Digital communication in a virtual world is a peculiar business. It hovers somewhere between the prosaic reality of a telephone call and the open-ended fantasy of a role playing game. You'll know what I mean if you've ever discussed server lag with an elderly octopus wearing fish-net tights. On the one hand, you’re talking to a real person at a keyboard, but on the other you're playing a masking game, in which your brain uses a digital puppet to talk to someone else's digital puppet.

The funny thing is that this is actually much more like the real world than you might expect: in the real world, communication is also a masking game in which your brain uses a meat puppet to talk to someone else's meat puppet. How, you cry indignantly, can anyone be so dismissive of the body? And what could be the benefit of removing all that useful body language and physical feedback from communication? Why not ask an expert? Here's four things my avatar taught me.

Sometimes less allows far more

If you've ever conducted a torrid, long-distance love affair which involved lots of interminable, passionate, painful phone calls ("Hello?..What's the matter..Oh, I know. Very much..Of course I do!…”) you'll know that sometimes being forced to focus on someone's voice alone means that it can ratchet up your sensitivity to the one channel of communication you still have. Which means you can listen to someone's breathing and know in a heartbeat how distressed or elated they are – information you would miss if they could razzle-dazzle you with brisk body language, slammed doors or the haunting scent of a favourite perfume. ABC benefits from this narrowed focus, yet at the same does allow for quite a lot of useful visual messaging. My avatar can wear a distracting hat if he wants. There is some scope for sending visual clues in how you dress, move and present your virtual self, and they're surprisingly revealing of taste and identity. Every choice we make reveals something of the person behind the puppet. My avatar is pretty clear on this: he's living proof that sometimes fewer channels of communication enable really quite efficient human interaction.

You had to be there

Most avatar chat is still text-based, and of course the language of text has its own rhythms, sly humour, and elegance. There's a brisk wit and immediacy in chat that hovers somewhere between stand-up comedy and passing notes in class. When someone finds exactly the right phrase and hits you with a comedian's timing, it can give the warm aesthetic pleasure you get from a brilliantly delivered line in a play or a clever crossword answer. Transcripts of chat sessions can't capture this wit well because text is a dance - it's all about timing, the slyyyy pause, the rush'd reply, the threaded exchanges in which you both ask questions and answer them at the same time, essentially folding time and then unfolding it without missing a beat or dropping a thread. But to get it, you had to be there – in that chat, at that time. I think this makes my avatar a little smug at times: he knows that no other medium can let him do what he does.

Pixel puppets feel real enough

There's now a wealth of research into how people use avatars in virtual spaces, and the jury is in. If people are given the tools to make a lot of choices about how use their avatars, they tend to make similar choices to the ones they would make with their real-life avatars – that is, their bodies. So people tend to keep the same sort of relative distance from the people they speak to in virtual space as they would in real space. Which means virtual cocktail parties feel very real. Gender operates very powerfully in virtual space: people are so used to treating people based on their gender that they tend to instantly decide whether you're a male octopus or a female octopus and then treat you accordingly. Avatars that are hard to gender identify tend to make people uncomfortable. We all have a lot of hard and soft wired behaviours to "human type things." When your avatar meets a virtual being that it identifies as a "human type thing" you tend to act as if it were human – assess it as a threat, analyse its gender, and so on. It's why we duck when the train comes towards us in the movie, if it's sorta real, we go with it. We also tend to merge with our tools. You don't park your car, you just park. You don't move your avatar, you just move. My avatar has no existential crisis. He just is.

Place is a state of mind

Yesterday evening I went to an interesting panel discussion held at a creative design agency's offices in a virtual world. There was a panel of four avatars and an audience of about twenty avatars. I sat in the front row, I asked questions. After the panel the panellists hung around for a while. It was a very interesting discussion about how using voice chat affects being in a virtual world, and so the panellists actually spoke on an in-world audio channel whilst also chatting via general text. The discussion lasted an hour. At the end of the discussion, I took of my headset, turned off my PC and stood up. And I'd been somewhere. I had a sense of a return to the real world from another place, as you do when emerging blinking into the light from a cinema. The sensation was no different in kind from emerging from the world of a favourite book - except that I'd shared this living book with about 25 other people. The place we were in wasn't real, of course. It was cyberspace, in author William Gibson's mellifluous formulation, a "consensual hallucination." In other words, it was a useful shared fiction. Gibson goes on in that quote to describe it as being "experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation." Well, we're not quite there yet – perhaps a few hundred thousand operators, some of whom I'm quite sure are not legitimate at all. My avatar knows that place is a state of mind: after all, that's where he lives, soon to be joined by a new generation for whom living a shared, fictional, digital life is as easy as well, ABC.

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