The first chapter talks a lot about avatars and how the ability to customize these characters can really emotionally invest us in the game. A great example I have found of this is the character editor in Fallout 4. I spent over 3 hours detailing my character and my character’s husband in the game. I was referencing pictures of myself and my boyfriend at the time trying to make the in-game avatars look as close to me and him as possible. I knew nothing about the story so I didn’t know [spoiler alert] that my husband is killed within the first 10 minutes of the game! I spent 3 hours of my life making him my dream man and he was taken away from me in minutes. I cried. I actually cried.
Aside from this I can’t really say I was ever that attached to my avatar, although I do always try to make them resemble myself in a way that still looks good. What I mean by this is that when I make my Mii avatar for example, I always think the version they come up with based on my photo is hideous. There are some feature options for Miis that make me think “why would anyone ever choose that nose?” So what I do is I make the character look the prettiest (in my opinion) and make the things like the hair and clothes resemble me. I’m always quite disappointed when avatars don’t have long hair options because that is one of my favorite things about my outward appearance and I rarely get to express it with game avatars.