Appearance

The first two questions that need to be answered for any virtual world are still character name and gender, but increasingly character appearance is becoming important.

In graphical virtual worlds, obviously it’s paramount (although even there it’s not mandatory—Lineage succeeds despite having thousands of characters that all look the same). In textual worlds, a character description is usually optional and can be added or changed at any time; a non-default description can often be thought of as a badge of non-newbiehood. Even some graphical virtual worlds allow players to create textual vignettes for their characters, to enhance role-playing.

Almost always, a character’s appearance is intangible: The virtual world itself makes no reference to it, so gameplay effects are non-existent. Although gender and racial ¹ characteristics will affect the image, other attributes won’t: You can be short and skinny yet still have more strength than someone twice your size. Unrealistic though this may be, players like to customize the look of their characters more than they like realism; at this stage, identification with a new character is more critical than its future effect on immersion.

An idea yet to be taken up by any major commercial virtual world ² is that of hyperlinks. It’s a simple matter to associate a hyperlink with any object in a virtual world, characters included, such that activating it opens a browser window to the character’s home page. This gives players even more of an opportunity to flesh out their characters, and can include other useful information, such as objects the character has for sale or is looking to buy. It’s convenient, and it’s extra content that costs the live team nothing to create. However, it’s also 100% immersion-breaking and very open to abuse. Some players will create links to inappropriate web sites, and other players will complain about it; the live team’s workload will increase accordingly. Linking to pages hosted on the developer’s own servers and limiting content to that auto-generated from predefined forms would help enormously, but would lead to increased bandwidth requirements (that is, expense).

Graphical virtual worlds use a paper doll approach to character image design. A basic, randomly featured model of the character is presented, which the player can tweak within certain parameters (the client is going to have to animate this, so changes can’t be too esoteric). Some adjustments concern the underlying wire frame (for example, height), some concern the palette (for example, skin tone), and some concern texture maps (for example, facial features). There are so many variables involved (some of which are interdependent) that most characters will look distinct from one another, except when someone is deliberately trying to create a doppelganger of someone else. Players generally like their characters to be unique ³.

When players create their character’s appearance, it’s the first opportunity they have to engage with their character. It therefore represents a powerful iconic representation of their identity goals. Unfortunately, these goals can change: You might start off as a dark, brooding, menacing figure, but in the course of interacting with the virtual world and its players discover a lighter side to yourself. However, the first impression you’re giving when you meet someone new is “I am a dark, brooding, menacing person.” Changes to apparel can have some impact on this, and there may be hairstylists, beauty therapists, and magic/plastic surgeons able to take it further. Your decision to change has to be conscious, though, which can present a barrier to identity exploration. Short of making characters change physical appearance based on their emotional behavior (which, were it implemented, would lead to a world full of characters looking like their own Dorian Gray portraits ⁴), this is something that graphical virtual worlds simply have to live with.

Appearance is a two-way cipher. It encodes what you want other people to think of you, but it also encodes what you want to think about yourself. When a non-newbie male player creates a female character, that character encapsulates idealized values that the player is aiming both to project and to experience—only very experienced role-players can keep the two separate. The same applies to all other aspects of character appearance—race, hair, eyes, skin tone, height, and so on. These are lexical tokens that combine to create impressionistic symbols meaningful in an emergent, cultural language of identity. Although rooted in the tangible (and, in the case of gender, in reality), it’s the abstractions that players make, and the common vocabulary they adopt for communicating these through appearance, that are important.

This semiotic view of appearance comes with two caveats. Firstly, not all players will invest time creating characters—they’ll take the random image with which they were first presented (unless perhaps it’s outstandingly hideous). The players most likely to do this are

• Newbies who are super-keen to enter the virtual world for the first time.

• Potential newbies checking out the virtual world before committing themselves.

• Players creating secondary characters for some specific purpose.

• Oldbies who are already as one with their online selves.

The other semiotic caveat is that some players use a more concrete real-world symbolism of direct identification. As noted in Chapter 3, Tolkien’s Gandalf character is one favorite role model, but there are plenty more from other works of fiction. Thus, in a Fantasy virtual world you may find a female character with dark, wavy hair, dressed in tight-fitting, purple clothes and calling herself “Deanna ⁵.” However, although this phenomenon is widespread across virtual worlds, each individual world usually has only a small number of people determined to role-play against the world fiction to this degree.