Avatar Generator

What the avatar generator does

You need an avatar. A little picture to stand in for you, on a profile, in a chat, next to your name somewhere.

This makes you one. Press the button and a fresh little face appears, ready to save.

And then read on, because the word avatar has one of the most surprising and beautiful histories of any word we use every day, and it turns your throwaway profile picture into something quietly profound.

How to use it

Press Generate for a new avatar, and click one to download it. Keep pressing until one feels like you.

Your profile picture is named after a god coming down to earth

Here is a fact that should be much more famous than it is. The word avatar, the one you use for a little picture on a website, comes from ancient Hindu theology, and it originally meant something enormous.

It comes from Sanskrit, from the word avatāra, and it means the descent of a god to earth. When a deity in Hinduism takes on a physical, earthly form to walk among people and act in the world, that incarnation is an avatar. The god Vishnu, for example, is said to have come down in a series of these forms, as a fish, a boar, a lion, a man, each one an avatar, a descent of the divine into a body.

Break the word open and it is even lovelier. It is built from a piece meaning down and a root meaning to cross over. An avatar is a crossing-down, a passage from a higher realm into the earthly one. It is the word for a god stepping across the boundary between worlds and putting on a body so it can be present here.

That is the word. That is what you are reaching for, without knowing it, every time you set a profile picture. A term coined thousands of years ago to describe the incarnation of a deity is now the standard word for the little image that represents you in a comment section. It may be the largest gap between an original meaning and a modern one in the whole language.

How a Hindu word ended up on a video game character

So how did a sacred Sanskrit term make the journey from Hindu scripture to your gaming profile? The path is surprisingly traceable.

The word first crossed into English in the late 1700s, still carrying its original religious meaning, used by scholars writing about Hindu belief. For a long time it stayed there, a slightly exotic word for a divine incarnation, appearing in dictionaries and religious texts.

The leap to computers came in the 1980s, and the person usually credited with it chose the word with real care. A game designer named Richard Garriott, building a role-playing game in 1985, needed a word for the character that represented the actual player inside the game world. His game was about morality, about the player's real self being judged by the choices their character made. So he wanted a word that meant precisely you, manifested in another world. He reached for the Hindu term, because that is exactly what it describes: a being from one realm taking form in another. The choice was not casual. It was the most accurate word there was.

From there it spread through early online worlds, and then it was launched into wide use by a single influential science-fiction novel in 1992, which imagined a virtual world where people moved around as digital bodies called avatars. That book put the word in front of a generation of programmers and dreamers, and from there it became simply the word, the ordinary term for any graphical stand-in for a user, from a game character to a forum icon to the picture on your profile today.

So the word travelled a remarkable road: from Hindu scripture, through eighteenth-century scholars, into a thoughtful game designer's moral experiment, out through a cyberpunk novel, and finally onto every social profile on earth. And at each step it kept its core meaning almost perfectly intact.

Why the word fits better than we realise

It would be easy to treat this as a funny accident, a grand old word slumming it as a label for profile pictures. But look closer, because the word actually fits what you are doing with startling precision.

Think about what an avatar genuinely is. There is you, in this world, at your keyboard. And there is a little figure that represents you in a different world, the digital one, where you cannot physically go. The avatar is how you are present in a place your body cannot reach. It is you, crossed over, given a form on the other side.

That is not a distortion of the original meaning. That is the original meaning, almost exactly. A god could not walk among mortals as pure divinity, so it took a form, an avatar, to be present in the earthly world. You cannot walk around inside a game or a forum as flesh and blood, so you take a form, an avatar, to be present in the digital world. In both cases the avatar is the body you wear to cross a boundary you otherwise could not.

Seen that way, the word did not get cheapened at all. It found a new and genuinely fitting home. Every profile picture is a tiny crossing-over, a way of being somewhere your body is not, and avatar is the perfectly correct ancient word for that. The people of the digital age needed a word for putting on a body to enter another world, and it turned out one had been waiting, fully formed, for three thousand years.

So the next time you pick a little face to represent you online, you can enjoy knowing that you are doing, in a small and secular way, the thing the word was invented to describe. You are descending into another world in a chosen form. The generator just makes the form for you.

Taking an avatar apart

The little faces this tool makes are built the way most simple avatars are, and it is worth knowing how, because it is a neat idea.

A procedural avatar is assembled from a small kit of interchangeable parts. There is a set of possible shapes, a set of possible colours, a set of possible features, and an avatar is one particular combination of them, snapped together. Change the pieces, and you change the face. The whole design is really a system for producing a huge number of distinct little characters out of a modest number of parts.

That is the same trick behind those unique geometric patterns some sites give you automatically when you sign up, before you have uploaded a picture of your own. The system takes some starting value and turns it into a specific combination of shapes and colours, so that everyone ends up with a different image, generated rather than drawn. It is identity manufactured on demand, one combination each.

The reason this approach is everywhere is that it solves a real problem cheaply. A service with millions of users cannot draw a portrait for each one, but it can give every one of them a distinct, recognisable little figure by combining parts in a different way each time. You get to feel like you have a face, and the system never had to draw a single one by hand.

So when you press Generate here and a new avatar appears, it is being assembled fresh from the kit, a new combination of the available pieces. Keep pressing and you are walking through the space of possible faces, one snap-together character at a time, until you meet the one that looks, somehow, like you. Which is a very old activity, choosing the form you will wear into another world, dressed up in some very modern plumbing.

How these faces are made

Nothing clever, on purpose. Each avatar is assembled from a kit of shapes, colours and features, combined a different way every time. Press Generate and it builds one at random, so each press is a fresh little face, and everything happens right here on your device.

Nothing you generate is sent anywhere.

Questions people ask

What does the word avatar actually mean?

It comes from the Sanskrit avatāra, meaning the descent of a god to earth in a physical form. In Hinduism, when a deity takes an earthly body to act in the world, that incarnation is an avatar. The word is built from parts meaning down and to cross over, so it means a crossing-down between worlds.

How did it come to mean a profile picture?

It entered English in the 1700s with its religious meaning, then in 1985 a game designer used it for the character representing a player in a game world, because it precisely meant you manifested in another realm. A 1992 novel popularised that sense, and it became the standard word for any digital stand-in.

Does the old meaning really fit a profile picture?

Remarkably well. An avatar is how you are present in a world your body cannot enter: you, given a form on the other side of a boundary. That is almost exactly the original idea of a god taking a body to be present on earth. The word found a fitting new home rather than being cheapened.

How are these avatars made?

They are procedural, assembled from a kit of interchangeable shapes, colours and features, combined a different way each time. It is the same idea behind the auto-generated patterns some sites give new users, a way to produce many distinct little figures from a modest set of parts.

Can I save the avatar?

Yes. Generate one you like and click it to download. Everything is created on your own device, so you can make and keep as many as you want, and nothing you generate is sent anywhere.

References

1. Avatar (computing), including Garriott's 1985 coinage and Snow Crash. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/avatar
2. Avatar, etymology and the Sanskrit avatāra. Etymonline. https://www.etymonline.com/word/avatar
3. Avatars. Virtual Human Interaction Lab, Stanford University. https://vhil.stanford.edu/publications/avatars-and-agents/avatars-0
4. On the Origins of Avatars, on the journey from Ultima to profile pictures. Bokardo. http://bokardo.com/archives/on-the-origins-of-avatar/