Online avatars are named for a Hindu god's descent to Earth

After Richard Garriott released Ultima III, letters from angry parents helped him notice something about his own games. To win them, players had found it necessary, or at least very useful, to steal and to kill peaceful townspeople. For Ultima IV, released in 1985, he wrote a story with no great villain to defeat. The hero's task was to become a better person.

Garriott wanted players to take responsibility for what their character did. They were meant to feel they were playing themselves, carried into a fantasy world. He removed options that got in the way of that, such as playing as a non-human. The idea of virtues came from a television program about the avatars of Hindu mythology, which said an avatar had to master 16 virtues. Garriott settled on eight, built from three principles: truth, love and courage. He also found those three in one of his favorite films, The Wizard of Oz. The goal of the game was to become the Avatar.

The game kept track of how the player behaved. Blind merchants asked you to type in how much gold you would pay, and paying less than the price counted against your Honesty. Giving alms to beggars showed Compassion. A healer would accept a donation of blood when you were in good health, and that counted as Sacrifice.

The word is Sanskrit and means "descent." In Hinduism it stands for a deity taking a bodily form on Earth. It is most often linked with the god Vishnu, and one list of his avatars, the Dashavatara, has ten. A game on the University of Illinois's PLATO system had used the word as its title in 1979. Garriott was the first to use it for the player's own presence inside a game.

In 1986 Lucasfilm's Habitat, an online world for Commodore 64 owners, used avatar for the figure each player moved around the screen. Players in the same place could see each other, talk, trade, and even rob and "kill" one another. At first this caused chaos, which led to rules and to avatars with authority to keep order.

In 1992 Neal Stephenson published Snow Crash. In its virtual world, the Metaverse, people appear as avatars, and a finely made avatar is a sign of status. In his acknowledgments Stephenson wrote that the words avatar, in this sense, and Metaverse were his inventions. He added that after the book first came out, he learned that avatar had been in use for years in a system called Habitat. Snow Crash was a success, and it made the word common.