Iris Wants to Know: Do You Spend More Time Tweaking Your Virtual Home or Your Virtual Self?

Janine "Iris Ophelia" Hawkins' ongoing review of gaming and virtual world style

For as long as I've been in Second Life, I've always changed my avatar's outfit almost as often as I changed my own in reality. This isn't always limited to SL, either. In both Skyrim and Dragon Age Inquisition I'm the kind of player who keeps a few different outfits on hand for a few different situations. An outfit for fighting dragons, an outfit for fighting demons, an outfit for hanging out in the fancy town with the fancy people. You know, practical considerations.

For as often as I change my avatar's clothes, however, I almost never spend too much time changing my avatar's surroundings. I'm the kind of person who updates my land or skybox once a year, if that, but at the same time I'm a big fan of some of the SL photographers on Flickr who capture their decor with as much originality and detail as avatars. Folks like pokute Burt, who created the pic embedded above, who can build a room with more character than ten avatars tied together. 

That's why I want to know, do you put more time into tweaking the look of your land, your virtual home, your skybox or whatever it is you have, or your avatar? What leads you to favor one over the other? As ever, leave your responses in the comments below.

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Janine Hawkins (@bleatingheart on Twitter, Iris Ophelia in Second Life) has been writing about virtual worlds and video games for nearly a decade, and has had her work featured on Paste, Kotaku, Jezebel and The Mary Sue.

Comments

[Kitty Revolver]

Considering I was a blogger for about 2.5 years, my outfit changed daily if not multiple times a day. As for the house, I lost the time and patience with uber-decorating a few years ago with The Sims 3, I had a huge CC folder and never used half of it. In SL, though all of those cups and food items became gatcha fodder. Yes 25$L per play, but of course my land would eat up the no copy items and of course I would have to get the rare, which would be in the middle of 30 common items. Plus no one came over to my place so I would end up standing in my studio most of the time or over at my friend's place, so decorating became pointless. Also, my mac would slow down SL really bad with all that mesh with all the proper shaders on. Frankly, I think I lost the will because my own places never looked the way that other's seem to capture so brilliantly so I stopped caring. I never had the amazing system that worked well with SL or the time to invest in that kind of experience.

[irihapeti]

self

[CronoCloud Creeggan]

The answer to that question is fairly obvious for me. (Most anyone who knows me in SL, already knows my answer.)

As I sometimes say. "Changing outfits, it is what I do." In fact it's usually the first thing I do upon logging into SL each session. Though I must admit I actually shop less than some of my friends think I do. I spend more time talking about shopping than actually shopping.

But yes, my avatar's appearance is important to me.