10 I Found My Dream Man(Men) on Second Life

People are constantly trying to modify their appearance; whether they change their hair color, buy new clothing, change their makeup, or add accessories (glasses, jewelry etc), it is all for the same reason: to alter their appearance to make themselves more attractive to others. To do all of these things requires quite a bit of time and money, however, the Internet has provided people with an outlet that enables them to alter their appearance with just a few clicks of the mouse. In Second Life, a virtual space, players are given the opportunity to modify their avatar, their digital self-representation, in any way they choose. Members of Second Life can alter their avatar’s appearance in so many different ways, I wouldn’t have even imagined half of the options. Players can change obvious things like clothing, hair color, height, gender but there are so many obscure characteristics that I didn’t even consider like chin width, eye spacing, teeth spacing and foot size. Nick Yee & Jeremy Bailenson studied how our digital self-representations could alter a person’s behavior in the virtual environment.

When I first started Second Life, I was prompted to select a name for my avatar; unfortunately, many of the names I would have liked to have, were already taken so I was forced to settle upon the name of Brooke Gourdou. After the name selection, I had to choose what my avatar would look like from a list of about 10 generic avatars; I chose the avatar “City Chic”, which appeared rather attractive. Once this was selected, I was placed on Orientation Island where I quickly altered the appearance of my avatar. Being on this Island made me feel a little bit more comfortable when I realized that there were other people like me who were a bit confused regarding what to do. I spent a significant amount of time modifying my avatar’s appearance knowing, that it would have a significant impact on how I would interact with others. As Yee and Bailenson state, “ the avatar is the primary identity cue in online environments… our avatars have a significant impact how we behave online” (274). I changed her hair, clothes, facial features and height to make her more attractive, confident and appealing towards other players; I shortened her skirt, put on more make-up, made her taller and lengthened and highlighted her hair to give off a model’s appearance. I figured the more confident my avatar appeared, the more social she would be and the greater the likelihood that others would interact with me.

As stated in the Yee & Bailenson article, the Proteus Effect is very prominent in the online environment, “users in online environments may conform to the expectations and stereotypes of the identity of their avatars…they conform to the behavior that they believe others would expect them to have” (274). In a sense, the Proteus Effect describes how it is expected that people will behave in a certain way depending on how they appear and are presented to others. For example, I specifically made my avatar especially attractive and alluring, and I believed that people expected her to be extremely sociable, outgoing, and talkative. This was because of the way I made my avatar appear: she had very revealing clothing, was very tall and wore a great deal of make-up.

After I stumbled upon the ‘flying’ feature, I was transported to a more remote part of the island where there were a number of people congregated. I quickly initiated a conversation with one of my fellow players, who exuded that tall, dark & handsome look. I started our interaction by saying, “Hey, this is my first time here, what are you up to?” He was very friendly and engaging and began to converse with me and developed into a rather in-depth conversation. I decided to explore the game a bit more by using the search button to find people who seemed attractive and who shared similar interests to me and decided to go to a clothing store.

According to Lee and Bailenson’s study, an individual’s likelihood to be intimate with an utter stranger depended on their attractiveness. They found evidence that participants who were more attractive were more willing to move closer to strangers and disclosed more information to strangers than participants who were unattractive. After having my fair share of interactions on Second Life, my findings were concurrent with Lee and Bailenson’s findings on attractiveness. However, it is important to note that in Lee & Bailenson’s study, the participants were unable to choose their attractiveness, while for my experience on Second life, I had the option to control everything about my appearance. When I was on the Orientation Island, before I altered my appearance, I did not stand close to any of the other players and did not engage any of them in conversations. I pretty much kept to my self and did not really venture towards any of the other members. However, once I changed my appearance for Brooke Gourdou, I felt a lot more comfortable and secure with my appearance and began to seek out people to interact with. When I met the ‘man of my dreams’ when I flew to the other side of the island, I immediately struck up a conversation with him and began to reveal quite a bit about myself. Knowing that other players would find my avatar extremely attractive and sociable, I began to play off of her appearance and acted the way people expected Brooke to be; to have high self – disclosure, to walk closer to people who I she was having a conversation with, and to have a more confident manner.

It’s very hard to disregard the presence of behavioral confirmation in my interactions on Second Life. It was clear that my ‘tall, dark and handsome’ friend found me attractive (he even said so) and for that reason decided to have as long of a conversation as he did with me. Behavioral confirmation (the notion that the expectations of one person cause another person to behave in ways that confirm the perceiver’s expectations) compounded with my own perceptions of my avatar’s attractiveness played an even bigger role in how I interacted with this player. As a result of this, we were able to have a more intimate conversation and learned quite a bit about each other. For Yee and Bailenson’s study, they purposely did not include the effect of behavioral confirmation in the experiment so that they could simply focus on “whether our changes in self-representations – independent of how others perceive us – cause the people behind the avatars to behave differently” (275). It was quite evident that our self-representations online can significantly effect our behavior both on Second Life and on any other collaborative virtual environment (CVE), but I think it is critical to also factor in the effects of behavioral confirmation in order to completely understand online interactions.