It’s always interesting when technology and religion/culture collide like Mac trucks. The BBC reports that Muxlim Pal, the first virtual world aimed at the Muslim community, is now live in Beta, and will officially launch in 2009.

The site, aimed at “Muslims in Western nations,” is based on the standard virtual world model popularized by The Sims and the eponymous Second Life. Each player gets an avatar that can be fitted with a number of inventory and wardrobe options including hijabs. Avatars can earn and spend currency, though the creators haven’t set up any of the money-making systems pervasive in Second Life. Each avatar multiple “meters” governing its “happiness, fitness, knowledge and spirituality that change when the character carries out tasks in the social world.”

Mohamed El-Fatatry, the founder of the parent site, Muxlim.com, stresses that the focus of the site is not religion itself—of the 26 different content categories on the site, only one is religion. Rather, the focus is on creating a space for Muslim culture in the virtual realm:

“We are not a religious site, we are a site that is focused on the lifestyle… This is for anyone who is remotely interested in the Muslim culture and the Muslim lifestyle.”

The English-only virtual world is equipped with a beach bar, arena, and shopping areas, and each user is given a private room to decorate. As for content, it’s no bacchanalian Second Life: Any content portraying violence, drugs, sexual references or profanity can be flagged by users and quickly removed.

Related:
RB: People Are Racist in the Virtual World, Too

Ever since their inception and hasty popularity rise, Second Life and its virtual cohorts have been a fascinating fishbowl into human nature. With their near-limitless possibilities for meeting, dating, battling, selling to, and influencing strangers, these cyber-worlds are perfect for studying the ways we behave and interact—both the beautiful and the ugly. And there’s been plenty of the latter to go around, from rape to infidelity to theft—in other words, all the same cruelty, discourtesy, and immorality that goes on in real life, only in a smaller, more publicly track-able format.

As such, it should be no surprise that the prejudices that play out in regular society—such as, oh, say, racism—also manifest in virtual worlds. In a new paper published online in Social Influence, Northwestern University professor Wendi Gardner and grad student Paul Eastwick found that avatars with darker skin in the virtual world There.com (a close cousin to Second Life) were less likely to have a basic request granted by another avatar.

The researchers had 416 participants/avatars make 2 back-to-back requests of another avatar. The first was to teleport to 50 virtual locations and allow the requester to take a screenshot at each one (a royal pain in the cyber-rear). The second, more reasonable request was to travel to a single beach and let the asker take a screenshot.

For those requesting avatars that were white, 20 percent more people said yes to the second request. For African American-looking avatars, the increase was only 8 percent. What does this mean? As Sharon Begley of Newsweek put it:

[B]ack in the real world, decades of psychology studies have shown that whether or not someone agrees to a request under these experimental conditions—and also in real life—depends on whether they think the requester is worthy of impressing, For dark-skin avatars, apparently, the answer is, not so much.

So much for the end of racism.

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