Examining Gender, Race and Body Image in a Virtual World

In this assignment we had to explore different worlds using Second Life which is a  virtual world.  Our job was to communicate with other people outside the class using text chat.  This is mostly experiment with gender and race and seeing how people would react.  In the first part of the exercise we had to use our regular avatar and communicate with people in two different worlds.  

My first world  i went too was the Shiromani Sandbox.  My ultimate goal was to communicate with two people.  I tried talking to a guy named Zein who didn't respond back to my chat.

here is a screen shot of me attempting to reach out to Zein.  He didn't respond back to my chat text..

Then i attempted to talk to a girl avatar named Angels. Still didn't receive a response so i ended up trying to communicate with another girl avatar named Countess.  She was finally responsive.  I guess third time is a charm.

We talked about our day..

Brought up the weather and told her i was enjoying this 80 degrees of sunshine. 

Seemed like a nice person.

Went to another world and tried to get involved in a huge group chat...

IN the bug group chat there was too much conversation going on so i decide to reach out to another girl avatar named Mia.  

That was still a no go so i tried another person.

The third time was a charm again..  Talked to a girl avatar named skylark who seemed to interested.  We talked about what kind of music we enjoyed.  She said she was a big fan of country and i told her that i was a huge fan of EDM.

This was the end of my first experiment with my original avatar.  I thought it pretty well. Got a couple good reposes from girls but none from guys.  Makes sense....

Now for my second experiment i am going to change the race and gender of my avatar and see how people respond to my appearance.  I ended up making my avatar fat this time.  And made my skin darker.

The next place I went to was Happy World.  Attempted to talk to 4 people and only got one response back.  One person told me to get away from them.

This is me changing my avatar.  I made my avatar heavy.

Tried to start a conversation with this person but she ignored me.  

This was the only person who contacted me but didn't respond back when i texted her through chat.

This was another girl who told me to go away.  I asked why but she didn't give me an answer..

So i left and went to try and find someone else..

After finally completed this exercise it was astonishing to see how people react to different peoples gender, race and looks.  Comparing both exercises, the first one i was more successful with ym original avatar.  When i change the shape and made him a lot heavier i got some crude reposes.  One girl told me to go away which i thought that was really rude.  You can judge a book by its cover people!!! If every person in the world looked the same, it would be just boring.