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Avatar

Jesper Juul and Rune Klevjer: "Avatar". In Klaus Bruhn Jensen and Robert T. Craig (eds.): The International Encyclopedia of Communication Theory and Philosophy. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons 2016.
https://www.jesperjuul.net/text/avatar/

A short history of avatars

The Sanskrit word avatar refers to the manifestation of a divinity. In Hinduism, Vishnu has manifested on Earth through multiple avatars, but several other gods have also appeared as avatars. Game designer Chip Morningstar is usually credited as being the first to use the word to describe a user-controlled character. The idea of avatars gained cultural prominence during the 1990s preoccupation with virtual reality (VR) and cyberspace, but had been prefigured in earlier popular culture. The idea of entering a computer-controlled space with a virtual body was first popularized in the 1982 movie Tron, and subsequently in William Gibson’s 1984 novel Neuromancer.

In the 1990s, the figure of the avatar was associated with an erroneous understanding of computers and the Internet as consisting of three-dimensional worlds and avatars. One example is the 1994 Barry Levinson movie Disclosure, in which the protagonist accesses an important company database through an avatar-based virtual reality interface. The avatar was therefore initially tied to the conception that future computer interfaces would be constructed in three dimensions and accessed using virtual reality displays. In practice, avatars have since been used almost exclusively for video game and virtual community purposes, rather than in more utilitarian contexts.

In games, we can distinguish between different aspects of avatars, each of which appeared at a particular historical moment:

  1. Allowing a user to exert direct control over a visualized spatial game world was first demonstrated in the 1958 Tennis for Two, where the player-controlled paddle is the mediator of the player’s agency.
  2. In the 1962 Spacewar!, the controllable spaceship represents the player in the game world; what happens to the ship is taken as happening to the player (“I was hit,” “You missed me”), and the core goal of survival is implemented as the survival of the player’s ship.
  3. The ability for a user to control a nonmechanical character in a graphical world first appeared during the 1970s, but it was popularized in games like Pac-Man (1980).
  4. Next, users could role-play an avatar, so that the avatar has a customizable personality that is distinct from that of the player, yet is controlled by the player. Jon Peterson argues that the character sheet for describing the skills and personality of the player-controlled character was developed in the Blackmoor, a precursor to the Dungeons & Dragons game around 1972 (Peterson, 2012).
  5. With the emergence of 3D games like Doom (1993), Tomb Raider (1996), and Everquest (1999), avatars also took on the role of vehicles of perceptual immersion and embodied presence within real-time 3D environments, bringing them closer to the popular image of Tron and Neuromancer. The navigable virtual camera became integral to avatar control, especially in first-person shooters (Rehak, 2003). In 1998, the introduction of Playstation’s Dualshock twin-stick controller established a new interface standard for consoles, designed to suit the particular demands of avatarbased 3D games.

Key debates

The history of the concept of the avatar, as well as dominant current uses, reveals a dual emphasis of meaning. When conceptualized as a vehicle of direct control and perceptual immersion, this idea is independent from the notion of playable character, which implies some kind of humanoid figure or personality. Playable characters in, for example, Habitat (1986) or Maniac Mansion (1987) are avatars even if not directly controlled in any way. Vice versa, we could say that the controllable marble in Marble Madness (1984) is indeed an avatar according to its function, even if lacking the character aspect. However, in common use, the notion of “avatar” implies some kind of personality, either as a simple figure (like Pac-Man) or as a full-fledged role-playing character.

Related to this double aspect of the avatar, a key issue in academic research has been the relative significance of the avatar’s appearance versus its capability through players’ engagement with avatars (Tronstad, 2008), particularly the question of whether singleplayer game avatars like Mario or Lara Croft should be conceptualized as vehicles of agency rather than objects of representation—as tools rather than as characters in the traditional sense. Against this view some theorists argued that the dual nature of avatars, as sets of capabilities and visual representations combined, is essential to their distinctive appeal.

In research on virtual communities and online role-playing, the main emphasis is on the avatar considered as persona, a vehicle of self-representation rather than a vehicle of perceptual or narrative immersion. In sociology and cultural theory, there is a central concern with how players express and negotiate identity through their avatars, especially as this relates to gender and ethics. The status of avatars is also key in broader discussions on the legal and economic status of actions and achievements in virtual communities.

The phenomenology of avatar-based 3D

Phenomenological and cognitive theories have been dominant approaches to player agency in video games, with a central focus on the conditions for immersive interaction through directly controlled avatars. Andreas Gregersen (2008) offers comprehensive accounts of ways in which the player relationship is rooted in the core cognitive functions of the embodied mind.

Analyzed in the context of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception (1962/2002), directly controlled avatars like Pac-Man or Mario have a very distinct way of creating and representing the phenomenology of the body (Klevjer, 2012). Through practice and habituation, the player begins to incorporate the controller-and-avatar interface as second nature, like a prosthetic extension of his or her own body. Our body is not an object in the world, Merleau-Ponty states, insofar as “it is that by which there are objects. It is neither tangible nor visible in so far as it is that which sees and touches” (1962/2002, p. 105). Hence, like a prosthetic limb or a blind man’s stick, avatar-based play extends our acting and perceiving body into game space, allowing us to, in David Sudnow’s formulation in his phenomenological analysis of the video game Breakout, “traverse the wired gap with motions that make us none the less feel in a balanced extending touch with things” (1983, p. 37).

Unlike other prosthetic extensions (such as a mouse cursor), an avatar represents the player in an ontological sense; via avatars, players can indirectly belong to a remote digital environment, and be exposed to its dangers. In navigable 3D environments, the virtual camera itself is also controlled by the player, either directly or indirectly via the avatar. Therefore, the player is no longer looking at the screen or even through it, but with the screen, as if tele-piloting a vehicle (Klevjer, 2012, p. 21). The world of the avatar becomes the new “here” of the player, at the expense of the “here” outside the boundaries of the screen, which disappears from awareness, including the controller interface itself.

Avatar-based 3D has a distinct and fairly restrictive appeal: the thrill of being a different body, in the space beyond the screen. This design is optimized for travel, exploration, and combat, within a perceptual framework of paranoid tunnel vision and high-precision finger gymnastics. By contrast, mimetic interfaces (Juul, 2009) establish instead the “here” in front of the screen as the primary space of play, and therefore do not need any prosthetic avatar. The paradigm of avatar-based 3D also conflicts with the dream of sensorially immersive VR as the future of game interfaces, which implies that the interface should be natural and immediate, and that we should immerse ourselves through our own actual bodies rather than through any extended proxy.

Identity

Linked to the above analysis is also the question of player/avatar identity,which has been a central topic in the emergent philosophy of computer games field (Sageng, Fossheim, & Larsen, 2012). When players refer to the avatar they control as “I,” does this also mean that they think of there being some kind of logical continuity between themselves and the character? On one hand, the “I” appears to reflect the standard way that our language expresses extended agency and representation of the kind that we find in avatar-based play, including “avatars” that we do not typically think of as such. We would typically say, for example, “I crashed into you” when playing with toy trucks, or “you passed me” in a board game. However, when avatars are also personalities or characters, there is a kind of identification coming into play that seems to go beyond mere agency (“I am doing”) or self-situating (“I am there/here”) to also include the principle of roleplaying, which is when the player says “I am” with reference to a fictional character. In play theory, Marjanovic-Shane describes the utterance “You are a pig” as having three distinct meanings: (a) as a literal statement, (b) as a metaphorical insult, and (c) as creating a fictional world in which the “you” of the sentence is to take on the role of a pig (Marjanovic-Shane, 1989). Accordingly, the “I am” that players use to describe the avatar can be seen as a declaration of make-believe.

The future of avatars

The popularity of avatars continues to wax and wane. The peak popularity of avatars in game design was with the rise of the first-person shooter in the 1990s, and later with online role-playing games such as World of Warcraft. In a literal sense, the term reappeared in popular imagination with the 2009 movie Avatar.

At the same time, video games have seen a remarkable resurgence of two-dimensional and avatar-less games during the early 2000s. Juul argues that the history of video games can be seen as a movement from the 2D graphics of early games, through 3D graphics in the 1990s, and then moving back to two-dimensionality and to playing games using movement controllers in the physical space in front of the screen (Juul, 2009). This trend is supported by the popularity of games on touch-screen devices, where the user’s role is often not to control a character, but to manipulate the objects onscreen through touch.

Though avatars remain by far most common in games and virtual communities, the idea that the future of interfaces involves avatars and virtual reality resurfaces at regular intervals, most prominently with the focus on Second Life some years ago, and with recent developments in virtual reality.

SEE ALSO: Game Studies; Human–Computer Interaction; Interaction Design; Narrative; Phenomenology; Presence; Psychology

References and further readings


Jesper Juul is an influential researcher in the field of video game studies. The author of three research monographs published by MIT Press, Juul also coedits the Playful Thinking book series. His latest book, The Art of Failure, asks why we play video games even though failing makes us visibly upset, a “paradox of tragedy” that relates to tragedy in theater. Before that, A Casual Revolution examined the recent shift of video games from a pastime for a narrow audience to being played by a majority of the population in many countries. Juul’s first book, Half-Real, is a theory of the relation between rules and fiction in video games. Juul is an associate professor at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Design. www.jesperjuul.net/


Rune Klevjer is associate professor in media studies at the University of Bergen, Norway. He has published a number of papers and articles on the theory and philosophy of video games, and is leading a Norwegian research project on games and educational innovation. Klevjer chaired the 2014 Philosophy of Computer Games conference in
Istanbul.