10: Beauty Lies in the Eye of the Beholder

I have never played online videogames before so this was an interesting experience for me. I decided to try Second Life to see what was so addictive about it. The game requires quite a bit of vested interest because you have to go through orientation and get used to how things operate, but other players were very friendly and willing to help. Once you finish orientation, you are teleported to the “welcome area,” which is where you meet/socialize with other players. I found this to be the most interactive part of the game because there was so much conversing and even in different languages (French, Spanish, etc.). There was a lot of diversity in the players and I met people from all over the world (Chile, Czech Republic, Lebanon, etc.) who happen to be online the same time as me. The 24/7 access and synchronicity help in the success of the game because there will always be other players online to interact with. Generally, since gender was apparent, people would begin conversations by asking age and location. I would follow the conversation by asking how they started playing the game. Ironically, the first person I met said they were also playing for a class. (I thought they were from Cornell, but they were from LSU)

The most interesting part of the game for me was changing my avatar’s appearance. I noticed that the majority of the players chose attractive avatars. Although users are permitted to make their avatars misshapen/not human, very seldom did I come across an odd looking/unattractive character. To better understand the issues in Yee & Bailenson’s article, I first made an attractive character and then made it ugly to see if I would experience the Proteus Effect, in which my behavior conforms to my digital self-representation independent of how others perceive me. In particular, when I was the attractive character, I found that it was much easier to talk to people. This may have been caused by the anonymity and my wanting to explore the game more so I was more extraverted or it may have been an increase in self-confidence and players responding more to attractive characters. I compared my experience using behavioral confirmation, where one behaves in ways that confirm the perceiver’s expectations, and the self-perception theory, where I observe my own behavior to understand what caused them. As the attractive avatar, my experience confirmed the first hypothesis because I exhibited higher self-disclosure and more information about myself than in the unattractive state because fewer people confronted me as the unattractive avatar. I did not, however, experience the first hypothesis of walking closer to people in the attractive condition. Being the unattractive avatar was viewed by others mostly as a joke, and I did not feel that I was perceived as unattractive. Independent of how others perceived me, I did not feel that my behavior was altered (i.e. – I was still as extraverted as I was before). Thus, my experience did not entirely verify the results declared in Yee & Bailenson.

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