My first and only experience with MMORPGs was when I played Final Fantasy XI for several months towards the end of my junior year of high school. As I actually detailed in my first blog entry, I eventually stopped playing the game because it felt like I had to make the choice between a social life and a virtual life due to the amount of hours required to make decent progress. For this assignment I stepped back into the shoes of a small, magical, child-like “Tarutaru” (see the portrait above - adorable, no?) named Munk.Unfortunately, I did not have the pleasure of crafting a new avatar for research’s sake (it would have been interesting to be one of the members of the sexy, cat-woman race called the “Mithra”), as this costs extra money, so I allowed myself to get reacquainted with good ol’ Munk for my hour in the world of Vana’diel. The first thing I noticed about the gamespace was that it was starkly deserted. All the hustle and bustle from my game-playing days three years ago seems to have vanished. The environment consists of usually crowded cities and sparsely populated fields (for combat with monsters)—even in the cities it was hard to find players—and when I did find them, most were Japanese-speaking, as the majority of the users are in Japan. When I was involved, the population was 500,000 users but now it is roughly around 100,000; most must have moved on to World of Warcraft or Second Life—or just got fed up with MMOs like me.
When I did manage to track English-speaking players down to socialize, I found that they were extremely task-focused. I tried some humor and conversation about personal information with several players, but all seemed to either ignore me altogether if there was mission we were collaboratively working on or just bluntly type instructions or demands if were fighting monsters or looking for artifacts. I attribute this to external factors. Essentially, FFXI is inferior to WoW, so all players looking for a socially collaborative MMORPG are there, and Second Life is for non-gamers; thus I believe that the users of FFXI are fans of the Final Fantasy franchise—which is predominantly single player.
Relating to Yee & Bailenson (2007), I certainly was in a position to experience behavioral confirmation and the Proteus Effect, as I was, well, tiny (reaching as high up as the waists of other, more human-like avatars). I did feel, to some degree, that others were treating me differently because of my size: larger beings would shout commands and instructions at me, even when I clearly knew what I was doing. However, I believe this is largely due to the task-focused atmosphere; thus there is less emphasis on appearance and more emphasis on what appearance means (the Tarutaru are good at magic so people were commanding me to help them perform magic). Perhaps it was because I haven’t played in a while and felt removed, but I did not feel a diminished presence because of my small stature and intense cuteness. Maybe if the focus of the game was to socialize (like it is in Second Life), I would have experienced Yee & Bailenson’s suggested behavioral differences, but this was not the case.
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Robert—-since you used to play Final Fantasy XI excessively, I think you had a unique opportunity to explore this world again while Yee & Bailenson’s findings. It is interesting that you mentioned the players seemed very task-focused and were not interested in socializing. It seems as the Yee & Bailenson’s findings are more applicable to a social environment in which appearance may play a greater role in interaction. Since the players in your space weren’t interested in forming intimate relationship, whether your avatar was attractive or not it probably wouldn’t make much of a difference. However, I believe that Yee & Bailenson’s second study could be applied to your situation. Even though you said you didn’t feel a diminished presence since you were short, I would be interested in seeing how behavioral confirmation came into the picture. Since the other players were treating you as if you were subservient to them, overtime I would assume that this would affect your self-presentation and your behaviors in this space. If people continuously are shouting commands and instructions at you, it seems like it would eventually make you feel inferior and in turn act that way.
It's been a while since I heard anything about FFXI. It seems like it's pretty much abandoned by English-speaking players. It seems to me that you had a little bit of the Proteus effect going on. I think Alyssa has a good point. Since you've only been playing for a short time (atleast in comparison to your old playing style), I think it might be a bit too early to observe any noticable changes. I reckon that your previous experiences with your avatar biased some of the Proteus Effects.
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