SL Creativity

Thinking about identity

August 2, 2006 on 2:57 pm | In Uncategorized |

Online Identity: some thoughts is a really interesting article I just read. I have been thinking a lot about the role the strong emotional attachment we feel to our avatars and how much of a sense of presence you feel when you meet people in SL. This is really one of the ways I believe that SL augments the web in interesting ways.

Resident Anya Ixchel lines up some of these issues in a really good way. I especially enjoyed her extensive account of avatar customization:

• 42 different skins until i found the perfect skin shade and texture I liked

• hundreds of different elements of my body shape - in the end I bought a default shape because somebody else did it so much better than I could manage

• over 60 different hairstyles

• the skin I am wearing here comes with 8 different make-up shades, from natural to glamorous. I started wearing the glamorous one (heavy red lipstick and lots of smoky eyeshadow) as default but now I prefer the natural look - soft pink natural lips and just a touch of eyeliner.

• having said that, I was not happy with the “natural look” eyelashes, so in this image you can see my new “long and lush” eyelashes. Learning how to position the individual lashes in this set was more complicated than building my virtual house and flattening the land the put it on.

• and I have at least 80 different outfits, 5 different sets of jewellery, and 22 pairs of shoes for different occasions. Some of my shoes are scripted to include special animated walks, or to change colour with a voice activated command.

• next comes my animations. I have a special set of animations so that my avatar will randomly vary her sitting position / standing position / flying technique / landing technique / response to other avatars.

• following on from the response to other avatars, I have a set of commands to animate myself and others with their permission - to hug them, jump on them, greet them in certain ways etc… These animations are really helpful with respect to interpersonal connections in world, though I don’t use them with many people because I don’t know many people well enough to be hugging them or tickling them or making physical contact with them!

This is a true testament to the efforts a lot people put into their appearance in SL. Going down that list you might suspect we’re dealing with a shopoholic here, but Anya outlines the thoughts that go into creating your presence very well. Check this quote:

Second Life supports all different forms of avatars - dragons, goths, tiny creatures, furries and so on. I didn’t choose a purely fantasy image because I am not engaging in any sort of serious fantasy roleplaying and when I am there I am being my real self.

I feel this ties in well with my earlier musings on Immersion or Augmentation and really speak to the strong sense of identity people have described to me during my conversations over the past weeks.

With SL you can currently express yourself with things like the above mentioned as well as your creations, chats, profile etc. Websites such as Myspace has shown to an overwhelming extent how much sense having an online presence makes to many people. SL takes this a few steps further now and one can only begin to imagine how many more of these are many more ahead of us.

License

This work is published under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License.