Tiffany Stoddard

Tiffany Stoddard, a 19-year-old psychology and sociology student at Macalester College in Minnesota, uses Zwinky and IMVU.

In Zwinky, part of InterActiveCorp, she and her friends dressed up as security officers and bugged other players in a virtual shopping mall. In another instance, she acted as a minister to "marry" her friends.

"You can't do all that stuff in real life, so it's an opportunity to do things you can't normally do," she said.

Stoddard, who is black, also experimented with race, creating avatars with different-color skins and testing how others reacted to her. She found that she received different responses as she looked for a virtual boyfriend, getting, for instance, responses only from white men when her avatar was white.

"It's a break away from reality," she said.

Tiffany Stoddard, a 19-year-old psychology and sociology student at Macalester College in Minnesota, uses Zwinky and IMVU.

In Zwinky, part of InterActiveCorp, she and her friends dressed up as security officers and bugged other players in a virtual shopping mall. In another instance, she acted as a minister to "marry" her friends.

"You can't do all that stuff in real life, so it's an opportunity to do things you can't normally do," she said.

Stoddard, who is black, also experimented with race, creating avatars with different-color skins and testing how others reacted to her. She found that she received different responses as she looked for a virtual boyfriend, getting, for instance, responses only from white men when her avatar was white.

"It's a break away from reality," she said.
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Tiffany Stoddard, a 19-year-old psychology and sociology student at Macalester College in Minnesota, uses Zwinky and IMVU.

In Zwinky, part of InterActiveCorp, she and her friends dressed up as security officers and bugged other players in a virtual shopping mall. In another instance, she acted as a minister to "marry" her friends.

"You can't do all that stuff in real life, so it's an opportunity to do things you can't normally do," she said.

Stoddard, who is black, also experimented with race, creating avatars with different-color skins and testing how others reacted to her. She found that she received different responses as she looked for a virtual boyfriend, getting, for instance, responses only from white men when her avatar was white.

"It's a break away from reality," she said.