I am not quite sure how long Linden Lab have been pointing people to a Flickr pool for promotional snapshots, but I will say it’s a bloody good idea and I’m going to dip into it! Discover Magazine had the same idea as me for the above picture too … wait wait I’m getting confused, I saw it there first! Anyway, Discover Magazine have an article up regarding skin colour in Second Life : Skin Color Still Matters in Video Games . The headline is a little misleading, I’ll get to that shortly.
The article is based on research by Jong-Eun Roselyn Lee : Does virtual diversity matter?: Effects of avatar-based diversity representation on willingness to express offline racial identity and avatar customization. I haven’t read the research paper, only the brief information on that linked page but Discover Magazine delves into it a bit deeper and explains how the study worked :
Lee gathered 56 study participants — half identifying as white and half identifying as black. She then had them read a fabricated magazine story titled “Meet the Coolest ‘Second Life’ Residents.” The eight “Second Life” avatars profiled in the story were either all white, in the low-diversity scenario, or an equal mix of white, black, Hispanic and Asian, in the high-diversity scenario.
She then had them perform two tasks: Create and customize their own virtual avatars, and rate their willingness to reveal their real racial identity through the appearance of their virtual avatar.
She found that black participants reported less willingness in the low-diversity scenario, and that they also created whiter avatars, as judged by objective raters. By comparison, white study participants were largely unaffected by either the high-diversity or low-diversity scenarios.
So this is a small study and doesn’t involved enough people for it to be the sort of vibrant study many would like to see. Another interesting fact is that the 56 people did not actually engage with Second Life in a social sense. They weren’t left to wander around and report their findings.
However the problem with a study such as this is the environment. There are quite a few issues with skins in Second Life. I’ve often seen people bemoaning the lack of choice of darker skins. There are several reasons for this but the main ones seem to centre around darker skins being far harder to give life to in a world like Second Life. The textures don’t stand out as much and therefore fewer content creators want to make them and fewer customers find them appealing. This may explain why the black participants created whiter avatars, those avatars may have just looked more appealing on the screen due to the design challenges of darker skins.
I don’t think it’s wise to read too much into the decision to use whiter skins. Strawberry Singh has many images of herself and friends in all sorts of different skins. Strawberry kindly allows her images to be shared under a creative commons license.
The thing with a virtual world such as Second Life is that content creators can and will make skins for all sorts of markets. However people also join virtual worlds and MMO’s such as World Of Warcraft to be someone or something else. I mean they may want to be an Elf, Dwarf, Wizard or more importantly Orc and there really aren’t that many great Orc skins out there, I’m not sure what a real Orc would make of this, they’d probably end up playing a halfling due to the lack of skin choice. I would imagine Orc skins are hard to make to be fair. Then there are those who want to feel the future, and for that we dip back into the Linden Lab Flickr pool.
So as we can see Second Life offers a wide and varied choice of avatar identity. The larger issue when it comes to ethnicity and diversity is whether people feel reluctant to identify with certain races due to the nature of the world around them. On that point a more serious issue is raised in the Discover Magazine article, This is a quote from someone who has engaged socially within Second Life :
One of the strangest things that I felt going through Second Life was that I was really one of the only black avatars pretty much everywhere I went… As I started to realize that I was literally one of the only black people on Second Life, I started to wonder what everybody else thought about the only token black guy walking around by himself.
That’s a far more disturbing issue. If people are reluctant to wear a skin because they feel they will stand out and it makes them uncomfortable, that’s far more worrisome than whether a skin looks good or bad. Second Life is a very diverse platform, there’s no doubt about that but that quote suggests that it’s not quite as diverse as I’d like to see. I would like to think that there aren’t too many people who feel that way about wearing a skin.
Virtual worlds and virtual reality offer people different ways to engage, they offer ways for people to explore on a different footing but I really hope they don’t become places where people are afraid to identify as themselves out of discomfort, rather than personal choice.
You’ve provided a thoughtful and moderate response, which is much more temperate than the reception the researcher is receiving elsewhere. Thanks for bringing some sense to this. I agree with you: I don’t think it’s wise to read too much into this small-scale study. But at the same time there is a kernel of truth in there that we should probably not ignore. I also agree with you that I hope there are not too many people who would hesitate to wear any skin except white for fear that they would stand out in SL. That’s kind of creepy to contemplate.