Digital Avatar

'Cause you can be way cooler inside a computer.
Image by cryoclaire.
Used with permission.

"You're not you.
You're your digital you,
Virtually real
But controlled by real you."

— Colin, Don't Hug Me I'm Scared, "Computers"

The modern form of "Avatar", instead of the older God in Human Form, that most people are likely to encounter in Real Life: a digital representation of a person in a computer world, broadly, the Internet. It can be as simple as the small graphic attached to posters' names on countless web forums, blogs, and the like; or it can be as complicated as a fully-animated 2D or 3D game character. For futuristic incarnations, add a dose of Virtual Reality to the mix. In some definitions, "avatar" is taken to mean "any game character you control"; in others (which is the definition used for this trope), a line is drawn between game characters and avatars that's more in line with avatar archetype. If Alice is controlling a character, like Mario, designed solely by the game designers, she's playing as that character. If she's controlling a character made to reflect her desired persona, almost always with a considerable degree of customization, she's controlling her avatar. This includes pretty much every MMO since MMOs have had graphics, and many if not most computer RPGs also rely on it.

While the Ur Examples can be found in old games — the 1979 Dungeon Crawler Avatar, the use of the Avatar in Ultima IV in 1985, the first online social world Habitat in 1987 — the Trope Namer and Trope Codifier is generally thought to be Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash. William Gibson had written about 3D characters in Cyberspace roughly 6 years earlier, and Vernor Vinge even earlier, but Snow Crash used the name "avatar" for them and ultimately popularized the concept.

In fiction, Digital Avatars are often found in Cyberspace, particularly incarnations of The Metaverse. The inverse of the Digital Avatar is the Projected Man, where a computer entity gets a digital representation to function in the real world. Just because it's not real doesn't mean there can't be romance: see Kiss Me, I'm Virtual.

Compare Deep-Immersion Gaming. See also Virtual YouTubers for real life examples of this trope.

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Examples

Advertising

• Demonstrated flawlessly in this Super Bowl Coca-Cola commercial.

Anime & Manga

• .hack tells its story from the viewpoint of the character's Digital Avatars in an MMORPG.
  • The exception is .hack//Liminality which was focused entirely in the real world. It should also be noted that .hack//SIGN was the only series to display the real world in an off-color shade of blue, while very other series has used normal colors. Real Colors appeared in one real world segment of Sign however at the very end and Tsukasa's player An Shoji is shown awake leaving the hospital and accidentally meeting the player behind Subaru
• Ghost in the Shell, being a textbook Cyberpunk setting, has the full virtual reality with customised avatars variant.
• Doing this is what initially drew attention to Lain from Serial Experiments Lain. The reason? She's an Artificial Human with a software uploaded into her mind, and being in the Wired is what liberates that software.
• Half of the Summer Wars movie is told in a MMORPG-like virtual world called Oz, in which everyone has their own avatar.
• In Sword Art Online, players of SAO are initially able to design their own avatars, but are quickly forced to change to avatars that look like their real-world selves. ALO, meanwhile, only lets players choose their race, with the character's actual appearance initially being random.
  • The randomization aspect may be the case with another VRMMO game, but this time avatars don't really look like their user (Much to Kirito's dismay).
• Used twice over in Accel World, where characters actually have two avatars. The first is their common, everyday avatars used when they net dive, typically chosen or even designed by their owners (main character Haruyuki's pink pig was forced on him by bullies) so there tends to be an element of wish fullfilment there. The second avatar applies to Burst Linkers and is used in the fighting game they compete in in the Accelerated World. What makes this second avatar so special is that, though it's the game that generates it, Brain Burst uses the player's psychological traumas and desires to generate the avatar's states. As stated with Dusk Taker, this means the fighting avatar can infallibly tell you something about the person controlling it. (In Dusk Taker's case it was that he felt he had nothing of his own and had to steal other people's stuff.)
• ½ Prince has each player's avatar in Second Life be based on their appearance, though minor alterations, like which race they pick or a change in hair and eye color, are allowed. They can also choose to be made 30% prettier or uglier.
• In ID: Invaded the people that can pilot the cockpit of Mizuhanome machine becomes a Brilliant Detective that is based on their peak age and wears Impossibly Cool Clothes.
• Yu-Gi-Oh! VRAINS: While in LINK VRAINS, duelists can create a customized avatar form and can even duplicate avatars, as seen when multiple individuals copied "Playmaker's" appearance to impersonate him, and when Emma Bessho assumed "Blue Angel's" appearance to lure "Playmaker" into LINK VRAINS. Some take on non-human forms with the case of Frog, Pigeon, Eagle, the unnamed Penguins, and others even copied monster appearances.
• Good Day to You, How About a Game?: The manga is about school girls playing a Mahjong mobile game, and it depicts each match as their cute animal girl avatars dueling with each other around a digital mahjong table.

Comic Books

• Kimmie66 is chock full of 'em. The main character is actually strange for having an avatar that actually resembles her.
• Spider-Man 2099: The Cybernet, being Virtual Reality, is ful of these. Gabriel's avatar looks like himself, except with a red luxury car. Other notable users have themed avatars like a Knight in Shining Armor.

Fan Works

• The Mobile Suit Gundam Wing Doujin Oz has a whole lot of fun with this trope. Relena gets trapped in Quatre's new VR game, and Heero goes in after her. When his friends come in to help, the game temporarily puts them in Relena's "body" before it assigns them a new role. Which means we get the hilarity of seeing the normally soft-spoken and polite princess acting like the Arrogant Kung-Fu Guy (ripping a slit in "her" skirt for mobility and attacking Heero with a bo staff), the Chivalrous Pervert (who decides to make the most of a strange situation and cop a feel), and the Rich Bitch (who takes advantage of the body to try and seduce Heero).
• In a variation in With Strings Attached, the Fans use avatars (preset, generic avatars) to interact with the four when they meet with them telepathically. When Shag mentions that they're using avatars, George mildly freaks out because he's only familiar with the traditional definition of “avatar” and thinks the Fans are divine. Shag hastily explains.
• At the end of Plan 7 of 9 from Outer Space, Captain Proton realises that the President of Earth is actually just a holographic Digital Avatar of the Great Calculator that truly runs society. This is a Mythology Gag to The Adventures of Captain Proton where the President of Earth is played by Voyager's Emergency Medical Hologram.

Films — Live-Action

• The Lawnmower Man, especially during the finale, in what also may be a literal example.
• Johnny Mnemonic, also during its finale.
• "Residual self-images" in The Matrix.
• The Antichrist Franco Maccalusso has one in the Day Of Wonders virtual reality program in the Apocalypse film series. In essence, he is fulfilling what the Book of Revelation says about "the image of the beast", that it "should both speak, and cause as many as wouldn’t worship the image of the beast to be killed."
• Ramona in The Singularity Is Near.

Literature

• Friendly AI H.I.V.E.mind of the H.I.V.E. Series appears to the main characters as a holographic head, but in the digital world he is a blue wireframe man. When Otto develops the ability to interface with computers mentally, he appears as a gold-yellow transparent avatar.
• Snow Crash, as above, being the Trope Codifier and partial Trope Namer in that the avatars in The Metaverse were among the first to have the term used in the way we know it today. To be fair, the quip under the page pic of Snow Crash protagonist Hiro Protagonist's avatar (yes, that's his real name) is inaccurate as Hiro is just as badass IRL as he is in the Metaverse.
• The William Gibson book Count Zero (from the same universe as Neuromancer) is probably the Trope Maker at least as far as the Cyberpunk genre is concerned; it was published in 1986, Snow Crash in 1992.
  A square of cyberspace directly in front of him flipped sickeningly and he found himself in a pale blue graphic that seemed to represent a very spacious apartment, low shapes of furniture sketched in hair-fine lines of blue neon. A woman stood in front of him, a sort of glowing cartoon squiggle of a woman, the face a brown smudge. "I'm Slide," the figure said, hands on its hips ... [She] gestured, a window suddenly snapping into existence behind her.
• In Murderworld, the differences between avatars and their users is important to the plot and characters. Hyperbolic badassery is valued in the game world, so users' typical, unimaginative avatars tend to be overblown, athletic, hypersexual, threatening, and gorgeous. Some users deliberately buck this trend and instead create the most repellent avatars possible.
• The construction of Digital Avatars and how they function are a major element of Tad Williams' Otherland series, one of the more modern takes on The Metaverse in fiction.
• Vernor Vinge has used this a few times:
  • His cult-classic novella "True Names", published in 1981, five years before Gibson, is often cited as the Trope Maker.
  • In Rainbows End, the widespread use of "wearable" computers makes this extremely common. The hacker known as Rabbit actually appears as a giant rabbit, for example.
• In Daniel Keys Moran's Continuing Time series, the equivalent of the Internet can only be reasonably accessed via a custom-written software agent that is capable of filtering and categorizing the tremendous amount of information available. It also acts as the user's in-verse avatar and oftentimes is borderline AI.
• Spectral Shadows has these in Serial 2, which takes place in an online roleplaying game. Some characters, such as Christine or Russel, take on anthro forms even though they are humans in reality. Over in Serial 11 we have Second Life knock off Another Life, which contains these.
• The protagonist of Cyber Joly Drim designs these.
• Most interactions in Ready Player One are done via these. Wade also finds out that his best friend Aech, whose avatar is a white male, is actually a black female (and lesbian) in Real Life. Interestingly, unlike most MMORPGs, OASIS only allows a user to have one avatar at a time. If that avatar dies, it's gone for good, including all its experience, items, and money. At that point, the user can create a new avatar but must start from scratch. At the end, IOI uses an artifact that kills nearly half the avatars in the world in a desperate attempt to keep Wade and his friends from the final gate. Wade gets lucky, because, earlier in the novel, he obtains a strange coin that turns out to be an extra life, which re-spawns him at the same location sans all his items.
• In Labyrinth of Reflections, Leonid has a number of avatars he uses throughout the novels. His first described avatar is Prince Ivan, a classic archetype in Russian fairy tales. When playing the Doom-inspired game Labyrinth of Death, he adopts the persona of a master gamer known as The Gunslinger. Later, when hiding out on a fantasy server, he creates an avatar of an elf healer named Elenium. During the first novel, he accidentally finds himself in a virtual brothel, where the girls can adopt any appearance and role the client desires. He himself is surprised to find the picture of his virtual assistant (whom he called Vicka) in the catalog and requests the girl In the end, the girl's name turns out to actually be Vicka, and her avatar matches her Real Life appearance. In the second book, Vicka secretly adopts a new avatar named Nike, and Leonid nearly gets in trouble with her when he tells Nike he likes her before knowing it's his wife. One of the plot points in the second book is an attempt to make avatars stick around for a while after their users log off, thus creating "virtual ghosts". This is all done to try to create true AI.
• In Hoshi and the Red City Circuit, everyone in memspace is legally required to have an avatar called a franca so people know who they are. Hoshi's looks just like her real self, but some people make alterations. For example, Martin Ho looks like a muscular superhero in a cape, and Luzzie Vai has programmed his emotive routines into his hair.

Live-Action TV

• Avataro Sentai DonBrothers portrays the protagonists' superhero forms in this way, as opposed to just wearing a suit; especially as the avatars can have drastically different body types from their users — the Blue Ranger's avatar is excessively muscular, the Pink Ranger's is inhumanly tall, and the Black Ranger's is a Funny Animal. The DonBrothers can also switch their personal avatars for ones of previous Super Sentai heroes in order to use their powers.
• Caprica: This is a cornerstone of the setting, where one of the most popular recreational activities (particularly amongst the young) is a Virtual Reality outgrowth of MMOs, with people representing themselves in this way. By the end of the pilot two avatars have gone sapient and now have a consciousness and will separate from the originals. Notably, one of them (Tamara Adama) was created post-mortem.
• Used in the Season 16 finale of The Amazing Race. When the teams did a challenge at Industrial Light & Magic, several of the racers were recreated as their own avatars.
• Seska has one in the revised version of Tuvok's holodeck program Insurrection Alpha in the Star Trek: Voyager episode "Worst Case Scenario", taking over where her deceased actual self left off. Tom Paris comments that Seska wouldn't let a little thing like death stop her from getting even with Tuvok for his betrayal of the Maquis.

Music

• "Do You Wanna Date My Avatar" a music video used to promote Felicia Day's Vlog Series The Guild, which is about a group of gamers.

Roleplay

• The players of Destroy the Godmodder are (unless otherwise specified by them) essentially controlling two characters at once: their real-life self, and their Minecraft/Terraria/TV Tropes/Whatever avatar. Their avatar does most of the work, whereas the real life one is usually reserved for RP. The only session to subvert this as a standard is the MSPA session.

Video Games

• Habitat/Club Caribe, created by LucasArts for the Comodore 64, was one of the first graphical online virtual worlds, a mostly social world with an "Adventuring" game component. The avatar concept is introduced a little differently than in the post-Snow Crash sense: Avatars are a separate species of being from humans led by an Oracle. The Oracle decided they were getting dull and lazy, and so initiated contact with humans to spice things up.
• In Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar, the Player Character fits the model of the Digital Avatar, with its complex morality system and all, but the story of the game is about the player seeking to become the Avatar by embracing virtue and questing for the Codex of Ultimate Wisdom.
• Second Life is particularly known for the extensive free-form customization of its avatars, massively multiplayer sandbox that it is. In any given public gathering you may find yourself next to any number of attractive humans, one or more dragons, furries and Beast Men, Anime characters, superheros, Cyberpunk, Fantasy and Sci-Fi personas in Impossibly Cool Clothes, a wiggling jello mold, a toy-sized teddy bear, a Giant Mecha, an abstract sculpture, an animated set of furniture...
• As of the 2000's, all major producers of video game consoles have now had some form of personal presence on their home consoles, with a 3D Digital Avatar. Nintendo gave the Wii its cute little Miis first, which would continue to appear on their later systems. Sony introduced PlayStation Home to the PlayStation 3 as one of many Follow the Leader worlds being inspired by Second Life at the time (but without most of the freedom) and the Xbox 360 introduced Mii-like cartoon Xbox Avatars with its Xbox Live interface revamp. Also, there is a handful of games on both Nintendo and Xbox consoles that allow the player to use their own avatar as a PC, most notably the Wii's eponymous series of games.
• The player in Rez is the avatar of a hacker, deleting viruses in the K-Project.
• To a certain extent many games that allow Character Customization are this. While there's nothing stopping you from playing as the default Shepard or Boss characters, or create existing or fantasy superstars in wrestling games, most gamers would based such a avatar on themselves to explore these worlds. Some of the more involved games don't simply involve dressing a character, this is meant to be you, with your decisions and choices actually matter, rather than a pre scripted story.
• Anyone who jacks into LINC-Space in Beneath a Steel Sky appears as a purple, semi-nude representation of themselves. Strangely, Robert Foster lacks his hair while Anita doesn't.
• In Ripper, Jake Quinlan's avatar is a simple-looking green putty CGI man that absorbs software into its rubbery head. If other people are around, though, he appears as his real self.
• In Net:Zone, members of Cycorp, a virtual research facility in Cyberspace are depicted as hovering gray CGI busts with varying animations inside. Zel Winters', for instance, shows a Steampunk-esque mechanism.
• In Kingdom Hearts II, DiZ uses an Avatar whenever interacting with Roxas while inside the Data Twilight Town.
  "My apologies, this is only a data-based projection."

Web Comics

• In Virtual Pet Planet, all of the owners have an avatar in game.
• The players of nelPLAY in Sarab get these.
• Electric Wonderland takes place in a Cyberspace world populated by these.
• In Tales from the Interface, the main protagonist becomes an avatar in a number of different virtual worlds.
• In El Goonish Shive, a chat program is used that seems to have static 2D graphical avatars which are portrayed as 3D animated interactive avatars for Artistic License reasons.

Western Animation

• The User in ReBoot is only ever seen as one of these inside the games.
• Code Lyoko represents them with a 2D to 3D Medium Blending when the characters go into cyberspace to fight XANA.
• The characters of Futurama use avatars to enter the Internet. Also, there's the miniaturized avatars used to go inside Fry in "Parasites Lost". (Because shrinking would require very tiny atoms, and have you priced those lately?)
• In The Simpsons, everyone in Springfield plays a MMORPG called Earthland Realms, in which they have avatars that looks like them.

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