Your2ndPlace

When I caught the headline, 'How Second Life Affects Real Life', I thought the Time magazine article might be reminiscent of an article I once read in the since devalued Byte Magazine over 20 years ago - where relationships with real people in a household were said to be suffering due to the use of personal computers. Yes, that discussion is quite old and probably still valid.

Upon reading it, though, it was about adding depth to something that at least a few people such as myself find shallow - but which many people seem to find very important. In some ways, it could be a simple matter of narcissism extended beyond the keyboard, or it could be escapism through a monitor... whatever it is, it is. The Time Magazine article points to some pretty well known papers for those of us on the inner loop of virtual worlds, but the insights of the author lend some value:

...I was desperately searching for the teleport tool when my sister walked into the room, peered over my shoulder at the computer screen and said, "Why'd you make your avatar ugly?" I logged off...

Yeah, when I started I got that from a few people - particularly women. And I'll admit that some changes were made on the advice of women, or people with female avatars (who the heck really knows?), but Nobody Fugazi's lumbering 8 foot tall avatar is still not what many would consider attractive. Why is he so tall, so huge? The secret? When making clothing, it's a heck of a lot easier to catch flaws on a larger, overbuffed avatar than a dinky avatar. Does my exception prove the rule? Maybe.

In my experience, male avatars are typically shirtless muscle bound rockstar 'wannabes'. Black is overdone - most of the time I feel like I'm having flashbacks of the 1980s. And female avatars? Either they're wearing the most titillating fashions where less is more or, on rare occasions, they are ultra-conservative. Does this color how I view the person at the keyboard? You bet it does - it tells me how they want to be viewed but does not tell me how they really are.

Then the article gets into... of all things... exercise:

...Virtual behavior may even affect real-world health. Stanford graduate student Jesse Fox randomly assigned avatars to 75 volunteers and divided them into three groups: one group watched their look-alike avatars run on treadmills for about five and a half minutes; another group saw their virtual counterparts lounge around; and a third watched avatars who did not look like them, but were of the same age and sex, run on treadmills. A day later, Fox found that participants who watched avatars of their own likeness exercising had themselves exercised an hour more in the intervening 24-hour period than people in the other two groups. (It's worth noting that the volunteers were all Stanford undergraduates, who were likely more active and fitter to start than the average adult.) "What I'm hoping to find out by picking apart these mechanisms is what motivates people and why this works," says Fox. "If you are energized by seeing yourself run, maybe you can put an avatar on the bottom of your computer screen for five minutes and it would persuade you to go to the gym."...

Acid test: Watch your avatar on the kama sutra pose balls and see if you get lucky in real life.

There's a big gaping hole in the research as presented in the article. What if the people who exercised in real life were more likely to have their avatars do the same? Behavior is a funny thing; people have been fiddling with creatures for centuries trying to figure out how people behave and have gotten very little for their research. I'm not saying it is a waste of time - what I am saying is that, generally speaking, the science of studying behavior seems to be awaiting the 'Eureka' moment, such as when Einstein penned the Theory of Relativity for physics. Oddly enough, the trouble with the research may be the very thing that the researchers are studying applied to themselves. Odd how that works.

In the end, I don't really buy it - and after all, isn't this what this is all about? Marketing? Of course it is. The altruistic side of things doesn't have the money or resources to perform studies like this, but marketing research does because it wants to sell more stuff. In the end, that is really the major effect on the real world from virtual worlds: getting people to buy stuff, something that was the basis for the book, Virtual Worlds: Rewiring Your Emotional Future.

As for myself, I have not felt the need to eat more fish when in my penguin avatar.

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