If you want to pick an avatar go into "profile" scroll right down the bottom and you will see where it says "Select avatar from gallery" click on that and you'll be about to choose one from there
Hey, does anyone know--did the use of "avatar" for these representation (also used in video games) originate with the computer game series, Ultima IV through Ultima IX, in which the character representing the human player (you) was called the avatar? (In Ultima, you played the role of a person brought from Earth to save a parallel universe, fantasy Great Britain. The character was called "avatar" after, I presume, the human incarnation of gods, which is what an avatar is in Hindu terms.)
For those of you not familiar with Ultima, it may sound far-fetched that the game could've contributed to our use of the word. But, in the 80s, the Ultima series was the state of the art for adventure role-playing games and its creator Richard Garriot (calls himself Lord British, but he's an American) was something of a tech celebrity (he's very eccentric and lives in a castle he built in Texas and has his own underground dungeon).
Most of today's adult techies in their 30s and 40s probably were exposed to the Ultima series as kids. It was the first game to involve a detailed, interactive fantasy world (which ran on the Commodore 64!) and in later incarnations drove the graphics card drivers to the extreme to support the state-of-the-art graphics Garriot insisted on (which ironicly contributed to the decline of the game, which despite better graphics seemed to grow more confined and less believable with each release--or maybe the problem was that I was getting older......).
Hi Andrea, yes, please feel free to go and choose yourself an avatr, there are plenty there to go for. Then if you would like me to customise it to move, just give me a PM.
