy Oneill
The first thing I noticed while reading Sam's personal reflection was that he had the intention of combining two characters in order to create a representation of himself opposed to just messing around with everything until it looked like him. When I created my avatar I just saw a premade avatar that looked like me so I settled for that opposed to having the intention of using two avatars. He talks about how some of his features were matched very successfully while other seemed impossible. He talks about how the more he tried to make the avatar look like him, the more he realized his uniqueness of his hair, clothing and how he held himself. In the end he was unsatisfied with how his avatar turned out. For his fantasy character, he goes into his thought process of what he thought he should do to create his fantasy character. He thought about creating an ideal self but found that he had more internal changes that he wanted opposed to external. He decided to just randomly create a character from scratch based on what he saw and then started to develop an avatar based on his expressiveness.
He brings up Tom Hanks in the last part of his reflection to tie the idea of him representing his expressiveness through his fantasy avatar. He talks about how his "real" avatar represented his outside self but it didn't capture his real personality. He anchors his feelings about his avatars with the movie Big. He relates the avatar process with the movie and I really enjoyed this section because it really brought out who he was and I felt a sense of "realness" as I read it.
-Kenny Yang
