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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."
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.
Oh, there's a risk alright. You'll lose all your 1337 EQZ if you don't get back to your virtual remains quick enough. (I've always wondered when someone would institute virtual insurance policies, where your junk would be saved for so many minutes from anyone getting their mitts on it before you can recover it.)
lalala jejejeje mi lykes =)
gee, i miss it so much...
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I recently started using Second Life. I haven't noticed myself behaving differently in social situations. In fact, the first thing I did in SL was find a quite corner, sit down and start playing with the building tools and scripting language. I'm as socially inept in SL as I am in RL. Pure geek.
I have noticed myself throwing myself off roofs for kicks though... which is not something I'd even consider in real life -- but you said "real world social situations".
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.
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.
And, it's 3rd person. In every 3rd person game I've seen, if you can see the guy on the screen, that's good enough. Actually pointing your avatar at someone else's avatar is very rarely done.
In a first-person game, you'd see this more often. People would actually look at the person they were talking to out of habit rather than standing so they were looking out at the wall or what not.
Since I'm a nerd, that's part of the reason I've been trying to get developers to make first-person MMO's. I think it would help with the interpersonal communication and the immersion involved with that.