Virtual Worlds
Internet-based virtual environments, such as the massively multiplayer online (MMO) game World of Warcraft or the non-game Second Life, are excellent environments for both capturing and emulating human personalities. The fact that these are not unreal, bu
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Virtual Worlds
Online virtual worlds, in which the user is represented by an avatar interacting with other avatars within a somewhat realistic visual environment, are an excellent laboratory for developing both capture and emulation, often in a highly integrated manner. Two kinds of virtual worlds will be examined here, primarily gameworlds like World of Warcraft (WoW) that naturally generate elaborate statistics about the behavior of each of millions of avatars, but also a non-game world called Second Life where the most interesting results of human action are the objects, environments, and expressions that users create. In addition, we explore how these worlds are larger than they might seem, because the social life they support extends to wikis and other forms of online communication and memory. This chapter brings the book to a logical conclusion, by examining not how people can be understood through their reaction to stimuli, as covered by the early chapters, but how they freely express their individuality within a complex world. In their popular book Infinite Reality, Jim Blascovich and Jeremy Bailenson argue that the human mind responds to computer-generated virtual realities as if they were the physical world, seeking to achieve personal goals inside them. We might express this in the following words: Virtual realities are both real and ideal. As leading researchers on the psychology and computer science of avatars and virtual reality systems, Blascovich and Bailenson confidently state: …the brain doesn’t much care if an experience is real or virtual. In fact, many people prefer the digital aspects of their lives to physical ones. Imagine you never aged, could shed pounds of cellulite, or put on muscle mass at the touch of a button. Think about never having a bad-hair day, expressing an involuntary grimace, or getting caught staring. Think also about a world with no putrid smells but plenty of delightful ones, when it rains only when you are inside, and where global warming is actually just a myth. In this world, your great-grandfather is still around and can play catch with your six-year-old daughter. There is no dental drill or swine flu in this place. [1]
To the extent that virtual worlds are realistic, they can be laboratories for capturing human behavior, including human interaction. For example, in World of Warcraft, teams of five players often send their characters into instanced locations where they must cooperate for 2 or 3 h in battling enemies and achieving goals, communicating by voice or typed text that can be compared with what their virtual representations actually do. Because WoW is a role-playing game, these representations are called W. S. Bainbridge, Personality Capture and Emulation, Human-Computer Interaction Series, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4471-5604-8_8, © Springer-Verlag London 2014
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characters rather than avatars, because like characters in a drama they have some degree of personality separate from that of the actor. In my own WoW research, I ran 23 distinct
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