Was this research sponsored by Second Life?
An advertorial for SadVille perhaps? Isn't it dead yet?
Virtual women are more likely to be naked than virtual men, researchers at the Canadian University of Laval have revealed, after publishing a scientific paper on the topic. An analysis of nudity in Second Life led the Canadian duo Anna Lomanowska, a psychologistm and Matthieu Guitton, a neuroscientist who specialises in " …
More virtual women are nude online in second life because:
All the real pretty ones are out on the town.
All the virtual nude ones belong to real ugly fat ones sitting behind a computer who never go out pretending to be the pretty ones in their virtual world.
With a small minority of nude virtual women being run by weird blokes with beards pretending to be women and getting a kick out of having a pair of virtual breasts.
Say it as it is.
quote: "With a small minority of nude virtual women being run by weird blokes with beards pretending to be women and getting a kick out of having a pair of virtual breasts."
I disagree, I highly doubt it is a small minority of female avatars being run by men. I'm going to cite Lara Croft as an example; what is the male:female player ratio for the Tomb Raider series, where you have no choice but to use a female avatar?
Blokes like looking at skimpily dressed / nude females, and creating a female avatar means you get to play dressup yourself; I'm sure a majority of guys running a female avatar are deliberately and specifically clothing it in a bikini, or nothing.
Also, the female gamer demographic is less moose-like than you think. Some of the "real pretty ones" are (happily?) married or in a stable relationship, and rather than being out on the town are inside playing WoW, or Farmville, or Second Life (wouldn't really call that a game, as much as a furry BDSM simulator though). Go through all your pretty female friends and actually ask them if they ever play games, from Angry Birds through to MMOs. You may be surprised at some of the answers :)
Maybe gaming ( I played Guildwars for a while - so much so I cant face buying GW2 for more of the same) is different to SL, but if youre going to spend a couple of hours more or less staring at a running arse whilst twitching at keys it might as well be a shapely female one.
Also - there are no women on teh interwebs!
Paris for staring at.
This is simply not true, there are women on teh interwebs, I've even met some IRL.
However it is probably psychologically for the best to believe the statement to be true because whilst there may be women on the internet they're most likely not on the same part of the internet that you're on.
Consider chatting away to someone pretending to be female in a game, is it better to picture them as a bloke, or get carried away and then have a "crying game" moment later on?
I prefer to think the internet is still void of double X chromosome individuals despite evidence to the contrary.
If naked male avatars could be generated with a large swinging penis I am sure statistics would show that the most of the men using said avatars were liars.
Strangely discriminatory, women avatars can have large breasts but men's cannot have a large appendage.
I say this is sex discrimination.
" if youre going to spend a couple of hours more or less staring at a running arse whilst twitching at keys it might as well be a shapely female one."
I'm inclined to agree, though the reason is a bit odder than I realised at first.
I'm a bisexual male, my taste in men is really trashy (big, ripped meatheads). Now, a lot of male models in games are precisely this- but I've noticed that even the big, ripped males are designed in a very sketchy way. A lot more care (albeit probably lascivious) seems to be taken with the female models, and good grief, the arses are a great deal better- collapsing arse syndrome certainly isn't dead, despite the era of Unreal Tournament being over.
Doesn't bother me much, as if I have to stare at an arse (some games don't play as well, or don't even offer an option for first person), a nice curvy female one suits me just fine- but it was strange to realise that it's such an imbalance.
Of course, the problem is more likely me having a mind like a Welsh railway (one track and dirty). It does sound like I am a one-man objectification army- that's actually not the case.. most of the time, honest :)
(Anon for very obvious reasons, it'd be TMI for coworkers)
Took your advice and asked 15 women between the ages of 28 and 37 if they played games on line.
11 said no, they had jobs and families that took up most of their time. 3 played solitaire and one, I say one just looked and raised her eyebrows and shook her head (the wife). I was then banished to the shed while the yummy mummy brigade had their weekly bash.
The consensus in the house was that if you have enough time to strut around as a naked avatar you:
1. Need to get out more
2. Need to look at your priorities
3. Need to get a job
4. Need to get a girlfriend
5. Exercise more
6. Learn how to talk to real people
7. Probably perverts
8. Fix the television
If you recall last year a recently married couple, who were on benefits and could not work because of their weight problems (seriously fat) played the game continuously next to each other on their computers using their 'perfect' body semi naked avatars.
The woman then divorced her husband because 'his' avatar had an affair with another avatar. I kid you not. She said she could no longer trust him.
"Go through all your pretty female friends and actually ask them if they ever play games, from Angry Birds through to MMOs. You may be surprised at some of the answers :)"
My Facebook feed (not that I ever read it more than once a fortnight) is frequently polluted with status updates from my manager and their scores on some marble bouncing game. I read that, then I see her at work and try to suppress a smile. "You're, like, mid-40s, married, with kids, why the hell are you wasting time on Facebook's games?!". That said, it seems to be the females more than the males in my "friends" list that play these things, sometimes getting quite competitive about it. And the older women kick the younger ones asses regularly.
The demographic of who uses and enjoys this sort of stuff might surprise people...
You should probably take closer note of the times that your boss' status updates get posted.
As a parent with two young children, I can attest that after the kids go to sleep at 8:30 or 9, there is little else *to* do but fart around on facebook until I'm tired enough to sleep. At that time of day, any housework that hasn't already been done whilst the kids were awake is too exhausting to do that late in the day (or way too noisy), you can't really expect to go out with friends and leave the sleeping kids with your significant other (and besides, you don't have much time left to spend in the first place, especially on a weeknight). "Real" hobbies can sometimes get accomplished, but these days "marble madness" often qualifies for someone's hobby.
At least it's not the usual old pastime of pissing away your earnings on gambling and booze, so there's that!
"Lots of women in WOW, a lot of them play male blood elves so they don't have to deal with people like you."
Or, conversely, because women like genderbending in games for exactly the same reasons that men do (I know, completely crazy!). But with the added benefit/incentive of not dealing with the aforementioned.
With a small minority of nude virtual women being run by weird blokes with beards pretending to be women and getting a kick out of having a pair of virtual breasts.
With the overwhelming majority of nude virtual women being run by weird blokes with beards pretending to be women and getting a kick out of having a pair of virtual breasts.
there fixed it for you.
mines the one that shows off my cleavage to best effect (sad but true :D)
I don't get how this study has any meaning beyond whatever its undoubtedly vital importance to the last four people in Sadville. How exactly does it relate to flashing one's tits or arse in real life and who exactly the fuck cares?
Have these people REALLY nothing more interesting to research?
What a startling piece of research. I would never have guessed that female figures from a fantasy setting have less coverings than male figures from a fantasy setting unless they had told me.
Or, of course, unless I was someone who ventured into bookshops and comic shops where EVERY female figure in a fantasy setting wears the tanned hides of five mice while the hero is either armoured head to toe or has the whole 'loincloth and a big chopper' thing going on.
I really must consider going into research to get paid to state the bleedin' obvious.
While I'll grant that probably accounts for a great deal more than the researchers attribute to it, some of them probably are women who would never be caught wearing clothing like that at home let alone in public. The real world has real, lasting consequences. Yes, men should control themselves, but wear clothing like that in public and your chances of being raped go up, so you don't do it. Act like a floozie and there are adverse consequences. In the virtual world none of that happens.
In a non-computer RPG I played once upon a time, the most conservative of the female players played a seductive floozie in game. In fact one of the funniest moments in our play happened when her character tried to seduce my uber-geek, no social skills character. She rolled a straight up success to seduce him. I said "Brooke looks up and says 'you're not a computer' and goes back to hacking away on his computer.' This was followed by me rolling a critical success and much laughter.
Another case study: Felica Day and The Guild. The character in the RPG is much more of a flirt than the character she plays in the script. Which mirrors her actions in real life. She may be happy to toss off an innuendo or three while talking on stage, but when some asks 'does the drapery match the curtains' he gets escorted out of the room (and probably by fans if security isn't fast enough).
Is it fair to assume that funding for this would have been less forthcoming if the title had been 'Virtual Environment Reveals Sex-Dependent Nature of Skin Disclosure'?
Also this smacks of a researcher who was supposed to be working having spent a year messing about on the internet and suddenly getting an ultimatum to publish something.
Glad I'm not paying Canadian taxes.
> After studying 400 avatars
> physical attractiveness [ was equated to ] the waist-chest ratios
An alternative theory is that some researcher got caught playing a computer game by his/her/its boss and made up some cockamamie story about "research" and "virtual worlds". Then they found they had to follow through when the boss said "Carry on, I look forward to reading your conclusions".
So far, so fair enough. However the really sad part of the whole affair is that after scxrambling around for an hour or two to knock together some words and meaningless statistics of dubious quality, they managed to find a publication gullible desperate enough for material to accept, and peer-review, it.
Coming next, maybe: the effect of a hang-over on FPS scores?
>Coming next, maybe: the effect of a hang-over on FPS scores?
See now, if you are going to do that then you have to be thorough. The effects of being slightly tipsy on your Scores, then being drunk.. then being absolutely blottoed, THEN the effects of a hangovers at all different levels. All the way from "ouch my head hurts" to "OMG I WANT TO DIE!!"
I'd like to see a study on how they change during the process of drinking. My friends have noticed an amusing trend that the more I drink, the better I become on FPS's.
I've come to the conclusion that this is due to me relaxing, and being less twitchy while aiming and so getting better at aiming....
Few years later we'll see the argument for giving all the troops rations of beer when out in the field ;)
There are men in SL playing women, but they are dead easy to spot. So if I, as a guy playing a male avatar can spot them, I'm sure women can spot them even more easily.
As to the real life females playing female avies, in SL no-one is old - everyone plays someone who is young and sexy. If you are somewhat less than attractive in RL, what's the point of playing an equally unattractive avie when you can go for uber sexy? And if you've got it, flaunt it!
As has been pointed out, there are many housewives looking for a bit of excitement in their life which they can't irl. They may or may not be a MILF in real life, and even if they are they probably wouldn't behave as they do in SL - but what's wrong with living a little fantasy?
SL gets an often unfair press - slagging off SL because of the amount of sex there is a bit like saying anyone who uses google is a saddo perve. Just try putting in the most harmless of google search terms and you can guarantee to have some pron links in there. The interwebs is awash with pron as is RL - SL merely reflects that, albeit in a somewhat more open fashion due to the anonymity of your avie.
All in all, it isn't a great surprise that female avies in SL show more "flesh" - just as it isn't much of a surprise to discover that "hotties" in real life show more flesh.
>the most harmless of google search terms and you can guarantee to have some pron links in there. The interwebs is awash with pron as is
This type of crap always gets my hackles up. No you can't and no it isn't. Do you read the DM? I can imagine you probably signed up for their block the internet campaign.
I have never found porn on the internet by accident.
I'm reasonably certain my then 50 year old mother was NOT looking for porn when she did that search that set her active desktop wallpaper to a then popular porn site.
That I as an experienced web surfer would have expected that possibility when searching for "special girl" in an entirely different matter. (She was trying to search the local hard drive for a picture she had saved of my brother's wife. She put that in the description when she used some piece of cataloging software that came either with a camera or an inkjet printer.)
>my then 50 year old mother was NOT looking for porn
So your dear old mum found some porn and bookmarked it to show you later. Or maybe she was so shocked she had to go looking deeper into the site just to make sure or find something more to her taste. Either way you've convinced me that a solitary sample of your mum once found porn so it must be everywhere.
Oh, and did I ever say it wan't possible to find porn accidentally? I don't think I did, merely that I haven't found that to be the case and that a search for an harmless topic cannot guarentee a porn link. It's people like you and the OP that fuel the mass hysteria that porn is everywhere.
I wasn't, and all I got for it was flack for not aiding SLs sea of one handed typists in their quest to die of a masturbation related disorder.
Yeah, SL the world where you can craft anything you imagine, as long as what you imagine are gigantic genitals, and really ugly lingerie.
Most people who criticize SL do so because they have BEEN there.
>most harmless of google search terms and you can guarantee to have some pron links
Not entirely true, at least with Google safe search turned on.
Few years back, the BBC had an article about a primary school teacher bringing in her VCR to school as the school's was kaputt. What she had left in the VCR was quite, quite, NSFW.
Back home drinking beers with a buddy, I recount the story and google "teacher porn videotape" to show him. Literally. About a split second later, we both spray beer all over the keyboard as we realize the search terms.
Well, Google didn't find the original article, that's true. But neither did it find much else that was objectionable. I was very impressed.
Women in SL show more skin... wow who would have thought
Drive through a major town in the middle of summer and you'll see exactly the same thing, all the blokes stuffed into suits or t-shirt and jeans, and a fair few women wearing nowt but a skimpy summer dress <drool> showing her legs <pant>.... and possibly showing some cleava... dang brb going for a lay down.
When I (male) wear 1970s above-the-knee shorts in the summer I am pursued by apparently complimentary wolf-whistles from teenage girls - and somewhat more threatening cat-calls from groups of women out with their children. It appears the trend for women to be "laddish" has changed the balance of such public behaviour between the sexes. Women in groups verbally harassing single young males has been a fact of life in many industries for at least a century. The IT punch room of the 1960s was a legendary example.
Nowadays young males on their own are intimidated by this sort of aggression when considering what to wear in public. They have also been sensitised to the possibility that they might be thought to be trying to attract members of their own sex. The mores and nuances of social fashion are always likely to be complicated.
...everyone knows why female characters wear less clothes. It's because the graphics are created by male 30 something vergin nerds who believe womeon would have worn chainmails bekinis in the middle ages had they been allowed to have fought. You just need to look at the desktop wallpaper of gamers/net admins and the like to see what they think of women. I haven't yet seen asysadmins desktop that doesn't have a picture of woman wearing a bikini while shooting guns. Nerd desktops are no different than mechanics wall calendars. These are the people making and playing the games, it's no wonder that the women in the game look like they do...
Majority of graphic and game content designers I've known are female. Never seen sexist desktop graphics on a developers screen, perhaps means I've worked in the wrong offices. Never deal with sysadmin machines but I did know a model with her self portrait in bikini pointing gun as her laptop background. Beware of stereotyping.
I think you might want to socialize with other sysadmins then :-)
I'll admit; my desktop also features a female figure (Motoko Kusanagi, the protagonist of Ghost in the Shell / GiTS SAC) but simply her head and left shoulder (so you can see her 'rank' of major) and that's it.
Not all of us sysadmins want to watch skin shots the whole day long.
Hot chicks wear less clothes. Sure it's obvious to everyone here, because that is all we see. What about the hot chick who don't. That might make for better if less interesting research.
As to all the other comments, sadville is not sadville any longer and has not been for a while, as all the people who thought it is/was have left. Those of us who remain thank you for leaving, please do not return.
Neither I nor my wife is fat or ugly, or socially repressed. We do however live about 75km from the nearest population center. We spend way too much time and money in SL, but it beats the hell out of STD's, DUI's, urban violence, not to mention the price of a night out on the town.
Also think about this, you will probably never be able to convince your wife, or another willing partner to participate with you in that particular fetish that you won't admit to having in RL, but in SL she just might and finding another willing partner that you will never have to see again is a no-brainer.
Secondlife, only open minds need apply.
you may now apply the vitriol
"you will probably never be able to convince your wife, or another willing partner to participate with you in that particular fetish that you won't admit to having in RL, but in SL she just might and finding another willing partner that you will never have to see again is a no-brainer."
And you use this as proof that it's not sadville? sheesh.
I just realized that when I was a young 'un, my sister's Barbie dolls spent much more time nekkid than her Ken dolls. I think that this was due to deep sociological and psychological factors that will be of the utmost importance to the future of humanity in the design of Barbarella-type spacesuits.
Where's my cash?
A: Far too many of the virtual "women" are teenaged BOYS. And B: In most games its hard to FIND female clothing that actually allows your character to be fully clothed , and generally the games don't let you use the male clothing.
Till Warcraft "for example" started with transmog, trying not to look like a hooker with a sword was just about impossible outside of Northrend. And Sadville is largely a fetish club.
During the time I spent there a few years back I generally wore Jeans, boots, a tank top, and a denim Jacket "Pretty much what I wear in real life". And one of the reasons I got bored with it and left was I got tired of explaining over and over why I actually wanted to dress like a normal person. People kept mailing me hooker wear and "shudder" stick on genitals so I could enjoy the "fun".
"A: Far too many of the virtual "women" are teenaged BOYS."
Possibly in WOW, or other online games, but for SL a majority of the players are adults, with the greatest majority being middle aged.
" And Sadville is largely a fetish club."
Well, possibly this is true, but since most of the representations of RL fetishes have been moved to zindra (aka perversion island) this is no longer a prevailing theme in SL. It does cater very well to my fetish of wearing a tux and listening to classic rock. I sure it would cater to your fetish of wearing jeans and a tank top.
" People kept mailing me hooker wear and "shudder" stick on genitals so I could enjoy the "fun"."
Unless you look like a n00b, these days nobody will be that helpful. And anyone with freebie genitals would be laughed out of most of the "fetish" areas. All that anyone I have run into in SL has ever asked of me was respect, and in turn that is what ask of them, and what I offer.
Maybe you should give it another try. But be warned, you may get bored, it is, after all, what you make it. ;)
Its not my "fetish" its my RL wardrobe. About 95% of it to be accurate. If you can't tell the difference between fetish gear and clothing, you may have issues.
As to the n00b comment, yes, the people who are jerks to people for not having the best and trendiest in real $$$ skins make it hell on people who wanted to explore or maybe learn to build. I have an old "birth date" and got very tired being expected to "keep up with the Joneses" because I'd been there a while. Isn't there enough of this in the REAL world? Now you have to be trendy enough for fantasy land?
And I'd never BE anyplace with virtual willy waving to start with. SL started with such promise, it turned into a 3D display of the net's worst excesses, I went back last year actually. The one sim I loved, the one that didn't have the ambiance of a nasty club, or the charm of a porn theater had to close. This is a good example of what it could have been, and sadly is no more.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWoRVQO3gJU
Don't dump it on me, I had high hopes, SL took the low road,
One persons fetish wear is another persons normal everyday clothing, it is not my place to judge either way, no matter what I actually think of it.
Yes, that is a problem with SL, you skin is only as thick as your RL skin and the need to bow to peer pressure is just as prevalent in SL as it is in RL. Nice that those mute, ban, and de-render functions exist. Makes jerks disappear like they were not even there. I actually know a couple of people who refuse to even put on a free skin and shape and are still in the version 1 skin. Strange, but it is their choice. I guess you must just have bad luck because I have not experienced the jerks you speak of. (I don't doubt they exist however).
It is truly sad that a number of the better sims have had to close, but there is no government funding for parks and "nice places" and the economy hit a number of people hard. The luxury that is SL was no longer an option for a number of people, and if you can't pay for it out of your own pocket, and it can't make money, then it unfortunately goes away. I was going thru my landmarks and have found that most of the places I knew of when I first entered SL are no more. That is the sad in sadville. That being said there are still many wonderful places in SL to spend time.
I do not mean to dump on you. But not everyone in SL are the type of people you complain about. Also, from what I understand the SIM you loved exists in a backup copy. Why don't you just buy a blank SIM and have it restored. SL is a function of the people in it, if all the positive influncers like you leave, then all that is left is the negative. Help make it what you want it to be.
"there is no government funding for parks and 'nice places' "
Actually there is, LL has a number of their own regions integrated in every continent, and most of it is parks and nice meeting places, and free building zones. There is in particular the vast sea that joins the eastern continents, for one. Little islands, a gorgeous lighthouse, and lots of ocean, all of it public access and use.
But your underlying point remains true: given the high price of acreage in SL there's little incentive for players to just have a lot of nice-looking land that is not put to commercial use. LL mitigated this a tiny bit but introducing quarter-price regions, but those just went to low-cost demand instead of feeding any need for more natural or just-for-the-beauty-of-it options.
There is simply too little granularity, because of the fixed 256x256m size of regions and hardcoded prim/surface values... which makes little sense, given how size of land and constructions is completely arbitrary beyond the absolute number of objects. There is no technical obstacle to making 32+ km sized single regions that have a very low prim count limit, and sharding those by the dozen on a single server. But they won't do it, somehow.
Another thing sorely missing from SL is that it's not making use of sunken-cost processing power, bandwidth and storage space: namely, that of the player base. Give them an option to allocate some of their already paid-for computer-hold, and they'll happily convert it to more virtual acreage. There are many distributed algorithms and existing, proven protocols, that could make it possible for the players themselves to host part of the Grid. The virtual reality Solipsis concept goes as far as having no central server at all, hosting its worlds entirely on the cloud-ified computers of the users themselves.
Great video. Sam Lowry is a great machinamist in SL but if you think the Lost Gardens was the only sim worth visiting you are sadly mistaken.
Sam has made many videos showcasing the talented designers in SL. And yes, there are many talented designers and creators there.
SL is not a failure. It's been going over 8 years as on open platform, 10 years since the first beta was opened to users.One of the features is that the map/landscape changes from day to day with new creative works. It can have bad elements for sure, but it can also have wonderfully creative and inspiring works of art.
Remember that men are turned on by visual sexuality much more than women. In the real world, Nude Women are simply looked at more than Nude Men. Note the lopsided balance of nude men (some) vs women (BEEELIONS) in porn.
Keeping that in mind, one would expect males to always be more dressed, since the Average Audience is less interested in looking at them. Hot studly male avatars are simply going to get less attention than hot women, so why play as the also-ran?
FYI, I have a female alt in Second Life. Sometimes she's a hot babe in a slinky dress, sometimes a scary-looking cyborg. I'm happily straight but it's fun to explore strangers' reactions when they think I'm a female. See things from the other gender's perspective, yanno.
I clicked on this thinking this was actual research on actual people in actual situations. Not video game nonsense.
It could have been provocative, shocking, or even thought-provoking.
e.g.: Imagine this type of introduction: "If we take it as axiomatic that men and women are equal in modern society, then how do we categorize differences between men and women showing more or less skin in identical situations?"
Then let's not talk about emotionally charged, and highly eroticized differences (like bare chests on the beach), but subtler ones, which may be easier to consider rationally (like open-toed shoes in the workplace).
That'd be worth a read.
In discussions with a few psychology experts, there appears to be some interesting dynamics involved with nudity and attraction. Men like looking at (attractive) naked women. Women like looking at (attractive) naked men. Women also like looking at other women. Men, however, fall into two groups. For most of us, there is a built-in 'threat response' involved with the view of a naked man. This has been demonstrated by fMRIs in several studies. The second (smaller) group of men lack this threat response and may also find another naked man attractive. This group may correspond with Kinsey's research showing a (startlingly) significant minority of men that have some level of attraction towards other men. Even those that identified themselves as straight. Kinsey found this to be about 35%.
From the point of view of 'acceptable' naked images (avatars, game figures, etc.) it would seem that, given an unknown audience, the naked female form offers the least chance of triggering a negative subliminal response. With naked male figures, that possibility increases.
The interesting research would be to strap a cross section of the population into an fMRI and compare their responses to their answers to Kinsey's survey and other issues of sexual identity. It may turn out that the lack of this threat response trigger is genetic. And it might be a necessary, although not sufficient condition for bisexuality or homosexuality. It might also be tough to do, as many gays don't like being poked and prodded (scientifically, that is) as if they suffer from a disease.
I think there are some interesting things that could be done with virtual reality in psychology research, but this particular paper strikes me as really problematic.
Different online games (or communities, if you want to be pedantic and say SL isn't a game) can have different cultural norms about what's acceptable behaviour. Second Life, in particular, tends to be more tolerant of nudity, open displays of sexuality, and unconventional sexuality (e.g. BDSM, furries...) than other online environments. Indeed, it's notorious for this. There's an obvious self-selection bias: the people who continue to hang around in Second Life are mostly the kind of people who enjoy the kind of things that go on in Second Life.
I really don't think you can generalise from Second Life to other online games, much less the real world. The result in the paper is just about a particular subculture.
(It might have been interesting to compare some of the "nudist beach" sims in SL --- I'd conjecture you'ld find a large number of gay men who enjoy looking at naked men --- which would skew your starts more towards male nudity, The point of the comparison being that the "gay bar" subculture has way more male nudity that the "star wars RPG subculture", with neither of them necessarily being typical of any wider group).
The whole study is worthless.
Men wear more clothing online because women judge their social worth rather than their sexual attractivity. Better clothes makes a man more attractive to the ladies. In virtual worlds, the physical body is arbitrary and everyone can be a Ken doll. The difference then has to express itself somehow, and often it does so through the wardrobe and gadgets show.