The Social Life of Avatars

In this chapter, I will give an overview of some central issues in research on shared virtual environments (VEs) - including "presence", "copresence", communication, and small and large group dynamics - across a range of virtual reality (VR) technologies and different conditions under which they are used. I will discuss different studies of the interplay between technological systems and their social implications, and how sociological insights about interaction in the real world can be brought to bear on interaction in YEs. Finally, I will argue that making links between different areas of research can lead to a better understanding of social interaction in VEs.

Recent studies of social processes via the Internet have begun to concentrate on the question of whether computer-mediated communication enables people to build up social relations with other persons despite geographical dispersion [1, 2]. It sill seems to be rather unclear whether the Internet can support the development of new forms of social structures, such as virtual communities, which exhibit social binding and social coherence comparable to those in real life. Studies that support the assumption that computer-mediated communication generates new forms of social systems [3, 2] are confronted with a more skeptical assessment, which raises the question of whether the variables used to provide evidence for this are really valid [4]. Critics refer to the absence of commonly-shared life-world perspectives in online communities [3], while more optimistic researchers point out that a common background in online environments is generated by communication [5, 6, 2].

In effect, I suppose I was unknowingly using my second reality as a social experiment and it has become very much a learning experience for me. Meg, virtual world user.

You are about to read a story of crime, deceit and punishment. The story takes place in a virtual world, but it is by no means a fictional story. All the characters portrayed have existed and the events recollected have actually happened. They are taken from the real everyday life of a virtual world. A virtual world is a virtual place that is persistent over time - unlike the environments of networked games like Quake - and it is accessible by many people at the same time. These people have to have some kind of self-representation, so participants can see each other, unlike the simultaneous visitors of a website. By calling it a place, I have implied that the system has to be based on some kind of spatial metaphor, unlike an electronic message board for instance. It can be a text-based system - but in this case it is graphical. My reason for telling this story is to point out some important aspects of the nature of the social interaction in this kind of setting that are easily overlooked by anyone who does not have extensive first-hand experience from participation in social virtual worlds - but I will save my analysis for later.

The idea behind "30 Days in Active Worlds" was to document fully the development of a virtual environment from beginning to end, as a plot of virgin virtual land which, it was hoped, would develop into a community and a fullyfledged new virtual world. The aim was not to create a dialog of life in the virtual environment, such as the well-documented My Tiny Life by Julian Dibbell [1] or The Cybergypsies by Indra Sinha [2]. Yet the events that unfolded over the 30 day period led to just such a documentation, and with it my views not only about community and design in a virtual environment, but also about the increasingly blurred boundaries between what is real and what is virtual. The title "30 Days in Active Worlds" stems from the free trial software of the Active Worlds (A W) server, which allows users to host their own world. The trial software operates for 30 days before timing out, enabling users to set up and run their own worlds and small communities before having to purchase a full server from A W. A W is a commercial multi-user system operating on a standard Windows-based system with a modem connection. Distributed and run from Newburyport, north of Boston, the A W Universe currently consists of over 700 worlds with an average of 400 users logged in at anyone time. Users, or citizens as they are known, appear as avatars. Avatars are the citizens’ graphical icons in the A W system, and the choice of avatars range from a large male biker called "Butch" to the petite female of "Tanya" with many incarnations in-between.

The design and structure of virtual environments have an impact on the nature of the social interactions found within the environment. Our goal in this chapter is to understand better why some designs and structures support sustainable, dynamic social interactions, while others do not. Over the past six years, the Virtual Worlds Group at Microsoft Research [1] has designed, deployed, and studied two virtual environment products, Microsoft V-Chat [2] and the Virtual Worlds Platform [3]. With both of these products, we designed tools for others to build and deploy their own environments, and we built and supported environments of our own. Over the years, hundreds of world builders have used these products to build virtual environments for their own communities. Thousands of end users have visited, joined, and helped to develop communities. Through our prototyping, observations, and data collection we have learned a number of lessons about the design process of community builders and the impact of design on the social dynamics of virtual environments. The following chapter describes Microsoft V-Chat and the Virtual Worlds Platform, our research process, and the central lessons we have learned.

In this chapter we are interested in the long-term uses of shared virtual environments (VEs). We begin with a review of research that is relevant to this topic. Next, we describe an exploratory trial to examine long-term uses whereby four participants - the authors of this chapter - took part in ten one-hour meetings in a desktop VE, Active Worlds (AW). The trial allowed us to examine the problems and changes that took place over the course of these meetings. The aim was to explore both technical and social problems. We found that the main technical problems were related to voice communication. We also found that technical issues and issues to do with the design of the VE, which have been the focus of much research on YEs, were much less important than specific social issues, including awareness of each other and how meetings were organized. We found, moreover, that there was a process of "adaptation" to the constraints of the system, and to how we collaborated in the VE. We conclude by describing some implications of these findings for future research into long-term uses of shared YEs.

[Social psychology is] an attempt to understand and explain how the thought, feeling, and behavior of individuals are influenced by the actual imagined, or implied presence of others. Gordon Allport, 1954 [1]

The BBC TV series Dr Who popularized the race of beings known as the "Daleks" [l]. A Dalek is a creature that is completely encased in a metallic shell, through which it can slide over the ground only over certain types of flat, smooth and electrically conducting surfaces. It has three limbs, one used as an eye-piece delivering a relatively small field of view, another which is a weapon, and a third which acts as an end-effector for the manipulation of objects. There is no direct evidence about Daleks’ auditory capabilities. However, this is unlikely to be good, since Daleks have a habit of repeating most things they say several times. Daleks tend to shout rather than talk, another indication of poor auditory capability and a lossy information channel. This evolutionary development was the result of a warinduced nuclear holocaust, thousands of years in the past.

Social aspects of virtual reality is an area of research that has expanded as the technology has matured. Collaborative virtual environments (CVEs) show great promise for investigating how human-human interaction works. The reason for this is that the mode of communication as well as task contexts, spatial affordances, information presentation and manipulation of common objects can be varied in order to understand the effects of - and interrelations between - these factors. The communication mode is often text-chat in virtual environments, and audio or video channels are used less often. It has only recently become possible to support other human senses like touch in three-dimensional virtual environments. In this chapter my main interest is in comparing the different communication modes, such as textchat, voice communication and video conferencing, and investigating the effect of supporting the touch modality. Evaluation of collaboration through different communication modes is not as common in the area of CVEs as in the area of telecommunications and computer-mediated communication (CMC). One reason for this is that social psychology has not had a large impact on research in the field of CVEs. In social psychological studies of mediated interaction, the focus of interest is, for example, on how people can build and sustain relations, prevent and solve conflicts, and collaborate to attain joint goals [1]. A general argument that a number of theories make is that the social richness of the communication medium has to be matched with the task in order for collaborators to accomplish these

With the introduction of the Internet, many people saw the beginning of a new era; an era of democratization, of status equalization, and of freedom of speech for everyone. The accessibility of other places and people via the medium of computers, as Weill as the absence of many social and status cues, would make it possible for people to reach out to other people across the national and social borders that govern our face-to-face interaction. We would turn on our computer-sand instantly be connected not only with our offices, our colleagues, and our families and friends, but also with people all over the world with whom we would make exciting new acquaintances.

This paper provides a unique quantitative analysis of the social dynamics of three chat rooms in the Microsoft V-Chat graphical chat system. We used survey and behavioral data to study user experience and activity. 150 V-Chat participants completed a web-based survey and data logs were collected from three V-Chat rooms over the course of 119 days. This data illustrates the usage patterns of graphical chat systems, and highlights the ways physical proxemics are translated into social interactions in onIine environments. V-Chat participants actively used gestures, avatars, and movement as part of their social interactions. Analyses of clustering patterns and movement data show that avatars were used to provide nonverbal cues similar to those found in face-to-face interactions. However, use of some graphical features, in particular gestures, declined as users became more experienced with the system. As we shall see, these findings have implications for the design and study of online interactive environments.