tars, and so on, players take their virtual subjectivities outside of the virtual world.

[ 9] Bardzell, S. and J. Bardzell. “Docile avatars: Aesthetics, experience, and sexual interaction in Second Life.” In Proceedings of HCI 2007, The 21st British HCI Group Annual Conference, Lancaster, UK: 2007. http://www.bcs.org/server. php?show=ConWeb Doc.13282

September + October 2008

interactions

the virtual hug animation offers something that a text-based greeting does not, and its visualized embodiment surely is a major aspect of that. One of the most common activities in-world is for two players to meet in a club and to dance together (the dancing animation is automated) and chat away the evening in a private instant-messaging window. This combination of text chat and collaborative embodied symbolic presentation is, based on the sheer popularity of these clubs, a potent combination for Second Life users.

As the hug and dance examples suggest, the performance of identity in virtual worlds is always multimedia. Stated more provocatively, online identity is an ongoing practice of multimedia authoring. It involves avatar design, using available avatar-design interfaces. Virtual worlds offer the opportunity to customize one’s day-to-day style, from in-world auction houses where players exchange virtual clothes for currency to Second Life vendors who sell virtual fashions for what indirectly amounts to U.S. dollars. With expressive interfaces ranging from chat windows with emoticons to voiced and animated actions, players can communicate with one another in robust linguistic and embodied or gestural ways. They can form short- to long-term persistent groups and establish their identities, habits, and manners in them. By acting in, and in some cases changing virtual worlds, players leave their mark on the world itself. Finally, by recording videos of themselves for posting on You Tube, blogging about their activities, creating MySpace profiles for their ava-

The Aestheticization
of Online Intimacy

If identity is a function of performance on a stage, and virtual worlds require performers to act in varying degrees as multimedia authors, then it follows that an aesthetic appropriate to virtual identity and virtual-world multimedia authoring will likely emerge. It already has, perhaps most conspicuously in Second Life in the emergent virtual fashion industry, which features major virtual fashion design studios, a critical community comprising virtual fashion magazines and blogs, modeling agencies, and fashion shows.

An aesthetic has also emerged in the context of intimacy. As we have argued, intimacy in Second Life is aestheticized by expanding it sensually and intellectually to make it participate in a broader range of visual and literary experience [ 9]. A glimpse at intimate interaction in Second Life quickly reveals that visually, it largely resembles its analogues in real life. Intimate fashions, such as one would expect to see in Victoria’s Secret, are abundantly available in-world. Props, such as beds and other objects of intimacy, are likewise available, often with animations. More subtly, and more important from a socio-cultural standpoint, idealizations of male and especially female forms are impossible to miss; most female avatars have supermodel proportions (and often movie-star hairstyles and stilettos to match), while male avatars often have athletic, even heroic builds. For better or for

worse, real-life analogues are the primary, though not only source of virtual intimacy’s visuality.

Two differences, however, are worth noting. First, visual elements, including both fashion items and ready-made attractive avatar bodies, are for sale— and quite inexpensive. One can acquire a whole closet, featuring a substantial collection of intimates, for very little money. Next, Second Life enables players to adopt a variety of avatar bodies, crossing gender, race, and even species (e.g., “furries,” which are humanoid animal avatars)— even with the same avatar ( gender, for example, is simply specified with an always editable radio button). Intimacy-related visuals are available for all these types of avatars as well. Differences such as these—the low expense and the higher variety of avatar bodies available to a player compared with real life—enable quite a bit more visual experimentation, and with it role play, than is available in real life.

Role play is another way in which Second Life users aestheticize intimacy. A major example of this is literary: the ability to participate in an intimate “scene” with another. Documents found in libraries in-world introduce users to the scene, offering advice on the mise-en-scène (including props and staging), character development, principles of narration, use of diction, performance advice, and so on. Now the ability to participate in a scene—which amounts to the real-time collaborative composition of an erotic dialogue—is a learned ability and cannot be bought in stores the way an outfit can and cannot be practiced alone. Resources,