Response to Visual analyses of the creation of avatars by Ferdig et al

Today I read the article Dr. Ferdig co-authored for the International Journal of Gaming and Computer-Mediated Simulations, entitled Visual analyses of the creation of avatars. I thought it was great! My comments today are all about the article so the page numbers of my quotes all come from that one source.

In my last blog, I discussed the emotions that I felt as I created my own avatar. I was surprised that, when given the chance to re-create my physical self, I found I picked many of my own physical characteristics, but made them a little better (or what I consider “better”). Ferdig’s article addressed this phenomenon. He and the co-authors examined what happened when participants in a study created avatars as heroes, villains, ideal selves and actual selves (p. 90).

The study participants were each presented with four small vignettes describing scenarios they would keep in mind as they created the four avatars. One set the scene for the creation of a hero, one for the creation of a villain, one for an ideal self, and the fourth asked participants to “to build a visual representation of yourself that you will use to interact with other students” in an online course (p. 93).

Analysis of the data was detailed and complex but a summary of the results showed some surprising conclusions. As expected, participants created “heros” and “villains” who were different in many physical traits from their real selves. The authors also found that “the majority of the characteristics changed were temporal. Temporal characteristics are those that can be easily changed in real life: clothing, hairstyle, and with the advent of color contact lenses, eye color. On the other hand, enduring characteristics are those that are not easily malleable: body type, skin tone, musculature, and gender-specific characteristics. This result was unexpected, as conventional wisdom supported with research by Turkle (1995) and Yee (2006), indicates that given the opportunity to become an anonymous denizen of an online world, one would adopt a liberated persona and the physical characteristics to match that persona” (p. 101). I found these results surprising as well, but especially interesting in light of what I discovered about myself—that my own ideal avatar also resembled me a lot!

I have one comment about these results: the comparisons the authors made between “real” and avatar came from photographs taken of the participants at the start of the project so some conclusions might not have been accurate. For example, the conclusion that many people made avatars who dressed in a more formal manner than they did in real life was based on a comparison between the avatar and the single photograph of that participant. The clothing the participant wore on the day of the photogram might not have been the norm for that person. This is a very watered down discussion of this topic, of course. But it’s one example.

I found all these results fascinating because they say something about how we view ourselves. Maybe most of us don’t dislike our own bodies as much as we suppose. In fact, this is even more interesting because a common theme in American society is that women are objectified and that we are bombarded with ads that insist we emulate some “ideal” body type. The idea of a slender woman with blond hair, tight buns, flat stomach, and large breasts is our supposed “ideal.” Yet, confronted with the opportunity to remake oneself into that image, it appears that most of Ferdig et al’s subjects did not choose that route.

These results are even more significant in light of one factor of the study that, from the researchers’ point of view was a problem but is not a problem from the perspective of “do American women really strive for a stereotypical ideal body?” In this study, 87% of the participants were female (p. 101). And, should one suggest that this American ideal is true mainly for the typical white woman, well, this study consisted of 96% white participants. In other words, these results could possibly be used to draw some conclusions about whether or not white American women really want to become Marilyn Monroe, Madonna, or Brittney Spears lookalikes.

On the other hand, last night I spent some time in the Help Institute in Second Life where I was amazed at all the skinny big-breasted, tight-butt women avatars, dressed in skin-tight jeans and very revealing cropped tops. I find it hard to believe that a large percentage of the people who are Residents of Second Life look close to that in Real Life…

Ferdig et al included photos of two participants paired up with images of the avatars they created. While I realize this might be an invasion of privacy, I wish I could have seen more photos alongside the avatars that went with those people. One pleasant-looking but overweight woman created a very thin, sexy avatar as a villain! The other woman created a male avatar for a villain even though the study stated that few participants crossed gender lines when creating their avatars.

I found this study absolutely riveting and I look forward to doing my own research on this topic. Just reading this one article gave me so many ideas for more research that I won’t have time, if I live to be 150, to look into all of them!

Ferdig et al brought up two interesting questions that emerged from their study related to gender and race: “Do female participants create male avatars (and vice versa)? Do participants create avatars of a different race?” (p. 101).

I look forward to investigating at least one of the topics Ferdig brought up or that I have thought of as I continue my blog.

References:
1. Black, E.W., Ferdig, R.E., DiPietro, J.C., Liu, F. & Whalen, B. (2009). Visual analyses of the creation of avatars. International Journal of Gaming and Computer-Mediated Simulations, 1(1), 90-107. http://www.igi-global.com/newsletter/october08/ijgcms.pdf

2. Turkle, S. (1995). Life on the screen: Identity in the age of the Internet. New York: Simon & Schuster.

3. Yee, N. (2008). Our virtual bodies, ourselves? The Deadalus project: The psychology of MMORPGs. Retrieved from http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus/ archives/001613.php