Infinite Lives

In keeping with this blog’s current trending toward pictureless confessionals and ridiculous ruminations on avatars, here’s more of the same.

I wasn’t allowed to play RPGs as a kid.

More specifically, I wasn’t permitted to play computer games in which you could create or alter your own character. Sometime, maybe a year and a half ago, I mentioned this fact on a podcast which, along with my semi-lyrical overuse of the word “totally,” seemed to arouse some bafflement and curiosity. “Why wouldn’t her mom let her play role-playing games?” some folks wanted to know. I hadn’t elaborated—I’d only mentioned it offhandedly—and perhaps that caused some people to be discouraged.

Of course, I was surprised by their surprise. Do these people not know, I wondered, that playing fantasy games will turn you into a warlock and your bedroom closet into a portal to hell?

I obviously have some lingering issues.

The power of urban myth

I was born in 1982, and I spent almost all of my childhood in a small, conservative town in Texas, during what I’ve now heard called the “Satanic Panic.”

The late 70s and early 80s are banner years for contemporary legend anthropologists. Urban myths—the likes that get a foothold among small-town Christian fundamentalist communities—were running amok. In 1977, Ray Kroc of McDonald’s allegedly copped to being a member of the Church of Satan. Fact. And in the early 1980s, it was common knowledge that Cabbage Patch Dolls themselves were possessed by demons. Duh.

One variation on the Cabbage Patch legend held that Xavier Roberts signed the buttocks of his doll-progeny to signify that he had blessed each one in the name of Satan. These bits of trivia were pronounced at the tables of our elementary school lunchroom as cold, hard evidence that evil dolls could, in fact, murder you in your sleep, if they wanted to.

Now that my readership has appropriately flatlined, I am permitted to publish the second in a three-part series of journal entries about my quest to create the perfect avatar. In part I, we talked about caricature, and I obnoxiously examined what makes my own face distinctive. Now, we examine what, exactly, makes cartooning effective. Here’s a hint: HAIR.

Seeing in the Abstract

Let’s talk cartooning.

In his wonderful work of literary and visual criticism, Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud explains (emphases his):

...I’m going to examine cartooning as a form of amplification through simplification.

When we abstract an image through cartooning, we’re not so much eliminating details as we are focusing on specific details. By stripping down an image to its essential “meaning,” an artist can amplify that meaning in a way that realistic art can’t.

How do cartooning, caricature, and avatars relate to videogames in a broader sense? The key, I think, is iconography. Take a look at Character Design for Mobile Devices, wherein realistic character design and artistry are pared down to their simplest and most fundamental pixels.

“How did you feel,” 1UP editor James Mielke asked Final Fantasy artist Yoshitaka Amano, “about seeing your elaborate illustrations transformed into such tiny sprites?”

Amano replied with an elegant description that could be applied to any type of icon. ”...Back then, ...my art couldn’t just go into the game without major adjustments,” he explained. “So I looked at the sprites as just a symbol of my art. Here’s an example: when you say ‘Mount Fuji’ and you make a motion like this”—here, Amano makes a peak sign with his fingers—“everybody knows what Mount Fuji looks like, so they get the mental image in their head. So I was in charge of making the master art piece that people would keep in their mind, and people would remember this art because of these symbols in the game.”

This is the first in a three-part series of journal entries about my quest to create the perfect avatar. It will not be a perfect or academic analysis. In fact, it may be the least formal of the entries at Infinite Lives, simply because it treads some personal ground. In part I, we’ll examine what makes my own face distinctive. Then, and for the next three days, we’ll take a look at my subsequent attempts at avatar creation, gauging how they have succeeded or failed. The final piece will appear here this Friday.

During the NXE beta, someone sent a message to my Xbox. I didn’t recognize the handle, but he apparently knew me. “Your avatar looks so much like you!” he wrote. I frowned. “I hate my avatar,” I wrote back curtly. Then I clarified: “The hair is all wrong.”

He wrote back, confessing he hated his own NXE avatar. You know, the hair.

Later, at a Thanksgiving dinner among friends, I complimented someone on his NXE avatar. “I liked mine,” he agreed. “But yours was incredible.”

Was it? I wondered aloud. “I haven’t worn my hair that way in a year,” I reminded him. He seemed really startled, slowly realizing that I was right. I do not have short, shaggy hair. Not anymore.

The art of avatar creation is, at times, the same as the art of caricature. It could be said, too, that caricature is the equivalent and perfect polar opposite of vanity, that willful misrepresentation of yourself as someone more attractive than you really are (see also: Myspace angles). Caricature is here defined as not only an exaggeration, but as a “grotesque imitation or misrepresentation.” And because caricature is a deliberate misrepresentation, in a perfect parallel with the art of vanity, it willfully contradicts reality. Your identity on the Internet, as in the workplace and in virtual worlds, is probably a work of willful caricature.

I mentioned the INN Revival Project in passing to Josh, my e-friend of over ten years, who, like me, had a Sierra Network account in the early- to mid-nineties. “Yeah,” he said of INN Revival, “too bad that never took off.”

Excuse me? This is a common misconception, I told him. “But they never got the INN software to work!” Josh protested. I let him know that the INN Revival is alive and well! And it isn’t a huge overhaul of the INN software—it’s actually the same software (mostly), emulated in DOSBox!

Getting Back to Our Roots

The ImagiNation Network, AKA the Sierra Network, was among the earliest virtual worlds and online multiplayer gathering spots. With the exception of LarryLand, which was densely packed with casinos and lewd talk, the virtual world was targeted at family values and wholesome, clean fun. In MedievaLand, you could hop into Shadow of Yserbius, a proto-MMORPG, or either of Yserbius’ sequels. Yserbius was an early graphical MUD that is, today, extremely clunky by WoW standards, but compared to the earliest text MUDs I telnetted into, was absolutely breathtaking.

In a way, Yserbius was INN’s downfall. AOL, who owned and operated Neverwinter Nights, purchased INN from AT&T, simply so they could shut the Yserbius operation down. Neverwinter Nights is credited on Wikipedia as being the first MMORPG to display graphics—this, I think, is absolutely debatable (not only because of Yserbius’ place in the canon, but also because of Mad Maze, the online Prodigy MMO).

Now that Josh knew INN was being played on PCs and laptops all over the world, he wanted in. But how?

“I assume you’re on a Mac,” I sighed. “It’s trickier than installing DOSbox for PC.”

Of course, the process isn’t that tricky; the real problem is, the steps are mostly undocumented.

What follows is the explanation I gave Josh. It’s tailored for Mac users like me, with OSX as your operating system. If you’re a PC user, these instructions might not do you much good—with a little extra reading, you’ll see that setting up DOSbox and INN for PC is actually easier. You can do it!

“My character was running all over the place,” I wrote in 2005, “and I freaked out because I was like, ‘If I were running this much and this often, I would weigh 90 pounds.’ And then I quit playing because I felt like I should have been investing more time in, uh, moving.”

I’d just sworn off playing Final Fantasy XI for PS2. That version of the MMORPG had come bundled with a proprietary hard drive; consequently, I’d felt obligated to play the game for months. I had tired of levelgrinding, and of fetch quests, but above all I was tired of running.

Over at Hack a Day, there’s a blurb about two guys who wanted to “see what it would be like to run as much as their World of Warcraft characters”—I guess the existential weirdness of watching your avatar live more healthily than you do had gotten to them, too.

These WoW fans rigged two treadmills up to their computers and, in full WoW regalia, commenced on what they’ve christened the RL Race Across Azeroth. The whole write-up (edit: since removed) is hilarious, the rig itself is extremely clever, and the corresponding video (edit: since removed?!) is adorable.

• Mana Energy Potions – RL Race Across Azeroth
• Truveo – Race Across Azeroth
• Hack a Day – World of Warcraft on a treadmill

Art duo Eva and Franco Mattes—AKA 0100101110101101.ORG—are the minds behind It’s always six o’clock. Each work in the exhibit conveys childlike mementos in unexpectedly violent ways. The overall effect is a little like what might happen if my old office cubicle exploded in an art gallery, but with more harmony and gravitas.

The show is on display at MU until June 29, so if you’re in the Netherlands in the next two days, you could drop in edit: I just realized that June was last month, and that I am exhausted.

I knew I vaguely recognized the artists’ names, and sure enough: their 13 Most Beautiful Avatars, a rumination on beauty within Second Life, was exhibited at a New York gallery in 2006.

Eva and Franco Mattes also exhibit what they call “synthetic performances” using their Second Life avatars. Each performance, in turn, is streamed live to a real-world audience.

• 0100101110101101.ORG – It’s always six o’clock (via)