Tag: gender
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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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AFK sex, the popularity paradox, and male avatars
Going back into Second Life after three years has given me a lot to think about. I wander looking for interesting things and people, then spend equally as much time pondering what I’ve found. I’ve started several posts but, being a methodical person, I keep stopping and asking myself more questions. Could this be the…
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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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The sexism in games debate, Auto-tuned
Jonathan Mann’s “Are Video Games Sexist?” Auto-tune rebuttal is fantastic. It’s catchy and amusing — except for the screenshots of hate tweets near the end of the video — but it also is a good little primer in how to think critically about an argument that could seem persuasive on the surface, but is actually a…
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Fighting about games: the incredibly nasty last two weeks
If you’re part of — or an observer of — gaming culture, you might be aware of the ugliness lately. If not, I encourage you to click away and go back to playing happily, because this is a subject that angries up the blood. I’ve been watching the recent rounds of discord in the gaming…
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Thoughts on virtual gender, appearance, and performance
Over at Motherboard is a short piece about a virtual gender stereotype experiment conducted at Stanford University. Basic concept: users competed against bots to complete math problems. Regardless of physical world gender, when users were assigned male avatars to compete against female bots, they were most successful. The avatar representations were simply cartoon faces (dark eyes and hair, pale…
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The complicated problem of female sexualization in games and virtual worlds
This is an opinion piece and I’m going to begin this post with my conclusion: games that have voluptuous shapes and skimpy clothing for female characters need to have modest and less curvaceous options as well, to allow women to participate without being unwilling sexual objects. There are a few important words there, including options and unwilling.…
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Movements can reveal the gender of the human behind the avatar
Simon Bignell tweeted a link to an interesting study summary this morning. Researchers used a custom quest in World of Warcraft to examine the gameplay of 375 people. They found some differences in avatar choice, movement, and use of emoticons when a man played a female avatar, compared with others whose offline and online sex were matched.…
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Virtual gender expression
I have a male alt in Second Life, but he’s very lonely. Gender expression is fascinating and as many people have discovered, virtual worlds are fertile soil to explore the topic. It’s generally accepted that many female avatars are controlled by RL (“real life”) men, whether in SL or games, and a certain percentage of…