Recently, Reuters ran an article about what sort of avatars adults want in Second Life. It was based on a poll done by Zogby for the U.S. Congressional Internet Caucus Advisory Committee. It found that 14.7% of the respondents would dramatically alter their avatars appearance from their real appearance.

This raised lots of interesting comments from the Second Life educators list. One question was about what constitutes a dramatic alteration of an avatars appearance. Presumably this would include presenting as a robot or a furry. Does it include presenting as a different gender, a different age, a different race or a different level of physical ability?

As I noted in my email, my primary avatar is constructed to look as similar to me as possible, without me spending a lot of time or money tweaking my avatar. As alternative OpenSim grids become more common, I’m spending more time trying to get my avatar on these other grids to look essentially the same as they do on the Second Life main grid.

As bigger issue with the question is that we know nothing about the respondents. However, I suspect the majority of them have not stepped foot into Second Life. It somehow seems a lot like asking someone who has never had bubble tea if they think they would like bubble tea. I’m just not sure how informative such questions are.

This takes me back to Steve Warburton's blog post Loving your avatar: identity, immersion and empathy. He presents different stages that people go through in relationship to their avatars; reaching the competency threshold, reaching a schism threshold, and a final phase, where the avatar swings between professional and playful modes of existence.

My hypotheses are that prior to people reaching the competency threshold, people may be more likely to say that they are willing to have dramatically different avatar appearances based on their own self image, willingness to experiment, etc. Once they are competent, up through the point their avatar having its own identity (social and cultural capital), I suspect they would be less willing to have dramatically different avatar appearances.

Once their avatar crosses what Warburton calls the schism threshold, I suspect that people would be again be more willing to have dramatically different avatar appearances. In the final phases, where the avatar swings between professional and playful modes of existence, I would expect people to return to being less willing to have dramatically different avatar appearances. However, this would be someone misleading. The appearance of their avatar while it is in its professional mode of existence would be similar to their real life presentation, yet the appearance of their avatar in its playful mode of existence would be more likely to have a dramatically different avatar appearance. The responses on the Second Life Educators mailing list seem to support this hypothesis. It also illustrates one other problem with the question. The question seems posited on the idea of a person having a single way presenting themselves in Second Life. Yet many people who are active in Second Life present themselves in different ways depending on the context.
With that, I'm trying to carefully side step the issue of exactly what we mean by 'avatar', and whether different presentations are 'alts' different shapes, different avatars, etc. (For more on this read my blog post, Thinking about avatars.)

Yet I will note that my hypotheses are based on my own interactions in world, and my own way of presenting. My primary appearance is as close as I can make my avatar look like myself without spending a lot of time or linden dollars on it. Yet I also have two other appearances, one as a cat which I think would count as a dramatically different avatar appearance and one as a little boy which may or may not count, depending on how you define "dramatically different avatar appearances".