Gamers’ Behavior Via Avatars In Online Games

Gamers use avatars to represent themselves to interact with others in online games. However, gamers’ behavior via avatars has received insufficiently attention by electronic commerce scholars, warranting further study on this issue. Positive interactions among online gamers should foster their loyalty to the game. Therefore, this study investigated how avatar design affects gamers’ behavior via avatars. This study obtained responses from more than one thousand online gamers that were used for further analyses. Criteria were set to exclude some invalid responses, so as to increase data validity. Moreover, reliability and validity were checked by using six tests, demonstrating the adequate performance in psychometric properties. Structural equation modeling was conducted for analyses. This study found that avatar design has an important impact on gamers’ behavior via avatars. Specifically, positive perceptions on avatar design motivate the gamers to exhibit positive behavior via avatars. Findings of this study provide feasible means for electronic commerce managers to encourage gamers’ positive interactions and thus should create strong virtual communities and subsequently loyal gamers

Web-Based VR Experiments Powered by the Crowd

We build on the increasing availability of Virtual Reality (VR) devices and Web technologies to conduct behavioral experiments in VR using crowdsourcing techniques. A new recruiting and validation method allows us to create a panel of eligible experiment participants recruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk. Using this panel, we ran three different crowdsourced VR experiments, each reproducing one of three VR illusions: place illusion, embodiment illusion, and plausibility illusion. Our experience and worker feedback on these experiments show that conducting Web-based VR experiments using crowdsourcing is already feasible, though some challenges---including scale---remain. Such crowdsourced VR experiments on the Web have the potential to finally support replicable VR experiments with diverse populations at a low cost.Comment: The Web Conference 2018 (WWW 2018); update citation forma

Social VR design features and experiential outcomes:narrative review and relationship map for dyadic agent conversations

The application of virtual reality to the study of conversation and social interaction is a relatively new field of study. While the affordances of VR in the domain compared to traditional methods are promising, the current state of the field is plagued by a lack of methodological standards and shared understanding of how design features of the immersive experience impact participants. In order to address this, this paper develops a relationship map between design features and experiential outcomes, along with expectations for how those features interact with each other. Based on the results of a narrative review drawing from diverse fields, this relationship map focuses on dyadic conversations with agents. The experiential outcomes chosen include presence &amp; engagement, psychological discomfort, and simulator sickness. The relevant design features contained in the framework include scenario agency, visual fidelity, agent automation, environmental context, and audio features. We conclude by discussing the findings of the review and framework, such as the multimodal nature of social VR being highlighted, and the importance of environmental context, and lastly provide recommendations for future research in social VR.</p

Avatars and computer-mediated communication: a review of the definitions, uses, and effects of digital representations

Avatars are growing in popularity and present in many interfaces used for computer-mediated communication (CMC) including social media, e-commerce, and education. Communication researchers have been investigating avatars for over twenty years, and an examination of this literature reveals similarities but also notable discrepancies in conceptual definitions. The goal of this review is to provide a general overview of current debates, methodological approaches, and trends in findings. Our review synthesizes previous research in four areas. First, we examine how scholars have conceptualized the term “avatar,” identify similarities and differences across these definitions, and recommend that scholars use the term consistently. Next, we review theoretical perspectives relevant to avatar perception (e.g., the computers as social actors framework). Then, we examine avatar characteristics that communicators use to discern the humanity and social potential of an avatar (anthropomorphism, form realism, behavioral realism, and perceived agency) and discuss implications for attributions and communication outcomes. We also review findings on the social categorization of avatars, such as when people apply categories like sex, gender, race, and ethnicity to their evaluations of digital representations. Finally, we examine research on avatar selection and design relevant to communication outcomes. Here, we review both motivations in CMC contexts (such as self-presentation and identity expression) and potential effects (e.g., persuasion). We conclude with a discussion of future directions for avatar research and propose that communication researchers consider avatars not just as a topic of study, but also as a tool for testing theories and understanding critical elements of human communication. Avatar mediated environments provide researchers with a number of advantageous technological affordances that can enable manipulations that may be difficult or inadvisable to execute in natural environments. We conclude by discussing the use of avatar research to extend communication theory and our understanding of communication processes

Choosing My Avatar & the Psychology of Virtual Worlds: What Matters?

Avatars and virtual worlds have become commonplace across the Internet in recent years through the development of the gaming industry and social media technology. The technology involved in virtual environments is becoming more accessible to the general public, and software for creating avatars or participating in virtual worlds can be found free online. Virtual worlds are used not only for recreation, but are also increasingly used for other purposes, such as education, marketing, and meeting places. We are finding new ways to represent ourselves online for various purposes. Recent research in psychology has shown that social phenomena in virtual worlds are comparable to real life experiences. For example, interpersonal distance and eye gaze are demonstrated in interactions with avatars in a manner similar to human interactions in the real world (Yee, Bailenson, Urbanek, Chang, & Merget, 2007). These experiences occur when individuals feel embodied by their avatar, or consider their avatar as an extension of themselves manifested in a particular virtual world. When utilizing this technology, an individual’s motivations and intentions may affect the appearance of the avatars they choose to represent themselves. In this study, we are examining the relationships between background attributes of virtual world users and the nature of the avatars used for self-representation in a specific virtual social context. We surveyed a sample population of college students on personality, use of communication technologies and social media, and gaming experience. Then, we presented those students with an array of pre-selected avatar choices for them to choose for representation in different virtual social situations. We intend to analyze whether the surveyed attributes of participants influence avatar embodiment and whether social context affects their choice of preferred avatars. By better understanding how participants select avatars and how avatars affect the virtual world experience, we hope to discover ways to better use virtual world technology for education and positive social connections

Being together in classrooms at the interface of the physical and virtual: implications for collaboration in on/off-screen sites

This article contributes to thinking about collaboration in classroom/virtual environments by considering how children (aged 10-11) engage in the process of ‘being together’ at the interface of the physical and virtual. It argues that, if educators are to develop effective pedagogies that capitalise on opportunities for collaborative and participatory learning, there is a need for nuanced accounts of the ways that children and young people relate to one another across on/off-screen sites and for new ways of conceptualising their interactions. Using a four-part story based on an illustrative episode from a longitudinal classroom-based study, the article explores how a focus on what Schatzki terms a ‘practice meshwork’ can highlight how relationships are shaped by and shape diverse practices. In particular it explores how embodied relations with things in classrooms mediate ways of ‘being together’ around classroom/virtual environments It suggests that different timespaces are consequently evoked as children play together on and around screens in class. Drawing on these ideas, the article advances five propositions about ‘being that arise from seeing relationships as entangled with multiple practices. It ends by arguing that, in planning for and researching collaboration, it is important to acknowledge how these five dimensions interface

A standard of care for individuals with PIK3CA ‐related disorders: an international expert consensus statement

Growth promoting variants in PIK3CA cause a spectrum of developmental disorders, depending on the developmental timing of the mutation and tissues involved. These phenotypically heterogeneous entities have been grouped as PIK3CA-Related Overgrowth Spectrum disorders (PROS). Deep sequencing technologies have facilitated detection of low-level mosaic, often necessitating testing of tissues other than blood. Since clinical management practices vary considerably among healthcare professionals and services across different countries, a consensus on management guidelines is needed. Clinical heterogeneity within this spectrum leads to challenges in establishing management recommendations, which must be based on patient-specific considerations. Moreover, as most of these conditions are rare, affected families may lack access to the medical expertise that is needed to help address the multi-system and often complex medical issues seen with PROS. In March 2019, macrocephaly-capillary malformation (M-CM) patient organizations hosted an expert meeting in Manchester, United Kingdom, to help address these challenges with regards to M-CM syndrome. We have expanded the scope of this project to cover PROS and developed this consensus statement on the preferred approach for managing affected individuals based on our current knowledge

Revisiting Milgram’s cyranoid method: experimenting with hybrid human agents

In two studies based on Stanley Milgram’s original pilots, we present the first systematic examination of cyranoids as social psychological research tools. A cyranoid is created by cooperatively joining in real-time the body of one person with speech generated by another via covert speech shadowing. The resulting hybrid persona can subsequently interact with third parties face-to-face. We show that naïve interlocutors perceive a cyranoid to be a unified, autonomously communicating person, evidence for a phenomenon Milgram termed the “cyranic illusion.” We also show that creating cyranoids composed of contrasting identities (a child speaking adult-generated words and vice versa) can be used to study how stereotyping and person perception are mediated by inner (dispositional) vs. outer (physical) identity. Our results establish the cyranoid method as a unique means of obtaining experimental control over inner and outer identities within social interactions rich in mundane realism

The researcher as experimental subject: using self-experimentation to access experiences, understand social phenomena, and stimulate reflexivity

The current article argues that researcher-as-subject self-experimentation can provide valuable insight and systematic knowledge to social psychologists. This approach, the modus operandi of experimental psychology when the field was in its infancy, has been largely eclipsed by an almost exclusive focus on participant-as-subject other-experimentation. Drawing from the non-experimental first-person traditions of autoethnography, participant observation, and phenomenology, we argue that participating as both observer and subject within one’s own social psychological experiment affords researchers at least three potential benefits: (1) access to “social qualia,” that is, the subjective experience of social phenomena; (2) improved mental models of social phenomena, potentially stimulating new research questions; and (3) an enhanced ability to be reflexive about the given experiment. To support our position, we provide first-person self-reflections from researchers who have self-experimented with transformed social interactions involving Milgram’s cyranoid method. We close by offering guidelines on how one might approach self-experimentation, and discuss a variety of first-person perspective ethnographic technologies that can be incorporated into the practice