As this travelogue is a week shorter than I thought, and it took me much longer to make a non-horrific Second Life avatar than anticipated, I’ve had to scale the scope of the project way back (the furry post is gone, sorry). I’ve decided to focus on the actual act of creation, instead of how those bodies go on to potentially lived experiences.
After the basic registration activities (name, age, country, gender, etc), you reach this step. No one can enter Second Life without an identity. Everyone must have a name, and one that fits preordained types. (Sara wasn’t available as a first name, so I chose SaraMarie. They then offered me a choice of several last names. Foehammer was the most awesome.)
More importantly, everyone must have an image–some sort of visual signifier of the self. As this is the preliminary stage, there are a few set bodies to choose from. You go into the world with one of these few bodies, then adapt it to your liking. While there is some attempt at diversity in the set avatars–there are a few token racial minorities, and a slight age range–they are very much idealized. All are young-ish and conventionally attractive. Most are white, and all have fairly Caucasian facial features. They are what the media presents as ideal bodies. The fact that they are the default entries into the program assumes that they are the ideal for the users as well.
The initial creation of your avatar
Once you’re in the world, it is possible to change your body (possible, but not necessarily easy). To Second Life’s credit, it does offer quite a bit of variety in ways to change your body–there are a wide ranges of sizes and shapes to choose from. However, anything that differs too far from the norm quickly falls into the Uncanny Valley. Pixel’s don’t look right, limbs don’t fit as they should–anything that doesn’t fit the norm is not just abnormal, but freakish. (This is when things go well–I wasn’t able to remove the skirt from my starting look, so I had to create another, super full skirt to go over it. I couldn’t change the hair at all, and I had to put on black boots because the original black heels disappeared about halfway.)
This is how you create your body. I'm not sure what that white stuff is.
In the end, this was me. I tried to be as accurate as possible, but the hair’s all wrong, the skirt is way disproportional, and my torso just looks bizarre. More imperfections weren’t even allowed in the system–there’s no way to add scars or acne, for example. There is something to be said about sticking to the idealized body: the world is not designed for those who don’t fit the ideal–even the virtual world.
This is my final self.
In my next post, I’ll talk about how the necessarily idealized nature of the virtual body has created a new body politics of physical transcendence, looking at current issues in pop culture (Avatar and Surrogates, for example).
Edit: Alison brought up an excellent point, in that I should have included other avatars to see if they matched the idealized body. That was going to be included in my next post, but it probably fits better here. Here are a few screen caps of avatars in the starting screen:
(As you can see, I’ve since figured out how to fix my avatar slightly)
While this is a small sample, it is representative of the typical player I encountered within the startup area. (I’m focusing on the startup area because other areas tend to branch out into subcultures. While this is interesting, I just don’t have enough time in this travelogue to look at those.) These avatars are young, well-dressed, and hot: ideal bodies. My more realistic avatar was totally out of place. While it’s possible that these all look like their users, it’s a statistical unlikelihood that so many hot people would be playing Second Life at one time. More likely, these are all what the users want to look like.
Possibly Relevant Posts:
- Our Avatars, Ourselves: How Do We Construct Bodily Identity on the Internet? (6) | Sara Hardwick
- Virtual Bodies or TwitRage: Two Ideas for Travelogues (4) | Sara Hardwick
- Hotter Than Reality By Far: Idealized Bodies in the Digital Realm (1) | Sara Hardwick
7 Comments
I really liked this post. I’m not exactly sure how Second Life works, but once you walked around (if you got that far), did you see the avatars that other players created? I’d be curious to know if they were mostly idealized.
I actually wondered that too when I first read your post…. Aren’t there a lot of different sub communities within Second Life? Do the body types you see differ depending on where you are there?
Clearly, the white smoke is God.
my avatar is hot woman with a cat head and fishnet stockings. really. I quit going on SL because my computer is very old and starts straining and I fear it will not have a second life if I push it too hard.
I did however, spend some time with the bf in SL because he was creating machinima. I watched him create buildings, characters with weird heads, ninja moves for the characters, animation sequences, etc.
of course, we attempted having sex with another character. this was actually hilarious – we went to one of the islands that encourages this behavior, then he morphed his body into a more ‘acceptable’ form, and we found this girl on a bed and approached her. it was awkward to say the least. and eventually a more virile (read: experienced) person came and took over and pretty much kicked us out haha. it was a lot of fun though =)
a friend of mine regularly conducts classes and meetings and such in SL – he’s really quite the expert. let me know if you want to get in touch with him for any info, etc.
@Alison Excellent point. I’ve updated my post with some other avatars.
@Lauren Marie I wanted to look at subcultures, but that sadly made the cut with the shorter travelogue time. Which is probably a good thing, cause I can’t really figure out how to find anything there.
I know! I tried to go online today to see how the avatar creation worked and to check out the community since I have never been on it before. I just gave up cause it was too time intensive. Maybe when I have more time in my first life, I can do some ethnographic study.
Yeah, I made a pretty bad choice for this travelogue. Although people on twitter have been relatively calm for the past few days, so my twitter rage idea would have been even worse.