CLASS 13: Identity in the Context of the Virtual Worlds

Identity in virtual worlds is one of the most fun things to create ans also often challenging,  People become avatars and often instead of making a character that resembles themselves they decide to create something they are not.  Which this cause everyone to judge and be mean to others.  When you go through different worlds for example, "secondlife", you see a lot of avatars that look different.  My experience in this worlds saw a lot cool characters, I even seen weird ones and also saw nude avatars, which made me raise my eye brows.  People judge each other in these worlds when they see avatars like this.  I for example experienced this in a class assignment, I had to change avatars and go through different worlds and see how people reacted or if they would talk to me.  I changed mine from a male to a female, so I had a female with a male name ID, well this caused people to turn theirs heads and question me and name calling started and whole bunch mean things happened.  I tired to prove to them that I was a male and was doing a class assignment but it was hard to convince some.  The one thing the article we just read says is that a lot of worlds allow people to be free and do a lot of things like nudity, sexual, fetish stuff.  I encountered this when i visited worlds, where I saw nude avatars and sexual gestures.  It is hard to prove if people are legit.  Virtual worlds can be fun also, it allows you to express your self and be someone you wish you were.  It also allows you to meet people and learn about things such as languages or where people are from and so on.  Identity is very important in virtual world and often times you either are excepted where ever one talk to you and so or your not accepted and no one talks to you therefore they are judging you.


When I first took this class and was introduced to avatars I had no idea what identity meant.  I thought it was to make sure to create something cool and it did not matter what it was.  When the weeks went on as I became more and more familiar with avatars I started to question if I really knew how important identity is when it comes to avatars in the virtual worlds.  When I was going between different avatars and different virtual world programs, I noticed the different avatars and so on.  I noticed some programs allowed you to be more free and others gave you only few things, so not as free.

One of the programs we used was Meshmoon.  Meshmoon allowed us to go through worlds and walk around and explore.  The avatars we used were avatars that were already their and we had to choose which one we wanted, so it was very limited.  Therefore you were choosing avatars that were really no your liking or style.  Meshmoon was cool because it allowed u to create our own world.  I really did not experience bad things like I did one some.

SecondLife was another program we used to go onto virtual world.  In SecondLife we created avatars to our liking, we had much more choices and it allowed us to make them as real as anything.  It allowed us to do whatever we wanted.  So identity in SecondLife could be whatever you wanted.  We didn't create worlds in there but we were asked to explorer worlds.  While doing this I experienced good and bad things,  The good was that were could communicate with others and those other were people from all over the world, so it was cool to learn about different languages and cultures form their respective countries.  The bad was, that there were a lot of name calling, sexual things, and etc.  This was very weird and also a clear eye opener , that people judge you as to what your avatar looks like and so on.

Identity to me in a virtual world is important.  There needs to be strict guidelines as to how an avatar needs to look like.  I feel it should be as close to who you really are in real life.  There also should be rules to prevent weirdos to say bad things or to do bad things.  People in virtual worlds do judge based on avatars, so identity plays a big role in Virtual World.  I never realized how important this was and is.

Throughout this course we had to do various things in virtual worlds.  I really enjoyed learning about avatars and identity.  I came into this course knowing nothing about graphics or avatars.  I leave with tremendous knowledge about the virtual world and other things.  Knowledge that I can pass on to others and knowledge that I know when you hear people talking about it.  The following pictures are my favorite that I took during the semester:

This is a final in our class, where we were asked to read about identity in the virtual world ans summarize it and then write paragraphs about what we know and learned through out the semester.  Here is a few screenshots of my avatar in meshmoon world, these were my favorite.  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

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