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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."
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.
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
Why do they call it "Second Life" if it's for MMO people who don't even have a primary life?
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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.
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
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 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.
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
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