Gameology: Commentary and Resources for the Game Studies Community

For many games, a universal avatar would be a negative, but for many other applications it could be a positive, as some of the other comments note. To me, the more important part is that a universal avatar would need to be based on an established standard (like XML or KML) and then the virtual worlds where the avatar could go would also need to have and use an established standard. There are too many academic game projects that fail because of a lack of planning/funding in relation to changing technology and the standards would allow for better planning and for far more projects to be fully developed.

Having virtual world standards would also allow for better interoperability--imagine taking historical files that had been added to Google Earth and easily moving them into a virtual wild west and railroads style game based, or moving game files into Google Earth. Virtual worlds need to be more portable for some of the more interesting things to happen and this is one major step in the right direction.