Art by  shenzaibird!

In the world of "Thousand Tales" ( https://www.amazon.com/dp/B086BBLJL9/ ) the people of the Game built robot bodies so they could explore the dangerous "Outer Realm", ie. the real world. Initially these were toys no more than dog-sized, often wearing plush pelts so they could work in the Game's chain of pizza restaurants and be cuddly. (The Ludo Corporation vigorously denied rumors of mysterious disappearances at night, despite an April Fool's prank.) By 2039 the "Squire" class of griffin-bot was useful for basic tool use as well as social interaction. In that year, there were highly publicized photos of such bots attacking people, a photo-op arranged by hackers and circulated for years as false proof of AI malice. In 2040 one of these bots helped save lives during a fire.

The wings were at most able to twitch for entertainment and balance. The slang "wingfail!" meant "oops, you forgot you can't actually fly in the real world" and similar mistakes.

After 2040, the color called Tyrian purple gradually became common among the Game's people as a mark of civilization and tradition. It was also associated with the Silver Circle movement in Central America, which had a silver-and-purple flag "because nobody uses purple". The United States in this period tended to use fewer, simpler colors due to the loss of factories and knowledge needed to manufacture dyes and increasing difficulty in maintaining an electric power grid. The use of the color in the US marked people as dissidents against the Party.

The heavily electricity-dependent Game culture needed to start running its own infrastructure, which meant being more involved in the real world and protecting its assets against hostile humans. The saying was, "All we wanted to do was play a video game, you know?" But the more serious people involved, knew that that was never the main goal.

What was behind those sensor-eyes? It was hard to tell. A given bot might currently hold a sub-human AI, a true AI, a human remote-controller, or a formerly human uploader mind; an an AI or uploader might or might not be physically stored on the robot's hardware. So there was little obvious accountability for what a given bot did. One particular bot had a reputation for always having a scarf or a hat or something as different "actors" took it on.