Avatar as Second Suit: Power and Participation in Virtual Work

Highly Skilled Professionals in Second Life: Materials for and Modes of Conducting the Study

This analysis relies on case studies of three institutions in the virtual world Second Life: the Swedish embassy in Second Life (formally known as the Second House of Sweden, 2007–2012), the Estonian embassy in Second Life (2007–2011), and the virtual city, Malmo in Second Life (2009–2010). ¹ These institutions had different national and international audiences and have in various ways been regarded successful. The Second House of Sweden was launched first and gained large coverage in the media worldwide and also many visitors and was regarded a successful PR project (Bengtsson, 2011). The Estonian embassy was a combined nation branding and nation building project and was mainly successful in terms of media coverage and visitors on the national arena (Bengtsson, 2012). The virtual city Malmo in Second Life was launched 2 years after the other ones, and after Second Life’s popularity peak, and was greatly criticized and mocked for its huge costs and lack of visitors (Bengtsson, 2013).

For this article, I interviewed eight individuals, six men and two women, who also provided me with information such as blog posts and photos. The interviews were conducted in Swedish or English, lasted from 1 to 2 hr and some include complementary questions sent after the interview, and I have transcribed them myself. The interviewees have been involved in different phases of the work process; some initiated the institutions, others built them, administrated them, staffed them, promoted them, and, in some cases, also closed them down. Some of them are technically experienced early adopters who use(d) Second Life out of personal curiosity and/or professional interest while others had no previous experience of virtual worlds. Some of them had very specific tasks to accomplish while others were able to freely define their activities in the virtual world. Some were able to participate in the creation of their avatars, while the avatars of others had to be more strictly adapted to their user’s position and appearance outside Second Life. As all of these users (and their avatars) represented public agencies, they had to adapt their looks and behavior in accordance with the agencies’ duties and areas of responsibility both outside and inside Second Life.

Second Life as a Professional Stage: Theoretical Concepts and Approach

The field of avatar theory contains a number of dominant lines. The early psychoanalytical interpretation of avatar use as identity work and elaboration of self is a strong and vivid tradition (cf. Turkle, 1984, 1995, see also Castronova, 2007; Kafai, Fields, & Cook, 2010; Wolfendale, 2007; Williams, Kennedy, & Moore, 2011) containing subdivisions such as avatar gender (Angerer, 1999; Banakou & Chorianopoulos, 2010; Ducheneaut, Wen, Yee, & Wadley, 2009; Dumitrica & Gaden, 2009; Dunn & Guadagno, 2012; Lehdonvirta, Lehdonvirta, & Baba, 2011; Lehdonvirta, Nagashima, Lehdonvirta, & Baba, 2012; Schrier, 2012; Sundén, 2003; Sundén & Svenningson, 2012; Yee, Ducheneaut, Yao, & Nelson, 2011) and ethnicity (cf. Groom, Bailenson, & Nass, 2009; Kafai, Cook, & Fields, 2010; Vang & Fox, 2014). Avatar appearance has gained huge interest, and many researchers underscored its influence on social interaction and communication (cf. Bailenson & Beall, 2006; Blascovich, 2002; Cheng, Farnham, & Stone, 2002; Garau, 2006; Schroeder, 2011; Slater & Steed, 2002; Taylor, 2002). A third tradition analyzes social dynamics of shared virtual environments, roles, and status hierarchies in virtual environments (cf. Axelsson, 2002; Brown & Bell, 2006; Hudson-Smith, 2002; Jakobsson, 2002; Sonnenwald, 2006; Steen, Siân Davies, Tynes, & Garfield, 2006). Schroeder and Axelsson (2006) discuss avatars in terms of work (also Teigland, 2010), although they do not consider the frames and restrictions that paid labor brings to the use of avatars.

I use Goffman’s theoretical framework to understand what a professional identity brings to the use of avatars (see also Malaby, 2009, p. 20ff.; Schroeder, 2002, p. 12). My analytical focus is the virtual institutions as regions and the work situation’s framing of social interaction, presentation of selves, and experiences and practices of the professionals using avatars at work. Regions are places where we perform and are defined by Goffman (1959) as follows:

…any place that is bounded to some degree by barriers to perception. Regions vary, of course, in the degree to which they are bounded and according to the media of communication in which the barriers to perception occur. (p. 106)

Goffman’s theories were developed based on the analyses of individual performances in different social settings. The preferred behavior in a place changes when the frame, understood as both material and social limitations for acceptable behavior, does, for example, when someone enters a room or at a given time. Goffman dealt with social roles and behavior in face-to-face situations, and others have pointed out that media technologies add new dimensions to social interaction (cf. Boellstorff, 2008; Jenkins, 2010; Ling, 2004; Lundby & Hertzberg, 2009; Meyrowitz, 1985; Schroeder, 2002). Nonetheless, Richard Jenkins (2010) argues that, besides the increased means to perform on different stages simultaneously, social interaction in digital media, in many respects, works in the same way as it does in face-to-face situations.

According to Schroeder (2011, p. 146), the key aspects of a frame analysis of virtual environments are the focus of attention, the character of the environments, the tasks of interaction, and the attention toward present others. Accordingly, I focus on the following: how the virtual institutions framed social behavior and interaction at work, how the virtual workers experienced interaction and performance, how they constructed and imagined their “audience,” and how they related to the personal and social front of their professional avatars. The theoretical terms are further developed later in the article.

Being and Becoming a Professional in Second Life

In this part of the article, I present a typology of the different kinds of professional users among the interviewees and the kinds of avatars they used when working in the virtual world. The two virtual embassies and Malmo in Second Life were part of the media hype about Second Life in the mid-2000s (Kücklich, 2009), and unlike many other activities in Second Life, they were projects driven from the top down, with an initially set project plan, deadline, budget, and a specified communication goal (see also Bengtsson, 2011, 2012, 2013). A majority of the interviewees had avatars that were created solely for the institutions and, thus, were not personal projects (although there are differences among them).

The following categorization is based on two dimensions: the users’ roles in the projects and the kinds of professional avatars they used for the purposes of their work. It illustrates the ways in which the interviewees’ experiences of having a professional avatar were related to their introduction to the virtual world and the way their focus of attention was structured when using their professional avatars. When discussing the users, I refer to the people behind the keyboards, and when talking about the avatars, it is their online personas that I have in mind.

Professional Users

There were four kinds of users among the interviewees: initiators, entrepreneurs, celebrities, and office clerks. The initiators were early adopters who had a (personal) background in Second Life and had initiated the institutional projects. These people had earlier (semi)private experiences ³ of Second Life and came up with the ideas for the projects. However, they did not enter the virtual world as professionals; when the virtual projects were established, they acted as (employed and paid) professionals in it.

Some of them later became entrepreneurs, executives in the early phases of the virtual institutions. Other entrepreneurs were involved after the idea was executed. Several of them were inexperienced newcomers to the virtual world and, as such, entered it as professionals. Most of the entrepreneurs did not even stay until the end of the institutional projects. They were part of the intensive building and inauguration phases and later left for new entrepreneurial assignments elsewhere.

A special kind of user occasionally involved in the virtual institutions was the celebrity. These people were well-known outside Second Life and lent the virtual institutions their celebrity glow. The most significant example is the Swedish Minister for Foreign Affairs, Carl Bildt, who inaugurated the Second House of Sweden in May 2007. There were also other examples such as the Director of the Swedish Institute, Olle Wästberg, formerly Swedish cultural attaché in the United States and a well-known profile in Sweden. In Second Life, celebrities, and their avatars, acted as officials in the state administration and worked mainly to draw the media’s interest to the virtual institutions. ⁴

The fourth category was that of the office clerks, working to administrate and staff the virtual institutions. The office clerks usually come rather late to the projects, and there were variations between them regarding their experience of engagement in and enthusiasm for the virtual worlds.

Professional Avatars

All the professionals involved in building and administrating the public institutions had to have an avatar as a work tool. This was, perhaps, one of the most distinctive differences compared with other work tasks in these organizations. As well as there being different kinds of users involved, there were also different kinds of avatars. Three main categories of professional avatars can be found in the material. The categorization focuses on how and why the avatars were created and how they related to the user’s private or professional self.

The first kind of professional avatar is unexpectedly classified as private. This refers to those involved who had created their avatars before they started to use them professionally as part of their employment. The initial purpose of the private avatars was to explore the individual, social, and commercial potential of the virtual environment. Private avatars represented their users both on and off duty.

The second category is that of the individual avatar. Individual avatars were created for individuals. However, in contrast to the private avatars, they were created solely for the individual’s professional role, which means that they were initially based on the person’s official role and purpose. The celebrity users referred to earlier had individual avatars designed to represent them in their official roles. The main purpose of the individual avatars was to represent the user in his or her role as a public officer.

The final category of professional avatars is that of the collective avatar, also adapted solely for institutional roles. The most distinctive characteristic of the collective avatars is that they lacked connection with any single individual; several individuals shared a collective avatar both synchronically and diachronically. For example, the Estonian embassy in Second Life had two collective avatars created for their employees; these were operated by multiple users because of organizational changes at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. These users had to “reserve” the avatar when they needed to use it. In Second Life, the users of the collective avatars, thus, shared the avatar’s look, history, and social network. ⁵

These categorizations are applied in the following analysis of the professional users’ focus of attention regarding the virtual workplaces as social and cultural frames, social interaction as experienced by the interviewees, and their relationships with their avatar’s front, that is, appearance.

Institutional Frames in the Virtual World

A frame analysis in Goffman’s (1974) terms takes into account both the social and material surroundings of human behavior and how they structure performances. ⁶ In an immaterial environment such as Second Life, it is sufficient to address spatial rather than material conditions.

Many have pointed out that the architecture in virtual worlds, and perhaps in Second Life more than others, often copies the architecture of the “real world” and does not fully take advantage of the distinct characteristics of virtual environments. ⁷ The virtual institutions all related to the sober institutional character recognizable from public institutions offline, although to varying degrees (see Bengtsson, 2011, 2012, 2013). Mimicking real-world architecture was meant to bring the seriousness of the off-line producers to the online arena and make the virtual environments recognizable to their visitors. The institutions, however, also adapted to the playfulness of virtual worlds, which is a part of the cultures of Second Life (Boellstorff, 2008; Kücklich, 2009; Pearce & Artemesia, 2009), as in the following picture of the interior of the Estonian virtual embassy (see Figure 1). As settings for social interaction, these institutions, thus, provided a conventional frame, though with a playful twist. Below is an interior shot from the Estonian embassy in Second Life, showing the mix of formal institution interior and playful Second Life culture (some of the sculptures in the building were mobile and could suddenly come jumping at you) ⁸ .

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Interior of the Estonian embassy in Second Life. Photo by the author.

Besides the spatial setting, there is a continuum of structures of behavior ranging from strict rules, such as laws and other regulations, to culturally defined norms of appropriate behavior. The instructions given to the office clerks who staffed the Second House of Sweden are an example of an explicit frame for the professional avatars’ behaviors. Initially, embassy project entrepreneurs and the Director General of the Swedish Institute were present in Second Life. However, after some time, they hired others to staff the embassy. Workshops were held for these temporary employees, and they were given instructions beforehand as to how to deal both with the technology of the virtual world and the character and responsibilities of the public agency, as seen in the document cited below (see Figure 2).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 2.

Instructions from a workshop held for those staffing the Second House of Sweden in Second Life. Unpublished. Provided by the Swedish Institute.

The virtual world was presented as the immediate stage for interaction, but the norms of the off-line institution (the Swedish Institute) provided an overall cultural frame as the employees were asked to take into account the responsibilities of the Swedish Institute, as well as off-line discourses about Second Life (regarding criminal behavior in the virtual world, etc.).

According to Schroeder (2011, p. 144), the “focus of attention” in virtual environments is related to the sum of distractions away from the screen, and several interviewees complained that they could not engage in the virtual world as much as they needed and wanted, especially as the hype around Second Life dwindled and their employers’ prioritization of the virtual institutions in the overall organization faded. Others had many other work tasks to accomplish while they were supposed to be logged in to Second Life during office hours and, thus, had to handle sudden interactions in the virtual institution in addition to their everyday work. They had to manage to perform online and offline simultaneously, staying concentrated on both stages at the same time (which is, nonetheless, a common experience for people using digital media for meetings, etc.; Wasson, 2006).

As a consequence, the online regions were not exclusively framed by the online world but also by the institutions offline. The spatial similarities between the online institutions and their off-line equivalents draw attention to the blurred boundaries of the virtual workplaces just like the multistage work tasks that several interviewees had to manage.

Social Roles and Interaction

The dual character of the virtual institutions as frames is even more accentuated when focusing on social interaction. Schroeder (2011, pp. 90–91) claims that virtual environments are media that afford users a more powerful sense of being there and doing things with others—in the general sense of affording a greater attachment to people and places—than other media. Even though the interviewees often expressed a detached relationship to their professional avatars, interacting in the virtual world was put forward as a powerful experience.

But what’s most important, and what I found cool, is that I worked with many consultants and freelancers and programmers who you gave an assignment and then you checked things out via e-mail and you met a few times and watched outlines, but the relationship that we built with these people who we had never met before, it was damn…

Interviewer: “Different: or?”

Completely different, but also much stronger. Just the fact that you could walk up to someone and talk to them, that’s a completely different thing, really. And I think that was, I remember how that struck me. That I thought “I hope that he or she is at work today” because I would like to meet them, sort of. It’s like having a real colleague at work. I found that cool.

Svensson, Mattias, Creative Director at Communications Bureau, Söderhavet, personal interview, February 9, 2010.

In the workshop instructions provided to the office clerks at the Second House of Sweden (presented earlier), interaction was presented as an in-world experience. However, those among the interviewees who were in charge of the institutional projects also strongly emphasized how they always related to two different audiences at the same time—the people they met in Second Life and the different groups offline. The two virtual embassies in particular were primarily branding projects and media audiences, domestic and foreign, were important addressees. One interviewee even claimed that if the Swedish virtual embassy had been closed down the day after its inauguration, it would still have been a huge success because of its “press value” and the large amount of attention that Sweden received in international news. ⁹ Although it is most likely that others would disagree with this, many of the interviewees saw the mass media and the blogosphere as constant spectators, given the large amount of attention the different projects were paid in the news (Bengtsson, 2011, 2012, 2013). Some told stories of anonymous visitors who later “came out” as mass media reporters who sometimes wrote very critically about the virtual institutions. Mattias Svensson, who worked with communicating “Swedishness” in the Second House of Sweden, described how they imagined the embassy’s audiences, both inside and outside Second Life.

Twofold really. I believe that we understood from the start that this was purely a PR project, although our focus was on those who were supposed to visit the sim, I mean the place, the embassy. But, perhaps even more so, not the people inside Second Life, I mean the geeks or whatever you call them. But, perhaps, I think we thought more even that ‘now a lot of people will come into Second Life, what if they can enter it by way of Sweden’. I mean, I almost think they were our primary target group, really, come to think of it…we put quite a lot of effort into teaching, and we had an entire island for newcomers who had never been to Second Life before. Kind of a training ground, really. (Mattias Svensson, personal interview, February 9, 2010)

Performing as a Professional in Second Life

This section takes a deeper look at the professional users’ relationships with their avatars’ personal fronts, in particular, their avatars’ appearances. In Goffman’s terminology, the personal front consists of “that which is intimately identified with the performer himself [sic!], and that we expect will follow the performer wherever he goes” (Goffman, 1959, p. 22). In a technological environment, such as a virtual world, appearance, sex, and body shape are easily changed and much earlier research points to the importance of avatar appearance (cf. Bailenson & Beall, 2006; Blascovich, 2002; Cheng et al., 2002; Garau, 2006; Schroeder, 2011; Slater & Steed, 2002; Taylor, 2002) for users (although others claim the opposite, see Schroeder, 2011, p. 39). Avatar appearance is often discussed as idealized self-projects, although related to the frame of the environment where the avatars act (Schroeder, 2011, p. 53; Vasalou and Joinson, 2009). ¹⁰

The relationship a user had with their avatar varied depending on the different kinds of professional users identified here and, in particular, depending on the different kinds of professional avatars. The appearance of a celebrity avatar was important for bringing the celebrity’s off-line reputation and significance to the virtual institutions. In addition, as their own names could not be used, celebrities needed avatars that could be recognized by the people they met and which, as a result, would attract the appropriate attention. Accordingly, the project manager of the Second House of Sweden called for a skilled creator in Second Life who could remake the avatar of the Director General of the Swedish Institute, Olle Wästberg, so that he was recognizable to those he met:

Olle’s avatar needs a makeover

Talking about identity, Olle Ivory, the avatar of the Swedish Institute’s Director General, Olle Wästberg, is looking for a makeover. He would like to look a lot more like himself and get a really impressive-looking outfit suitable for virtual embassy openings and such.

If you, or somebody you know, are interested in designing a new skin and clothing for Olle Ivory, drop me a line in-world (Belmeloro DiPrima) or else e-mail me. If you can show some previous work, that would be great. (www.secondhouseofsweden, March 21, 2007)

However, for those who used avatars initially created for private purposes, avatar appearance and persona were more important. Two of the interviewees had been involved in the sale of a PR bureau with interests in Second Life (and involvement in the Second House of Sweden). One avatar, a well-known figure in the Swedish Second Life community, and to which all the virtual land was connected, was included in the sale. In their interviews, both the buyer and the seller, respectively, referred to how awkward it was using someone else’s avatar and risking meeting yourself in Second Life (U. Eriksson, project manager at communications bureau, Sweden Island, personal interview, November 4, 2009; J. Hedberg, former CDO of PR bureau, Preatores Laboratory/Early October, personal interview, November 18, 2009).

Thus, depending on the type of avatar the interviewees had used, they had either weak or strong ties to it and following from that also to its appearance. The users of private avatars generally had stronger avatar relationships; users of professionally initiated avatars (individual or collective) naturally related to them less emotionally.