2006: The Year of the Avatar

Next year -- actually even this Christmas season -- is going to be the Year of the Avatar.

We're all going to be so amazingly cool, because we already have -- we already *are*? -- avatars.

We're going to be explaining to Mom and Dad and Uncle Frank this Christmas around the groaning board what an "avatar" is.

Gosh, sitting in RELIC's Irish stone pub the other day with this dawning realization, I decided even to put a new picture of my avatar in my profile. I don't spend much time decorating him -- I got a real wake-up call last night in seeing these gorgeously blinged out customers of mine who built a huge house. Lately, I've noticed the rapper avs are wearing these pants rolled up on one leg, with a bandana tied around it. My first comment was to ask the fellow if he had hurt his leg. Then I realized it was some kind of gang symbol. Of course I'm hopelessly out of touch with these things.

I've felt for ages that it was the Year of the Avatar, but several experiences coalesced to make me announce it. First, this email going around and being chuckled at by Herald staff called Dream Stripper -- it has a 3-D sort of IMVU type of world (no, I did NOT go there and pay the $50 to see it) where you can design a stripper and have her dance for money. You aren't in any multi-users context, but what happens is that the multi-users start to segue in as you pass around the link and talk about it.

Then I was clicking around Yahoo and I had this surreal experience of wondering for a second if I was inworld or on some SL-related site because I saw the word "avatar". Now the Yahoo Messenger thing apparently is going to get better with more avatar design capacity.

Avatars are going to start to be everywhere. And they aren't going to be the kind we know and love, where first the world is put in with 2-3 or 3-D depth and streamed, contained a sense of place, then the avatar is plunked in like Adam and Eve in the Garden of Paradise.

No, in the new avatar experience, the avatar is central, and everything else is folded in around him like a kind of Hollywood stage backdrop. The backdrops and props don't even have to have any actual streaming or depth, they can be just very good-looking to compel you to go spend your IMVU credits or whatever to create them. After all, if you're going to be just looking at your screen and cybering, why having any friction (except um where you want it)? Why have the annoying task of flying, bumping into stuff, landing and rezzing?

Soon, people will give out business cards that contain an avatar name on the back, or next to their RL name, and perhaps a link for that avatar on a Yahoo site or else a virtual world like SL.

ratemyavatar.com is going to have to come back soon, and is going to have to go Metaversal as it reflects everybody's avatars in all kinds of games.

Soon LL will have these "publish to web pages" for avatars as we can already see on the interface in the current client and we'll be buffing up these pages more and more instead of moving around in the 3-D world.

It's this Year of the Avatar closing in on our beloved Linden Lab -- something they probably saw or instinctively felt -- that is making them redesign our beloved world with such jolts and jars -- flattening it, distending it, diluting it, making it lose its richness and depth. Next week, the Year of the Avatar will be upon us -- and to compete, LL will have to be positioned.

What do I predict when they bring 1.8 next week?

o Chaos -- people will be confused, angry, and giddy and map-happy and there will be a lot of confusion at first.

o Game crashes and lock-ups -- like all game patches, it won't work. We forget, without all this arguing about p2p, that 1.7 doesn't even work right yet, now we will compound that buggyness with 1.8 1.7 took at least 7 days to work right and had 3-4 patchlets. It's getting so that game patches are like a lockdown of the game in which you just have to plan losing 30-50 or more customers just because they can't log on or can't SEE.

o A sea of red lines. Nobody wants to listen to me on this. But it won't matter when they start to see it. All it will take is for one experience of some giddy newbie flying into your bedroom for you to turn off p2p. That may be the default for some people. In fact, I'm trying to think how I will do this, and figuring I'll keep my public spaces always on p2p but honour requests of tenants to turn it off on their individual lot.

o Landing problems -- explorers of 1.8 report that they land on walls, water, in the air and falling, etc. etc. In fact some have advised deliberately picking water as a clear place to land.

o Map-reading problems. Remember, Americans aren't taught geography in schools. So reading a map and figuring "hmm, I need to go north a little more" or "I saw that cool build next to my friends house one sim over" -- this may be beyond people. I know that I don't instantly say "oh, that's north" myself unless I look at the minimap and often take awhile to comprehend it.

o Use of the sim list and anger that it doesn't have word completion. So that means yes, surprise, surprise! People WILL land in telehubs after looking around for sim names they heard of. That's why I'm leaving my telehub malls right where they are for now.

o A huge land chase to find where the cheap and devalued land is. Already snow, which was in the toilet, doubled in value in places. I already made a killing selling snow here and there, it's  hilarious. I think more and more clubs will find snow, it being Christmas.

o A huge chase to see where the traffic is -- which means clubs, escort services, casinos -- and locating crappy little builds to hawk stuff, have camp chairs, etc. near them. This might magnetize the blight a bit -- but, it is feared, it will spread telehub blight around, too.

o With crashing prices at telehubs, telehubs will be the new cheap land, or at least, desirable out of habit and some getting the news belatedly. Already we see far more hideous crap going up everywhere outside of Hyles and Wixom, for example, with crap in the sky, rezzing in your face crap, ugly, horrid pimp-mobile kinda crap. And while it may disappear in 30 days, it's in your face now, making flying difficult. When I see these areas now, I feel like those scenes in Back to the Future when that mean school bully got to marry the Mom instead of the right Dad, and the whole world became ugly as a result.

o Increased valuation of well-built, managed, and controlled private islands and their stores -- p2p will bring way more business for Ansheland.com because she will have the best-looking areas with least blight and will arrange where people can land with space to rez.

o Windfalls in traffic for those with name recognition, who used to have no traffic because either they didn't bother to create it by showing up in world and having events or talking to customers, or because they weren't near telehubs. So media starts like you-know-who and those on the top 20 list or who show up in the first 100s in FIND will be kings and queens.

o Some telehub malls will continue to do well. They have sales, their customers know where they are, like Ross, Garrison, Hanson, Nuba, Clunn, etc. and they will just carry on as they always did, only now with less angry FIC bitching about rezzing buildings and obstructed traffic. It will be nice.

o There will be a huge, vast, dawning awareness that the problem isn't the buildings that rezzed in your face at telehubs, it's the buildings that rez in your face EVERYWHERE. Guess what! They rez 1000 m2 away that slowly -- especially now since 1.7 -- and they will now become even more of a problem. Before, you could plan your route with that quick page-up and forward-arrow jabbing as you hit a hub -- you could compensate. Now, you will have no idea where they are. You will p2p to a place that seems inviting, and damned if this crap won't rez you and trap your av. Well, we warned you : )

The problem is, you won't be trapped in an empty mall where you can browse and shop. You'll now be trapped in some angry avatar's living room and he will eject you and put his land on lock.

o The theory is that those who followed all the Linden net-nanny social engineering nostrums like "value-add with building on your land" will now reap rich rewards. Avatars will come to look at their beautiful builds and bask in their gorgeous spas, etc. I'm betting that this will only marginally increase. People don't value beautiful builds. They value socializing with others and value personal contact and recognition of their good designing of their avatars. Remember, this is the Year of the Avatar. It is not the Year of the Kick-Ass Built-By-the-Numbers Uber-Architecterati SL Build." That's some other year.

o The same people who always run things will buy the top slots, like Azure Islands and IceDragon and Anshe Chung, and no one else will be visible.

o The Lindens will see their classifieds sales not really doing so well, so they will go back to their vicious social-engineering again, only this time not only will they take down the forums classifieds completely, to prevent free competition, they will either increase the cost of FIND PLACES ads to $250 or more, or they will even remove FIND and tell us they are working on a new FIND or something. I don't put it past them these days.

o More franchises ("franchulates") will be handed over to SLBoutiques and ROAM and so on who will be allowed into the Infohub areas. This will be seen as "meeting public demand" which will be agitated for by the usual few.

Funny, being the first on my block to have already had an avatar for ages, I don't feel so good. I may go and hide.

Comments

[Squeedoo G.]

Okay! Vefore you ask why I am trying to leave a comment on almost all of your articles...well, it is because I am so behind on your work! dang! You write quickly!

Alright, now for my comment:

That is a very scary view of SL's future. It sounds like the "world around the avatar" instead of the" avatar around the world". (Which means the avatars are a part of the world instead of the world being an extension of the avatars. Umm,I hope that made sense.) But, no need to hide. I'm sure you could ask Linden Lab to at least keep some of the good qualtities of 1.6, if it is even possible. I am not even sure.

Oh, and how do you pronounce "Architecterati" anyways? Sounds like a dinosaur of some kind. :)

[Xen Dolev]

Today a huge trend on the web is Avatars, no doubt here.

In the digital world everybody can create a digital identity; choosing a nickname, how to present oneself, appearance of the blog etc… Arguing, it can be said that our identity is being self-created the same way in the ‘real world’ (styling the appearance for example). At the very least, it can be agreed that self expression is an integral part of it.

To fill this need of self creating, the usage of an avatar that represents the self over the web is becoming larger in the last years. People tend to change it to better represent the changing moods and tastes in real time to their communication peers, on the web.

The mobile world has become a bridge between these two worlds, the digital and the real. So, the evoking question is why not to self create ones identity over the mobile?

The Klonies is a great new youth oriented service that extends the Avatars craze form the web to the mobile. This offering allows the user to create his character from the mobile phone and/or the web. After choosing a certain look, hair style, clothing etc…, he can call his friends who get to see this newly created Avatar (Klonie) on the friends’ handsets. So this Klonie is now the representation of the caller in the mobile sphere, just like on the web. This way, you could personalize the way you look on your friends’ mobile whenever calling or sending an SMS.

[Xen Dolev]

Today a huge trend on the web is Avatars, no doubt here.

In the digital world everybody can create a digital identity; choosing a nickname, how to present oneself, appearance of the blog etc… Arguing, it can be said that our identity is being self-created the same way in the ‘real world’ (styling the appearance for example). At the very least, it can be agreed that self expression is an integral part of it.

To fill this need of self creating, the usage of an avatar that represents the self over the web is becoming larger in the last years. People tend to change it to better represent the changing moods and tastes in real time to their communication peers, on the web.

The mobile world has become a bridge between these two worlds, the digital and the real. So, the evoking question is why not to self create ones identity over the mobile?

The Klonies is a great new youth oriented service that extends the Avatars craze form the web to the mobile. This offering allows the user to create his character from the mobile phone and/or the web. After choosing a certain look, hair style, clothing etc…, he can call his friends who get to see this newly created Avatar (Klonie) on the friends’ handsets. So this Klonie is now the representation of the caller in the mobile sphere, just like on the web. This way, you could personalize the way you look on your friends’ mobile whenever calling or sending an SMS.

[Prokofy Neva]

It's interesting that you write about making avatars that suit your moods. I'm drawing a blank on that one, because I don't do that, at least I don't think I do. Perhaps I have an array of given avatars and I say to myself, hmm, I'm in the mood for exploring today, think I'll use this lesser known avatar today so no one will IM me, or something like that.

In SL, you can have so many folders, looks, skins etc on one avatar that you don't need to have a separate account/avatar to change the mood. You can even put on a group title or name that will change your name somewhat. I prefer having avatar's with different names to go with the different skins -- I don't like the SL limitation on alts and prefer the unlimited feature that TSO had.

I don't have a phone that works as you say but I see others who do and I wonder whether they want to use that dinky interface to do what you're describing.

I can imagine a thing like this being viral, in that your friends see you did x or y with your Klonie and they change their look too. I see this on kids' Yahoo avatars, etc.

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