Saturday, July 14, 2012
Second Life
This article really poked out to me. I like that it was on the whole Second Life online world. I enjoyed reading about second life in the previous article Just Like ME only better. This article was about how gender roles are on this online cyber world of Second life. I like how it was from a women's perspective. They did a study on these two women that go into the Second Life world with a male avatar. This was because it was figured that the woman would be objectified and attacked sexually. Another thing they talked about in the article was gender stereotypes. It said that most of the men and women that were in the online world were "attractive". Meaning that most of the men were tall and muscular and all the women were sleek slender and had big boobs. I feel like that is how most people who choose to engage in this online world would make their avatar to look "perfect" or what society today would think is perfect. I enjoyed this article because of the way people really create fake people to have two lives. To me it is kind of crazy.
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Hi Beef31,
ReplyDeleteI thought this article was fascinating too. It was interesting that it was based off the experiences of several women who did not normally play in these online game worlds, and their experiences are quite eye-opening. Like you mentioned, they felt wary of interacting with other avatars at first for fear of being objectified. For women, that can be a real concern in real life too–unwanted flirtation and objectification is definitely uncomfortable, so it was interesting to how this sort of fear was present in the female researchers, even thought they would be participating through their avatars in an alternate cyber world. I also talked about the dominance of stereotypical standards of beauty too. Isn't it weird that in these online worlds, people tend still gravitate towards the same ideals of big-breasted women with tiny waists, or tall men with muscular bodies, when they have so many options for their avatar? Actually, maybe it's not so weird.
Also, I started thinking about players choosing avatars of the opposite gender. For one of the women, I can understand how it felt safer using a male avatar. Would she make him tall and muscular too? But what about the other way around? What if a man uses a female avatar? Does he knowingly choose that because he'll like the attention? Are there benefits to having a female avatars, such as getting more gifts? The researchers did not discuss any pros of having a female avatar, but maybe it's because they didn't ramp up the sexual appeal as other players did. I think it's funny to think about how many people are masquerading as the other gender, and why. Just how many of these "sexy" female avatars in games such as Second Life are really just guys?