Second Life

For Assignment #10, I decided to try out Second Life. This was my first experience playing in a multi-user world, and it was a bit difficult. I had to first create my avatar, and name her. This posed a couple of questions—did people generally use their real-world names? Or did they use names to protect their anonymity? I decided to go with the first option, and used my own name for my avatar. My anonymity was protected by the fact that I had to choose a last name from a list of preselected last names (which my real last name was not on). After choosing a name, I had to choose a look for my avatar. I had the choice of a few different characters, ranging from the “girl next door” look to some sort of animal-cartoon character. I chose the one I thought was most attractive out of all of the choices—the girl next door. Here is a picture of her compared with a few other Second Life characters.

(I am the girl with long brown hair wearing a purple shirt and jeans.) There was a very interesting interaction that occurred, and I believe the attractiveness of my avatar led to my actions. What happened was, as I was still learning how to walk/move fluently, I interrupted a conversation. An avatar named Carnel said to the rainbow-haired avatar, whose name is Racly,

[22:49] carnel Kanto: hi, Racly

[22:50] carnel Kanto: you are so beautiful!

I decided to jump in to the conversation, pretending Carnel was talking to my avatar, so I responded:

[22:51] You: thanks you're not so bad yourself!

[22:51] You: sorry I had to jump in

To which I had a positive response from Carnel:

[22:51] carnel Kanto: lol ;)

[23:00] carnel Kanto: hi, Vivian

[23:01] carnel Kanto: Here I am!

I think this interaction, after reading Yee & Bailenson (2007), confirms the first two hypotheses of the study—H1) participants in the attractive condition walk closer to the confederate than the participants in the unattractive condition, and H2) participants in the attractive condition would exhibit higher self-disclosure and present more pieces of information about themselves than participants in the unattractive condition. This interaction showed how because of my attractiveness, I was able to interrupt a conversation and not be reprimanded, as I would be in real life. I also wouldn’t want to interrupt a conversation in real life because I don’t think I would have the confidence to. One really has to have a lot of confidence to interrupt a conversation because it is seen as a rude and impolite gesture; I guess my attractiveness allowed me to get away with it in Second Life. I also did not hesitate to walk up to others, perhaps it’s because I was a little lost and confused, and wanted some help. I probably asked for more help than if I had been labeled an “unattractive” avatar; I definitely wasn’t afraid to talk to any of the other characters. This definitely supports hypothesis 1 and 2 because I had the confidence to walk up to people and get close, and I had the confidence to disclose information about myself (that I didn’t know how to play, that I was new, etc.). I wonder what it would be like if I chose the animal-looking avatar. Would I have had as much success with getting help, or talking to people?

One of the limitations of Yee & Bailenson (2007) study was that they “were unable to explore the role of choice in the Proteus Effect,” and while I did not experience those limitations, I did come across some other limitations. I was able to choose my avatar, I wasn’t just randomly assigned an attractive, average or unattractive avatar. While I was able to choose my avatar, I wasn’t able to personalize it—I had to select a premade avatar. This restricted my ability to express myself, but I guess that’s not as important for this study. From this experiment, I felt that my results demonstrated how the appearance of my avatar shaped how I interacted with others. I don’t know if my online self-representation will in turn shape my real-world behavior, but I guess only time will tell. How often I play Second Life also probably makes a differences of how it will shape my real-world behavior; I don’t know if I’ll be back anytime soon, though.