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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.
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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Looks like you didn't get as much as you could have out of Second Life. Try the following strategies:
1) Script a device so it acts like a listening bug and plant it in people's houses. (Make sure to have it spawn a copy of itself every 10 hours so it doesn't get deleted!) Confront them when they talk smack about you, and blame any third parties in the room for ratting.
2) Name a device after someone nearby and have it make offensive remarks. By default, objects have green text when they speak, while humans have white text, so be sure to have it preface its statements "Hey, check this out guys, I can make my text green!"
3) Arrange to store your money with someone else before you get your "allowance" so it will think you're poor and given you more Linden Dollars.
If you just did some of those things, I'm sure you'd have more fun.
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
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
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.
*Woosh*
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