I am not great with video games in general, so I was a little intimidated at first to try out Second Life. I did not realize how much detail and options the game gave me with choosing my avatar. At first I was so conflicted and indecisive with how I wanted my avatar to look. I had so many options from gender, height, attractiveness, the list goes on. I thought I would try going to the opposite of what I am in real life. Since I am a 5ft. petite female, I thought it would be fun to try being a 6ft. alpha male type. Going along with that whole theme, I chose a name that I thought would fit the character, Brad. Playing in Second Life was an interesting experience where I felt myself acting very outgoing and approaching other avatars with self-confidence. I portrayed myself or "Brad" as the life of the party or typical jock varsity sports player type that is more aggressive and so on. Normally I am relatively shy around people and just say "hello" with a smile and that is pretty much it. In Second Life I felt a lot more confident because I was supposed to be this big manly guy named Brad.
This brings up concepts from the readings by Yee & Bailenson. I definitely think that I "conform[ed] to the behavior that [I] believe[d] others would expect [me] to have", which is as they define, the Proteus Effect. Without even making a conscious decision to act in the manner of the avatar "Brad" I did it because I thought that is what Brad would act like. Reflecting back on my thought process however, I felt that my impression of "Brad" was very stereotypical and that I felt the general opinion of other's about how Brad is supposed to act, is how I acted in Second Life.
Just to briefly address the other points Yee & Bailenson make, I did consider "Brad" to be attractive and did find myself in a closer proximity with other avatars. Yet for the idea of self-disclosure, I did not find a correlation with my avatar and disclosing more information. This however could be due to the fact that I have not been playing in Second Life for a long time and perhaps if I were to continue being "Brad" I might end up disclosing more information. Overall however I felt that my reaction to the game Second Life was very accurate and went according to Yee & Bailenson's findings.
Comments:
http://comm245red.blogspot.com/2007/11/10-was-juice-worth-squeeze.html
http://comm245red.blogspot.com/2007/11/assignment-10-i-like-my-first-life.html
2 comments:
Grace, great post! I thought it was interesting that you chose to be a male because it gave you a chance to use digital deception and test some of the gender signals we learned from last week. I also found it interesting that in creating this avatar, you created a stereotype for him. In doing so, it may have led your experience to confirm Yee & Bailenson’s discussion on the Proteus Effect. Do you think that part of the reason you conformed to “Brad’s” character was because of behavioral confirmation? Since others perceived you as an attractive stereotypical male, maybe it also affected the way you behaved. You probably did not self-disclose as much information because you were pretending to be someone you’re not, so it was more difficult for you to disclose more information about yourself since that would require you to lie.
I think that choosing to play a male avatar is a really interesting way to test out if Yee and Bailenson's findings applied to you. I think it's really interesting that your experience was so close to Yee and Bailenson's experiment, since mine was so different. (Maybe it's because I was so confused the whole game.) You did a good job relating your experience to Yee and Bailenson's!
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