Monday, January 28, 2008

Group Project idea....

Our group (Amy, Tawyna, Dave, David, Josh) has been tossing around some ideas and what we finally settled on was to examine the psychology of the Avatar. We want to look at Avatars from the standpoint of masking soieties in whih masks are used to conceal "true" identity, as well as transform into another being, diety, or concept. The idea with masking is that the person who is masked become the persona of the mask, but not completely as in "possession," We want to know if the Avatar has become the modern mask. Will the Avatar's personality differ considerably from that of the creator? We intend to do this through a series of personality tests. The first will be administered to the individual, prior to Avatar creation. We then want to have them create thier Avatar, spend some time in world, and have thier Avatar arrive on Gator Nation Island to take a personality test for itself. We'll then compare the tests and determine similarities and differences. We also hope to breifly examine the appearences, at least we've considered it, but have realized our research interest is not so much the way the Avatar looks, but more if the persona is different from it's creator. We also have theorized that the transformation will be more complete with more time spent in world.

Though this is obviously a very minor account of our plans, it should give you the basic gist of what we intend to do. Enjoy!

3 comments:

gritz said...

Hey, folks -

I think your idea leads in an exciting direction. Part of my doctoral research has been on the "presentation of self" in online social networks like Facebook, and I think there is some material there that may be of use to you.

Presentation of "digital self" is a hot topic in that area right now: what information people put out and what information they hold in the creation of profiles. I can send over some links if you think that will apply to what you are doing.

Deciding to what extent avatars are a performance, and to what extent they "are" their RL creator, is a key question that has legal as well as philosophical implications. A big question to answer for the class: how will this affect teaching in SL?

arturo said...

I agree with Gritz about your idea. I don't know if there are studies in this respect but it seems so obvious, doesn't it? There are so many aspects which play a part in the transformation which takes place when wearing a mask, or using a puppet to approach tabu subjects for example (like the sex activities mentioned in other posts), Narcissism, the etiology of disorders (e.g.eating) or anxieties , the quest for approval etc etc.

I look forward to seeing how it develops. The hard part as you already know is acquiring significant data, but some of it might already exist.

You may want to read Puppets, Masks, and Performing Objects by John Bell (very interesting)

I did enjoy:-)

Tawnya said...

Gritz, thanks for the suggested links, we would love to look through them!

Another reason why this issue is important to understand is: do the same rules/concepts transfer from RL to SL. By this I mean, if we are marketing to a certain group of people in RL, there is considerable research to tell us the best way to market to that group. But if people in SL are markedly different in personality, tendencies, etc there is not much research to tell us how to market to these "masked" individuals.
:)
Tawnya