“Video games have increasingly being deliberated as a propaganda tool to influence people with regards to some targeted matters. Design of game’s character plays an important role for such objectives”.

While I was creating my avatar, I found this quote to be quite à propos: not only was I aware that this avatar was going to supposedly represent me in this virtual space, but that most of my actions, my fate, and my gaming experience was to be predicated on my fictional identity. Knowing this, I found the choices to be interesting, especially the aspects regarding body type and facial features. Everyone playing this game has the same set of choices, or ones that are presumably very similar, and I found that the only choices available were of a very Euro-centric, conventional ‘attractiveness’ variety. There was no body that wasn’t an hourglass for my female character, for instance, and her huge eyes and other facial features were distinctively Caucasian. To be fair, there were options for darker skin tones and adjusting nose bridge width etc., they just weren’t the default and were not as common. The ‘propaganda’ aspect discussed in the quote above pertains to this scenario in a fairly nuanced way: by creating an almost endless amount of choices, the game is set up to make the player feel like it’s an exhaustive list of physical features, and that subconsciously these are the only ‘correct’ physical features to have. Interestingly, I found myself choosing features I either had in myself or wanted to have, like for example I’ve always wanted red hair and bangs, so my avatar has those. I can imagine that this is a fairly common phenomenon, and that by creating a virtual world based on a grasping attempt to conform to societal beauty standards, albeit through non-human gaming characters, one runs the risk of reproducing existing discourses around beauty.