character; he thought only someone playing "themselves" could be properly judged based on their in-game actions. Because of its ethically nuanced narrative approach, he took the Hindu word associated with a deity's manifestation on earth in physical form, and applied it to a player in the game world. Other early uses of the term include Lucasfilm and Chip Morningstar's 1986 online role-playing game Habitat, and the 1989 pen and paper role-playing game Shadowrun. The use of avatar to mean online virtual bodies was popularised by Neal Stephenson in his 1992 cyberpunk novel Snow Crash. In Snow Crash, the term avatar was used to describe the virtual simulation of the human form in the Metaverse, a fictional virtual-reality application on the Internet. Social status within the Metaverse was often based on the quality of a user's avatar, as a highly detailed avatar showed that the user was a skilled hacker and programmer while the less talented would buy off-the-shelf models in the same manner a beginner would today. Stephenson wrote in the "Acknowledgments" to Snow Crash: Types and usage An avatar can refer to a two-dimensional picture akin to an icon in Internet forums and other online communities. This is also known as a profile picture or userpic, or in early Internet parlance, a 'picon' (personal icon). With the advent of social media platforms like Facebook, where users are not typically anonymous, these pictures often are a photo of the user in real life. Alternatively, avatars can also be three-dimensional digital representations, as in games such as World of Warcraft or virtual worlds like Second Life. In MUDs and other early systems, they were a construct composed of text. The term has been also sometimes extended to refer to the personality connected with the screen name, or handle, of an Internet user. Internet forums Despite the widespread use of avatars, it is unknown which Internet forums were the first to use them; the earliest forums did not include avatars as a default feature, and they were included in unofficial "hacks" before eventually being made standard. Avatars on Internet forums serve the purpose of representing users and their actions, personalizing their contributions to the forum, and may represent different parts of their persona, beliefs, interests or social status in the forum. The traditional avatar system used on most Internet forums is a small (80x80 to 100x100 pixels, for example) square-shaped area close