We introduce the concept of Avatar problems that deal with situations where each entity has multiple copies or "avatars" and the solutions are constrained to use exactly one of the avatars. The resulting set of problems show a surprising range of hardness characteristics and elicit a variety of algorithmic solutions. Many avatar problems are considered. In particular, we show how to extend the concept of-kernels to find approximation algorithms for geometric avatar problems. Results for metric space graph avatar problems are also presented.
