Avatar Communities

Avatars—online representations of people—allow millions of Internet users to represent themselves to others, experience life in virtual communities, build their dream homes on digital landscapes, and engage in a novel form of human expression.

The term cyberspace was coined by the novelist William Gibson in his 1984 work Neuromancer, and virtual worlds were colorfully described in Vernor Vinge's True Names in 1981 and in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash in 1992. All three writers conceived of a computer network that would immerse its users in three-dimensional virtual worlds. Hollywood has given us a tantalizing view of human beings entering into digital landscapes in films such as Tron (Disney, 1982). In the 1970s at laboratories such as NASA Ames, MIT, and Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, researchers first created networked cyberspaces on computer workstations with graphical displays and chased each other about as cartoon eyeballs in the game Maze War.

Avatars shown talking in the voices of their users in Traveler, an early avatar community.

Bruce F. Damer; used with permission.

In 1985 at Lucasfilm, the inventor Chip Morningstar, working with his colleague Randall Farmer, created Habitat, a virtual town with two-dimensional cartoon representations of users, all connected by dialup connections and running on the popular Commodore 64 home computer. Chip needed a term to describe the digital personification of users in the Habitat worlds, and he chose the word avatar, for its meaning from Hindu theology (as defined in Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary): “the descent of a deity to earth, and his incarnation as a man or an animal.” Avatar has now entered the technical lexicon as “an icon or representation of a user in a shared virtual reality” (http://Jargon.net 2003).

Avatars can take many forms. They may be detailed human or animal figures, such as those that were found in one of the first Internet-based virtual spaces, Worlds Chat, in 1995. There are avatar communities that allow thousands of users to work together to build structures in three dimensions, as in AlphaWorld (1995) and Adobe Atmosphere (2002). In others, participants can transmit their actual voices and share music (Traveler, 1996), or they can engage in sword-and-sorcery quests, as in Meridian 59 (1996), Ultima Online (1999), and EverQuest (2000). There are even avatar communities in which participants can design and run the lives of whole fictitious communities, as in The Sims Online (2002). The U.S. military has been using avatars in training and recruitment environments since 1983 (with SIMNET) and continues to do so today (with America's Army, 2002).

Avatars should not be confused with bots or agents, which are software-driven entities that often mimic human behavior. An avatar is always representative of a living, breathing human being. Users often take great care in designing their digital personae and the virtual worlds they live in. They often accessorize their avatars with clothing, weapons, and supplies, and they accumulate skills or “health units.” Users almost never want their avatar to resemble their physical selves, preferring the liberation of expression and societal strictures [Page 79]that anonymity brings. Over time, users tend to treat their avatars less as string puppets and more as a direct digital costume they don when they log on.

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