Abstract
This paper is concerned with age-identity in the virtual environment Second Life and explores some initial questions about how older people understand and utilise their understandings of physical age characteristics in creating an avatar. Through a hands-on seminar, 22 older people who had no experience of Second Life, created an avatar and adapted its appearance, after which they filled in a questionnaire on their experience The study approach is based on a behavioural model rooted in the sociological concept of performativity, to begin to talk about appearance, identity and behaviour in virtual environments. We detail and discuss questionnaire responses and individual interviews through a series of user profiles. By speaking to the ‘performativity of age-identity’ we draw out themes and issues involved in older people’s use of character personalisation in virtual environments*.
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Reed, D.J., Fitzpatrick, G. (2008). Acting Your Age in Second Life. In: Markopoulos, P., de Ruyter, B., IJsselsteijn, W., Rowland, D. (eds) Fun and Games. Fun and Games 2008. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5294. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-88322-7_16
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-88322-7_16
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