The computer-based multi-player videogame that I played over the weekend was World of War Craft. I’ve heard about the game especially throughout this class but I never had an experience playing it. I went home to visit my family and I saw my cousin playing the game. I decided it was a perfect time to kick him off and get some homework done. At first I had no idea what I was doing and it took me a while to get used to controlling the avatar because I had never played a videogame on the computer before. The game space was actually very interesting. It was a complete fantasy world. The area that my cousin helped me get too was a forest. There were trees, grass, little huts where you could find other players, and there were also some evil enemies running around.
Although I did find the environment impressive in terms of graphics, I did not really enjoy the experience I had. I also did not feel that the hypotheses Yee and Bailenson set out in their article, applied to my gaming experience. My avatar was a white tall man with white long hair and a long beard. My avatar travelled on an animal that looked like a big white tiger. Although I was tall and had dominating features, how I interacted with other avatars was not affected. I did not perceive myself to be especially attractive or unattractive. The characters that I stood close to were characters controlled by people my cousin knew. Because my cousin knew them and often played with them, I trusted them. I felt that they would help me out throughout the quest. I also did not disclose much information throughout the game. Perhaps that was because I did not feel that my avatar was attractive. The only time I really spoke to other players was when we were discussing what was going on within the quest. There was not any real conversation about life issues going on. My avatar was also tall. However, this did not affect my confidence. While my avatar was tall, my confidence in the game was actually low because I was a newbie and I was unsure of myself.
Overall, I did not find any of the ideas outlined in Yee and Bailsenson’s article to be true of my gaming experience. I feel that the main reason why this is true is because I was a newbie. I was completely unsure of everything I was doing, so the people I kept close to were the people who I thought would help me. Even though I was tall, I was not confident at all. My conversation also did not include self-disclosure because I was new at the game and I was concentrating more on what was happening on screen with my avatar than disclosing information to strangers or to my cousin’s friends. I feel that many of Yee and Bailsenon’s ideas probably do come up with people who are frequent videogame users, but for someone who is new to it; it definitely takes time (more than 1 hour) to become comfortable with the game. Once you are comfortable with the game and all of the features, then I think you will more likely see some of the correlations between attractiveness and behavior described in the article.
3 comments:
Reading your post made me think of an interesting point to the proteus effect and to their article. They played a "game" where social interaction was the goal. I guess, for the purposes they wanted, that is reasonable, I just think that the avatar should only have an effect in a social situation, or maybe in a game where what the avatar looks like makes a difference in how the goal is fulfilled.
Though I didn't experiment with WOW, I had a similar experience in Second Life. I think the article we read fails to consider the novelty of a new online space in player behavior. Pointing to Peter's comment, Second Life's objective is unclear to me, but if I had to call it anything, I would say it's fitting in with a new kind of society...aka social interaction on some level. So I'm going to agree with him when he implies that the Proteus effect is not very applicable in a game like WOW. I liked reading your post...I wish I could have done my post on WOW, but I didn't know anyone who had an account...
As a 3 year (retired) veteran of World of Warcraft, I want to say that you make some really interesting points. I too did not really feel like any of Yee and Bailenson's Proteus effect played a role in any of my interactions. I feel like you also brought up an interesting point in saying that maybe players who have already become acclimated to a game won't really experience the Proteus effect all that much. However, World of Warcraft is a game that focuses on character development, not socialization, so maybe if we both had played Second Life instead, we would have had a different experience. By the way, that white tiger you were riding around on is called a Nightsaber. I used to have several of those.
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