Virtual World User or Gamer? Please Take This 5 Minute Survey for an Academic Study on Male & Female Avatars

My colleague Robert Geraci, a Professor at Manhattan College who regularly researches and writes on Second Life and other virtual worlds and games (including for this book published by Oxford), is studying real life gender in relation to avatar gender, and is looking for volunteers to take an anonymous, 5 minute test:

• If you're MALE IN REAL LIFE and use virtual worlds/games, click here to take this survey.
• If you're FEMALE IN REAL LIFE and use virtual worlds/games, click here to take this survey.

I just took the male version of the survey, and found the questions pretty interesting. But let Professor Geraci, who's conducting the study with his wife Dr. Jovi Geraci (who also teaches at Manhattan), explain the overall goals of this project:

"We hope to understand what relationships people have to the bodies of their videogame avatars. In particular, we want to know how men and women think about the genders and appearances of the avatars. To date, there have been studies of whether men play female avatars and vice-versa, and there has been commentary upon the attire of game avatars, but nothing significant about the meaning of those avatars. We hope to rectify that through empirical research (surveys and interviews) that will tell us what people want from the avatars they choose. Eventually, we will submit a final essay to an academic journal either on gender studies or game studies (we haven't decided yet). Once our work has been published, we'll release the raw data for others to use in further research."

That also means New World Notes will blog the results, so please please help out. Once again:

• If you're MALE IN REAL LIFE and use virtual worlds/games, click here to take this survey.
• If you're FEMALE IN REAL LIFE and use virtual worlds/games, click here to take this survey.

If you have questions or comments about the study, please ask in Comments, and Prof. Geraci (Soren Ferlinghetti in SL) can hopefully hit them below. And if you know other virtual world/games users who might like this, please share with them:

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Comments

[foneco zuzu]

Less then 5min:)

[shockwave yareach]

Done. Though I found the questions perplexing. "Does playing a monsterous Hero make you feel more masculine?" Um... I'm a furry inworld, sure. But I'm hardly a hero and I'm hardly monsterous. It appeared to be written for a WoW audience rather than SL users.

"Is your armor revealing?" If it was, then it wouldn't be very effective armor, now would it? Nothing is more embarrassing than waking up in the cemetary because you just HAD to have those assless +1 chaps-of-domination. :)

[robert]

hi shockwave,

the survey is for users of video games, virtual worlds, etc., many of which do permit of revealing armor that remains protective in game. if someone is solely a resident of SL, the survey may not work quite right, alas.

[robert]

and many thanks to the few dozen folks who have taken the survey already. i'll check in periodically in case anyone has questions. thanks again!

robert

[sirhc desantis]

Do my tail and ears count as armour? =^^=

[Harper Ganesvoort]

I was curious about the "armor," "heroic" questions in here. When I put on armor, it's purely for a photo shoot; I've never participated in an RPG scenario in world. I think the above comment by robert answers this, and so I'll be holding back for now. (When I saw the questions along the way, I dumped the tab without submitting.) But I will consider redoing and submitting, and I'll go ahead and write this survey up in my own blog.

[Madeliefste Oh]

I think the survey shows a narrow conception of what an avatar is to people.

My avatar has nothing to do with playing a character. For me my avatar is a transport for bringing creative activities from rl to a virtual surrounding.

[avatar games online]

Just did it!

[Pienaar]

@ shockwave & Harper

I guess if the answer is "it doesn't change my perception of being heroic" etc. then you should choose the value #3, which is neutral.

[Unti Kamala]

It seems rather unfortunate that the questionnaire gives only male and female as choices for one's gender. Yes, these two categories cover some 98% of all people in RL, but in SL gender classification can be a bit more complex than that. Even going with simply the RL gender distribution, one should remember that it's often the rare cases that raise the most interesting questions and give most insight into the topic.

As an example (and a disclaimer that I'm not completely impartial in this :) ), I've ended up using a female (if not very feminine by SL standards) avatar most of the time, although for some special purposes there are a few others in the back of my inventory. One of them is male, but in the past year or so I've also been an owl, a dragon, and a collection of rubbish whirling in the wind. The male human one is the one I use the least these days (for situations like a severe shortage of male dance partners), mainly because regular gender-switching got me into a couple of rather nasty situations in my younger days. To make the question of my preferred gender more complex, in a RL historical re-enactment setting I have a persona that is clearly male, and my everyday one is as gender-neutral (or genderqueer if you want to label it that way) as I can manage. It's not at all clear how I should answer the survey.

I'm not saying that everyone must always accommodate non-binary views of gender. What I *am* saying, though, is that given the stated goals of the project, a strict male/female view of gender introduces a clear bias. The study would be much stronger if the data-collecting phase was a bit more flexible.

[Deoridhe Quandry]

"Is your armor revealing?"

That's such a WoW (and other MMO) question I ended up thinking of my avatars when I was playing that (when it was ugh, can this "chain mail" cover more than six inches, PLEASE???) than my SL main avatar. In SL I can make sure my armor covers me realistically!

[Cicadetta]

Well, I answered the survey, but I'm not sure how informative my answers will be. I'm a shapeshifter in SL, and I am not alone in that. Offered a longer explanation in comments. Hopefully they'll make sense...

[robert]

hi unti,

i really struggled with ways in which to ask the questions to be gender-inclusive. as it is, however, we ended up going with pretty straightforward gender identities as a means of engaging simpler (rather than more complex) problems. until we've figured out the one, we probably can't figure out much of interest to the other!

when we composed the survey, we really had conventional gaming options in mind (MMOs, console, etc.), and not so much SL. james was gracious enough to blog on us, which has given us some really interesting data that pertains primarily to SL users rather than traditional gamers. the differences will be fascinating to explore (and for years to come, i think!).

thanks to all who are contributing!