In my thesis, I seek to answer the following questions: What opportunities do virtual worlds offer for experimenting with identity? What interrelationships exist between users and avatars? What motivations drive the creation of avatars? If you want to take part in a virtual world, after signing up you always need to create an avatar first. The term comes from avatara in Hinduism, which means descent, i.e. the incarnation of a deity as a mortal being. In the context of video games, the avatar is the graphical representation of the player within the world. Virtual worlds are defined as multiplayer, online games that are different from conventional games in the sense that there is no single goal to achieve within the game, there are no scores and statistics, but the focus is on socialising. Players create avatars in virtual worlds which identify them and which they can use to interact with other players, exploring an identity, gender, race or career different from their own through social interaction. The framework and operation of these interactions can be defined by the gameplay or by rules set by the users. In my research, I rely on the socio-psychological and cultural anthropological field studies on how the inner reality of three virtual worlds, Whyville.net, Second life and VRChat, works. I present the games in the chronological order of their release and their topicality: as we follow the development of the digital technologies driving the games, new levels appear in the field of my research. Avatars are increasingly customisable, in-game agency is increasingly sophisticated, and fewer and fewer elements of human communication are lost in the virtual environment.