Alice Lives!

This URL was posted to Raph Koster's blog.

http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol11/issue1/nowak.html

It is a good research paper on the qualities avatars are chosen by. The gist:

Interface designers who wish to elicit attraction in users might consider anthropomorphic, non-androgynous, feminine, child characters for their interfaces. Future research should examine other contexts and varied child-like images to assess the extent to which these results are generalizable.

Lewis Caroll was right. Alice is archetypal