I was at a complete loss as I began playing EverQuest as a newbie by the name of Sinkaba. Cool name I thought as I tried to find my way around the game. I was a frog-like human, with lots of strength and intelligence. I was able to pick what character I portrayed, and this took me a while to decide. For this whole experience, I wanted to be sure I picked the "best" character. After much thought, I decided to just go with the "muscle-frog" (I forget what it was called on the game), and be as far from human-looking as possible. The frog was powerful looking and not the most attractive thing out there, which is half the reason why I picked him. I wanted to see if i would feel less superior to all the more attractive and human-like characters I was playing against. I don't know if I played the game wrong, or what, but for some reason I did not come across as many people as I thought I would. There was a very attractive character who first greeted me, and I did not notice myself feeling intimidated at all. I was a little overwhelmed just because there was SO much going on, and so many missions to accomplish, and so many hints and conversations to read. But after a little while, everything seemed not as new and I began settling into the game. I actually began feeling cool about being the frog character. Yee and Bailenson's (2007)article about Proteus Effect caused me to approach and think about online gaming in a whole different way. Yee and Bailenson define Proteus Effect as the way an "individual behavior conforms to their digital self representation independent of how others perceive them". In their experiment, they found that height did matter, and people who were taller ended up being more confident. Also, the more attractive the character was/is, the more intimate they become with others and the more they self disclose to these perfect strangers. Since I was not a human being, I think my time in this online space was less associated with Yee and Bailenson's hypothesises. The conclusions they came to made perfect sense, but unfortunately, they did not apply to me. I think since I am not a regular online gamer, I do not let myself get caught up or attached to the people I meet or how I portray myself within this game. I can understand if gaming was my life I would take more time with my comments and make sure I was putting my best foot forward, but for this exercise, I just went in and played, without giving it much thought.
1 comment:
I think it’s great that you tried Everquest. I also used an MMO for my Assignment 10 and think that with both of our situations, not finding the same results as Yee and Bailenson (2007) all around may be because of the outlying variables that influence the MMO space versus the controlled VR interaction setting that they used. We also used very different avatars (troll and “musce-frog”) than the Yee and Bailenson (2007) study which used human VR avatars. It would be interesting to find out what individuals perceived as attractive in non-human avatars. (i.e. using the Horde faction in World of Warcraft and rating attractiveness of avatars with the non-human characters). I wonder what the results from a study like that would be and if there are specific differences in personalities between people that play Horde (“evil”/dark characters) and people that play Alliance (“good”/noble characters).
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