My So-Called Virtual Life

As teens experiment with identity in virtual reality environments, marketers are rushing to meet them. Here are some things they should keep in mind

by Anastasia Goodstein

I went through several phases as a teenager. In my Molly Ringwald phase, I wore vintage clothing and pouted a lot. In my punk phase, I sported blue-black hair and ripped fishnet stockings. In my hippie phase, I became a vegetarian, didn't shave my legs, and dabbled in paganism.

It was all a natural part of adolescence: hanging out with different crowds and trying different identities on for size. I was influenced by pop culture (for instance, all of the John Hughes movies and early MTV) and decorated my room and my school notebooks with pictures of my friends as well as Duran Duran.

Today's teenagers are doing many of the same things we did, but where we existed in a largely analog world, they live a lot of their lives digitally: socializing through instant messaging, posting comments on each other's blogs or MySpace pages; personalizing ringtones, buddy icons, and social network profiles; even hooking up, breaking up, or making up via text messages.

Preparing a Virtual-World Pitch

One of the most interesting spaces where teens are experimenting with identity is in virtual reality environments. While networking sites like News Corp.'s (NWS) MySpace have received the most attention in the past year, teens and tweens are also hanging out in games like There.com, Habbo Hotel, Whyville (see BusinessWeek.com, 7/17/06, "Working for Clams in Whyville"), and Teen Second Life. They're also using sites like Meez and WeeWorld to create portable avatars, visual representations of themselves, for use in multiple instant messaging clients and on different social networking sites.

And where teens tread, marketers rush in. But before planning any infiltration of virtual worlds inhabited by young people, companies should bear in mind a few tips, starting with a keen understanding of exactly what it is kids are doing there.

• Know why they're there. Teens have some pretty sophisticated reasons for hanging out in virtual worlds—beyond the pure fun of hanging out with friends. Sherry Turkle is considered one of the pioneering researchers in the area of computers and identity. In her 1995 book, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet, Turkle wrote that the computer is "a significant social laboratory for experimenting with the constructions and reconstructions of self."

Since the early days of the Internet, teens and tweens—those between childhood and adolescence—have experimented online with being someone else, whether an adult or someone of the opposite gender or a different race. What virtual reality games have done is offer teens the opportunity to express different identities not just through what they type but through their virtual physical appearance.

Sonja Baumer, Ph.D., who researches how children and teens use digital media, explains that for younger tweens, whose identity is mostly focused around physical appearance, the very possibility of self-representation through an avatar is very appealing. "Younger children and tweens emotionally invest in avatars and spend time choosing clothes/hair styles and improving their representations," she says. Baumer maintains that older teens may be frustrated by the "flatness" of avatars' representation (on sites like Habbo Hotel) and require more sophisticated self-representation (on sites like Teen Second Life or There.com).

The anonymity afforded by virtual worlds also offers teens the opportunity to break out of whatever labels they may have been given in the offline world. If you're overweight in real life, your avatar can be svelte. If you're shy, you can still be the most popular avatar in the world. Or as Michael Wilson, CEO of There.com explains, "The things which are so important to teens—'Am I popular?' 'Am I good looking enough?' 'What if I act like a jerk?'—all become less important when they realize their avatar is an anonymous form of self-expression."