Don’t Peek at my Avatar

One late night in July, I was busy constructing a carillon when I received an IM from Caledon Oxbridge University tutor Miss Jemima.

“Dean Kondor, can I call on you to help please? There are very few other staffers with eject powers at this time.”

“Sure,” I replied. “What’s wrong?” The university is so well staffed, I am seldom called upon so directly. I was keen to help and started to wonder at what brash and boisterous avatars were causing disturbance.

“There’s a girl standing naked at the Entrance Hall. I tried to chat and IM her for ages but she doesn’t respond or move.”

“I’ll be there right away. Please send a cab.”

When I arrived,  I saw a lovely dressed woman and a tall man with a Russian name. “Thank you for coming, Dean Kondor, ” she said. I still couldn’t see the offending naked girl, the reason I was called in. Miss Jemina stood calm and assured; the Russian man seemed to be her friend. Was this a hoax?

Suddenly, between two of our poster boards, I saw a naked woman, bare-breasted and head shorn clean. From her knees down it was transparent, as if she had some sort of transparency glitch. The naked girl reminded me of one of those broken mannequins from the Blade Runner warehouse scene.

I ejected her. Still cammed on her, she plunged 30 feet beneath the sea, and it seemed as if I was dragged down with her. Then I hit the Escape key, and my point of view sprung back to the grateful Miss Jemima.

We chatted briefly and I returned to my carillon. But even as I worked I remained disturbed by the image of that naked, bald avatar. Miss Jemima made the right call as a tutor and I had responded appropriately, textbook fashion. But what had happened to the naked avatar’s owner? Was she midway through changing clothes when the PC crashed and she was left stranded? Or was the owner frustrated by her efforts to change appearance, and abandoned the avatar there in despair?

***

Just as we do not walk about naked in public spaces, so as avatars, we don’t roam around naked in Second Life. Sometimes the no nudity policy is directly stated in the land information or covenant. At other times, a basic dress sense is assumed as part of our regular social interaction.

In modern society, we reserve nakedness for private home moments, the changeroom, and for moments of intimacy. It would be disquieting in real life to attend a talk and see the presenter naked.

At this year’s Virtual Worlds Best Practice in Education conference, Ebbe Linden,  the avatar of Linden Lab CEO, gave the opening speech. For the first twenty minutes, amongst a crowd of over 100 avatars, I saw him as naked that the naked girl I ejected from the university. And no, Ebbe was in no danger of being ejected for being naked in a public space.

What’s going on here? Is there some kind double standards? Is being naked more okay for a male than female avatar? Is being naked more okay for a VIP Linden as opposed to an anonymous newbie?

It needs to be emphasised that since no one else laughed or reacted to Ebbe’s nakedness on the day, it is possible that it was a viewer glitch restricted to only me and a few others. Frau Jo Yardley (founder of The 1920’s Berlin Project) has the only blog entry I could find with snapshot evidence that she saw him naked too. The sim we were in had reached its avatar limit and lag was at a peak. So a glitch and the delayed rate of downloading all the avatar information could have caused the clothes not correctly rigged onto Ebbe’s mesh body. He was wearing one of the new mesh avatars from the new range that was just about to be released for newbies.

Unlike the earlier ‘classic avatar’ style which is clothing layers textured on a human frame, the new mesh avatars are closer to real life. The human frame is textured with skin and clothing are separate objects that fit over the human frame. That is why Ebbe appeared naked in my viewer: all the different data files that comprised his intended appearance, including how his t-shirt and jeans were to be ‘rigged’ to his human frame, were not fully downloaded.

So Ebbe was not ejected because the experienced ones amongst the audience understood that temporary nakedness is a technical side effect of his mesh avatar. There was no intention or accidental actions that resulted in his nakedness. I need to add that we were all paying such close attention to his speech that I (and others who might have seen him naked) quickly overlooked his clothing glitch.

At Caledon Oxbridge University, we recognise that newbies will modify and change their appearance or clothes early in their Second Life experience. We also understand the importance of keeping nudity under wraps, following social conventions. Male and female change rooms are provided as a safe and comfortable environment for newbies to change clothes. Other residents on campus are able to go about their business without being confronted by nudity.

Recently the issue of peeping toms was brought to my attention. At a July Q&A session with the Deans, a complaint was raised about a peeping tom who cammed into the female dressing room from the male one.

Perhaps the two dressing rooms are situated too close together, a faculty staff suggested. We could remove the temptation to peep by moving  the dressing rooms to different heights.

Then another staff reminded us that avatars can cam a great distance. Professor Ravelli can view 1500m and more down to the ground when he is working in the skybox. His naughty pupils should beware!

As Chancellor Martini said wisely, “What might help is to IM the offender and ask them to keep their eyes to themselves. In my experience, people who do things like that in a virtual world are usually quite immature, and counting on anonymity. Once discovered, they will leave… We try to offer some privacy here in Oxbridge, but to be honest, there is no such thing as privacy in Second Life ~ only what we can demand for ourselves.”

Those of you new to the virtual world may find it difficult to comprehend that not only do we discourage nudity on campus, we assist avatars in protecting their ‘modesty’ when they  undress or change clothing. Actually, at the Q&A session, I could see there was a divide between those who wanted avatar modesty to be protected, and those who didn’t see why it was needed.

At this point of the discussion, Prof. Red Quixote, our Pose and Animation instructor, asked bemusedly: “ Am I the only one that finds the concept of ‘pixel peepers’ absurd?”

A visitor to the campus also pointed out that if some people are so concerned about getting peeped on, perhaps they have an identity crisis and are better off left to go elsewhere outside the campus to ‘change clothes’.

There was an escalation of tension in the Q&A discussion and this visitor left abruptly.

The tension came about because for some oldies in Second Life, there is a tacit understanding that Second Life users can identify so closely with their avatars that they appreciate changerooms and worry about peeping toms. Some of the avatar skins and shapes are so photo-realistic and so well crafted, it is not so incomprehensible that some of us respond the same way we respond to an oil painting or a photograph; or a broken set of mannequins in Blade Runner.

“A man, to be greatly good, must imagine … must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination.” (Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defence of Poetry)

“The mightiest lever known to the moral world, Imagination.” (William Wordsworth)

“There can be no passion, and by consequence no love, where there is not imagination.” (William Godwin)

I hope you are well, naked and bald girl avatar that I ejected one Saturday night in July.

I don’t even remember your name any more.

I wish instead of the ‘Eject’ button that sank you to the bottom of the sea, I had a button that would envelope you in a warm woolly blanket, and suspend you up in the rafters of the Entrance hall, and keep you sleeping, safe there from preying eyes until you wake up and are ready to explore the virtual world again.