Avatar Antecedents?

Sorting books has become a continuous necessity as houses change. Long forgotten titles come to light, now valued in a different way to when they were originally encountered. However collectors items such as our copies of Cicely Mary Barker's Fairy Books are in the condition of 'Very Much Used'. Each colour plate has crayon-scrawled initials on them, evidence of the way as children we 'claimed' each character as ours to represent 'Us'. I thought this was a unique family game but reading Kenneth Grahame's short story 'Its Walls Were As of Jasper' in Dream Days found it may have been more widespread among a pre-digital age of children.

'In the long winter evenings, when we had the picture-books out on the floor, and sprawled together over them, with elbows deep in the hearth-rug, the first business to be gone through was the process of allotment. All the characters in the picture had to be assigned and dealt out among us, according to seniority, as far as they would go.'

Certainly seniority was a key factor in these allocation rights/rites but the multiple personal choices provided the chief excitement and interest. We turned the pages to pick who we would be and entered into continuous negotiations. In virtual worlds a major hook is that first moment when you choose a name and select or create a Starter Avatar, and next, see them magically materialize.

In 'Its Walls Were As of Jasper' each of the four children's responses and choices are recognizable from this contemporary experience. In particular, Charlotte's vividly brings to mind any number of imaginative winged avatar reincarnations. 

'Charlotte was only too pleased  to take the child-angel seated at the lady's feet, grappling with a musical instrument much too big for her. Charlotte wanted wings badly, and, next to those, a guitar or a banjo. The angel, besides, wore an amber necklace, which took her fancy immensely.'

Kenneth Grahame's small hero finds himself drawn into the fascinating background on the page which features first meadow-land and, further on, a looping white road. This in turn leads up a conical hill to a fortified, castellated city overlooking an anchored, masted ship riding the waves of the blue seas beyond.

Picture books, however lovely, prove to have a number of frustrating limitations that are not imposed on an avatar inworld. They are flat, two dimensional, linear and confined.

'There was plenty to do in this pleasant land. The annoying thing about it was, one could never penetrate beyond a certain point. I might wander up that road as often as I liked, I was bound to be brought up at the gateway, the funny galleried, top-heavy gateway, of the little walled town. Inside, doubtless, there were high jinks going on; but the password was denied to me.' 

In a 3D world all-round panning and camera controls exist. One can go anywhere - assuming that is, there is somewhere to go, viz. that someone has built the stuff and taken their time to develop a complete sim or enriched the contents of a world across several regions and continents.

Charlotte has faced the limitations 'She, too, had walked up that road and flattened her nose against that portcullis,' but finally she manages to get ahead in this game of Edwardian picture books. She invents Physics. 

'and she pointed out something that I had overlooked - to wit, that if you rowed off in a boat to the curly ships, and got hold of a rope, and clambered aboard of her, and swarmed up the mast, and got into the crow's nest, you could just see over the headland, and take in at your ease the life and bustle of the port. She proceeded to describe all the fun that was going on there, at such length and with so much particularity that I looked at her suspiciously. "Why, you talk as if you'd been in that crow's-nest yourself!' I said. Charlotte answered nothing, but pursed her mouth up and nodded violently for some minutes; and I could get nothing more out of her. I felt rather hurt. Evidently she had managed, somehow or other, to get up into that crow's-nest. Charlotte had got ahead of me on this occasion.'

Charlotte continues to go forward and will astonish us all.