Creating an Avatar of Myself

I started off by trying to create an avatar on Second Life that resembled myself. The process was difficult, but overall I think there were a lot of different opportunities to help create a realistic representation of myself. I was shocked by the array of options for changing your features but could tell that more regular users would be able to do a lot more with their character than I was able to figure out. I went through and tried to make my facial features and hair as close as I could to myself and I ended up looking nothing like myself, but it did work on it for a while.

After giving up on Second Life, I decided to go on to the Wii site and create another avatar of myself. This time it was much simpler, but the options were much more limited. Especially with clothing there was only one choice, rather than being able to personally design every aspect of an outfit.

For both avatars I noticed how simple defining features made a huge difference when creating my avatar. The one feature that I spent the most time deciding on for both avatars was my hair. Trying to find the most similar style and color was extremely influential in deciding how similar the avatar looked to myself. Also, simply having a more feminine body on Second Life, made it easier to tell my identity rather than on Wii where I felt the need to have myself wear pink to be able to recognize myself as a female. It is easy to see how little details can help set apart, gender, race or other identity markers.