What is an Avatar? Creators Chip Morningstar and Randy Farmer Trace the Ancient Roots of the Latest Buzzword

Submitted by Michael Kan on Mon, 02/01/2010 - 11:50

Blue aliens with cat-like faces might first come to mind when one hears the word “avatar,” now that James Cameron’s latest sci-fi flick has become the top grossing movie of all time.

But the box-office hit film is just the latest medium to popularize the word “avatar,” an ancient religious term that’s taken on a new meaning in modern times.

Aside from the movie, many people are likely familiar with the word “avatar” as an expression of the self (or the alter ego) in a virtual world. Participation in video games, internet forums and Heritage Key’s own King Tut Virtual Experience can all involve using a 2-D or 3-D representation of your self.

Hindu Roots of the Avatar

But while the modern day meaning of “avatar” implies gaming and interaction, the original definition has a very different meaning. In Hinduism, avatars act as manifestations of deities. This occurs when a god has decided to come to our world by taking a human or animal form.

The most well-known avatars were associated with the god Vishnu, who often appeared in our world to restore good in the world when evil threatened to corrupt it. The deity would do so by fighting off demons as a fish or a boar. At other times, Vishnu would lead armies to victory as an eventual king (Sounds a little similar to the plot of the movie Avatar?).

Originally, the term “avatar” derived from the Sanskrit word Avatãra, which means “descent.” But it was not until 1784 that the word “avatar” first appeared in the English language. Two centuries later, the term would gain a whole new meaning with the advent of video gaming.

The 1986 online role-playing game known as Habitat was the first instance where the word “avatar” was used in the modern sense. Players assumed their own persona and interacted together in a virtual community.

Chip Morningstar and Randy Farmer: The Men Who Invented the Avatar

Chip Morningstar is one of the creators of the game who coined the term. In an e-mail interview with Heritage Key, Morningstar explains that his background as a “bookish kid” led to him coming across the word.

“It seemed an appropriate mapping,” he added. “In the sense that we humans are like deities, or at least external souls, with respect to a virtual world that exists only inside a computer simulation.”

But the word's new meaning didn't exactly catch on at first. Randy Farmer, the other creator of Habitat, said, "Initially, even marketing people in the early 1990's in our own company, Communities.com, bristled at this new and foreign sounding word."

Over time, however, science-fiction novels and the growth of online gaming and the internet would cement the new meaning of 'avatar'. Farmer added, "I knew the term was permanently in the language when Felicia Day recorded Do You Want To Date My Avatar?"

With the popularization of the term, now it’s not just Hindu gods who can descend upon different worlds, but people. Today, avatars come in the form of characters ready to fight in some virtual battlefield to the simple picture used to identify oneself on an internet forum. In Heritage Key’s case, a user can don their explorer’s hat and visit a virtual version of King Tut’s tomb.

Constant Evolution of the Word

But modern day avatars have also gone beyond simply allowing us to visit new worlds. With online virtual worlds such as King Tut Virtual and Second Life, users can customize their avatar in almost any way they wish. (Like Vishnu, a user can choose to be a human or an animal. But the makers of Second Life also give you the option of being a vegetable or mineral.)

As the Second Life website states: “You can create an avatar that resembles your real life or create an alternate identity. The only limit is your imagination. Who do you want to be?”

While our avatars exist only in the virtual world, that's not quite so in James Cameron's latest film. In making Avatar, the director was also well aware of the word’s ancient meaning, as well as its modern use. The only difference with his avatar characters is that they’re meant to be real, at least on film anyways.

In an interview with Time Magazine, Cameron said: “In this film what that means is that the human technology in the future is capable of injecting a human's intelligence into a remotely located body, a biological body. It's not an avatar in the sense of just existing as ones and zeroes in cyberspace. It's actually a physical body.

Perhaps the word “avatar” will continue to evolve as technology continues to advance and change. But Morningstar is conflicted over how the term is used today.

“I've been variously gratified, amused, and dismayed at the way the word has taken on the life that it has,” Morningstar said, adding that he sometimes feels as though he ruined the term “avatar.”

“On the other hand, it's great fun at games industry parties, job interviews, and similar occasions to be able to claim bragging rights,” he said. “And the ways the term has morphed and transmogrified in use have been endlessly fascinating.”

Read 13 comments, or leave your own

About The Author

Michael Kan (follow me:

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Last three pieces by this author:

After Bowers Museums, Tarim Mummies move to Houston Museum of Natural Science | Treasure-laden Ming Shipwreck May Have Smuggled Arms | Four New Museums Planned in Xi'an City Wall Renovation

Michael Kan is a freelance journalist based in Beijing, China. He graduated from the University of Michigan with a degree in history and Asian studies. From 2006 to 2008, he worked as a reporter at The Kansas City Star, and then took a year to teach English in Xi'an, China.

Comments

Jon Himoff:

I thought it was Snow Crash that came-up with avatar and metaverse first, but that was published in '92 . I guess Neil Stephenson was inspired by Habitat then.

Mon, 01-02-2010 15:42

Michael Kan:

Actually Morningstar talked to me about this and said that Neal Stephenson independently came up with the idea of using the term "avatar" as well. Below is what Morningstar said in an e-mail to me：

"Finally, Neal Stephenson's novel "Snow Crash" was published (in, I think, 1994) and he used the word for the first time in front of a mass audience, in a book that got a lot of attention, and, I think, really cemented the term in peoples' minds. Neal independently thought of the term, albeit 7 or 8 years later, but invested it with almost exactly the same meaning as I had, which I take as validation of the concept. Neal and I have talked about this at length, and we're both pretty convinced at this point that his coinage was a truly independent event (e.g., he hadn't once read some article about Habitat that had subliminally jogged his subconscious); nevertheless he graciously cedes me priority on the invention, with a very nice acknowledgement in the more recent editions of his book. I consider having met and become friends with Neal to be one of the nicest consequences to me of this whole linguistic affair."

Mon, 01-02-2010 16:16

Rebecca T:

That's got to be the most civilized IP dispute ever!

Mon, 01-02-2010 21:20

matthewburgess:

Those were the days. I recall researching the yet-to-be-named "virtual communities" space at Volpe Welty VC in '96. We had a clunkier name for it at that point, that Bill Welty coined after we did some noodling on our whiteboard: SPICE. Synchronous Person-to-Person Interactive Computing Environments. Gulp.

Before we started looking at business models and business plans, we wanted to understand the history of and technologies enabling all of this. We studied graphics acceleration hardware, modem latency, etc. And then we got into security, persistent identities, reputation management, micro payment economies. We tried to learn issues from TCP/IP stack to Jane Jacobs' theories on urban planning and neighborhood building. And this is where Chip and Randy sat squarely as THE guys to talk to. With Habitat, they had already begun tackling issues that were critical, in our view, of real, meaningful communities developing online. They were instrumental in our forming an understanding of what was to come on the Net.

I recall companies coming into our board room with a PPT deck, a business plan, and a copy of Snow Crash. One enthusiastic entrepreneur plopped it on the table, at the beginning of the presentation, and said "THIS is our business plan."

Fri, 05-02-2010 18:09

Jon Himoff:

Matthew--does that make you almost a Spice boy?

Fri, 05-02-2010 18:47

Mansolaris:

Oh, come on. What are you Westerners all about? You had to write a whole article on the genesis of the word 'avatar' when it's all there in Wikipedia? Just fucking search, man. Hindus have had the operational idea for millennia, and it causes not a bit of confusion among the whole a billion and a half of them, all over the world, to this day. The idea of the 'avatar' is one of the most hallowed in Hinduism. It just means the "reincarnated self'; in Hinduism, a self can be reincarnated billions - quadrillions - of times, not just in human form (it all depends on 'karma', a concept way more complicated than the one that the non-Hindu West has simplified and appropriated for consumer use) but even as a lizard (you refuse a person, even the worst of villains, a drink of life-giving water, you're condemned to reptile-hood in your next life). An avatar is the reincarnation of a person who has done good, and needs - and is forced by that need, and her/his knowledge of that the need of those who need to be saved - to be born again to save humanity (or as much as humanity that wants to be saved, which is, frankly, an open question). Every religion in the world has a second, or third, or fourth, reincarnation of the founding deity. The Second Coming of the Christ, much awaited as it is, would probably be an avatar, with all the memories, the passions and the drives of the original.

So, Cameron's take on the avatar isn't all that far from the core concept - except that Jake would have had to be dead and incinerated to be an avatar. Not psychologically dead, which orthodox Hinduism doesn't recognise as a valid excuse for not wanting to be alive, but physically - like, wiped, all molecular traces gone. Which he is not. But he is an avatar in the sense that he saves the N'avi; he saves their very way of existence.

As for our avatars in sites such as Second Life: they're not, unless we count ourselves among the already dead. That's a thought.

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