Tag: sex
-
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…
-
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…
-
VWBPE conference, day 2
It’s the second day of the 2015 Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education conference! One thing that I can’t help noticing: my Kay avatar has existed in Second Life for five years, which is essentially “middle aged” for this world. At VWBPE sessions, it’s not unusual for more than half of the avatars to be older than her. The…
-
Teledildonics, VR movies, holograms… what a roundup!
I’m trying to be more active on Twitter lately because I find fascinating articles daily but don’t have time — or enough insightful thoughts — to write a lot of commentary. You can follow me @AvatarAnthro if you want to keep up with that. In the meantime, here are some very recent favorites: Finding the…
-
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…
-
How much does “IRL” information matter in a virtual space?
When you meet someone in a video game or virtual world and start to form a friendship, what level of real world information do you expect? The classic age/sex/location? Career or school level? Photos? Link to a credible online profile? Voice chat? Conversely, what level of real world information do you offer? Why? I’m deeply curious…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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.…
-
Reason magazine’s Video Game Nation cover: misogynist or really damn misogynist?
By way of a story link, I found myself at Reason magazine’s site. There I discovered that the theme of the June 2014 issue was “Video Game Nation”. My reaction was Then I saw the cover art for the print edition: And my reaction became The image is a riff on a Grand Theft Auto…