Wagner James Au / New World Notes

You’ve probably seen this new Meta demo of podcaster Lex Fridman interviewing Mark Zuckerberg as ultra-realistic avatars while wearing VR headsets. While technically impressive, there’s a small problem: Decades of evidence that few people actually want ultra-realistic avatars mirrored after themselves in virtual worlds, that they undermine a unique value of the Metaverse — and worse, that they import high levels of toxicity into a virtual world's user community.

There is no proven relationship whatsoever between the popularity of a metaverse platform and photo-realistic graphics. The very most popular platforms, Minecraft and Roblox, are intentionally low-fi, immersive through their physics and responsiveness. Their blocky, whimsical avatars are similarly abstract. 

The same can be said for the furry and anime-themed avatars of metaverse platforms VRChat, and the hand puppet-like avatars of Rec Room — both of which are so popular on Meta’s own Quest 2 headset, it caused the company to raise the price of the headset. 

This preference for non-realistic avatars relates to the core user base for metaverse platforms: People in their teens and pre-teens, who are generally still uncomfortable and unsure about their own real life identity and appearance. 

But the problem is even more acute for teen girls and young women, still negotiating the social expectations and judgements around their real life appearance; presenting them with a lifelike avatar to customize — let alone an avatar that resembles who they are in real life — is effectively asking them to shoulder even more social expectations and judgements, just in the virtual world. 

The fundamental problem with Meta’s approach is that Zuckerberg, with no prior experience in game development or virtual worlds, apparently believes the Facebook model of real identities online should apply to the Metaverse. 

This misses the essential value of metaverse platforms as a place where people can explore, imagine, and create entirely new experiences blessedly separate from real world limitations. Beginning with personal identity. 

Overwhelmingly, metaverse platform users do not prefer avatars based on their real real-life appearance — even when the internal tools to customize them that way exist. This preference can even be seen in avatar gender choice. According to a survey of hundreds of thousands of gamers conducted by researcher Nick Yee and his firm, Quantic Foundry, 1 in 3 men prefer to play as a female avatar — with about 1 in 10 females choosing male avatars.  

The irony is Mark Zuckerberg could have learned all this from the very person who helped bring the company into Metaverse development:

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Finally bringing Second Life to the modern age of online communication, emojis are coming to the official Second Life viewer. You can even start playing with them now via this release candidate.

As befitting its status as a metaverse platform, this addition didn't come directly from Second Life publisher Linden Lab, but from a community developer: Kitty Barnett, who co-develops the third party SL viewer Catznip.

Kitty tells me her addition should support most every character from Twitter's open source Twemoji font.

"Aside from the multi-character emojis," she clarifies. "So yellow default smiley, not skintone-tinted emoji, or flags, or some of the job emojis will come in female and male variants, which is actually two characters joined behind the scenes — which wasn't easy to jury rig on top of the existing SL font system – or at least not on an initial go." It will also support shortcodes and non-English languages.  

Even better news, Kitty was able to get Linden Lab to incorporate this addition simply by mentioning it and @-ig Second Life's official account on Twitter:

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