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A Primer on Rights in Video Game Avatars
Video games have come a long way from the days of arcades, joysticks and blowing into cartridges to fix the game. It's an industry now worth more than $120 billion a year and greatly surpasses the movie and music industries among the most popular forms of public entertainment worldwide.
Today's video games are complex, interactive works of cinematographic art that, although guided by major studios, the players themselves get to direct. Jeff Goldblum, Mark Hamill, Kristen Bell, Martin Sheen, Norman Reedus and Kit Harrington are only some of the actors on a growing list of celebrities who have starring roles in video games, sometimes even playing characters who look like themselves.
In addition to the game characters that are created by the production studio, most games now also enable players to create their own character (also known as an avatar). With thousands of variations in skin color, body type, hair and facial features available for personalization, an avatar can mirror a gamer's own look or can be a product of their imagination. The processing power of these games has improved so that these characters look almost realistic, making it difficult to discern if a particular scene of a game is animated or filmed.
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