Why Duplicate Yourself in Your Virtual Life?

This post covers the culture of Second Life but you can apply it to others like WoW, Kaneva, EVE Online and other adult venues:

Many residents are spending a lot of time and money trying to make themselves look as real as possible, with photo-realistic skins, hair that waves and flows almost as naturally as real hair, living in houses that look as if they’d sprung from Architectural Digest, walking on photo-realistic terrain in ultra-realistic sunlight next to water that looks as if it were about to flow off your screen onto your keyboard and talking instead of typing …

What got me on this thread was seeing a picture in Wagner James Au’s New World Notes blog, showing Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, the Philippines’ president, who wandered into SL for a meet-and-greet a few days ago, and one of tech-communication guru Howard Rheingold, who will also appear at the New Media Consortium’s in-world event next week and is a veteran of SL speaking engagements. Both celebrities (relatively speaking) have gone to great lengths to create (or have created for them) true-to-life avatars. So also do many of the people I know who have high RL profiles, especially if they’re involved in SL marketing efforts like Joe Jaffe and Greg Verdino — but they’re the most current. To me, this is a little disconcerting.

Why, I ask for the sake of starting an argument, would you want another version of the real you in your virtual life? What’s the appeal of having everything look as picture-perfect as possible? Even my friends who prefer to prowl SL as aliens, or furries, or tinies, or even as alien furry tinies, like to have fur that’s positively strokable, eyes that glow realistically. Isn’t imagination enough anymore, or am I missing something? I remember a help-wanted ad that specified the avie had to have a photorealistic skin. It’s a given among the strip clubs that Ruth-like avies need not apply, but elsewhere? Pourquoi?

Let’s discuss!