Really

A few months ago, I got an email from a virtual world training company, that stated that prejudice is eliminated in virtual worlds, since “everybody can choose their own appearance.” Of course, prejudice and bias is as common in virtual worlds as in any other place where people interact: it runs rampant. Hamlet Au (nee Linden) described the negative comments one Second Life user received when she went from white and blonde to “a staggeringly attractive, astoundingly photo-realistic, young African-American woman”. Nick Yee has written about “The Transfer of Stereotypes and Prejudice” in games, including how male and female characters are treated differently by other players.

All of which leads to the question posed by Ren Reynolds at Terra Nova: Do virtual worlds liberate us from prejudices, or reinforce dominant stereotypes? Another claim that’s often heard is how virtual worlds lets people express their “real” self. Yet, it often seems that our real selves are tall, thin, muscular and/or voluptuous. I’ve heard SL business owners describe how they use female avatars in business meetings, since it seems to encourage “better behavior” in clients, or trying to match the appearance of potential customers, in order to put them at ease.

It seems that we are leaning more to the reinforcement of biases than liberation, but I wonder if people are going to get tired of having to appear in a certain way in order to be accepted? Is there a point where it gets disconcerting to realize that a large part of your social network has an image of you that is vastly different than your real physical appearance?

Another question is whether virtual worlds like Second Life even allow the easy creation of avatars that realistically depict different body types, ethnic backgrounds, and disabilities (the avatar described in Hamlet Au’s article was a custom creation by a skilled avatar designer). In Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud describes how realistic depictions of women and minorities did not appear in comics until there were a substantial number of women and minority comic book creators. Are we going to have to wait for a similar type of evolution in virtual worlds (or do we get to look forward to more worlds based on dolls and ponies)?

Update: I just saw Fleep Tuque’s Open Letter to SL Skin Designers talking about the difficulty of trying to offer a diverse set of avatars to potentially hundreds of new SL users (in an educational setting). She says, “ There are virtually NO fully transferable skins for folks who wish to have an african, latino, asian, or other non-white skin type.” Clearly, the default avatars offered by Linden Lab are not sufficient, and it is interesting that while non-white avatars are available for sale, they are not as freely available as other types. Is the scarcity a result of the difficulty in creating them, or because of a (perceived) lack of interest?