Image by Susanne Drechsler
Since the flat avatars of Project Mesh Revolution have provoked quite a lot of buzz – but also, a fair amount of anger from SLers who were expecting a standard mesh body — here's an apropos excerpt from Making a Metaverse That Matters.
While many people in the virtual world industry buy the myth that ultra-realistic human avatars should be the end goal, my reporting about what they did to Second Life suggests otherwise. Here's the excerpt:
Myth: Photo-realistic human avatars and world graphics are the Metaverse’s end goal
This is a favorite myth among metaverse advocates who consult or work for companies producing 3D graphics cards, 3D development software, and 3D engines.
There is actually no proven relationship whatsoever between the popularity of a metaverse platform and photo-realistic graphics. Despite this, a wealth of metaverse startups and platforms frequently announce new plans to roll out ever more realistic environmental graphics, and ever more eerily human-like avatars.
The very most popular platforms, Minecraft and Roblox, are intentionally low-fi, immersive through their physics and responsiveness. Their whimsical avatars are similarly abstract.
Why this is likely relates to their core user base: People in their teens and pre-teens, who are often still uncomfortable and unsure about their own real life identity and appearance. This seems even more acute for teen girls and young women, still negotiating the social expectations and judgements around their real life presentation; presenting them with a lifelike avatar to customize is effectively asking them to take even more social expectations and judgements.
We also have something of an opposite proof point.
At launch, Second Life avatars were human by default but not realistic. The internal prim creation tools encouraged the construction of avatar attachments (robot helmets, furry tails, etc.), which led to a wide variety of avatar types and environments to explore.
The arrival of mesh in Second Life in 2010 — high resolution 3D files created in offline software and then uploaded into the virtual world — greatly changed this dynamic:
Nick Yee has already spoken in Chapter 9 about the community moderation issues that realistic human avatars engender: Preference them in your virtual world, and all the hidden and not so hidden prejudices of our offline world come along with them.
Thanks to mesh and other graphics enhancements, Second Life avatars and environments now look as detailed and as vivid as those from top AAA games. (For those lucky enough to own a powerful PC.) However, this rise in visual quality has contributed little to actual user growth.
But by enabling ultra-realistic avatars, especially through mesh-based body attachments, mesh quickly altered the world’s culture. The Second Life web-based Marketplace accelerated this trend, since content creators now had incentive to create mesh avatar enhancements compatible with the most popular mesh bodies.
Within years, the virtual world’s economy came to be dominated by ultra-realistic avatars; the overall creative culture changed, accompanied by the rise of environments most suited to them — glamorous beachside homes and nightclubs, beautiful locales that resembled real life tourist destinations and locations for the latest reality TV show.
As Second Life’s economy snowballed around quality mesh items, so did its culture. While avatar fashion and virtual housekeeping were always a crucial part of the virtual world, the creative tools also attracted a cohort of creators and tinkerers more interested in using the platform as a multi-user game development space and all purpose sandbox space.
By and large, however, tinkerers of this type faded in prominence within the larger community, overwhelmed as it was by new fashion releases and shopping extravaganzas. (They still exist, but are less prominent in the community.)
Realistic human avatars also shape how the rest of the world takes shape:
“Once users are presented with a believably human template,” as researcher Nick Yee explains, "You want chairs and furniture and cars where your bodies can sit in and drive around, and you need large virtual closets to put all your virtual clothing and people are building these beautiful cantilevered houses by the beach side because that's what people do in the real world.”
While Linden Lab may have hoped Second Life users would define reality according to their wildest imagination, the realistic human avatars shaped how much of the world would evolve:
And with them came all the social problems typically associated with wealthy beach enclaves in the real world.
“[That's] where the racism and the sexism comes from," as Yee puts it. “Because when the avatars are sufficiently human to make human assessments upon, our inherent human biases come clawing into the digital world… It's almost unavoidable, because once you have bodies that are anywhere near realistic, people feel the need to dress up their bodies, and to look cooler than the next person. And suddenly you have this whole economy based around selling bodies and hair and body parts.”
To be clear, Second Life is overall an endlessly creative community that for the most part is highly positive and supportive. And the SL mesh community is incredibly creative and largely positive. At the same time, Linden Lab making attractive humans the default was (and is) a conduit for much player-to-player abuse.
I began noticing that as an embedded journalist very early on. Female avatars which were poorly customized often got roundly ridiculed by many in the user community; people who adjusted their avatar to look fat or disproportionate (because in a virtual world, why not) were jeered at and harassed.
Worse still, avatars which weren’t white regularly received racist comments and trolling. I've written about a woman, white in real life, who customized her avatar to look like an attractive Black woman — and was instantly hit with racist jibes, even by people she thought were her friends.
In the same way that Nick Yee's early Stanford studies suggest that users unconsciously bring the unwritten rules of eye contact and social distance with them in these virtual worlds, "a lot of racial norms, gender norms, and sexual harassment follows us in,” he tells me. “We shouldn't be surprised by it now.”
Much of these insights, by the way, are featured in his seminal 2014 book, The Proteus Paradox: How Online Games and Virtual Worlds Change Us―And How They Don't.
A metaverse platform is inherently a virtual world, but as Yee’s book title suggests, any assumption that a virtual world will offer a complete escape from our daily prejudices and cruelties is sorely shortsighted.
What do you think? Agree/disagree?
Wagner James Au / New World Notes 
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