Can someone tell me what it is with avatars? I’ll help: they’re horrid and they’ve failed. They were going to be the way of the future. Our body doubles in the online communities of the 21st century. Now they drift around the internet like ghosts. And most of them never evolved beyond cyberpunk and robot goth.

Obviously, it’s where avatars (in computing) come from: subcultures heavily influenced by SciFi, fantasy and gaming. But after almost two decades on the internet, you’d think they too would have gone through some shiny-pastel web 2.0 phase. Not in the least.

I’ve been doing a bit of research into avatars for work. It seems they can have a special role in education and commerce. Because an avatar is supposed to be a neutral character, it can be helpful as a teacher or an adviser.

That is why some of the avatars that made it into the mainstream have been (female) figures like IKEA’s Anna, Microsoft’s Ms Dewey or Ananova, the now defunct newscaster. Except for the first Anna, you could hardly call these successful though.

Google the term avatar today, and some of the top sites you’ll run into are services like IMVU, the instant messenger for teens, and Moove. Look at the screenshots from these sites, and tell me that you either a) like these childish self-misrepresentations for the morbidly insecure or b) think that’s who they maybe should have cast for the I’m a PC adverts instead of Seinfeld – who actually looks a bit like an avatar himself.

I don’t know. Serious scholarship could never get enough of avatars: how they were going to dominate our virtual-reality controlled worlds in the future. Or how they’ll help achieve

intuitive user interaction for websites … and enable developers to construct websites based on anthropomorphic metaphors

That last bit from MetaFace by the way, the Virtual Human Markup Language Project, who call them Embodied Conversational Agents. If you prefer, you may call them Virtual Interaction Characters or Anthropomorphic Interaction Agents too. Whatever. I think they’re ugly. They look like pimps and hookers.

So, except for Face Your Manga on Twitter, avatars don’t seem to catch on. Perhaps, like some of the more lifelike robots, they freak us out? Or maybe the web has moved too far into our real-life, our day-to-day identities, that we prefer a regular profile pic over a scary unreal cartoon character?

Or maybe someone will have to just reinstate Clippy soon.