Player-Avatar Symbiosis

Player-Avatar Symbiosis

Link:http://frictionalgames.blogspot.co.uk/2010/12/player-avator-symbiosis.html

In a recently released paper, Jeroen D. Stout (creator of Dinner Date) proposes an interesting theory on the relashionship between player and avatar. It is related to the things that have been discussed previous post about immersion, so I felt it was relevant to bring it up. The full paper can be gotten from here. I will summarize the ideas a bit below, but I still suggest all to read the actual paper for more info!

Most modern theorists of the mind agree that it is not single thing, but a collection of processes working in unison. What this means is that there is no exact place where everything comes together, but instead the interaction between many sub-systems give rise to what we call consciousness. The most clear evidence of this is in split brain patients, where the two brain-halves pretty much form two different personalities when unable to communicate.

This image of a self is a not fixed thing though and it is possible to change. When using a tool for a while it often begins to feel like an extension of ourself, thus changing ones body image. We go from being "just me" to be being "me with hammer". When the hammer is put down, we return to the old previous body image of just being "me". I have described an even clearer example of this in a previous post, where a subject perceives a sense of touch as located at a rubber hand. Research have shown that this sort of connection can get quite strong. If one threatens to drop a heavy weight or similar on the artificial body part (eg the rubber hand), then the body reacts just like it would to any actual body part.

What this means for games is that it is theoretically possible for the player form a very strong bond with the avatar, and in a sense become the avatar. I discuss something similar in this blog post. What Jeroen now purposes is that one can go one step further and make the avatar autonomously behave in a way that the players will interpret has their own will. This is what he calls symbiosis. Instead of just extending the body-image, it is the extension of the mind. Quite literally, a high level of symbiosis means that part of your mind will reside in the avatar.

A simple example would be that if player pushes a button, making the avatar jump, players feel as if they did the jumping themselves. I believe that this sort of symbiosis already happens in some games, especially noticeable when the avatar does not directly jump but has some kind of animation first. When the player-avatar symbiosis is strong this sort of animation does not feel like some kind of cut scene, but as a willed action. Symbiosis does not have to be just about simple actions like jumping though, but can be more complex actions, eg. assembling something, and actions that are not even initiated by the player, eg. picking up an object as the player pass by it. If symbiosis is strong then the player should feel that "I did that" and not "the avatar did that" in the previous examples. The big question is now how far we can go with this, and Jeroen suggests some directions on how to research this further.

Having more knowledge on symbiosis would be very useful to make the player feel immersed in games. It can also help solving the problem of inaccurate input. Instead of doing it the Trespasser way and add fine-control for every needed body joint, focus can lie on increasing the symbiosis and thus allowing simply (or even no!) input be seen by players as their own actions. This would make players feel as part of a virtual world without resorting to full-body exo-skeletons or similar for input. Another interesting aspect of exploring this further is that it can perhaps tell us something about our own mind. Using games to dig deeper into subjects like free will and consciousness is something I feel is incredibly exciting.

The Personality of Immersion in Video Games and Virtual Worlds

Link:http://neoacademic.com/2010/06/29/the-personality-of-immersion-in-video-games-and-virtual-worlds/


A recent study by Weibel, Wissmath and Mast (2010)^[1] examines the Big Five personality correlates of immersion in virtual environments, finding that high Openness to Experience, Neuroticism, and Extraversion are positively related to the tendency to be immersed.
Immersion is not very clearly defined in the article, so we’ll have to assume they’re using the layman’s definition – that feeling you get where the outside world fades away and your entire attention is on the game/virtual environment.  This seems related to the concepts of engagement in business research and flow in psychology, although this paper makes no attempt to pull in either.
The results here are somewhat atheoretical, as there was no a priori attempt to link personality traits to specific characteristics related to immersion.  There’s certainly nothing wrong with a brute force empirical approach, but it does change the sorts of conclusions that can be made.  This work found that all three personality traits were related to emotional involvement (one dimension of immersion) while only Openness was related to absorption (the other dimension).  Neuroticsm was also the most strongly related to emotional involvement of the three.  But the specific reasons for these variables to correlate in this way (i.e. Why are neurotic people more likely to be immersed?”) are unclear.
There are certainly limitations.  The research was conducted entirely via survey with a 21% response rate.  Immersion is studied here as immersive tendency, a personality trait with items like, “How frequently do you find yourself closely identifying with the characters in a story line?”  While the authors make a claim that this is related to immersion in “mediated environments,” it’s not clear if such general immersive tendencies would translate into actual differences in behavior, and furthermore if  immersive tendencies in technology-mediated environments could be measured with items like the example given above.  The low response rate also raises some concern about missingness, although the severity of this problem depends on why people were missing.
Still, the implications are interesting.  If these three personality traits are related to tendencies toward immersion, and if this generalized to immersion in virtual environments, it opens up the possibility we can predict engagement level in technology-mediated training programs from personality, which would potentially affect how much trainees learned from those environments, holding all other features constant.  For example, I might hypothesize from this that people high in Openness would be more engaged in a training program held in Second Life rather than in person, and would as a result experience better learning outcomes from the Second Life training program.