Stanford avatar study in Second Life

[Melita Magic]

A controlled study conducted by Stanford University. The study was regarding avatar appearance.

http://vhil.stanford.edu/projects/secondlife

I wish they went into more detail about that. Maybe someone interested enough can email the person on the page for more details.

Now this is what a real study looks like and is conducted like. Not "my professor ate my homework, please IM me your RL data."

Just had to say that too I guess. Lol

[Dillon Levenque]

Wow, if that was done as stated, it WAS a serious attempt at a study. Each student spent 'at least six hours' a week for six weeks. That's not a ton of time but looking back on my first days, I think that's enough to really get an idea of Second Life.

I'm with you, Melita. I'd really like to know more about this one.

 

 

ETA: I just emailed a request for information; if I learn anything I'll post it here.

[Madelaine McMasters]

From the look of the screen capture and the dates in the page's bibliography, it appears this study was done in 2008 or earlier. I too am curious about the results.

[Jasmin Helstein]

I could be wrong but I think this is the manuscript.

http://vhil.stanford.edu/pubs/2009/harris-tracking.pdf

A few statistics and lots of references ... It only makes me wonder what the study was about.

[Dillon Levenque]

It certainly looks like the study in question: the description of the participants matches the one on the shot Melita sent. This excerpt from the introduction is interesting:

"Results demonstrated that although the social networks of users continued to broaden over

the course of the study, users became less inclined to explore regions, decreased their use of highenergy

actions such as flying or running, and chatted less."

High energy? Anyway, I'm sure it must be the one.

[Charolotte Caxton]

Interesting, that is true. I don't fly nearly as much as I used to when I was new and I hardy ever run. Double click to teleport is so much faster. Thing is, I love flying.

[Dillon Levenque]

I'm just starting but this does look like an interesting document, and thank you for finding it. These two paragraphs in the introduction are particularly interesting given the very recent discussion of this topic (and the many other times it has been discussed before).

Second Life is an online virtual environment, but unlike massively-multiplayer online roleplaying games, it does not employ rule-sets to structure in-game achievements and goals. Since user behavior is neither pre-defined nor restricted, scholars have recently turned to Second Life as a research platform to study how people behave in the virtual environment Blascovich and colleagues have proposed that immersive virtual environments may be unique in their ability to provide social science researchers both experimental control and a realistic context. In this way, a virtual world can provide all of the benefits of a laboratory study, with all of the generalizability of a field study.

(bolding mine). It then goes on to directly compare SL to WoW:

There is a growing literature examining social networks which is relevant to these questions. In one study of the online game World of Warcraft, researchers unobtrusively collected longitudinal data from over 200,000 users via an automated script at intervals of approximately fifteen minutes. By examining patterns of social groupings in the game, researchers found that users were far more likely to be playing alone than with other players even though the game is billed as being “massively-multiplayer.” The authors of that paper suggest that online games are popular not because of the direct social interaction they offer, but the persistent social ambience they provide—the appeal of being “alone together”

Again, bolding mine. I do realize that there is no 'typical' Second Life resident, but as one who stays here more for the social interaction than for any other reason by far, I am pleased to see that academia finds some validity in my madness.

[Charolotte Caxton]

I like that, being alone together. Nothing like having some me time but seeing your friends are just an IM away.

[Melita Magic]

Wow thank you all for your posts and insights and comments and thoughts. And experiences you shared. Much appreciated!

Thank  you also for finding the finished paper and the quotes from it. They had some good incisive things to say about Second Life. I wouldn't argue with any of their conclusions, from those quotes. I've never tried WoW and don't want to. I don't want to kill things. I want to see beauty and - be alone or 'alone together' - fellowship when it suits the parties involved, and community of some sort.

It was interesting the details to which the study went. That to me is the way to do it. I guess that's why I get annoyed with those who say they don't want to even go into Second Life but just to interview some residents. To me that's a bit like they are saying they want to take a trip to the zoo and report back on the exhibits therein.

That plus the lack of seriousness masquerading as legitimacy. Blah. If they are just being nosy or curious nothing wrong with it, just say so.

 

[Melita Magic]

---

Dillon Levenque wrote:

ETA: I just emailed a request for information; if I learn anything I'll post it here.

---

Please do. I would love to hear if they did any follow-ups or have plans to.

I also noticed the Stanford studies used students or people they already knew in real life. I would think that would also be the only way to do a controlled study. Otherwise how would they know or trust the data, if comparing RL to SL? As some studies fishing around for participants here, claim to do. Even if they met the person in a coffeehouse first, how would they know more than they saw.

They would also have better access to communicate with people they knew. I always wondered why the people asking in here didn't just ask some classmates.

[jwenting]

As to the WoW information, I can attest that a lot of people do play alone a lot. BUT, that's often not by choice. They want to be part of guilds, go raiding or pvp with others, but many or even most such guilds and teams won't accept you as a member unless you're max level and have expensive and hard to get equipment.

As a result, many people spend a lot of time on their own training up their skills and toons to where they're deemed acceptable to the raiding guilds, then more of the same farming gold to buy those expensive items from the members of those guilds who have them for auction.

Then, when they have joined those guilds, they find that the guild members spend most of their time standing around the major cities, chatting in guild chat, or in im with friends, and only play together for the weekly raid that they, as newcomers, aren't invited to because the raid group is full (they've been put on a reseve list in case one of the core members fails to show up). They do however have an obligation to provide funds and goods for the guild for use by that raid team, which means more time alone harvesting stuff and farming gold.

 

[Dillon Levenque]

Interesting. To me, that would make WoW something entirely different than Second Life—the only similarities would be that they are both online and they both have a large number of users.

I do realize not everyone approaches SL the way I do; that's why I said 'To me'.

[Czari Zenovka]

---

jwenting wrote:

As to the WoW information, I can attest that a lot of people do play alone a lot. BUT, that's often not by choice. They want to be part of guilds, go raiding or pvp with others, but many or even most such guilds and teams won't accept you as a member unless you're max level and have expensive and hard to get equipment.

 

---

I've had this same discussion on the WoW forums when I played regularly.  I played EQ for 7 years straight (logging in for at least 2-4 hours/day), then intermittently for another few years.  I played WoW from Dec. 2011-May 2012 as a break from SL.

In both games I prefer to solo.  I have met many others who also enjoy soloing.  I never try to join guilds.  The 3 guilds of which I was a member in EQ over 10 years all approached me and even then I soloed most of the time.  Grouping is too fast and furious for me.

I never thought I would play WoW but a friend I met last summer on EQ talked me into trying the free demo - loved it.  Re: guilds, WoW was a lot different than EQ in that EQ never spammed guild invitations nor IM'd random people to try to get them to join their guild.  Getting at least 5 random guild invitations each play period on WoW were totally annoying.  I did learn how to turn off the auto-invitations but still got a lot.

Again joining a guild isn't my style but when a similar discussion came up on the WoW forums another person kept insisting all the advantages I'd have from being part of a guild and what I was missing.  Yes there are some advantages but some people...and me specifically...prefer to solo.

My SL is similar.  I never get it when people post saying they're bored.  I never have enough time in the day to do what I'd like in SL.  I can go weeks without ever leaving my parcel and be happy as a clam - building, working on my shop, etc.  I have quite a few friends, but a lot of them are also builders so we touch base every so often, but definitely not every day...or even every week.  One or two people I talk to more regularly but generally while we're each doing other things like....building.

Maybe it's an only child thing; I learned at a young age how to entertain myself.

 

[Jeremy Starship]

Actually, while the Harris paper published in the journal PRESENCE describes the mechanics of the study, the only place where we describe the details of the use of machine learning to predict "first life" features from Second Life tracking data is in the "Digital Footprints" chapter of Infinite Reality (www.infinitereality.org).

Thanks for your interest in our work!

The Virtual Human Interaction Lab

 

[Dillon Levenque]

Update!

I just got a reply from Helen Harris to my email. She was very interested to learn that the study had been mentioned on the SL Forum and asked who brought it up. You can let me know if you want me to send her a link to the thread, Melita.

She sent me three links to look for more information. One was the same one Jasmin posted here earlier. The other two are:

http://vhil.stanford.edu/pubs/2008/yee-sl-data.pdf

 

and

http://vhil.stanford.edu/pubs/2011/yee-spps-personality.pdf

 

I've only  glanced but neither is extraordinarily long; one's only three pages. Of course it remains to be seen how impenatrable the language is ;-).

[Pussycat Catnap]

participants were instructed to create a new Second Life account. In Second Life, experimenters gave each participant their assigned avatar shape, L$1000, a

nd a scripted object which would track their online behavior.

- That right there invalidates the study.

I understand they had to do that to find out what people do in SL.

But... that itself fundamentally alters what people will do.

How many folks would go to Zindra and hop on all the poseballs if it was going into their academic record?

- Not many, I suspect. I could be wrong, but its a little like being asked to 'work the equipment' in front of the classroom... I've met people, mostly guys, crazy enough to do it (well, they'd work the equipment of any women volunteers but maybe not their own), but I suspect most people would -NOT- go in for it.

 

Now go to Zindra and start checking the average avatar age of people in the infohubs and 'free poseballing' clubs... Its mostly the newbs and the noobs, and the people making money off of them. Plenty of older residents indulge as well, but almost all of the newbs do...

And that's just the poseballing. Plenty of other less extreme things folks might consider when not concerned about their name being on it. Like trying out a nude beach. Or spending the time they were supposed to be in Mr. Carter's English 1B class hacking up elves in an RPG sim, or going to a Philosophy debate and presenting their support for Rousseau and the Khmer Rouge's successful implimentation of his model (no sane person would have that view... but this is SL...)

Some folks won't even go to a rock concert if they know their buddies from the ghetto would find out, and vice versa with the other guy's buddies from the trailer park and a hip hop concert. But both will freely go to the genre they're curious about when logged into SL on an avatar they feel comfortable in.

 

The moment you track the participants, any data is flawed beyond recovery.

- And that's the common fatal flaw outsiders have in trying to understand this world we're in. You can't study a population that has personal autonomy and privacy as its core ideals using the standard 'real world' methods. The very methods used to ensure you didn't fake your data taint it.