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My Other Self is an Ass-kicking Supermodel
By Celebrity Trollop | August 24, 2006
Lisa Galarneau writing at Terra Nova, a blog that follows MMOs from a research/academic perspective has been thinking about female gamer’s attitudes toward their avatars. The title of her blog post is the same one I used here — just because it tickled me. She adds the aside, “I swear, I need this bumper sticker.” Lots of us do (especially Sol Columbia!!)
Lisa continues,
It seems like just about every time I get together with female gamer friends, the topic of conversation inevitably (and much to my chagrin) turns to the cuteness of avatars and our frustration with the limited options we are usually given to control their attractiveness. I had a long, involved ranting session the other night, for instance, with another WoW gamer about how frustrating it is to play the Horde, mainly because the avatar customization options are limited to a few (arguably) unattractive races. We talked about how we both have female undead mages, whom we spent quite a bit of time trying to make as cute as possible, yet are still frustratingly unattractive. And how it disturbs us a bit that we care all that much, closet-inhabiting fashionistas though we might be.But I’m gonna confess. I do care. An unattractive avatar is so disruptive to my gameplay that I will stop playing if I can’t do something about it…
And she proceeds to discuss in detail some of the other theories about why women, in particular, seem to care a lot about playing attractive-to-her avatars. She concludes her post like this:
I left several Guild Wars guilds immediately after joining because they had badly designed guild tabards that didn’t match my outfits. That officially makes me shallow, doesn’t it?
Not in my opinion. One thing that constantly fascinates me about Second Life is just how much customization is possible — how people choose to represent themselves to others within that huge universe of possibilities is very interesting to me. Especially because I love the diversity of possibilities, not just in the realm of fashion, but also time and place. Pure Victoriana? Steampunk? Cyberpunk? 20s gangster moll? Second Life can cater to that. That’s a really remarkable thing, in my opinion.
Ms. Galarneau is looking for comments from female gamers — and I suspect I have more than a few among my readership. So that’s one reason for the link here, but also I think it’s just an interesting topic — definitely in the realm of fashion and style — because what is fashion if not some kind of fundamental form of self-expression?
I found a broader Second Life tie in at The Second Skin documentary blog, which is a documentary about how different people adapt, play, and use online worlds. Second Life features fairly prominently (I gather) since one of the “protagonists” of the film is in world DJ Nexeus Fatale. Film maker Victor Pineiro adds his own thoughts on this topic — and he’s also looking for some more subjects for his movie. Maybe you’re one of them? Have a look and find out.
Topics: Classified Highlights, Opinion |
This article is right but not anything new. I’ve been playing games since quake 2 and luckily I had 3d modelling skills because I hated the models they had to chose from, and I ended up making my own exactly how I wanted them to look. It is harder in WoW, but WoW is not that great of a game in my opinion, Items shouldn’t make the character, the skill of the player should, and with the right epics anyone can own anyone. That’s cool though, at e3 a large group of us veteran modellers, texture artists etc, stood around making fun of Blizzards pitiful people. City of Heroes has better customization for your characters, plus most of the new games coming will have a lot more. If you went to e3 this past year, you can see it’s something a lot of mmorpgs are integrating in. Guild Wars wasn’t the best game, but they could have worked harder on the customization level. I think the only mmo I liked straight off was Lineage 2, just because the Dark Elf female model actually slightly resembled me, and they all dressed similar too minus the armor, just the gothic look.
Posted by: KV on August 24th, 2006 at 3:55 pmI really do need that bumper sticker, but I’m that in real life too, so it might be redundant..ok, maybe not, damn genetics! ;P
That was a great article. I think I secretly might have sleep wrote it or something because it echoes so many conversations I’ve had over my online years. The stuff about WoW and City of Heroes really is dead on. I pretty much refused to play Horde because the avs are all ugly and would only play humans on the alliance side. I pretty much choose my race/class in MMOs based on what looks the best rather than skills and abilities (I played a high elven monk for a bit in EQ2 if that is at all enlightening lol). So yes, I’m also a bit vain or shallow about my avs, but it’s one aspect of online worlds I have a lot of fun with ;)
Posted by: Sol Columbia on August 24th, 2006 at 5:15 pm