Examining Gender, Race and Body Image in a Virtual World

The above two images are my avatar interacting with someone in this world.  This is what my avatar originally looks like.  This person was real cool to talk with, she was from England.

Here I changed my avatar to a women.  I had everyone looking at me and wondering why my avatar had a guys name instead of a woman.

I am still here trying to talk to people, after a few rude rants I finally start informing them what I was doing and that thought it was pretty cool and could not believe how they themselves reacted to my different avatar.

These groups of people were real nice at the end however at the beginning they were very judging,  This screenshot shows me saying bye to them.

Here I changed my character to a zombie type avatar.  I got a bad experience in this world, I got called names and tons of swearing.  I left and went to another world.

This is is my zombie character in a hotel area, and I meet people from all over the world.  They were super nice and not judging my avatar.  We actually all talked about our countries which was super cool.

This was a cool assignment to do.  I had problems with secondlife at first then after a couple reboots, I was able to use it.  I entered a couple worlds were no one was one or choose not to talk.  Then I went into this world that looked like a plaza, and meet a nice person from England.  When I changed my avatar to a women and went to another world, I got judged right away.  They weere like how come I had a girl avatar but a male name ID.  Then I got jokes and even sweared at.  I talked and told them what I was doing and why.  They all thought it was cool and found out for themselves that they do judge people in these worlds.  Then I changed my avatar to a zombie type.  I went into this world were it was real bad, lots of swearing, profiling, just overall bad.  I had to leave because they were very mean.  Then I went to a hotel type world were I meet people from various parts of the world and they were awesome and did not judge and were not mean, they were very welcoming.

This is a final in our class, where we were asked to navigate through secondlife worlds using different avatar and seeing peoples reactions.  Here is a few screenshots of my different avatars in secondlife worlds.  It is a final exercise from the Immersive Education course that I am taking at Boston College.  The course is called Discovering Computer Graphics.  For details, visit the immersive BC portal at http://ImmersiveEducation.org/@/bc