The Verge on Second Life - Beautifully Produced, But I'm Not Sure About Its Gender Claims

The Verge has a pretty good, beautifully produced article looking back on Second Life's last 10 years featuring folks like my pals founding Linden Hunter Walk and anthropologist Tom Boellstorff. Some of the reporting seems a bit off in places, so caveat however-you-say-"reader"-in-Latin. Such as:

This might not be far off the truth: [Ex-Linden Fee] Berry tells me that at one point Linden Lab said six of every ten women in Second Life were men behind their avatars. One of the most famous women in Second Life, Jade Lily, is a male member of the US Air Force named Keith Morris. Morris real-life married another Second Lifer, Coreina Grace (real name Meghan Sheehy) in 2009.

I'm not aware of Linden Lab ever making such a claim about avatar gender, I seriously doubt they would do so in public, and I'm not sure how such a claim could be reliably made; at the same time, Linden Lab has often reported that the most active SL users are women in real life. So I'm not sure where this claim is coming from. Speaking of which, Keith Morris is (or was) Jade Lily, and did marry Megan Sheehy (as I blogged here), but by then, I'm farily positive he had already left military service.

Anyway, still worth a look.

Please share this post with people you like:

Tweet

Comments

[Dividni Shostakovich]

Here's one way Linden Labs could estimate RL vs SL gender: run the names connected to people's credit card numbers against lists of the first thousand common male and female first names, and then link the results to their avatar's gender. Easy-peasy. Most likely few people give payment info for their alts (why bother, you can just send them money), so those wouldn't be much of an issue. You would have the problem of people who don't file payment info at all, but you'd get a fair estimate. Besides, these days Google knows what picture books your mom read to you when you were three and Facebook knows you have dishes waiting to be cleaned, so anything's possible. (By the way, the phrase you're looking for is "caveat lector.")

[Nedria]

"run the names connected to people's credit card numbers against lists of the first thousand common male and female first names, and then link the results to their avatar's gender. Easy-peasy."

Y'all are assuming here that everyone plays one gender, when I happen to know in fact that isn't at all true. Myself included, I know multiple folks who play male, female, and androgynous. To accurately answer the question you would first have to use the close-minded broad assumption that everyone in RL and SL is either only male, or only female.

Once that's done you'd also have to take into consideration - are you going to count RP alts or not? I do have payment info on file for my alts, and my RL gender is female, however not all of my alts are female. Good luck estimating that.

I think people should stop worrying about defining gender so much.

[Dividni Shostakovich]

Those are good points, but I didn't say you'd get perfect results: you'd get an estimate, no matter what you did. How many people *mostly* use alts rather than their main av? Even 1 in 500 sounds high, scarcely enough to make a fair estimate impossible.

I basically agree with you about the ridiculous and often closed-minded worrying about people's gender. I don't give a hoot what gender(s) individuals play in SL, and I think it's nobody's business but their own. But I can imagine that Linden Labs would find it useful to get overall numbers in order to tweak marketing or for some other business reason, or they may want to cooperate with academics studying certain aspects of virtual world activities. In fact it could be very encouraging to know that (to imagine some figures) 50% of RL males usually play females, but only 5% of RL females usually play males (or whatever figures you want to plop in there). It would be *fantastic* to learn that many people value playing a different gender, even if we have no idea why. There are legitimate reasons why aggregate data could be useful. In contrast, utilizing data about individuals (without their permission) would unquestionably be an invasion of privacy.

[Vaki]

The situation you're describing -- e.g., collecting all users' RL names from our credit card information just to compare with avatar gender -- would be so blatantly against LL's privacy policy that it would probably incur a response from the FTC (which comes down pretty hardcore against companies that do shit like that).

The six-out-of-ten statistic probably comes from one of the many voluntary surveys taken of SL residents, many of which are done by universities, wherein respondents are asked their real life gender and the gender of their main avatar. If you haven't been asked to take a survey like this, you probably just haven't been paying attention, because they come around pretty frequently.

[Keith Morris]

I am indeed out of the Air Force (since 2007), but I don't think playing a female avatar would have violated the Don't Ask Don't Tell rule of the day. Also, Meghan's last name has never been Sheehy. That would be her mom's married name. You can just call her Meghan Morris now. ;)

[Tracy RedAngel]

I really couldn't care less about anyone's RL gender. I have friends who are female in RL who play on male avatars, and friends who are male in RL and play on female avatars. They simply want to experience Second Life as a different gender.
Maybe I'm being a little dismissive of the issue because my SL husband is also my RL husband, and well...I don't date in Second Life. But if someone is that worried about being 'hoodwinked' by someone of a different gender, well they can always ask to hear their voice or Skype. And don't tell me about those voice scramblers...they're not convincing l

[Emperor Norton]

"Morris real-life married another Second Lifer, Coreina Grace (real name Meghan Sheehy) in 2009. "

Pretty much sums it all with the men playing women avis.

[Keith Morris]

"Pretty much sums it all with the men playing women avis." I'm interested to know exactly which part of that sentence you're generalizing across all males who play female avatars. And are you limiting your inductive reasoning to the Second Life context alone, or does that include men who play Tomb Raider as well?

[Keith Morris]

It must be that I got married. All men who play women get the ladies because we understand them better. ;-)

[Lani Global]

Most of us who create avatar content, create scripted content, or do RolePlay in SL have a variety of alt avatars of all genders.

Does she, or doesn't she? Only her NSA agent knows for sure.

[Ung]

Ok, Wrap your heads around this concept:
Among many other freedoms, Second Life provides users with complete gender choice, so users can behave and interact in a way that is unburdened by social bias and restrictions that accompany socially imposed gender stereotype.

This should be promoted as a strength of Second Life, giving people from many oppressive and conformist societies a freedom they cannot have in their day to day lives. Critics of this gender freedom fail to see beyond the confines of their own culturally inflicted gender bias.

[Cyberserenity]

I have one male avatar and three female. Ohh and one fantasy being. In SL we still have the freedom to speak and do what we want. I can be whatever i want and i can write what i want and not being censored. Or thrown out. Some well known places do not allow that. More freedom on the net!

[zzpearlbottom]

Ung says it all!

[CronoCloud Creeggan]

It's the usual thing, some tech-journalists seem to be upset by SL's appeal to women because they wanted it to be THEIR playground and not "Barbie dreamhouse EXTREME" so they try to minimize that by saying things like "All the SL women are men".

[melponeme_k]

@Cronocloud

You hit bullseye. One of the main reasons why techies and the tech press is so hard on SL is because there were too many women. And because of women, SL didn't turn into the dystopic, hackerish copy of Snow Crash that they envisioned.

Its hilarious this is the group that screams when game platforms have no girls/women. Then when faced with a platform that does, they then scream girl cooties.

[Arcadia Codesmith]

Nottingham Trent University published a study in 2008 finding that 70% of women and 54% of men in the sample played the opposite gender in games.

The small sample size renders that study statistically unreliable, but it's interesting that it corresponds roughly with the Linden comment.

It's also interesting that the number of women who play cross-gender is significantly larger than the number of men. It might be a different story for virtual worlds, but then again, it might not. It does challenge widespread preconceptions throughout much of the industry.

I play all along the gender spectrum with different avatars and sometimes with the same avatar (Second Life being one of the few worlds that lets you switch at will). Gender is a subject of some interest to me, but the more I delve into it, the more convinced I am that human biological dimorphism has only slight behavioral ramifications compared to the artificial construct of socialized gender roles, the pseudoscience of evolutionary psychology notwithstanding.

Be who you want to be. And I'll do the same.

[Achariya Maktoum]

In the world of fashion blogging, I know several male characters who have female players. Four at least. No, five. All of them prefer to be known by their character's gender, and keep their real life details private.

Three female/gender-neutral friends of mine are played by men, and two are quite open about it.

Still seems skewed toward women playing men, for the most part...

[Pussycat Catnap]

"Its hilarious this is the group that screams when game platforms have no girls/women. Then when faced with a platform that does, they then scream girl cooties."

Lol...

How sadly true.

Look at how they've reacted to Anita Sarkeesian.
I swear sometimes living and working in the Silicon Valley, I end up wondering if this is Taliban controlled territory...

The level of both racism and misogyny in the tech and gamer industries is shocking. It makes the GOP seem like a lesbian party in the hood...

[j7sue]

What's gender?

[Joe Clark]

Surprised that no one has yet mentioned the fact that gender binarism isn't even a fact in RL. It's not an either/or choice.

I did a pretty exhaustive lit review on gender-crossing for my "Virtually Queer" fictional autoethnography a couple of years ago. Some readers might find the research surprising: http://www.academia.edu/300310/Virtually_Queer_Subjectivity_Across_Gender_Boundaries_in_Second_Life_-_revisited._Southern_States_Communication_Association_Memphis_April_2010.

[Mitch Wagner]

I just discovered the original article and loved it. I found myself nodding along as I read. Very little journalism done by non-SL-natives captures the good and bad of SL so well.