Examining Gender, Race and Body Image in a Virtual World

In this assignment, I visit a few different destinations in Second Life, each time changing the appearance of my avatar. The goal of this assignment was to see how users of Second Life react to different types of avatars, with different genders, races, or clothing choices.

Here is the first world I entered, London. I went in with the avatar I had used in previous Second Life assignments.

Here is the second avatar I changed to. Someone started talking to me here, maybe because I had changed to a female avatar.

I ran into Filipe when I went back to London after changing my avatar.

Here I changed my avatar again. The interactions I had with people in this world weren't much different, so I went into another world.

This is the Blarney Stone world, which was a little busier than the London world, at least in that there were more people in a smaller area. I tried talking to people using nearby chat, but aside from a few explicit comments from other Second Life users, not much was said.

Changing my avatar once again

I have changed my avatar one last time, and as I was still in the Blarney Stone world, I decided to try one more world.

This is the Inspire Space Park world. I can't really say a whole lot about the reactions of people here, I tried to engage in conversation but didn't get much of a response, outside of one or two people.

Chatting with some Second Life users

More chatting

All in all, I really don't think I was treated any differently as I changed the appearance of my avatar. I did notice that a few people started to chat with me after changing from male to female and entering another world, but that could have been coincidental.

The voice conversations that were going on were very interesting to listen to. There was a lot of immature conversation taking place, as well as some explicit conversation, but I guess that's to be expected where everyone can stay relatively anonymous. I asked one of the people I was chatting with why they used Second Life, and the response was that "you can do whatever you want and there are no boundaries."