Slashdot Mirror
Avatars Need Personal Space Too
Nicola Jones writes to alert us to a study showing that avatars need their personal space. Avatars in the virtual reality of Second Life act like real people in this way: boy avatars stand further apart than female ones, and characters tend to avert their gaze from each others' eyes when standing close together. This result holds whether the avatar is being played by a man or a woman. From the article: "The authors say this means that these online gaming environments are a goldmine of social data as well as a potential experimental research platform." Obviously not all behaviours translate from the real world to the virtual one, notes UIUC computer game researcher Dmitri Williams: "There is no research on what translates and what doesn't.... People's willingness to take risks in online worlds is radically different. Death is not permanent online."
I wonder if it was a disgruntled avatar that caused the security breach
The authors say this means that these online gaming environments are a goldmine of social data
Uh huh. I've had a lot less people ask me "R U 4 SECKS CHAT???" in real life.
Avatars in the virtual reality of Second Life act like real people in this way
Avatars act like real people in almost every way. They're extremely materialistic, cliquish, and superficial. "Playing" a game like Second Life is like hanging around with a bunch of thriteen-year-olds. The only difference is the conversation is less intelligent.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Nearly as original as putting up a DikuMUD, today.
what?!?!? that waifish female elfen thief is really a 57 year old cost accountant named Roger? I think I'll be sick first, then kill his ass!
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
People, Its time to step outside of your parent's basement.
Nothing sucks like a Vax, nothing blows like a PowerMac G4
First of all, the granularity for moving around seems to be about 1 meter. Getting into just the right position (conversational position, you perverts! :) can be somewhat difficult. Same with facing angle... it seems to be about 10 degrees.
Trying to draw any sort of conclusions about subtle nuances of communcation seems, frankly, rediculous.
Adman
Isn't that a kind of a contradiction? If death isn't permanent, it's not really a risk, is it? I find comments such as this stupid.
I think avatars actually act differently than the controller (player) would in a similar real world social situation.
With the internet things like chat rooms or online games shield the person from most of the social or psychological repurcussions for certain behavior. 30 year olds act like 15 year olds. Accountability goes out the window. The moral boundaries are also changed. How many people do you know that would cheat in an online game but would not cheat on an exam?
Why do they call it "Second Life" if it's for MMO people who don't even have a primary life?
/* No Comment */
"People's willingness to take risks in online worlds is radically different. Death is not permanent online."
All right, chums, I'm back, let's do this. LEEEEEROY mnmJENNNNNKINNNNS!
Death is not permanent online.
Need to read your copy of Neuromancer again, fuck with the wrong black ice, and death online is infact, permanent.
Oh, wait I guess I'm about 20 years ahead of reality.
>...Death is not permanent online."
No proof it's permanent offline either. Could be we have much longer respawn time. Or that "afterlife" thing... might be available for a small price... your immortal soul!
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
I tried out Second Life for the first time today, and was sorely dissapointed. I'd read the BBC News article about it so I thought I'd see what the fuss was about.
It was really laggy, maybe my housemate was killing my bandwidth with downloading again. That made it pretty much unplayable, but the fact it crashed no less than ten times (something my computer never does) in about 30 minutes turned me right off it.
What I did observe though was a lot of confused characters running around and telling each other to "get lost" and then LOLing heartily. Reminded me of school in some small way.
From what I've read, an avatar in Second Life can be anything from a walking flowerpot to a polka-dotted dragon. I really don't see how avatar interaction can be used to glean any useful information.
It would be cool if your character could get a job in this game. Unfortunately, the game is retarded. They need a way to buy guns in the game so you can mug people.
Or better yet, just make GTA into a MMORPG.
People's willingness to take risks in online worlds is radically different. Death is not permanent online."
And neither is herpes so go and get all the free love you want online.
Oh wait. I guess virtual worlds are still more "virtual" than they are worldly.
Is it really a "risk" if the consquences aren't real?
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Nick Yee, Jeremy N Bailenson, Mark Urbanek, Francis Chang, Dan Merget, The Unbearable Likeness of Being Digital: The Persistence of Nonverbal Social Norms in Online Virtual Environments.
(Given that the whole article is about a particular paper, they should have given a proper citation, or at least told us what the title of the paper was.)
My summary of their findings: on average, female characters stand closer to female characters than male characters stand to male characters. Distance between male-female pairs has larger variability than distance between same-gender pairs. This is the same as what happens in real life.
People's willingess to take risks online is about the same as their willingness to take risks elsewhere. It's just that risks online tend to be small.
Th risk of pissing off someone you 'met' 30 seconds ago is much lower than pissing off someone you work with every day. On the same token, there are plenty of people who have very bad behavior when interacting in 'the real world' with people they don't expect to see again - just hang around the customer service dept. of any retail establishment for a bit.
paintball
and, when they die in the Sims 2, I prefer to keep them at a retirement home, so they won't wake up the old folks too much (they live upstairs, the bottom floor is for cars and aspiration rewards).
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
What was the author of this smoking ? I want some :) The avatars' physical behaviors, in-game body language and motions are umm PROGRAMMED. Players DO NOT have control of things like head movements and innate motions. The avatars behave just like the people and sex they were modeled after. While I don't dispute the wealth of sociological information available, I hardly think that pre-programmed body langauge gives insightful clues into human nature other than that of the designers, and judging by the proportions on most female models it is easy to see the MALE art dessigners hands, and grubby finger prints all over :))
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
Tell that to my sims. Swimming to their death.. peeing themselves to their death. Killing themselves when fixing a light bulb.
Not only is Death permanent but it's humiliating.
I disagree with your conclusion that someone would cheat in an online game but not in the real world. I've been giving a lot of thought to cheating in MMORPGs lately, and have been observing behavior in Eve-Online, which is my favorite online entertainment.
I've tried to talk to players who have either "ganked" or scammed other players and I've found that even outside their role-playing they feel comfortable with unethical behavior. I've spoken to about 20 players involved in what I would consider online cheating and asked them the same sort of questions that you'd find on an ethics quiz in a personality profile. I've given the same questions to about 15 players with whom I have had "ethical" interactions.
I'm not really surprised to find that people who would not cheat or scam in real life also would not do it in an MMORPG. Maybe if I get a few minutes, I'll explore this further and write up my findings, but I'm too busy sending out email about the 55 million dollars in my dead Nigerian brother's overseas checking account.
I was serious up to the last sentence.
You are welcome on my lawn.
i wonder if the distance also varies with the player's cultural background. For example, I noticed traveling in India that the expected amount of personal distance was much less than in America. Haven't read the article, so maybe they talk about this.
Did you see that?
See what?
That avatar looked at me...
C'mon man...avatars can't 'look' at anybody...
No, man...I'm serious as a heart-attack. I swear. That big red she-male avatar over there by the elevator looked right at me!
Listen. Avatars here are on display...that's all. They have no host and no history files so they can't do ANYTHING - get it?
Ok, whatever you say, but I'm telling you, that 'no-host, no-history' cross-breed stared at me as we floated by.
"Death is not permanent online." but it jacks up 10 minutes of your life when you have to take the spirit rez... If i recall most player modles dont have collision detection. Its more to fun to stand inside that green haired preist...
But people's willingness to take risks in real life is domain-specific, so which domain of willingness did you mean?
Goldmine is right. A goldmine of research grants that is. If that's not a Freudian slip I don't know what is.
Seriously, I can't believe this is being given any attention whatsoever. Anyone discussing this with a critical eye is wasting their time, and is probably mentally retarded.
In World of Warcraft, there is no collision testing between characters - people can pass through each other, and the only things you can collide against are static pieces of the environment. However, despite this, groups of people doing something together look pretty normal because everyone instinctively keeps some distance away from everybody else. It's very interesting to watch people naturally spread out and navigate around each other when the "shortest path" would be for them to travel as a group.
It even runs on Linux. Linux-Alpha 32bit Intel that is.
This is true. I almost never try to infiltrate galactic death machines in real life without proper protective gear and never rely on finding all the ammo I need laying around in containers in empty rooms.
If the masses can keep you down, you're not the Ubermensch.
Article: Male avatars (whether created by a man or a woman) stood further apart than female avatars, for instance, and were more likely to avert their gaze. And when an avatar gets within a few metres of another, the user reduces eye contact by moving their character to face slightly to the right or the left of the other 'person'.
Now, as a semi-regular presence in Second Life, I must say that the statements above are not necessarily true. The SL avatar's gaze follows the UI mouse pointer, and considering that the average user spends a lot of time in the UI navigating through inventory/item edit/whatnot, I think it can be said that a good portion of an avatar's gaze direction is a side-effect of the real user's actions at the time. Even if they are "moving their character to face slightly to the right or the left of the other 'person'.", their eyes don't remain fixed on one location. It's just as easy to have [the virtual-world equivalent appearance of] eye-contact with the other individual(s) as if you're facing them directly.. It's all about what you're doing with the mouse at the time.
$0.02
--Weasel
[BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY]: X5O!P%@AP[4\PZX54(P^)7CC)7}$EICAR-STANDARD-ANTIVI
Isn't /. and the rest of the web tired of the relentless PR 'news releases' and 'studies' that Second Life is constantly sending to every web news site.
Second Life is trying to make up for a poor 'gaming' experience by somehow convincing everyone that it's newsworthy to have virtual cybersex and pay for virtual items. That was old news in the 90s.
nuclear iraq bioweapon encryption cocaine korea terrorist
They came out with a Sims 2:New Orleans expansion?