After copious research and judicious ogling, Iris Ophelia and her team have riffled through the profiles of 97 nominees to select 30 semifinalists! The list is below. In the next voting round, New World Notes readers will get the help choose the finalists by voting on these digital dudes in blocs of ten. So if you're a semifinalist, send Iris Ophelia a headshot ASAP. And if you're a friend of a semifinalist, nudge that boy to do so toot fricking sweet.
With that, here are your semifinalists for hottest male Second Life avatar of 2009:
Philip Rosedale hasn't significantly modified his avatar look pretty much since, well, since founding Second Life in 2003. Same handlebar mustache, same jagged hair and rainbow codpiece, and so on. Which is ironic, because that means the world's most famous avatar is also a poor representation of the virtual fashion enhancements that are so important to Second Life's culture and economy.* Unable to stand it any longer, Winter Jefferson unilaterally created this example of a Philip Linden makeover, updated:
Well played, Winter, well played. Now you can peer into Philip's crotch and see yourself staring back. (Then again, really, hasn't that always been the case?)
Our call for nominations of hottest Second Life male avatar generated a frenzy of response -- Iris Ophelia just dug through the Comment thread, and came up with 97 names. This weekend, she'll be selecting 30 semi-finalists from these, so here's your chance to lobby on behalf of your favorites below. Who should definitely be included in the semi-final round, and why? Be sure to include beguiling screenshot links, throaty encomiums, and other SL-based evidence of male hotness!
And the nominees for 2009 Hottest Male Avatar are...
For the last couple years, New World Notes style columnist Iris Ophelia has profiled the hottest male avatars, as nominated by you and selected by her. (Besides a lot of ogling, it's a fun way to explore the Uncanny Valley.) Question is, are there at least ten male avatars who deserve the coverage this year, who haven't been featured already? After two years on dude-watch duty, Iris isn't sure.
So if you know a male Second Life avatar she should consider, please post the name in Comments. Just nominate some fresh faces who haven't been covered in previous round-ups -- that includes 2008's people's choice winner at right, Mr. Bone Mosten, and the gentlemen featured here, here, and also here. (Full list after the break.) Let the nominations begin!
Exclusive to NWN, Iris Ophelia's ongoing showcase of all things stylish in SL
In mid-October, one of SL's most successful skin designers released a set of skins that stirred up tremendous controversy. Gala Phoenix of Curio launched her Battle Royale skins, which feature her usual fabulous shading and high quality textures, adorned with some equally high quality dirt, bruises, blood, scratches, scars and gouges. Reactions were mixed, to say the least; in fact, they often verged on heated. Is a woman with a bruised eye presumed battered, or could she be battle-hardened? I've got a few thoughts on the issue after the cut.
In Second Life, it's a truism that the more gargantuan a female avatar's breasts are, the more likely the owner is actually a man in real life. In an interesting if limited study, Pixels and Policy's Gatsby Crumb conducted a survey female avatars, and found that wasn't always the case. 70% of female avatars told Gatsby that breast size was an important consideration when creating their persona. Most of those surveyed self-reported as women in real life, and while many said they resisted making their breasts stereotypically large, several said they did so... so they could make friends easier. Not for sexual reasons, necessarily, just to encourage basic social contact:
"At first I played with an avatar that I thought represented me physically... But not many people talked to me. Now [with a large-chested avatar] people go out of their way to IM me and send me friend requests."
The study inspires feminist game blogger Tami "Cuppycake" Baribeau to wonder about the social expectations of virtual attractiveness: "I’m an overweight female in real life, yet my avatar in Second Life is thin and adorable," she acknowledges. "Why is it, that we fight the typical female appearance ideals, yet when given a choice to create our avatars as overweight or as similar to ourselves as possible, we don’t?" Image: pixelsandpolicy.com.
Today and tomorrow, the metaverse development company Beta Technologies is hosting an in-world conference on doing business in SL, with Dusan Writer and Amanda Linden presenting. Here's more details. That's interesting but not newsworthy in itself, as conventions like these happen in Second Life all the time. What is notable in this case, however, is that Beta Technology’s CTO, Gwyneth Llewelyn, will also be presenting -- and speaking by voice. A celebrated Second Life analyst since 2004 or so, Gwyn's created quite a persona for herself (that's her pictured in 2006), but up until now, has relayed her personality and intellect entirely through text, either in-world through chat, or on her prolific blog -- no voice for her in all those years, except for a couple presentations she made in her native Portuguese (she tells me). For this conference, however, she'll be speaking English, offering a first glimpse of the real world person behind an avatar who's remained anonymous for so long.
Danny Nolan, breast physics coder; inset, the Emerald menu option he pioneered
The rise and fall of a female breast may seem like the most basic thing, but as it turns out, trying to simulate it in a virtual world is not all that easy. So when Danny Nolan and other programmers tried to add realistic physics to avatar breasts as a feature in Emerald, an open source Second Life viewer, they were sometimes stymied in strange ways. In one trial, adjusting the breast physics seemed to create spikes that burst out of a test avatar. Other times, the bouncing motion of the breasts somehow made a giant hole where the chest should be. (A bug the Emerald team is still trying to fix.)
The thing is, when the human breast meets Newtonian mechanics (or a virtual simulation of same), it "involves quite a bit of math," as Emerald lead developer Skills Hak puts it. "We were discussing the math behind it almost daily, and fixed a lot of bugs it created." (Trigonometry was brought to bear.) But Emerald's breast physics worked sufficiently well that they were added last week to the viewer latest build.
How does it work? In actuality, a limited form of breast physics already exists in Second Life, but it's only available in the avatar adjustment menu, as a "buoyancy" option. "I simply did the math in calculating the physics itself... to simply visually show it," Danny Nolan explains.
"It's basically just modifying the breast buoyancy slider in realtime, fully client-side," as Ms. Hak puts it. That means the breast physics are only viewable to someone who's running Second Life with the Emerald viewer, and has enabled that option. From the world's point of view, however, the breasts have not changed. (Which suggests a unique metaverse twist to the old philosophical conundrum: If a virtual bosom heaves in a Second Life forest, but only you see it on your monitor, does it actually make a jiggle?)
Emerald was already the most popular third party SL viewer before the breast augmentation, but since it was added last week, it's been in even higher demand: "Downloads for our latest release are over 50,000 already," Skills Hak tells me. "We switched over to hosting at google-code in the meantime though (because people were literally DDOS-ing our server with download requests) so it might be well even more." With roughly 750,000 active users, that means about 6% of the Second Life population now has access to Mr. Nolan's breast enhancement. Or to put it another way, if you have a female avatar, and you're at a Second Life event with 16 other Residents, chances are that one of them is able to watch your bosom bounce in a way you may not have intended.
Which suggests a problem that often happens with the social contract of Second Life, when technical ability crashes up against user consent. In this case, what if you have a female avatar, and you don't particularly like people watching your virtual breasts moving in a way you didn't choose?
Around the time Philip Linden was announcing his departure from full-time management of Second Life, someone else important to SL had an announcement of her own to make: Citing many motivations, Irene Morris, well-known in-world as the talented metaverse artist Eshi Otawara, has abandoned her avatar. Or as she puts it on her site,
The Eshi Otawara name is NOT a Second Life avatar anymore. Eshi
Otawara is an ongoing business concern owned by Irena Morris.
In a way, Eshi and creative individuals like her are just as important to Second Life as Philip Linden himself, for if it was Philip who first conceived of a world of boundless imagination, it was Eshi and her colleagues who made that vision real. At the same time, Eshi's departure points out a recurring challenge of the Second Life experience: It's often difficult to maintain a balance between one's avatar identity and one's first life, especially when there's a mismatch between the two. For instance, virtual acclaim without sufficient monetary reward, and declining physical health while owning a perfectly trim avatar, two things Eshi complained about in her departure notice.
I haven't spoken with Eshi in awhile, but I'm sad to see her leave (even though I have a feeling she'll be back in one form or another soon enough.) Speaking more generally, I have talked with Residents in a situation similar to what Eshi faced, and offered advice like this:
It isn't enough to become a famous in-world content creator, you need a business plan too, and willingness to treat it as a job.
If you do want to turn your SL content into a business, you may want to have an alt avatar that's separate from your adoring fans/needy customers.
Second Life is an adjunct and enhancement to your first life, not a replacement. If the former is suffering due to the latter, you're doing it wrong.
What do you advise, when someone finds their Second Life overwhelming their first one? What did you do, when that someone is you?
Rez Magazine has the results of a valuable survey, which asked SL Residents the source of their avatar name. Very few respondents chose a name to reflect an in-world roleplay choice, while many more chose an avatar name that's a derivation of their real world name. By far the most preferred choice, however, is an avatar name that originated from another MMO or online service. I fit in that category, come to think of it -- I've used "Hamlet" in several previous Internet systems. (That also explains the plethora of unwieldy, unpronouncable avatar names that actually seem like AOL-ish account names.) I am surprised that this was far and away the most preferred option, as it's been my intuition that most avatar names are some variation of the a user's RL name. (With "Au", I personally fit in that category as well.) I'd definitely like to see how a survey with a larger sample plays out, however, and one that includes international users not fluent in English. When it comes to naming, at least, the early results suggest most users do not go with a name reflective of a "second life", so as they choose one that extends previously existing Internet identities.
In any case, what category does your avatar name go into? (3:20pm: Bumped due to interesting conversation in Comments.)
