Fourth of March is tomorrow

Dibbell talks about how the issue of gender gets murky in the world of MOO. Murky because it foregrounds the issue of how gendered one's identity is, and in Dibbell's book, more so for female. I must be careful in trying to mirror or fit Dibbell's experience to my own in Second Life as I believe the interface makes a lot of difference – text based vs visually rich 3D environment. In a text based environment, there is gaps for readers to fill in between the words. No matter how precise the descriptions are, there are always room for ambiguity, imagination and creativity when readers try to visualize the descriptions. These gaps allows the reader to project his/her own perception onto the description and the same description may yield different visualization for different people, especially more so for readers of different culture. After visualizing the descriptions, the reader then try to characterize the descriptions. One good example is how often when there is a movie adaption of a book, readers of the book goes “that is not really how I imagined him/she/it to look and sound like”. As for a visually rich 3D environment like Second Life, the first step of visualization is stripped away and the visuals attack the 'readers' (in this case, viewer perhaps? Hmm lets just use 'players') directly.

I would like to discuss a little on the idea of 'monstrosity' as mentioned in the Mutation.fem reading before talk about some of my experience in Second Life. With regards to the point of female characters in games tending to exhibit unrealistically large bodily proportions, perhaps precisely because the issue of gender is so murky in online world exaggerations have to be made in if they were to come out as a definitive female or male character. As female characters in games, especially First Person Shooter, perform actions that are typically masculine, female character perhaps need to have an exaggerated appearance in order to maintain the notion that they are very female characters albeit doing typically masculine things.

Okay, now the boring bits are over, I shall proceed on to my 'adventures' in Second Life. First and foremost, the thought of cross dressing never occurred to me when I signed up for Second Life. The only consideration I was making when signing up is whether to let my avatar reflect more of myself or should I try to come out as a different character than my real life persona. Perhaps subconsciously, I am like Dibbell towards the end of the chapter that, I was afraid to be found out.

With regards to the issue of monstrosity, all I can say is, it seems that in Second Life, you are a monster if you are not a monster. What I mean is that I see more flying spaghetti monsters or 3 headed ogres or things that I cant even describe (maybe it is due to the way I just randomly teleport around islands. Hmm I should have just stayed in Newbieland or the virtual NUS campus) than beings that resemble human. Even humanoid figures have bleached hair with blue skin or impossibly muscled chest and arms and small frail legs.

There are a few times I go up to a female looking avatar and ask if they are really female in real life, most would immediately reply 'yes'. I had one incident where this fella got so offended by that question that she (or he or it? I dont know) chased me around the island scolding until I logged out of the game 10 mins later (hmm I should have just teleported away on hindsight but I am not sure if that fella can track my location).

Discussion question: Is the ambiguity of the text based world a better arena for gender and identity experimentation than a rich visual world?