No. 1 (43) (2026)

The Sanskrit word avatar means “descent.” It refers to the incarnation of a deity—most often Vishnu—who takes on a bodily form and enters the material world to restore a disrupted cosmic order. In contemporary interactive and multimedia digital culture, the avatar functions as the user’s visual proxy, granting a sense of agency in virtual environments and enabling participation in diverse forms of mass communication, from social media to digital games. Avatars appear in many forms, ranging from schematic visual icons to three dimensional, interactive representations of the user’s body. They can alter a person’s actual features in various ways, whether through radical transformation, idealization, or hyperbolization. Yet the avatar’s role extends far beyond that of a visual calling card. Its cultural significance lies in the psychological effect produced when individuals identify themselves with their digital incarnation. It now functions as a core feature of digital game entertainment, a means of crafting one’s media persona, and a strategy for sustaining a distributed online identity. This last possibility opens the door both to abuse and criminal actions, such as identity theft, and to compensation, for example, for people with disabilities who can create their digital personas according to their own imaginations. The avatar body operating in the virtual world is simultaneously an embodiment of its user—shaped by the way they interact with technology—and an innovative medium of engagement, enabling the transformation of their presence in the storyworld into embodied action. The player’s avatar is always an identity negotiated between the individual and the technological environment that makes its generation possible.

The use of the word avatar to describe the player carried both rhetorical force and a concealed commercial purpose. This functionality was first introduced in Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar (Origin Systems, 1985). The metaphorical framing of the player as an incarnation of a Hindu deity functioned as a marketing strategy and stands as an instructive example within the cultural history of technology, illustrating both cultural borrowing and the mechanisms of cultural appropriation. This conceptualization of the digital persona activated the player’s sense of embodiment and agency (distinct from the notions of “character” or “icon”) by granting them a divine status within the storyworld, where they could act intentionally and independently. They assumed the qualities of both director and actor, and, in relation to the literary world, of both narrator and character. In virtual reality, the avatar made the user an active agent, heightening their sense of inhabiting a fictional world and offering a new form of identification with fictional entities, different in intensity and dynamics from identification with, for example, a literary character. The ability to multiply one’s incarnations across various media and continually modify them expands the range of experiences available to the digital user on a scale even greater than that suggested by Umberto Eco’s famous phrase, “he who reads books lives twice.”

Many activities and cultural practices that rely on gamification mechanisms (such as video games, social media, and digital marketing) provide users with avatars that function not only as virtual representations but also as extensions of their physical selves. As Rune Klevjer has noted, the fictional space time mediated by the avatar becomes “our tangible world, our habitat.”¹ The avatar enables the user to fulfill the dream of entering a fictional reality not only as “themselves,” but also, in part, as “themselves embodied in another body,” adapted to radically alien conditions.

For contemporary gamers and social media users, the value of the avatar lies in its role as a vehicle for co presence within global virtual communities, enabling rich and multifaceted forms of interaction. Creating and using avatars thus opens up a new dimension of social relations. Avatar use has therefore become a significant phenomenon within internet psychology and within contemporary technologically mediated interpersonal contact.

Within the poetics of cultural texts, the use of avatars can be examined through reflections on the construction of subjectivity, the dynamics of cultural communication, audience engagement mechanisms, and transmedia narrative. It is also important to trace the transcultural history of this form of representation. These and related themes are explored in the articles collected in this issue of Forum of Poetics, whose authors draw on literary works—both print literature and experimental multimedia forms—as well as film, theater, digital games, and the history of intercultural contacts.

Bartosz Lutostański and Magdalena Rembowska-Płuciennik address narratological issues in new contexts shaped by the expanding presence of digital entities. Rembowska-Płuciennik identifies functional parallels between the addressee of second-person narratives in print culture and the avatar in interactive digital genres. In both cases, a sense of co-presence is produced, enabling engagement with other entities. Lutostański, meanwhile, examines stories generated by artificial intelligence; his analyses suggest that the tools traditionally used to study fictional discourse are no longer adequate. Consequently, he argues for the development of a new hermeneutics capable of describing “simulated” fiction. Boris Lanin and Aleksandra Zywert shift their investigations to the dystopian literary worlds created by contemporary Russian writers. Lanin examines the interplay of technology, memory, and identity, drawing on the novels of Vladimir Sorokin. Zywert, in turn, interrogates the possibilities of individual self determination and self definition in an era of pervasive technologization and the networking of interpersonal relations; she analyzes the prose of Viktor Pelevin and Anna Starobinets. Izabella Adamczewska Baranowska opens an entirely different space for exploration, bringing digital gonzo to Forum of Poetics. She discusses the dromoscopic performances of Ross Goodwin and Simon Morris, while simultaneously questioning the status of works produced by “protein”–technical assemblages. Dorota Korwin Piotrowska is also interested in the relationship between literature and digital media. She analyzes the paragraph game Bałwochwał [Idolater], created by Mariusz Pisarski and Marcin Bylak on the basis of Bruno Schulz’s prose. Her study focuses on the player’s identity as it oscillates between immersion and emersion, as well as on the game’s rhetorical strategy itself (she introduces a new term, rhetoree, to reflect that). Elżbieta Niewiadoma is, likewise, interested in digital games and audience engagement strategies. She offers a comprehensive discussion of interactive metalepsis and the role of avatars, which enable a subtle, immersive crossing of boundaries between worlds. Michał Mydla also writes about avatars, agency, and video games; he, however, highlights the role of antiheroes and a phenomenon he terms the self deprivation of agency. A crucial element of his analysis is the study of language used in games (Mydla underscores the particular importance of film). Avatars have also invaded film and theater. Rafał Szczerbakiewicz analyzes the relationship between humans and increasingly autonomous devices “powered” by artificial intelligence. Drawing on both literature (Isaac Asimov, Frank Herbert) and classic movies (Stanley Kubrick), he examines Western cultural anxieties from multiple perspectives. Maria Sławińska also turns to the classics, this time in the theatrical field. She revisits Edward Gordon Craig’s theory of the Über-Marionette and explores the parallels between this utopian concept and the contemporary use of avatar forms on stage. Finally, we also take you on a journey to the East and offer an analysis of Wu Cheng’en’s Chinese novel Journey to the West. Gao Min employs the broad concept of the avatar (please note the earlier religious and spiritual implications of the term) to capture the spirit of Chinese culture depicted in the 16th century work. It turns out that this seemingly ultramodern concept (and tool) can also be applied here.

So, avatars are on the offensive. And in (inter)action!

1 Rune Klevjer, What Is the Avatar? Fiction and Embodiment in Avatar-Based Singleplayer Computer Games. Revised and Commented Edition (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2022): 94.