Avatars United

» see avatarsunited.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

The character I had was on an Ultima Online private server, and that is precisely the kind of character Avatars United could do nothing with. Its trick was pulling verified data out of official game services, the World of Warcraft Armory or the EVE Online API, so that a profile could prove it belonged to the person claiming it. A private server has no armory, just an operator with a database and no interface to anything outside it. My identity in there was real to everybody who played there and structurally invisible to the rest of the internet.

Enemy Unknown AB came together in Sweden in the summer of 2007, a group of childhood friends who played games with each other, and launched Avatars United in March 2008. The premise was that the identity worth socializing under is the character, not the person holding the keyboard. You made a profile per avatar and connected it to the world that avatar came from, then posted and organized groups under that name. Around ninety games and virtual worlds were supported.

It was a good read of where things were going and a bad read of when. In 2008 the mainstream answer to online identity was Facebook asking for your legal name, and the audience for the opposite position was real but not large. Nobody has solved it since either. The closest thing that worked is Steam, which got there by owning the games rather than by federating other people's.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the eight months ~

Linden Lab bought Enemy Unknown AB on 30 January 2010. The reasoning was public and made sense at the time. Second Life had a large population of people who cared intensely about their avatars and almost nothing resembling a social layer wrapped around them, so buying a working avatar social network was cheaper than building one from scratch.

On 23 September 2010 Linden Lab announced that Avatars United would close, and it closed on the 29th. Six days of notice. The stated plan was that the underlying social technology would be folded into Second Life, and Second Life did get profiles and feeds afterward, so the claim was not empty. The other ninety worlds and everyone whose avatar lived in one of them were never part of that plan and were never going to be.

~ what got buried with it ~

What died was the federation. A profile for your WoW character that also knew about your EVE character needed somebody willing to keep talking to both companies and to keep parsing whatever each of them published, and no game company had a reason to help with that. Linden Lab, once it owned the thing, had less reason than most. It sells one world.

The idea keeps coming back with better funding and the same ending. Every few years somebody proposes a portable identity that travels between games, and every time it runs into the fact that a character is worth something only because a company is running the server it lives on, and that company would rather you stayed. A small Swedish team got a lot of it working in 2008 and then belonged to somebody who did not need it.

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