Do You Wanna Date My Avatar
  

a spinoff / sideshow of The Guild series

Director: Jed Whedon
Writer & producer: Felicia Day
Music: Jed Whedon
Lyrics: Felicia Day
Cast:

• Felicia Day — Codex; lead vocals
    
• Vincent Caso — Bladezz
• Jeff Lewis — Vork
• Amy Okuda — Tinkerballa
• Sandeep Parikh — Zaboo
• Robin Thorsen — Clara

The Guild: 2009

Do You Wanna Date My Avatar is labeled by its creators "The Guild Music Video" because it is the first video-spinoff or soundie-sideshow from that independent Web series, The Guild. This song-and-dance video was an absolute runaway hit via iTunes and YouTube from its first day out. The Guild is an indie Internet success story, a harbinger of fresh trajectories. Their second-order experiment of Do You Wanna Date My Avatar opens another virtual window into their creative space.
  

The singing and dancing are both well done, Felicia Day very nicely presenting the lead vocals, virtual virtuosity personified. Jeff Lewis and Sandeep Parikh declaim their avatars' talents while Vincent Caso and Robin Thorsen embody sybaritic virtual pleasures. Felicia Day is also the evocative lead dancer, supported principally by the flowing Amy Okuda and bouncing Sandeep Parikh; but all the avatars dance after a fashion, and the combined effect is very entertaining.

The music is a catchy and fun single song, with some interjections. The lyrics are brilliant. The chorus gives us the theme but the rich allusiveness is in the verses. Here's the chorus:

Do you wanna date my Avatar
She’s a star
And she’s hotter than reality by far
Wanna date my Avatar?
  

If you don't pick up all the textual subtlety by listening, you can read the lyrics at Watch The Guild's page for Do You Wanna Date My Avatar. The film wants re-listening, as well as re-watching.
  

You needn't have seen any episodes of The Guild or be a role-playing gamer to enjoy Do You Wanna Date My Avatar, although it helps if you have a general idea of games in cyberspace and characters living in a shared and computer-managed, postulated spacetime. Virtual reality in many forms has a long and still-developing history in science fiction, with Vernor Vinge's "True Names" (1981) foreseeing how the evolving role-playing games could overlap with mundane life.

An MMO is a massively multiplayer online game, like The Guild's stomping-ground and battlefield. The online game in which The Guild avatars fight and flirt is deliberately not congruent to any specific role-playing game like World of Warcraft. It is intended to reference generally the online gaming experience.

The soundie's background mostly is a blank: we may think of it as an open computer screen upon which we see the costumed avatars cavort. The exception for a while is Felicia Day — as her avatar Codex, of course — sprawled upon a bed of treasure, shiny coinage of virtual realms.
  

The computer keyboard has become the toolbox of the demiurge. As Codex seductively sings, in cyberspace "You can type commands". Go ahead:
  

Felicia Day is a standout creator and performer. The Guild altogether is a clever conglomerate of talents, virtual and real.

© 2010 Robert Wilfred Franson