Let me ask you a question: just how long did it take you to settle on the appearance of your avatar? And how many conscious and unconscious choices went into determining your SL look?It fascinates me that, while some of my SL friends haven’t changed their avis’ appearance very much since the first week of play, others almost continually morph from furry to neko to human and back. I have my own rituals of appearance: my SL day is either a black hair day or a white. I may dally with other skins and shapes but they just don’t FEEL like me.
So when I stumbled across the Avatar Identity Research Center, in a trawl through Events yesterday, I had to find out more. What is it that drives us to choose the physical details we do?
I won’t give you any answers here…there is more fun to be had following the link. Rivka Rau and Noctis Oh, sociologists in both RL and SL, founded the Research Center and are keen to expand their research into residents’ perceptions of other avatars. What you will be treated to is a literate and thoughtful slideshow on our search for SL identity, created by Darwin Mizser, the designer behind AVid fashions and the Research Center’s current host. Mizser’s slideshow discusses the restraints and freedoms allowed by technologies available to SL designers and the power of appearance to affect our own vision of our SL and RL selves. The designer makes the provoking claim that an SL avatar offers “ a more accurate portrayal of one’s soul than is the arbitrary real life body.”
I’m not sure if I am entirely convinced by the argument. After all, decades of my own work have gone into creating the wonder that is the RL Miss Cortes, not to mention all the centuries of happy accidents in my ancestry. The marriage of research project and fashion promotion is also a little confusing. But I quite like that confusion. Identity is a subtle concept after all.
Avatar Identity Research Center
