Avatar Skins: Rescripting a Female Body in a Virtual Learning Space, Second Life

• In Event: BodyWorks: (Pre)scriptive Embodiment in Diverse Educational Spaces

Abstract

This paper discusses avatar skins as sites to trouble prescriptive avatar body design structures in one virtual world space to elucidate the pervasive gendered and heteronormative design embodiment scripting that occurs in a virtual world, Second Life ™. I envision Second Life as a safe educative space for learning about identity and negotiating a marginalized body.

“You can always tell a male gender swapping” answered Kay. “How?” asked the researcher. She types, (laughing) Only a man would design a woman to look like ‘Barbie.’ (Author 1, 2013).

Second Life (SL) is one online virtual world and learning environment where residents (users) engage and socialize with other residents to create online “second lives.” One critical aspect of living in SL is the creation of an avatar who is a player’s visual representative and a form of embodiment placed within a virtual space. Design prescriptive frameworks (affordances, constraints and conventions) facilitate user identity, gender, embodiment, and performance across many (if not all) Massively Multiplayer Online Games and Virtual Worlds. However, most design frameworks are not user-centered (Antonenko, Dawson & Shilpa, N.D.; McArthur & Jenson, 2014). In virtual world bodies are produced, reproduced and disciplined through power and culture (Boellstorff, 2011), thereby undermining their full empowering potential.

The methodology for this research is a multi-year Auto/ethnography, drawing from the analytic and reflexive data sources of an avatar researcher/participant and avatar participant qualitative interviews within the virtual community.

The research analyzes avatar embodiment (affordances, constraints and conventions) in Second Life. In so doing, I challenge assumptions about gender and heterosexuality that infuse virtual learning spaces by demonstrating and analyzing pre-scripted design affordances that limit players choices in designing Avatars and their “body skins”. I demonstrate that Western heteronormative pre-scripted design affordances, limit player choices and, at least in Second Life, the possibility for subverting such constraints through player mediated affordances called ‘body skins’.

Significance: to highlight the practice of the body in diverse educational sites and to elucidate scripted heteronormative body design stereotypes in Second Life as a means of what Jane Roland Martin would consider, body/gender mis-education (Martin 2002; 2007). The research underscores the need for game design affordances to meet the needs of players and, more importantly, the educative potential for marginalized students exploring identity through social interaction in virtual worlds and avatar body construction.

Author

• Janet Handwerk, Oklahoma State