So, as you can probably tell by the lack of entries here lately, infrastructure in the grid has again been causing me serious troubles; man, it's starting to sound like a broken record around here, I know. Here's hoping that I can finally put a decent home gaming system together on my end soon, and that Linden can get the issues on their end fixed in a timely way as well. I've been spending my time instead on some real-life projects, but have also been thinking recently about a subject someone brought up at one of the endless Second Life blogs I now read. I wish I could remember now who originally talked about this, and what exactly they said, but the gist was that avatars in SL (the 3D graphical forms that represent us when we're logged in) are unreliable indicators of who in RL we're actually talking to, since there is the constant opportunity to radically change them at a moment's notice. I think, in fact, that the first commenter was mildly complaining about it; about how it's a loophole in the "MMO as communications platform" argument that some are making these days, how anyone can make an avatar that seems attractive and trustworthy, no matter if they actually are in RL or not.

The reason I've been thinking about this, in fact, is that such a statement doesn't jibe with the experiences I myself have had in the grid; if anything, the way my avatar looks now is the result of a long evolutionary process, with an inherent "vision" in mind the entire time of what I wanted it to look like, just with more fine-tuning coming each month as I learned more about the interface. Here above, for example, is a shot of my avatar on my very first day of existence, way back on Help Island before I knew barely anything about what I was doing; and as you can see, the basic 'look' of what I was going for has never really fundamentally changed in all that time. And maybe I'm unusual in this, but in my case it's because I was modeling the look after how I look in real life, which hasn't changed very much either in the nine months I've now been a resident; even from my first day, I've realized that if every single person walks around as a muscled, six-foot-tall bronze god, the way to really stand out is to make an avatar that looks like an actual human being.

Here, then, is what I suppose you could call "Miller Copeland v2.0" -- still the same basic look as before, but with certain details tidied up, and with more of an understanding now about how clothes work. This is inevitable, I think; while actually at Help Island, after all, it's tempting to just do the minimum amount of work on your avatar needed to look decent, since there are so many new things about the interface to learn about.

Once I successfully married my Paypal account with my SL account, then, and was able to bring some money into the grid for the first time, I went out and got me a decent photo-realistic skin; yes, for those who have never played, customized skin is yet one more of an endless amount of content players can create and sell to other players, although since it's a more complicated one it's usually one of the more expensive ones as well (with very, very good skin liable to cost you US$20 [10 pounds, 15 euros] or more). Ah, but what to do with the "balding like Kevin Spacey" hair I have in real life? Like I said, most people who become residents choose to have the most stereotypically "perfect" body and hair electronically possible; this leaves few options for those of us looking for widow's peaks and the like, especially without looking like some kind of cartoonish movie villain.

So here, then, is what I'm looking like these days; yet more tweaks to the overall body, the same skin as before, but now with a prim-style hairdo that looks absolutely nothing like the hair I have in real life, but at least looks realistic now in comparison to the rest of my avatar. Please, won't someone think of all the aging slackers out there who want Jeremy-Piven-style hair in the grid, and make us some good-looking prim-based thing we can wear? My point, though, is that in nine months now of slowly shaping this look, the basic idea has never been thrown out since day one; it's been consistent enough now, in fact, that I have friends in the grid who can recognize me in a room by "face" (my avatar's face) alone.

And really, I've been thinking this week, isn't this true for a surprisingly large amount of people in Second Life? I'm thinking of lots of people, for example, who I've known for six months or nine months now, who have a consistent-enough "look" to their avatars that I can recognize them by sight alone. This is for all kinds of different reasons, of course -- some are lazy, some like the persistence of the vision, some are like me and are basing it on a RL look that doesn't change much. Independent of the reasons, though, doesn't this refute what that original blogger was saying? Can we tell more about a person, in fact, through the avatar they choose to display, than it might seem at first? Does a person say something about themselves by choosing to retain certain avatar characteristics over time? By carving a better and better-looking virtual representation for themselves, are they exposing more and more of who they really are as a person?

This is maybe an interesting question to answer with my female avatar, since her look has always been based on a very specific criteria; she's always been an amalgam of the various women I've dated out here in real life, who disturbingly tend to share a lot of traits. So in that case, I very much have been trying to give off a certain attitude, a certain personality, based on what the avatar looks like; I've always wanted Miller as a woman to come off as spunky, fiercely independent, sexy and sassy, just like most of the women I've dated over the years. Here above, then, is one of the only photos I have of her first iteration, way back when I was a new-enough player to still be using the built-in hair function (which most females give up quickly, because prim-based hair clearly looks so much better). As you can see, already with a touch of sassy spunkiness, but still fairly generic-looking as a whole.

Here, then, is the female Miller's first prim-based hair, better than before but still with a ways to go, and still sporting a free skin that's better than the default but again with a lot better options out there. This is maybe, what, a month or two after I first started playing, basically trying to do the most interesting stuff I can with free items, which is one way to be taken seriously when you're in Second Life (but more on that below).

Here, "Female Miller v3.0" -- tweaked frame, tweaked hair, better understanding of clothes, but with still that free skin that is only so-so. This is such an important part of the Second Life experience, I think, is getting as good of quality a skin that you can, both that you will "feel more real" when interacting and be taken more seriously by other players. And that gets us to...

...How I look now, seen above, which gets me lots of attention now all the time. Believe it or not, between the eyes and skin and hair and clothes, you're looking at an investment of...30 American dollars? And a dozen hours of carefully tweaking the shape and size of my body parts? That's part of the question from before that's not even being counted, and should; that we learn a lot about the person on the other side of that avatar, based solely on how much time and attention they've put into creating that avatar. It's more of a sociological thing, really, than any pinpoint analysis of what the person is specifically like; no matter what their personality, we know that they take Second Life seriously, obviously come back again and again, and have spent a decent amount of money and time on getting that fact across. It seems sometimes that everyone and their f**king mother is arguing right now over the "numbers" of Second Life -- of how many "residents" there are versus "users," and those on in the last week versus the last month -- and I say what I've always said, which is "who cares?" Grand totals are the things for advertisers and lawyers to worry about; the only statistic that matters to me as a player is how many cool people I'm meeting, and how many cool experiences I'm having. Like it or not, we do engage in a bit of prescreening in the grid, based on how a person's avatar looks, to determine whether we should spend the time to get to know them or not. Whether that person takes their avatar seriously, and shows that they're there for the long haul, profoundly affects this prescreening process.

Anyway, that's what I've been thinking about this week, as I patiently wait for the bandwidth to get securely connected again. Dear God: Won't you please somehow let a decent mid-priced Windows or Mac-based computing system magically fall in my lap this month? Your attention to this matter is much appreciated! In the meanwhile, why don't you share your own thoughts about your avatar's "evolution?" Do you hop randomly from one radically different look to the next? Or is your current look the complex result of a lot of small tweaks? How much do you judge others based on the look of their avatar? Do you cut newbies a break, or perhaps heap special scorn on veterans who still look like newbies? Your two cents are always appreciated.