Avatar-the-word
I turned to F. Randall Farmer, a creator of the online multiplayer game Lucasfilm’s Habitat, for the origins of the term’s current incarnation. He and Chip Morningstar invented the game in 1986, when they also coined avatar in the “online persona” sense (though gamers had already been exposed to the word’s Sanskrit meaning with the 1985 computer role-playing game, Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar.) “Chip came up with the word ‘avatar,’ ” he recounts, “because back then, pre-Internet, you had to call a number with your telephone and then set it back into the cradle. You were reaching out into this game quite literally through a silver strand. The avatar was the incarnation of a deity, the player, in the online world. We liked the idea of the puppet master controlling his puppet, but instead of using strings, he was using a telephone line.”
Very nice, but — “toon” does not come from Toontown, Randy! I first heard it in connection with Sierra’s The Realm; I remember being slightly confused when some Realm players logged into UO and started talking about how small their toons were.
Most mudders, of course, referred to this as a “character,” taken from D&D, and that carried through into UO, since we were mostly mudder types. But to my mind, both the avatar and the character are the same sort of thing — a graphical version of what we tend to call a profile in a broader web sense. Be it icon, textual description, or a/s/l, it’s just identifying information.
It may be that Second Life is indeed why “avatar” is so widespread today, though I would be just as likely to give the credit to Snow Crash — a major inspiration to many of the virtual worlds of the 90s. There were bokos and conferences called “avatar” during this time period. Snow Crash frequently got mistaken credit for the coinage.
Another minor sidelight: a few years ago, the Oxford English Dictionary was running a project on finding the earliest citations of science-fictional words, and I did manage to get Chip & Randy proper credit. 🙂
17 Responses to “Avatar-the-word”
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I use avatar, personally, but my friends constantly refer to their avatars (!) as “toons”. I have an intense dislike of the word “toon”. It sounds rather dimunitive, especially when you hear people using it to describe their 300lb, heavily armored tank with the 6 foot battle-axe.
I have shown Second Life to many non-gamer types in the past couple years. While I would use the word Avatar without giving it much thought, I noticed that some people reacted to the word with something approaching hostility. Like the nerdy guy who can’t help but refer to vinegar as acetic acid, to the non-nerdy listener the signifier outweighs the signified. Instead, because it is hard enough for some people to wrap their minds around the idea of a virtual world to begin with, I call my avatar ‘me’.
I too have seen the sad rise of the term “toon” of late. Please, continue to use and popularise “avatar”, and save the genre’s respectability! 😉
Toon seems to be gaining in prevalence thanks to WoW — where, since the characters are decidedly cartoony, you sort of have pressure towards it. I am not sure what drove the initial terminology there though.
Remember, it’s in the Laws, courtesy of the late Jeff Freeman: “Fighting the battle for nomenclature with your players is a futile act. Whatever they want to call things is what they will be called.”
I think it’s exactly the inherent mismatch of the word “toon” that makes it preferable to some. Not to mention it’s fewer letters and syllables. I agree, though, the diminishing nature of it is… grating, at times.
To me, I use character and avatar, but to refer to two different things. Character, to me, is the RP side of it, since I am an RPer at heart and usually flesh out that side of all the characters I make, even if I don’t ever plan to actually RP with them (doing so in an MMO has always felt vaguely silly to me). Avatar then refers to the embodiment of the character, the little bit of graphical hit-detection I’m driving around, referring I guess to the next (or simply another) layer of abstraction.
Anyone else make distinctions like that?
@Brookston,
I never use “me”, because I never make me. Maybe if I ever specifically made an avatar to represent myself, I would.
I would agree with the distinction, except that I play text RPs, and well… there is no bit of graphical hit-detection being driven around. 😀
I’ve never used anything except character. All these whippersnappers with their fancy puppets and car-less drawings are nuts.
I have never liked the word “toon”. I immediately deduct about 20 IQ point from anyone who uses it.
Hey, Raph! Quit spoiling Toontown’s bogus moment in the sun! Even though it is inaccurate and undeserved, I’m still hoping that the goofy word “toon” rises into dominance over the nerdy word “avatar” and that Toontown gets false credit for its origin. I just want historical inaccuracies to be on my side, for once! 🙂
I still prefer to use “character” for a character and “avatar” for the graphical representation of a character. We’re slowly seeing a change, though, to have “avatar” mean character and “toon” mean graphical representation of a character. This may be resisted by MMOs that regard cartoon-like graphics as being a bad thing, though – if you call someone’s character a toon in LotRO, you’re basically insulting it (at least you were on the server I played on).
I believe (but may be mistaken) that “toon” gained its present currency through Toontown, but of course Toontown itself got the term from Who Framed Roger Rabbit (or, strictly speaking, the novel Who Censored Roger Rabbit). The movie may have led to the term’s use in The Realm, and doubtless contributed to its general ability to escape beyond the confines of Toontown.
Richard
I don’t like “toon”, and I just can’t get used to it. I always talk about my “character”, or just “char” when I’m lazy (although that has led to some confusion at times).
And the graphical representation – well I call it “Spielfigur” or just “Figur”… you know, like the little figures you move around while playing a board game.
Richard Bartle:
Then what word do you use to refer to both character and avatar? Charatar?
I can see how distinguishing between the thing and what the thing looks like can be useful, but in most cases, I think a holistic reference might be even more useful.
I was against the term “avatar” when working on standards because I felt it demeaned the Hindu religion, but was argued out of that by a Hindu who said they really didn’t care. An n of 1 isn’t much to go on, but it was enough for me.
If history is a guide to argot, frequency displaces amplitude, so if toon becomes more popular, ‘avatar’ will become ‘soooo last week’ and maybe another term will displace both. With the social network 3D becoming mainstream and possibly replacing games as the first exposure of newbs to 3D, I wonder if other game genre terms and techniques are about to be upended as the digital print world that spawned in typography and technical writing upended those cultures. It is not uncommon for the first phase to be a ‘dumbing down’ or ‘primitive is better’ phase as the defenders of the new faith become legion.
I first heard ‘toon’ in Who Framed Roger Rabbit. I’m curious how it came to be popular from a linguistic perspective.
@Morgan Ramsey,
I know that for me, it’s akin to distinguishing between “me” and “my body”. I hadn’t given it much thought, but perhaps there’s nesting in these terms.
Or, maybe it’s layers of separation, making a continuum like this:
Me———>Persona———>Character———>Avatar———>Toon
…where choice of terminology is defined by level of connection, greatest to least.
I still say “character.” In fact, I had a little chuckle the other day, when I noticed that I still use that term even in my bug reports.
They say that if Shakespeare was alive today he would hardly understand a word we are saying, especially when you are talking about technical terms like avatars and the like. The language is constantly changing and the techie lexicon is out of control.
Prescott Hardcastle:
Avatar is not a technical term. We only define avatar that way. Shakespeare would likely relate avatars to the avatars of India. The avatars of India descended from another realm. They weren’t the embodiment of some ideal.
I’ve actually been working on a paper that discusses self-identity in the context of virtual worlds. Peter’s continuum above was inspiring. I’m seeing virtual identity more along these lines: self -> personality -> character -> avatar -> self.
The idea is that the avatar descends from the self while taking on the attributes of the personality and the characteristics we intentionally project. As we develop, so does our avatar. As our avatar develops, so do we.
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