Avatars Need Personal Space Too 127
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."
Yeah, whatever... (Score:5, Funny)
Uh huh. I've had a lot less people ask me "R U 4 SECKS CHAT???" in real life.
Re:Yeah, whatever... (Score:5, Funny)
You don't hang out in the right bars.
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The spelling/iteration isn't too far off, either.
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Yeah, when I'm in 30-second warm up in Wolf:ET and I'm lying on top of my teammate knifing him in the thigh, I try to avert my gaze.
I wouldn't want to act too gay, you know.
more than one similarity (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:more than one similarity (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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1) is against the ToS, and would have you banned (in theory).
2) Only a moron would fall for that, seriously... Then again....
3) That, uh, doesn't work.
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Re:more than one similarity (Score:5, Funny)
-=(J) <-- Joke
( )
_|_ <-- You
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/ \
Lameness filter
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> -=(J) <-- Joke
>
> ( )
> _|_ <-- You
> |
> / \
>
>Lameness filter
Can someone please explain this joke to me in detail?
Thank you.
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*Woosh*
-=(J) <-- Joke
Lameness filter
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_|_ <-- You
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/ \
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I mean, oh my god, have you seen the dresses at Dazzle, delish! And the gowns at Rebel Hope and Simone are to die for. Simone has a new gown called Salome that has matching Shiny Things "Lady" slingbacks available. Tres Chic!
Actually the materialism is part of the fun, at least for me.
Wow.. (Score:2, Insightful)
Nearly as original as putting up a DikuMUD, today.
what?!?!? that waifish female elfen thief is really a 57 year old cost accountant named Roger? I think I'll be sick first, then kill his ass!
I don't read too much into this... (Score:5, Informative)
Trying to draw any sort of conclusions about subtle nuances of communcation seems, frankly, rediculous.
Adman
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rediculous
As opposed to bluediculous or greendiculous..
Seriously, you think there's no problem with people getting the wrong idea or trying to pervert things in a highly pixelated environment where they once got on just dandy with nothing but text?
Re:I don't read too much into this... (Score:5, Funny)
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Rediculous means to diculous again as opposed to dediculous, which means to remove diculous.
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Wouldn't it be fun if it's the game doing it?
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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 w
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As for first person MMO, SL FFXI and EQOA have first person modes.
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Play 2 accounts on 2 separate computers, and it's possible that while YOU think you are standing only 3' fromthat avatar, they see you as being 6+ feet away.
Common in all but a few MMOGs (WW2OL being one of the few where 3rd party and 1st person representations are tracked to a high resolution, IMO).
So this 'data' is valueless unless the researchers are ALWAYS looking at the first person data.
Anonymity (Score:3, Funny)
With the internet things like chat rooms or online games shield the person from most of the social or psychological repurcussions for certain behavior. 30 year olds act like 15 year olds. Accountability goes out the window. The moral boundaries are also changed. How many people do you know that would cheat in an online game but would not cheat on an exam?
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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".
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Sounds just like the real world to me.
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Cheating is for losers (Score:2, Interesting)
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 c
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I think I met that guy before. . . he was the Admin for a CS clan server I was in probably 6 years ago, I found out he was cheating on the server when clanmates weren't around. Told everyone what happened an
"Second LIfe"? (Score:5, Funny)
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Why do they call it "Second Life" if it's for MMO people who don't even have a primary life?
Because they can get the kind of life they want in, oh a few days or less online, where they can try for years to get the kind of life they want IRL and still end up where they started, if not worse off?
660,000 people online. Says something about dissatisfaction with that status quo, perhaps.
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It also could mean that some of these individuals have self esteem issues, be physically challenged, or might just be lazy in the real world. If you tell me I can be a rock star in a game in a few hours or weeks great! Tell me to that to be a rock star in the real world that I have to have talent (talent is for sake of argument - we all know you don't REALLY need talent ie. Ashley Simpson), work a day job/play clubs
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I don't think it says much about people being unhappy in their real world First Life, I think it is a means for some people to live out a fantasy life for fun.
Right, where in real life they're not necessarily accepted into any group or don't have a lot of friends.
Online: Hi, I'm Bobasaurus. Hi Bobasaurus, how's it going? Great, can I hang with you? Sure. etc.
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Obligatory meme reference (Score:1)
All right, chums, I'm back, let's do this. LEEEEEROY mnmJENNNNNKINNNNS!
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Death is not permanent online. (Score:2)
Death is not permanent online.
Need to read your copy of Neuromancer again, fuck with the wrong black ice, and death online is infact, permanent.
Oh, wait I guess I'm about 20 years ahead of reality.
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>
> Need to read your copy of Neuromancer again, fuck with the wrong black ice, and death online is infact, permanent.
>
> Oh, wait I guess I'm about 20 years ahead of reality.
And wouldn't it be great if it was...
Any doubts on the size of the market for software capable of killing a fucktard over TCP/IP can be resolved by spending 20 minutes in any MMORPG. 10 if the MMORPG is SWG and you're talking about Jedi.
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Obligatory bash.org quote here. [bash.org]
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*Game Over* (Score:2)
No proof it's permanent offline either. Could be we have much longer respawn time. Or that "afterlife" thing... might be available for a small price... your immortal soul!
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or, alternately, maybe we die several times in everyday life... but the 'player' saves every so often. to the character, reloading the last save would be imperceptible, so thats why we don't remember getting hit at the intersection on our way to work
Second Life (Score:3, Insightful)
It was really laggy, maybe my housemate was killing my bandwidth with downloading again. That made it pretty much unplayable, but the fact it crashed no less than ten times (something my computer never does) in about 30 minutes turned me right off it.
What I did observe though was a lot of confused characters running around and telling each other to "get lost" and then LOLing heartily. Reminded me of school in some small way.
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*shrugs* Second Life isn't for everyone. You really have to get a feeling for it.
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If you want to see more of SL, I recomm
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I have graphical settings turned up (being a fashionista in the game) so it's always slow for me. I can speed it up some by running it at 800x600 rather than the full window size.
I'm on a laptop too, 2.2 GHz Mobile Celeron, i852/855 integrated graphics, 512MB RAM. The newer clients seem to handle themselves better, I can actually run a web browser or notepad with 1.12 and not crash.
My homepoint is in a Wel
Less than human (Score:1)
Second Life Sucks... (Score:3, Funny)
Or better yet, just make GTA into a MMORPG.
Re: Next time try it before you say it sucks (Score:1)
Next time check out the classifieds [secondlife.com] before you speak.
There are places in the community that you can do this. It is a full on world with sex, guns, money, power, and plenty of stupidity. Its fun. As far as hardware. Seems to run fine on my P4E 3.0Ghtz ATI 9800Pro 1Gig ram
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Comment aside, I'd have to agree and say that you should play the game before badmouthing it, since the game does have jobs, and not everything needs to have guns to be cool.
Swords work just as affectively.
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And I already live in the "Real GTA".
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Run along now and play your game.
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You:"It would be cool if your character could get a job in this game. I think they wanted me to pay real money to buy stuff or something."
Me:"I use a free account, pay no money, make stuff and sell it thereby generating real life income." (Implied "You can too.")
You:"whatever. (inane and non sequitur comments and mumbling about 2d platform and sel
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You feel the need to be _anonymous_ to defend a '3D platform' on a web site and make ad hominen attacks. If you are going to be a raging fanboi, at least use your real name, you sniveling little coward.
Second Life is a product of marketing hype, not new net dynamics. The marketplace for virtual items and cash in online games is longstanding and far greater than anything Second Life has come within 1% of achieving. Go check out http://ige.com/ [ige.com] if you want to see what serious cash flow in virtual 3D sp
What is really a risk? (Score:2)
And neither is herpes so go and get all the free love you want online.
Oh wait. I guess virtual worlds are still more "virtual" than they are worldly.
Is it really a "risk" if the consquences aren't real?
Exactly. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Exactly. Almost. (Score:2)
The Actual Paper (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [nickyee.com].
(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.
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I think the study reeks of bullshit anyway. There isn't even any eye contact in games.
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Something I've noticed in Second Life - when gathering in small groups, people tend to congregate in a circle, avatars all facing inwards. There's no need for this, especially with a free-floating camera. To compound it, your screen might often be covered with browsers, vari
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Also, these motions help you know what other people are doing. When they are look up at the sky randomly the person might be going through t
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computer game research" = English Lit? (Score:2)
I like to stack my avatars six deep (Score:1)
what? (Score:2)
They came out with a Sims 2:New Orleans expansion?
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DEE Dee Dee (Score:2)
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I seem to remember also that if you alt+click somewhere, as you would to go into "zoom the camera about" mode, it fixes your avatar's gaze on that point, regardless of what you do with the mouse, until you move or click somewhere else.
Death isn't permanent online? (Score:4, Funny)
Not only is Death permanent but it's humiliating.
Culture (Score:4, Interesting)
Huh? (Score:5, Funny)
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.
rez please (Score:1)
This is a bullshit study, (Score:1, Troll)
Linux Alpha (Score:1)
Risks online? (Score:3, Insightful)
This is true. I almost never try to infiltrate galactic death machines in real life without proper protective gear and never rely on finding all the ammo I need laying around in containers in empty rooms.
Aversion of Eyes?! (Score:3, Informative)
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
Enough of the Second Life PR machine... (Score:2)
Second Life is trying to make up for a poor 'gaming' experience by somehow convincing everyone that it's newsworthy to have virtual cybersex and pay for virtual items. That was old news in the 90s.
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People, Its time to step outside of your parent's basement.
Uh. That's where I used to explode capacitors. I have such pleasant memories of it all.
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I guess subscribers just got a third life without knowing it (the identity thief)
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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...
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The exception, of course, was in any situation where people expected to get AoEd. Then they would spread out. Don't want to get killed because you were too close to Leeeroy when he agroed the wrong mob. Even in realm vs. realm combat, most raids would travel in