Gender Equality and Avatar Design
The Gender Equality and Avatar Design project progresses earlier work with Cooperative Innovations around Virtual Reality character (avatar) design, and how to make this inclusive for a diverse audience, with a focus specifically on gender diversity.

In 2022, Dr Aneesh Barai worked together with the National Videogame Museum and the queer arts organisation Andro & Eve to hold a one-day online workshops around gender awareness, inclusivity, and challenging binary gender avatar design. The Gender Equality and Avatar Design work draws from Dr Barai’s expertise in diverse youth cultures, including publications on racial diversity, gender diversity and neurodiversity in children’s media, and work on videogame literacies.
The National Videogame Museum recently established an exhibition titled In Play, around non-binary gender identities and experiences of computer game play, and are planning to open a new permanent display on diverse representations in games. We were also fortunate to have Pamela Aculey contribute to the workshops, bringing intersectional perspectives around race and disability to our discussions, and expanding to think about how Augmented Reality can play a part in this work. This project was funded by the Higher Education Innovation Fund (HEIF).
The event brought together curator Emily Marlow and learning and outreach officer Leah Dungay from the National Videogame Museum, CEO of JustLikeMe Books Pamela Aculey, and Finn Warman, the Artistic Director/CEO of Andro and Eve, for a half-day with two workshops. Andro and Eve run professional gender awareness training run gender awareness training from the perspective of queer culture and trans rights.
For the second workshop, Emily, Pamela, Leah and I presented our own work in creating and supporting diverse material for young people, and critiquing problematic approaches to representation in the videogame and youth culture market. These experts in the field provided deep insight into the challenges that videogame companies face when trying to diversify, and where possible solutions to those challenges, as well as examples of successful cases, might be found.
Principal Investigator: Dr Aneesh Barai, Lecturer in Education and Children’s Culture.