Our Avatars, Ourselves
Posted by anastasia on 02-22-2008
In Totally Wired, I wrote about a girl in Teen Second Life who rocked “the grid” selling fashions designed by her (and her mom) — she was animated and talkative or at least her avatar was. In real life she was painfully shy. I also remember a viewer created “pod” at Current about World of Warcraft where one of the gamers (who is a scruffy, white college kid) talks about how he likes being “a 6 foot tall black dude with a huge ax.” It turns out that playing avatars is not just about fantasy or even being your better self, it can actually be therapeutic. According to this Newsweek article (thanks Holly!):
In one Stanford study, volunteers were assigned avatars who ranged from attractive to plain. It is one of life’s inequities that the world sees attractive people as possessing a long list of desirable traits, including honesty, generosity and kindness. Perhaps as a result, people judged attractive are more self-confident than ugly ducklings, and so tend to be extroverted. Using a virtual-reality headset, the volunteers–actually, their avatars–walked across a room to interact with another avatar. Those with attractive avatars got within three feet of the stranger; those with homely ones kept almost six feet away. How much “personal space” one needs is inversely proportional to self-confidence, which having an attractive avatar increases. When the stranger asked the players to “tell me a little about yourself,” good-looking avatars revealed more: feeling attractive increases self-esteem and therefore friendliness…
…avatars might serve therapeutic purposes, helping those with social phobia, say, become more confident and friendly in real life. The work also underlines the power of new media to affect our behavior: players who roamed a virtual world as a KKK-clad avatar felt more aggressive than they did before playing the game, while those whose avatar wore a doctor’s coat scored higher on a test of friendliness. It’s not clear how long the spillover to the real world lasts. But even if it’s only a few hours the potential is impressive: online players spend, on average, 20 hours a week as their avatar.
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