“I bet you don’t have fur and a fluffy tail in RL!”

Khoisan in SL and in RL ... spot the difference?

OK, I admit it: I’m not 25 years old. Or 30. Or however old my avatar may look. And you are probably no spring chicken either. Nor do I, in real life, have the kind of body that suggests I’ve frittered away too many of my waking hours in the gym. Nor of course am I, in the real world, seven-foot-something tall. As for my hair, let’s not even go there. But, let’s face it, how many aging avatars with unexceptional physiques does one see in Second Life? Not many, huh? We generally just go with the flow, trot off to the usual outlets for our 20-something skins and shapes rather than scouring the obscurer reaches of the grid for the elusive 50-something avatar that will still bear scant resemblance to who we are in real life.

So I’m always intrigued to occasionally hear, or to read in curmudgeonly profiles, residents railing against their fellow residents on matters of avatar appearance.  Most commonly the comments are with regard to height, residents sanctimoniously professing that, since they’re five-foot-whatever in Real Life, they’ve scaled their avatars to that very same height in Second Life.  And, by implication, so should everyone else.  Thus I was pleased to read recently in a female resident’s sober and intelligent profile:

There are some sorry souls who, while appearing to accept that the Linden dollar does not map directly to the US dollar, that the value of the US dollar is not pegged to the value of the Zimbabwean dollar, that a bra size or shoe size in Switzerland does not map directly to a bra size or shoe size in the USA, and that a US mile is not an British mile, nevertheless seem to be under the odd misapprehension that measurements in SL should be commensurate with the meters and feet by which we measure in RL. My height in SL is set to 65% of maximum in a range 1.87m to 2.39m, which when translated into RL would suggest that I am probably far shorter in SL than my RL 5’6″ / 168cm. Please consider this before making a fool of yourself by telling me that I appear to be 2.2m / 7’3″ tall 🙂

Height apart, the more general issue is with regard to whether one feels there ought to be, as a matter of honesty, any degree of resemblance between one’s real-life appearance and one’s avatar appearance.  And to reflect upon this “ought to be” is self evidently to reflect upon, not Second Life itself nor upon any presumed set of unwritten rules, but the presupposition on the part of some residents that graphically honest self-representation is important.

I was interested to note, last academic year, that three of my male students had chosen to have female avatars.  I asked one of the three why he had made this choice, to which he unhesitatingly replied that, if he had to be sitting at his screen working for so many hours at a time, it would at least be nice to have something attractive to look at.  (My friend Alexi coincidentally today sent me a similar remark from a discussion group participant who too had chosen to create a female avatar: “It’s nicer to look at a female’s ass then male ass when I stare at the screen”.)  I took it that this remark, in turn, said something interesting about his relationship to his avatar and, beyond that, his stance towards Second Life: that he did not in any sense identify with his avatar, whom he saw as no more than a visually pleasing building tool, an extension of his keyboard and mouse, through which he accomplished his content-creation work, and that consequently his stance was one of disengagement from any in-world life as an avatar.  This seemed to me an unsurprising conclusion, given that presumably most of my students were in SL solely for purposes of completing the modules they’d need for their undergraduate degrees in computing.

So I’ll now return to the gripes of those self-righteous residents who expect some degree of authenticity of self-representation: why do I hear them whinge about an avatar’s height or size of boobs or muscles that suggest a diet of steroids, yet never “I bet you don’t have fur and a fluffy tail in RL”?

I’ll be taking this topic further in a longer essay, ‘Virtual embodiment, body image, and radical body modification’, but in the meanwhile I leave you with a few questions: How important to you is authenticity of appearance?  Quite independently of more complex issues of persona or digital personhood, what do you consider to be your primary stance towards your avatar’s appearance? an idealised representation of yourself? a pure fantasy? a digital tool?  What considerations determined your choice of skin, shape, hair, and other core features of avatar appearance?  Your comments and views are, as always, eagerly sought and always welcome.