In Second Life my name is Abi. I am taller than average, wear high-heeled Mary Janes, black pants covered in zippers and a t-shirt with a dragon on it. I have bright pink hair. In real life I am short, never wear high heels, and have light brown hair. The only features my avatar and I have in common are blue eyes and freckles. Yet, I consider my avatar an extension of myself when I am in Second Life. While I know some people who change their avatar regularly, the fact is, I like Abi. I like how she looks and how I feel when I’m walking around Second Life in her “skin.” I’ve tried changing my avatar before and I always go right back to the original Abi. My connection to my Abi avatar has led me to some questions lately as I read about possible cross-virtual world avatar compatibility, the increasing use of virtual worlds for collaboration, and the setting of dress codes or guidelines for company employees in virtual worlds. My main questions are would I use Abi as my avatar for business meetings or collaborating with colleagues? And, should I?

Games Become a Business Tool

Although Second Life allows online space for collaboration, it was not originally designed to be specifically for virtual business meetings. Linden Lab envisioned a world built entirely by its inhabitants, whatever their vision happened to be. Developers were surprised when the first Second Life inhabitant built a beanstalk to the sky rather than a house or a car or some other real world object. That act was indicative of the desire of many Second Life residents to be freed from the day-to-day offline world and to have an online space where anything is possible. So, although Second Life offers a space for collaboration over distances and differs from massive multi-player online games in that there are no objectives, quests or leveling, there is still very much a sense of fun and play that is important to its residents. This often extends to residents’ avatars. Abi is a form of play for me because she gets to wear clothes that I would never wear in real life, she can fly, and she can have pink hair everyday without worrying about getting a job or being taken seriously. Occasionally she can even transform into a blue and green dragon and sit in the tree tops. These are all obviously things that are not possible for me in the real world.

What happens when the game becomes a business tool, as has happened with Second Life? Often fun and gaming are not seen as important to business strategy, perhaps they are even viewed as detrimental. So it seems inevitable that businesses desiring to use virtual worlds will need to find ways to work with or around the game aspect of virtual worlds to ensure that serious work is taking place. Businesses also have to worry about issues of security regardless of where work is being done. These issues have led some businesses to adopt guidelines for business avatars in virtual worlds. For example, Cisco licensed business attire for employees’ avatars. This helps ensure that employees are dressed appropriately for business meetings. Cisco has also arranged for all employee avatars to have the same last name so that they are easily identifiable to each other and to help keep non-employees from taking part in private conversations. IBM has also created guidelines that tell employees that appearance should be “appropriate” for a business setting especially when meeting clients. There is even some caution against changing avatars too frequently in order to build reputation and trust among others.

When I read about these guidelines, the business side of me says that all makes sense. The side of me that loves virtual worlds, the Abi side, feels infringed upon.

Distractions

In his latest book “Exodus to the Virtual World”, Castranova discusses research around the human brain, motivation and media. Some research has shown that the human brain reacts to media in the same way that it reacts to real events. When we are watching media such as a movie our brain reacts to the media as if it were real, unless we are motivated to remind ourselves that what we are seeing is not real. So when I watch a scary movie, which I don’t like, I am motivated to remind myself that it’s not real. But if I watch a comedy, which I do like, I don’t remind myself of this because the experience is pleasurable for me. The second scenario is effortless for me. The first scenario requires me to use up cognitive resources to remind myself that what I’m seeing is not real.

What does that mean for people in the virtual world? It can mean different things depending on the person and the situation. For someone like me, who has spent some time in various virtual worlds and likes them, it means that when I am in Second Life it is a pleasurable and fun experience. I do not feel the need to remind myself constantly that things are not real. My interactions with people in Second Life feel very real and comfortable for me regardless of how someone’s avatar looks. I have spoken with Jack Skellington and a dwarf with equal success in communication. It also is real for me to see Abi walking or flying across the landscape. For someone who is not a regular inhabitant of a virtual world, it all may be an annoying distraction that gets in the way of communication. I have a friend who visited Second Life with me once and was, in her own words, “creeped out.” For her it was not fun and her visit was spent reminding herself that this was not “real.”

This can have big implications for the effectiveness of meeting others in the virtual world. If I’m there to have a business meeting and the person I’m meeting with is spending her entire time thinking about my pink hair and wondering if this is what I really look like in real life, or if I’m even who I say I am, communication can definitely suffer. Trust can potentially suffer as well. Would you trust a giant cat in a real world meeting? What about in the virtual world? The director of IT innovation at Price Waterhouse and Coopers says he changed his avatar’s appearance from a muscled, tall man with a Mohawk to an avatar that more resembled his real life appearance and wore a business suit. He did this because others were distracted by his original avatar’s appearance.

Some organizations may try to work around this issue by taking meetings out of virtual worlds like Second Life that can be classified as games and use in-house virtual worlds specifically designed for business, such as Wonderland. That might be a reasonable idea for now, but not one that will work permanently in my opinion.

The Changing Nature of Work

The premise of Castranova’s book that I mentioned above is that the workforce, among other things, will be changing. As more and more people opt to spend hours in virtual environments, the in-person hours taken out of society will have big impacts on the way we interact with others and live our daily lives. Castranova predicts that this exodus to virtual worlds will have society wide impacts including on our expectations of work. So for now I might be willing to trade Abi for an avatar that looks more like the real me in order to conduct a meeting or give a presentation in a virtual world, but that might not always be the case.

Castranova argues that eventually people will expect the real world to mirror many of the options available in the virtual world. Work will have to be fun, too. Giving up Abi, an identity that I spent a lot of time creating and being, does not sound like fun to me. The promise of being able to take my Abi avatar to multiple virtual worlds, technology that is currently being worked on, makes it sound even less fun. Just as casual Friday has crept more and more into the work week, eventually workers might demand that they be able to dress however and as whomever they please in virtual worlds. The potential to have a malleable identity is one reason people are drawn to virtual worlds in the first place. If I have to look like myself in the virtual world, why wouldn’t I rather just have a video conference instead? What would having to forego my favored identity mean to my satisfaction and effectiveness in interacting with others?

Businesses are already contemplating these issues and some are issuing avatar guidelines for employees–others aren’t. I think assuming that real world rules and guidelines should transfer to the virtual world might be an over simplistic point of view. I still am wondering about how okay it would be for me to use my Abi avatar in a business setting–and relative to other avatars I’ve seen in Second Life, Abi is fairly conservative. Does it make a difference if I know the people I’m meeting in the off-line world? Does it matter if my communication partners are comfortable and familiar with virtual worlds already? Does it matter if my avatar is non-human or fantastical? Are others okay with my virtual identity?