Avatar Sex – the Joy of the Not-Real

Proceedings of the 21st British HCI Group Annual …, 2007

Second Life, a participant-created multi-user virtual environment (MUVE), gained sudden media acclaim in 2006. Prior to that, the world was developing many of the characteristics that have come into their own today, such as virtual fashion lines, a thriving virtual economy, scripted interactive furniture, vehicles, and toys. Perhaps not surprisingly, much of the early content was adult in nature, from cyberstrip clubs to kinky lingerie, sex animations, and interactive virtual genitalia. More surprising was the visibility and prevalence of the BDSM (bondage, discipline, and sadomasochism) subculture. In this paper, we report results from a two-year study of the BDSM subculture in Second Life, combining virtual ethnography and artifact analysis with recent HCI theories of experience design to understand how and why this complex phenomenon emerged from Second Life users. We contend that the participant-created world enables the construction of powerful aesthetic experiences, and that these experiences are made possible by the interweaving of visual, literary, and interaction aesthetics.

What do interactions in virtual spaces suggest about everyday life in the digital age? How do interactions in virtual spaces shape everyday life in the digital age? Guided by hypermodern theory, I conduct participant observation in the social virtual world Second Life to provide tentative answers to those questions. I suggest that Second Life is both a social psychological playground where participants enjoy individualistic fantasies and a virtual community where they collaborate on collective projects. When people define the virtual as real, it is real in its consequences. Accordingly, social virtual spaces such as Second Life offer sociologists unique opportunities for research, education, intervention, and hence, the development of a virtual imagination.

What do interactions in virtual spaces suggest about everyday life in the digital age? How do interactions in virtual spaces shape everyday life in the digital age? Guided by hypermodern theory, I conduct participant observation in the social virtual world Second Life to provide tentative answers to those questions. I suggest that Second Life is both a social psychological playground where participants enjoy individualistic fantasies and a virtual community where they collaborate on collective projects. When people define the virtual as real, it is real in its consequences. Accordingly, social virtual spaces such as Second Life offer sociologists unique opportunities for research, education, intervention, and hence, the development of a virtual imagination.

Avatars are traditionally understood as representing their human counterparts in virtual contexts by incorporating many aspects of a person's real world physical characteristics within the virtual form. An alternate approach, in which avatars are instead imbued with non-human characteristics, challenges the limitations of solely anthropomorphic principles and expands the potential of avatars for virtual world interaction and communication. This paper provides a brief history of nonanthropomorphic avatars, with a focus on exploring the current use of such avatars in virtual worlds. In order to explain the shift in degree of anthropomorphism, we discuss Goffman's theory of symbolic interactionism, which holds that the self is constructed as a persona through social performance and relates identity to social behavior rather than appearance. Since nonanthropomorphic avatars are persistent characters engaged in a prolonged performance in virtual worlds, their use also may motivate emerging social mores, politics and ideologies. This paper argues that such avatar species create new social interactions and modes of communication that may signal interesting directions for future research.

Second Life (SL) is one of the best known virtual lands, and enables online personae called avatars to live out and experience a second life. SL symbolizes a utopian world- the place where the femininity is free from the restrictions of political and societal norms built upon obedience, devotion and classification. The authors hope that this paper will elucidate and highlight how conservative, suppressed or geek woman identities in real-life can turn into free spirited three-dimensional avatars desperately willing to lose ties to real life. How and why the digitally living-pictorial women characters embody themselves? What are the driving forces for the altered egos to create their ideal selves on changing their docile bodies into winged creatures with stiletto heels? Keywords: Second Life (SL), fused identities, online personae, feminine personhood

IR14: The 14th annual conference of the Association of Internet Researchers

The study of the player-avatar relationship has been central to scholars of video games and virtual worlds. Work has attempted to explain the relationship by focusing on the technologies of social presence, the socio-emotional relationship between players and avatars as distinct social others, the capability of players to adopt the personae of their avatars, and the psychological merging of player and avatar as a unified person. While these approaches are useful in explaining specific forms and types of player-avatar relationships, they tend to adopt qualitativelydifferent approaches to the phenomenon that limit their ability to inform one another and, in turn, our understanding of the holistic player-avatar experience. To this end, the following paper demonstrates how player-avatar archetypes generated from narrative analysis can be reanalyzed for dimensions of character attachment to highlight intersections with agency and intimacy, and suggests the utility of such an approach to understanding the larger video game entertainment experience.

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Lacan did not propose a totalized subject, but he proposed a divided one whose representation is structured in each interaction with its peers through Saussure's argumentative language. This shows the real, the imaginary or the symbolic as (a), (a') or (A). This study tries to propose and discuss that it is currently possible to establish virtual issues, taking into account social and psychological effects of the cyberspace and the capacity to decide and execute actions. Virtually, the representation is given by the Avatar known as (A'), since it is an evolution of the Other (A). This interaction is being done through the use of language, with the construction of signifieds and signifiers. Signifieds are conceived in the virtual world and signifiers in the real one, but the last one could allow the first one to materialize the Other (A) in the Avatar (A'). Second Life is a metaverse, a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG), which shows 3D virtual wo...

Virtual reality (VR) is a term that identifies computer generated environments that involves various forms and levels of interaction and immersion with the users’ position and surroundings. Originally inspired by science fiction, today virtual reality is commonly used in entertainment industry, in tactical combat stimulations, medicine, psychology and aviation. With a revenue of products that is expected to reach 5.2 billion USD in 2018 and a dramatic rise of users from 6.7 Million in 2015 to 43 Million user in 2016 (Statista, 2016) VR platforms manifests themselves as a mecca for a wide range of users from teenagers to 40+ users where everyone can exist in their own forms (a.k.a Avatars or Aliases). VR and Augmented Reality (AR) applications form a type of Heterotopia that Foucault described as seemingly open spaces, where the only initiated body can access (Vidler; Foucault; Johnston, 2014, p.22). From gaming, chat rooms, to artworks; initiation options vary in hardware from PCs (46% of users in 2016), to Gaming Consoles (28% of users in 2016) to Mobile (26% of users in 2016). Its projection also extend to real world communities, real life relationships, and a separate virtual economy; VR and AR are topics that raises many questions on the political, economic, social and theoretical level, that deserves analysis and study. Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) as the founding fields that creates VR has long been dominated by males, Cyberfeminism and Cyborg feminism were theories that revolutionized the way we see gender in technology; Cyberfeminism emerged out of the awareness to the male dominance of technology, and encouraged ‘women’ to engage more with technology. It had two opinions within: One that favored existing outside the label of feminisms seeking the push for more knowledge of new media technologies as is, and the other that saw critical participation that surpasses the call for “all girls need modems” (Consalvo, 2003, p.2) as crucial to not only be an active participant of decision and policy making, but also to be able to utilize the mediums and tools we have to help everyone outside the Western, White, Technologically Privileged population online and offline (Consalvo, 2012). On another side stood Cyborg Feminism with the foundational work “A Cyborg Manifesto” (Haraway, 1991), that discussed the human-machine symbiosis, abolishing all boundaries of sex and gender, to establish the multi-gendered, multi-sexed, and non-binary “Cyborg”. This also opens the door for the role of corporeality and gender by Judith Butler (Butler, 1990), and the similarity between the fluid geographic nature of VR and fluid representations of its inhabitants. The paper the debates and previous discussion a topic that is relatively new in theoretical discussions; this paper tries to explore various gender theories and technology with focus on virtual realm, it explores various forms of virtual spaces, various gender and sexuality representations in them, and whether or not they are manifested in the same way real life is. It argues that virtual reality as a realm of parallel existence, as a heterotopic realm can be as space of amplifying the sexual representational norms that exists in real life, and yet also manage to create its own rule of the game. It uses the world of “Second life” as a focus of study, both by the author of the paper, or by other studies conducted on Second Life population.

2010