Please Don’t Call Them Avatars… Unless They Are Avatars.

Posted on by Judy Unrein

The Last Airbender. An avatar.

Here’s the bottom line, readers: I love you. And I don’t want you to get called out by “people who know”. Ya know?

So here are the common definitions for the word avatar:

1. A representation of Vishnu.

2. A personification or embodiment of an ideal. (This is the Avatar: The Last Airbender definition.)

3. A representation of oneself. (This is the James Cameron’s Avatar definition. It also describes a character you control in an online game or virtual world.)

There is very little elearning with avatars by those definitions. A learning agent is not an avatar. Neither are characters in a scenario.

We already have a lot of jargon in our industry that muddies the waters for both solution providers and purchasers. Especially as character packs gain popularity, I’d love to see us have more clarity around this term.

  • Steve Flowers

    Thank you, Judy. This has always bothered me a bit as well. Characters aren’t necessarily agents and neither characters nor agents are avatars. These distinctions matter if we’re looking for meaningful applications of these strategies.

    • http://onehundredfortywords.com Judy Unrein

      Steve, go for it and I’ll link it up here! :)

  • Whitney Lowe

    Thanks Judy for that clarification. This jargon term has a tendency to put some people off and I think it’s much better to clarify what avatars are really used for. 

    As you mentioned character packs, I am curious what you think of them? This does seem to be an increasing trend. Do you think they will limit or drive ID decisions? For example,… “I’ll do this in my course because I have a character that can show it well”

    • http://onehundredfortywords.com Judy Unrein

      Thank you for articulating *why* it’s important to have precision in our terms, Whitney. It’s not just about avoiding getting snubbed at the better elearning cocktail parties… it’s so that we can think and communicate clearly about our strategies. 

      So, character packs… you can get these standalone and have been able to for a long time, but software makers are starting to integrate them into the software itself, so it’s probably going to be yet another instance of one of my favorite topics: How  Our Software Shapes Our Designs If We Let It. There is some good research out there on using characters and learning agents that supports my experience that it can be a really positive design decision; however, I have no doubt that there will be overuse and misuse. 

      I put some thoughts down about learning agents a couple of years ago… what they are, examples of great ones that I’ve seen, examples of awful ones that I’ve seen, development considerations, etc. It might be time to revisit/expand the series. http://onehundredfortywords.com/full-series-learning-agents/

  • Steve Flowers

    Ran across this related article. There are some really great concepts on this guy’s site.

    He breaks the experience of avatar control down to projection. He doesn’t use avatar, but it means the same thing. He uses the general term “doll”. I’m not sure if I like the term, since it’s a new term in a buzzword saturated market, but the concept makes sense.

    “A doll is any presence in a game world over which a player exercises direct control. Sometimes the doll is represented by a human figure, sometimes it is a ship, a car, a hand of God, a simple block or dot. It can even be an invisible presence such as the hand that twists blocks in Tetris. Dolls respond to player commands with predictable behaviour, and are his agent in the game world.”

    http://whatgamesare.com/2011/02/cars-dolls-and-video-games-narrativism.html