Itico’s 31st Creation Day was November 8.

I created Itico 31 years ago and I still get people asking me why, especially on Second Life, which I joined in 2005, where the vast majority of people make their avatars look like an idealized version of themselves. To answer that we must go all the way back to…

It was late 1990 and I was transitioning from living at home directly into university dormitories. I was doing this because I had received a scholarship to attend California State University at Chico immediately after high school. Even though my high school was in a moderately sized city, 90,000 people, I spent most of my time 14 miles out of town in a much more rural location where we had lived for the past six years. This place was less rural then our previous place but the point is that I suddenly moved into the middle of a city of about 48,000 people and moved into a dorm with a few hundred close strangers.

While I wanted to have the dorm experience, I had wanted to take a break between high school and university, more than just the usual summer. With how the scholarship was set up, I was not given really an option. Take the scholarship and get my education paid for or take a minor vacation and come back to the university and try for student financial aide, which I would have gotten but still I felt that it wasn’t a real choice.

I will likely write more on the scholarship in the future but it is not truly relevant to this story.

I found myself in a whole other world not because of my visual impairment, although I did not share some experiences with others because of that, but we seemed to be at the university for different reasons. The way I saw it, most of my fellow dorm-mates were there to break loose from their families and cut loose, and maybe study just enough that they didn’t have to call their parents up and beg to come home. I was there to learn because I felt that it was what I needed to do, and at the same time to find things that I hadn’t done before or been allowed to do at home. In many ways these people in the dorms with me were polar opposites. Don’t get me wrong, most of them were great and interesting people and I’ll always value the friendships I had back then, even if few of them have lasted so long. Still, it was hard enough for me to adapt to studying at the university and adapting to the cultural shift outside of classes at the same time.

Unlike many of my peers, I seemed to know what I wanted out of the university education. I came in wanting to learn how to work with computers, to learn computer programming and whatever else I needed to do to get a technology based job because that was where I felt that a visually impaired person had the best chance.

I was wrong about that, but that too is another story.

While I had friend and we would often hang out during the day, many of these same people would go out on any given night to throw back cheap-as-you-can get water beer and get stupid. I would much rather stay in my room, order pizza, read a book and maybe tinker with a computer problem. I know, how boring is that.

Since I started out in computer science, I gained access to the universities collection of computers, including the Hewlett-Packard HP-850 supercomputer. At the same time, I gained access to the then primitive Internet. I loved it. I suddenly had access to books at a huge library, but also access to resources from all over the world, and when I discovered newsgroups and then IRC, Internet Relay Chat, I was hooked on this whole Internet thing. I could finally talk to people who were a lot more like me.

Don’t think that I stayed in my dorm room late into the night playing text based games and chatting with people I’d never meet, no that didn’t happen until after I moved out of the dorms. For the first two years at university, I was out with friends, or cycling and hiking in the park, meeting friends to play LAN Deathmatch DOOM in the computer labs, and even tried my hand at NetTrek on the old X-Terminals. (If you don’t know what I’m talking about, that’s all the better for you.)

While I still lived in the dorms, however, I started to live a double life, online and offline. At first though it was me, then me because I got tired of the “wascal” jokes. Even back when I was on IRC, where your character was essentially your nickname, I decided to pick a tiger as a representation of myself.

So, why the tiger? Well, I grew up surrounded by a lot of cats, especially in my teens, and I liked them but cats are small and while dangerous on their own scale, not usually dangerous on the human scale. So, I wasn’t going to be a cat. Cats were too common too. California had enough cats and even some wild cats. What did California not have, in the wild anyway, was tigers. I loved the seemingly contrary pattern of stipes that should make tigers stand out, but under the right circumstances, made them extremely difficult to see. Like me, tigers also really just wanted to live their lives, find their spaces, find some mates (friends and partner), and really just do what tigers do. Yet, several subspecies had already been pushed to extinction and certain people still wanted to hunt them, like somehow a tiger was a threat to a white man with a large gun. I am also a more distant kind of social that many people look at and call anti-social. I’m not and cats are not. They just have a wider comfortable zone then even Americans do. So, I felt a lot of connection with tigers.

After a short time on IRC alone, a then friend of mine introduce me to the LP-MUDs and other text-based real time text based games. I became a player, then a helper and eventually a designer and programmer which lasted until about 1994 when I was working with an early online education startup which finally was accredited out of France. That relationship ended in 1995 when they offered me a job, for $1 an hour, which even by 1995 standards was completely outrageous for the amount of time I had put into their code. When I told them that, they tried to pull the, “well we have been working on this for longer for less” card. I said, “Yes, and that’s the risk you take as a founder. Don’t expect to get any employees if you treat them like this.” A year later, they folded.

The last LP-MUD I played on had a class of character that could take on different animal shapes and could be useful in a fight. Also, when you got beat up too bad your character turned into a puddle. I loved it. Just the idea that you could have a guy in power armor, a mage and a wild cat all fighting together was just hilarious to me and of course, since I had to be different, I chose to be the shape changer. Although, I had not advanced enough to actually get the cat form, I was trying!

In 1994 I met a friend in a creative writing class and we wrote a terrible play, then we moved in together. I essentially taught him how to better use his computer and then I made the biggest mistake of my life…I taught him how to use the Internet.

My introduction to the furry fandom was not stellar. In fact, this is how it went. My friend found furries, got into an email based role playing game, got me to join, then he totally killed it. I went back to what I knew, the online text worlds and we found furry themed ones. By this time, I was quite tired of the text only games and computers were just starting to create some good games that people could play at home.

This is when was really filled out. Because I didn’t want just a generic tiger character, and because I had failed at my idea of a “cat in space” story idea while we were in class, I decided to write a story. Since the cat in space idea did not pan out the way I had hoped, I decided that I would upgrade to a tiger.

That took me to the name. I read too many stories and like a lot of them. I never liked one story more than any other and even if I did, I didn’t want to be labeled, or boxed into, a fandom for that story. So, I decided to write my own story and try to come up with a name that was not associated with any story that I knew. It took me about two month and I can not even remember how many different names, I can only think of 4, that I rejected.

I finally settled on Itico. It was short, relatively easy to remember and as far as I knew at the time, unique. In fact, it was about 30 years later when I accidentally discovered that Itico was a valid Lebanese name, and also one letter short for the Italian word “Iticco”. I think I did pretty good.

For literal decades I kept these two worlds apart but when I started working with the Virtual World Education Consortium and Virtual Ability, I decided to change that.

I adopted Itico as a way to cope with a world in which I did not feel I belonged, a world which didn’t seem to care about me and certainly didn’t usually support me and what I wanted to do. So, while I know that I am not human, when I’m using Itico I don’t suddenly believe that I’m a tiger. I know I’m not. However, it’s just more interesting for me to look at the world, or the real and the virtual worlds if you prefer, through the lens of an alien telepathic tiger.

If that doesn’t make sense to you, believe me when I say, I don’t understand much about the way that you view the world either.

The world, virtual or not, would be totally boring if we all looked at the world the same way, thought the same and all liked the same thing.

Many people who don’t fit the mold of whatever norm you would like to point out eventually get fed up and step outside. When we do, we break the automatic classifications that people put us into by our gender, color, manner of dress, hair, the cars we drive, etc. Of course, then we also become “others” and put into another group that becomes a target just because we refuse to even try to conform.

That puts people like me into a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situation. I can’t conform, I can pretend to conform, so you’re going to hate me either way.

It doesn’t have to be that way.

You could accept difference. Accept the fact that different perspectives, different opinions actually make us stronger, more resilient and a whole lot more interesting.

Sure, I know, that makes life more complicated. You would rather put people into simple little boxes of “us” versus “them” and move on with your life.

Life isn’t that simple, my friend. Never was, never will be.