RACE

YoVille seems to be a bit more simplistic than some of the other virtual worlds classmates joined. This is quite apparent when looking at gender and race. When creating your avatar, you can only pick a male or female character, with gender specific outfits and hair. Going deeper into designing your avatar, you have to pick a skin color. You have a choice of “light, light brown, tanned, brown and dark brown” in YoVille when making your avatar. Most of these choices look exactly the same, and the only one that really looks “black” is the dark brown. So for me being light skin, if I want my avatar to resemble me, it really has the color of a tanned white person. They have no representations for people who are not the basic black or white skin tone.

Going beyond the basic appearance, I looked at the representations of colors in actual game playing. I visited different events and noticed that race is not very present. Most of the avatars were the same color, which is the “tanned” white look. This could be because of the lack of variety while choosing skin tone, or due to the lack of minorities actually playing. In reality, most people do not strive to be the lightest or the darkest and this was apparent in the game, which lacked a wide variety of colors. This fact made it hard to actually look at race in YoVille. The only thing I could really focus on was the absence of diversity when choosing your own avatars skin color, and interaction with other avatars.

Going along with this idea of the lack of representations of minorities, do you think if YoVille (or any other virtual world) offered more skin color options tomorrow, there would be more of a representation of minorities, or do you think the player s would continue to choose the tanned white/light skin look? Why or why not? Do you think this has anything to do with the ideal media representations that we see today?