Creating Avatars

What is an Avatar?  

If you are playing Ultima or another quest game you will find that the hero is refered to as "the Avatar". This is because he or she (depending what character you chose to create) has performed a number of outstanding deeds and is of apocalyptic signifigance to the Ultima world.

 However, if you join some online communities, the word "avatar" is used to refer to the face that you show to the world on your profile. The programme offers the user a number of alternatives in  creating their public face or "avatar".

1) The first is to load a presentable picture of yourself. This is okay if you are not shy and you know that your friends are part of that community and want to interact with the real you. It may also be useful if you are a business person communicating and advertising on-line.

Theoretically, there are safeguards preventing your contact details and full name being broadcast to everyone. You can use a screen name, but your email has to be available to the administrators of the site. The profiles of persons under the age of 18 are supposed to enjoy special protection and display less identifiable information, which is very responsible of site administration.

2) The second way you can create a public face or avatar is to load a picture of your pet, own creative art or craft. This is a good way of expressing yourself personally and retaining a certain amount of privacy.

3) The third method of creating a public face is to utilise a generic avatar available from the social networking site or use a "customise avatar" function. I activated this on one site and found I entered a whole new world of creative options. There were a multitude of selections of backgrounds and skins available. I settled upon a certain face and was then able to dress the figure in a number of different costumes and alter the figure's hairstyle. I could also choose backgrounds to give the avatar additional personality.

The program allowed the user to save faviourite "items" and up to 12 favourite complete avatars. I enjoyed creating avatars so much that I exceeeded my 12, upon which I took screenshots of a selection of my avatars and loaded them back in as "photos". I noticed that if you do this, you lose animations in the background and special features such as blinking eyes, but it is still your picture and I guess it protects the sites intellectual property. A picture has to be cropped, so I found I lost the feet and lower legs of my custom avatars doing this. I guess I could spend time scientifically reducing the dimensions of my saved file to advoid this loss, but the time involved would probably not be worth it.

The avatar creates your online presence in the community and can be adjusted according to the season as there are New Year, Prom and other special occasion items. It can also be adjusted according to mood. I am not sure that I recommend a bikini clad avatar for a female for purposes of personal safety as online abuse can occur, but if you do receive annoying unsolicited comments they can be reported to the site administration.

Link to Yahoo Avatars: http://au.avatars.yahoo.com/

Cecelia

Real Time Online Gaming

I'm pretty sure I logged in here at one point and published a review of Evony 2, describing the ways it had changed by merging with Facebook as a playing platform and my new experiences in the game.

The game-play in Evony 2 wasn't as “pure”in the sense that being on Facebook attracted people who were not dedicated players. There were daily gifts from other players. That was fun, but also turned into something of a rort as you needed to link up as many other players as possible, and lobby for them to be as high a level as possible.

Once you had someone's Facebook account, you got to know them better and some genuine friendships, and even one or two marriages developed!

There were a few famous false accounts that no one ever worked out who or what sort of person was behind them. Multiple accounts also became a big problem. Some people had them just for fun, others were “spies”.

Having each other's Facebook also created friendships and conflicts of interest with other alliances. Security was not the same.

In the end, the game became too time consuming and stressful. I gave my cities away to people who wanted to continue to play.

What is the deal with the much advertised on-line game Evony?

About a month after we got the Internet I noticed my son playing a game. My son has always been a fan of strategy games, but I have tried early versions of some of the big names and decided they were not for me. The buildings in many strategy games are too small and give no visual satisfaction, thus leading to my getting bored and quitting the game.

However, Evony was different. The home city had beautiful large buildings and clicking on them brought up interactive menus.

You could not actually walk a character around in the buildings (which is my favourite thing in gaming), but even so, I had to have an account for myself!

It was free to play Evony, which was a wonderful thing. So I signed up. Along the way there were opportunities to collect reward packages and more items were available if you chose to buy “game coins” but the majority of playing activities could be done for free. You just had to work harder to build a great character.

I played as Morgana in Server 48. The computer called me “Lord” which I thought was a bit sexist as I was playing as a female. Following this line of thought, I did a count and found there were less than half the number of female faces available compared to male faces.

This is something the developers should address as I can testify that the game attracts female players.


Anyway I had great fun playing Evony. Resources were a bit limiting, but I found that if you planned and developed your city correctly you could produce enough for 75% of your own needs and trade excess high value produce for gold in the market to purchase other  resources. That was fun too.

I belonged to an “alliance” and felt that this was one of the best features of Evony.  Alliance leaders quickly explain the best playing strategies to new members. Some people are playing from Europe, others from the United Kingdom, I am playing from Australia and the majority are playing from the United States of America. Till this point I had no international contacts, but now I know when people from other countries get up and go to bed. I was also really happy chatting to other alliance members because we had the game interest in common.


Another great thing about the alliance is that while everyone had their individual account, they were also playing together. I have seen some fantastic synchronised battle work, and always seemed to be in the middle of some inter-alliance war or other. I’m not sure how I feel about other players getting defeated, but it is part of the game and the highly skilled players can perform some amazing comebacks.

I believe it is more ethical to deliver a warning by declaring war on the opposing alliance. That gives the opposition a chance to build up their defences and forces. Sneak attacks are resented by most players and are most likely to provoke revenge actions. However, I have seen warring alliances ending hostilities by acknowledging each other as neutral and then “friendly” alliances.

Well, I am just a “Mum” player and part of my purpose in writing this review is to establish that the game Evony can be played by everyone – not just the long term strategy fanatics.

Evony is found on the web at: http://www.evony.com/index.do

© Cecelia (Screenshots used with permission from Evony public relations)