Tag: avatars
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My avatar, myself
My rez day as Kay Jiersen is this week, and combined with visiting a thought-provoking exhibition at GBTH, I have embodiment on my mind. I’ve written about this in the past, but years have gone by and it’s worth considering again. To age or not to age Since Kay was born, my physical self has…
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Where are the SL men?
A Study of Gender Presentation in Resident Profiles in Second Life Public Spaces When I returned to SL a couple months ago, I noticed that there seemed to be a lower percentage of apparently male avatars than I remembered from 2010-2015. I wondered if my chosen destinations were female-leaning, so I began jumping to areas…
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The world, three years later
Other than volunteering at the Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education conferences for a couple years, I haven’t been in Second Life since very early 2016. Instead, I played some video games (ArcheAge, Subnautica, No Man’s Sky) and learned to make vector art in the time I had to play at my computer. My curiosity…
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I’d love a virtual world/MMORPG mashup
Second Life isn’t a place I spend much time now, though my posts about SL continue to be get the most traffic and my daily companions also have unused, long time SL avatars. I’m more active in ArcheAge than ever. I left my drama-filled guild and now spend most of my time with my game…
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Second Life: conference, land sale
I’m happy to say that I’ll be volunteering at the Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education (VWBPE) conference again this year. It takes place from March 9-12 in SL and OpenGrid and everyone is welcome to attend, no charge. Some of the sessions are also streamed live and recorded to watch later. And that’s where I…
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Identity: Tell me, who are you?
Who are you? Who are you now, and is that the same person you always are and always were? I’ve always played with identity. As a child I was imaginative and, let’s say, indiscriminate about the boundary between reality and fantasy. The first sign of this may have been when I was five and screamed…
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Does the Internet make me more girly?
This might come as a shock, but I’m not really a glamorous sort of gal. I know, I know! Most introverted middle-aged women who blog about tech and anthropology are nearly indistinguishable from Angelina Jolie, but I guess I’m an outlier. So, I’ve been thinking about how the Internet shapes my superficial performance of femininity. When…
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Incidental bias is still offensive
Recently I became a volunteer tester for a new game*. In this system, the default avatar is non-human and apparently without gender. The company currently provides thirteen additional pre-built complete human avatars: seven male, six female, with some diversity of appearance. You could think of it like the array of mesh avatars for new users in Second…
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VWBPE conference, day 3 (part 2)
The afternoon session “Educators and the Second Life Viewer”, led by Oz Linden, wasn’t a topic that had direct impact on me, but I was curious. Apparently, I wasn’t the only one: Oz began with an overview of how the Lab does viewer development and release and then the questions came flooding in. Most of…
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What is age in a virtual world?
Below is my contribution to Strawberry Singh’s “First & Recent Challenge”: two photos of my first Second Life avatar, wearing similar tops and standing in front of blooming trees in my (virtual) backyards on the SL mainland, separated by almost a decade. I’ve been in a few discussions about representing age in virtual worlds recently and this…