Augury

Via Zen of Design I came across this interesting little site: SexySprite.

This is basically a “Hot or Not?” site for characters in videogames. What’s kind of amusing to me is that pretty much all of the top-rated characters are from Guild Wars — Score one for ArenaNet’s consistently strong visual design, I suppose. Only Lineage 2 and Second Life even break into the top 50, albeit with the typical “nearly naked chick with big boobs” strategy.

Just browsing random images, it seems like Second Life people are far overrepresented on this page. About half of all the images seem to be from Second Life. I’m actually kind of surprised that the art is as good as it is in Second Life, even if it isn’t that great. There are even a few that aren’t geared towards the lowest common denominators of sexuality and might actually be considered attractive. Second Life character portraits also have by far the largest amount of touchup work done on them. Characters from virtually every other game are simply screenshots or assemblages of screenshots using an emote for posing variety. Second Life characters will have artificial backdrops, color splashes, bloom effects, image smoothing and all kinds of other editing done to them.

I guess I’m feeling a bit of an academic twist coming on. So much is made of the malleability of appearance or perception of appearance in online games, I think it says something (particularly with regard to Second Life) that these are the appearances people willingly choose for themselves when they want to present themselves publicly. I’d say “So much for psycholinguistic conspiracy theories about the constructedness of beauty” and whatnot, but then I realized that it’s futile to even try and make an argument when it’s just going to be twisted or subverted anyway.