Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
around the games and the communities of friends developed in the play across DSL
lines.
From the point of view of popular culture, what we saw of MMOs at the end of the
1990s still constituted “fringe” engagement; despite growing numbers, gamers contin-
until nearly a decade later was the change in the network engagement that the MMO
gamers were beta testing for the rest of us. In a big way, interactive dimensional space
had opened up for network users outside of niche-use groups.
The hobbyists and enthusiastic computer scientists of 1998 can say they were right
about the potential of these virtual spaces. They just got the timeframe and the tech-
nology wrong. The graphical online world of that period was made up of objects and
operations still too ugly, too difficult, and simply too nerdy to have broad appeal. As for
VRML, fate did not deal it a winner's hand. The seismic flux in mediation that HTML
(hypertext markup language) had created in 1991 regarding the adoption of the World
Wide Web fizzled later in the decade with the would-be visual companion to the In-
ternet protocol. I asked a respected computer scientist active during that period why
VRML did not fly. He replied simply, “It was too hard.”
Designing Media
The research on embodied agents of the 1990s takes very seriously the question, what
does “adding a face” mean for human use of computers? In this moment in the early
twenty-first century, we shift our focus from human-computer relations to human-to-
human mediated relations, the C3 interaction of communication, community, and col-
laboration. In looking at the legacy of avatars, we find embodiment agents driven by
users
not by computers. Developing AI no longer provides the goal for the design
strategy, but rather something more old-fashioned yet diabolically complex: human-to-
human communication…at a distance.
The line I am drawing takes us from the very earliest text-based graphics, such as
emoticons or ASCII art, through the automation of agents to the user-manipulated 3D
avatars we find today. The technology that facilitates each level of representation dif-
fers, but the urge to create an image that imparts basic human emotions in mediated
communication remains consistent. The anthropomorphic drive to create a likeness, to
