"My life was so great I literally wanted a second one. Absolutely everything was the same... except I could fly."- The Office

For this assignment I decided to enter the world of Second Life, inspired by Dwight from The Office and his exploits in “second second life.” In a recent episode of the show, he jokes that his Second Life avatar, who looks exactly like he does, leads an almost identical life, selling paper and playing a game called Second Second Life, the only difference being that he can fly.

I tried to replicate this experience for myself this past weekend, as I found a program that was supposed to map a person’s face from any digital photograph onto an avatar. I even had a picture of our beloved professor all picked out and ready to go. However, it was not meant to be, and the software simply would not work.

Instead, I found I had to settle on creating my own avatar. Unlike many of the other posters on this week’s blog, I opted to represent myself as falsely as possible. My tall, slender, blonde, female avatar had proportions similar to a life sized Barbie doll. She should not have been able to stand, but luckily, she had the power of flight.

I managed to find a few people willing to talk to me in the first area I spawned in, but all of them seemed to be new as well, and were not very interested. I managed to fly to a more populated area, after half an hour of difficult travel. I could not figure out how to teleport. I found a woman walking in to her own house, and quickly flew in after her while the door was open. She ignored all of my attempts to establish conversation.

Eventually I made it to some kind of event, where real music played loudly and many avatars stood around in a sort of town square. I found it fun and exciting to play the part of my avatar, and it was not hard to attract attention. The more complicated and accessorized avatars, however, were not interested in talking to me, as I clearly did not posses the level of sophistication they did, and was not wearing any items other than the default clothing.

Yee and Bailenson’s article “The Proteus Effect: The Effect of Transformed Self-Representation on Behavior” states that we conform to the stereotypes and expectations of our personal avatar. I found this to be quite true, as I used the handful of default gestures to make physical contact with the male avatars I met, and giggled quite a bit. This attracted even more attention to my avatar. The Proteus effect manifested itself in my behavior. Though I know who I am in real life, I also consciously designed my avatar; and thus I wish to conform to her appearance. Therefore, I take advantage of the intense and narrow band of cues available to my conversational partners, as well as the slight asynchrony of text based communications, in order to ensure that my actions truly match up with my assumed persona. This strategy was extremely successful, and I had a few interesting conversations, though at least two ended with my partner suggesting actions which required behavioral sequences and animations my avatar did not yet possess.

I greatly enjoyed my adventure in Second Life, and will probably play again. However, I will never pay real money to play the game, and consequently, will never be able to acquire more complex behaviors, objects, or physical property. It was definitely a fun assignment, and I will continue to try and get the software working to map my own face onto an avatar- if only to see how I am really perceived.