'These our actors': the representation of players in the legal game

Recent trends in litigation, corporate structuring and technological innovation have highlighted core dynamics concerning identities generally, and legal personhood in particular. This paper seeks to explore and question the concept of the legal person, itself, as an actor, and its construction through quasi-juridical systems of power. We argue that there is an ontological separation between living men and women and their legal representations, and propose a conceptual schema based in part on the games studies literature, wherein actorial identities known as 'Avatars' are created by performative declarations (Searle, 2006), and act within a bounded Framework. This schema is employed to distinguish corporations from individuals, to model the use of legal ‘Avatars’ by Apple Inc. and show unique properties of Bitcoin technology as well as the novelty of decentralized autonomous organizations such as zeromember LLCs (Bayern, 2014).