Les jeux vidéo en ligne, un miroir de la personnalité des internautes ?

Dans cet article, nous explorons la possibilité de détecter la personnalité des utilisateurs de jeux vidéo à partir de leur comportement dans le monde virtuel. Un questionnaire administre à 1 040 joueurs de World of Warcraft permet d'établir leur profil sociodémographique ainsi que leur personnalité grâce au modèle à cinq facteurs. Nous utilisons ensuite des logiciels de collecte de données automatisées pour suivre les comportements virtuels de ces mêmes joueurs pendant quatre mois, en mesurant quotidiennement 3 500 variables comportementales pour chacun de leurs personnages. Sur la base de cet échantillon, nous montrons que, malgré le sentiment populaire selon lesquels les jeux sont un échappatoire permettant de créer une nouvelle identité fantastique, la personnalité des joueurs persiste lorsqu'ils enfilent leur corps virtuel : les jeux vidéo en ligne sont en fait un miroir de la personnalité de leurs utilisateurs.In this article, we explore the possibility of inferring the personality of videogame players using traces of their online behavior. Survey data from 1,040 World of Warcraft players containing demographic and personality variables was paired with 3,500 behavioral metrics collected daily in the game world over a four-month period. Despite the popular belief that online games allow many forms of « identity play », our data shows that a gamer's offline personality remains surprisingly stable when they step into the virtual world. It therefore seems that online videogames can be a surprisingly reliable mirror of their users' personalities

Quality Versus Quantity: E-Mail-Centric Task Management and Its Relation With Overload

It is widely acknowledged that many professionals suffer from “e-mail overload.” This articlepresents findings fromin-depth fieldwork that examined thisphenome-non, uncovering six key challenges of task management in e-mail. Analysis of quali-tativeandquantitativedata suggests that it is not simply thequantitybut also thecol

Human group formation in online guilds and offline gangs driven by common team dynamic

Quantifying human group dynamics represents a unique challenge. Unlike animals and other biological systems, humans form groups in both real (offline) and virtual (online) spaces -- from potentially dangerous street gangs populated mostly by disaffected male youths, through to the massive global guilds in online role-playing games for which membership currently exceeds tens of millions of people from all possible backgrounds, age-groups and genders. We have compiled and analyzed data for these two seemingly unrelated offline and online human activities, and have uncovered an unexpected quantitative link between them. Although their overall dynamics differ visibly, we find that a common team-based model can accurately reproduce the quantitative features of each simply by adjusting the average tolerance level and attribute range for each population. By contrast, we find no evidence to support a version of the model based on like-seeking-like (i.e. kinship or `homophily')

Avatar-mediated creativity: When embodying inventors makes engineers more creative

An important challenge today is to support creativity while enabling geographically distant people to work together. In line with the componential theory of creativity, self-perception theory and recent research on the Proteus Effect, we investigate how avatars, which are virtual representations of the self, may be a medium for stimulating creativity. For this purpose, we conducted two studies with a population of engineering students. In the first study, 114 participants responded to online surveys in order to identify what a creative avatar may look like. This enabled us to select avatars representing inventors, which were perceived as creative by engineering students, and neutral avatars. In the second study, 54 participants brainstormed in groups of 3, in 3 different conditions: in a control face-to-face situation, in a virtual environment while embodying neutral avatars and in a virtual environment with inventor avatars. The results show that inventor avatars led to higher performance in fluency and originality of ideas. Moreover, this benefit proved to endure over time since participants allocated to inventor avatars also performed better in a subsequent face-to-face brainstorming. The prospects of using avatars for enhancing creativity-relevant processes are discussed in terms of theoretical and applicative implication

Chapitre 1. Les jeux vidéo en ligne : un laboratoire virtuel de recherche en sciences sociales ?

« Les MMOG sont pour les sciences sociales l’équivalent d’une boîte de Petri ou même d’un accélérateur de particules. »Edward Castronova (2006) Les MMOG : de l’ingénierie sociale à grande échelle Les jeux en ligne massivement multijoueurs (de l’anglais Massively Multiplayer Online Games, abrégé ci-après en MMOG) occupent une place unique dans l’espace vidéo ludique. Au premier abord, les activités offertes dans les MMOG les plus populaires du moment (World of Warcraft, EverQue..