New World Notes

Watch This Academic's Moving Speech on How Virtual Worlds Can Help People With Disabilities

Jay Jay Jegathesan is a PhD candidate from the University of Western Australia, and his thesis is about how virtual worlds (specifically Second Life) can help build communities, and this is him passionately presenting a short summary of his work so far:

"In 2009," Jay Jay explains to me, "I founded a fully immersive 3D University campus on the virtual world of Second Life [official site here], and we are now recognized as world leaders in global community development through this technology. This turned into my PhD, which examines how global communities have emerged through virtual worlds in particular among people with disability or chronic illnesses."

Here's how he explains why this is possible:

Cheating in Second Life Relationships Extremely Upsetting to Many SLers, Study Finds

Cheating in Second Life-based romantic relationships is extremely disturbing to the person being betrayed, a new study by a Belgian academic finds. This won't come as a shock to longtime SLers, but the study, led by PhD candidate Katleen Gabriels (of Vrije Universiteit Brussel), puts some quantified numbers to this insight. Surveying nearly 400 volunteers, both Second Life users (250 of that 400) and non-users, she explains, the researchers "asked to imagine as vividly as possible one of two scenarios: You are being cheated on by your actual partner, versus you are being cheated on by your partner in Second Life." Unsurprisingly, non-SLers were disturbed by the former scenario, but didn't react much to the Second Life hypothetical.

However, when SLers were asked to rate their reaction on a scale of "not at all" to "extreme", here's the percent who went with the strongest response:

Virtual World/Gaming Academics: What Are the Best Academic Studies on Race & Avatars in Second Life?

I was just chatting with a graduate student whose thesis revolves around Second Life, and she brought up an interesting point: There seems to be few academic studies on race and avatars in Second Life. "I think it is fair to say that in general there is a huge gap in the literature," as she put it to me. "[M]y initial search found very few results, leading me to assess that there is a huge gap in the literature. One would expect that, given the amount of literature dedicated to sex and gender within Second Life, there would be a comparative amount of research on race and the dynamics of race and ethnicity. But it's missing."

While searching, she often instead found New World Notes posts on race, like this classic about a white woman who experienced Second Life as a black avatar. And to be honest, after writing anecdotal posts like that, I expected (and hoped) academics would run with the topic in a more rigorous way. And maybe we're just not looking in the right places, but evidently, studies like that are scarce.

So help us out, virtual world/gaming academics: Have you come across papers like this?

Can We Improve Our Recall With a Virtual Memory Palace? UCLA Grad Student Testing Just That - And You Can Help

Nicco Reggente is a PhD candidate in UCLA's Cognitive Neuroscience department, and as part of his work, he wants to create a castle in Second Life - specifically, a virtual version of a "Memory Palace", also known as the Method of loci, an ancient means of memorizing information:

"The MoL technique is designed to exploit the remarkable vividness of our visuospatial memories by using spatial environments as scaffolding for memorizing non-spatial content," as he explains. "[O]ne is typically instructed to conjure up a familiar structure (e.g., a childhood home) in their imagination that will serve as their 'memory palace'. While mentally navigating through this environment, one can imagine 'placing' a list of to-be-remembered items in different locations. When later attempting to retrieve this list of items, one simply has to navigate back through the environment and 'observe' the objects in their previously placed locations. My proposal would give this classically powerful mnemonic technique a virtual makeover by creating virtual memory palaces and allowing participants to volitionally place to-be-remembered objects in locations of their choosing."

As it happens, the Memory Palace idea is one of Philip Rosedale's inspirations for the creation of Second Life, so I think Nicco is on the right track. However, the challenge is creating such a palace in SL, under some very specific criterion he has. However, he has a budget to pay an SL creator (ideally who lives in the Los Angeles area), and, you know, it's For Science. If you're interested, e-mail Nicco Reggente at nreggente at psych dot ucla dot edu.

But first, read the guidelines he has in mind - they will probably require the Second Life game creation tools released earlier this year:

Second Life Users Much More Analytical & Intuitive Than US Average, According to New MBTI Comparison Study

Second Life users are much more analytical and intuitive than the US average as measured on the MBTI scale, according to a new academic study from Athabasca University. Specifically, as author and MA graduate Nancy Tavares-Jones explains to me, among Second Life users "there was a statistical significant difference (or over-representation) of Thinking over Feelers and Intuitive versus Sensing." (You can see these differences in the chart above.) "The difference was enormous," she adds. "It was significant to the 0.001 level, meaning there is less than 0.1% chance that the results were acquired by chance." In each variable, the differences are 20% or higher.

The data was compiled through voluntary MBTI tests taken by Second Life users, which New World Notes helped promote last year, which were then compared to MBTI personality averages in the United States. (She chose the US average as a comparison point because most SLers who took the test are American, she tells me.)

In case you're not familiar with the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, here's what these dichotomies mean, as the report author explains:

Take a Short Research Survey on Second Life Identity & Consumption Practices for L$1000

Click here to take a short survey (less than 30 minutes) created by Peter Nagy, an academic fellow with Central European University in Budapest, who's using it for his a doctoral thesis, which is on "the relationship between offline and online identities and consumption practices in Second Life", as he describes it-- and he's paying the first 300 respondents L$1000 each to complete it.

I had a look at his questions, and they'll likely bring up some fascinating insights on that subject, which I'll be blogging about as the data comes available. More from Peter (whose SL account name is VirtualMesmer):

ABC News Surprised Female Second Life Avatars Bare More Skin Than Males -- Iris Surprised ABC Thinks This is News

Iris Ophelia's ongoing review of gaming and virtual world style

"Getting naked in the virtual world — more women than men show flesh!", ABC News breathlessly reported recently, citing research by Canadian academic Matthieu Guitton, who was totally amazed to discover that female Second Life avatars tend to bare a lot of skin, you guys. That's supposed to be surprising news -- but it's actually just the latest evidence that most major media outlets and a lot of academics don't know much about virtual worlds. It's not exactly like ABC is a stranger to women baring skin themselves. The picture above, a parody of a different but no less popular set of housewives, is by celebrated SL photographer James Schwarz, and it illustrates my biggest issue with this article beautifully.

This point is probably painfully obvious to most NWN readers, but in case ABC News or would-be virtual world researchers are still confused, let me explain:

Take a Survey on Avatar Gender for Academic Researchers

Click here to take a 20 minute survey on avatars and gender being conducted by Jon-Paul Cacioli, a Lecturer of Psychology at Charles Darwin University in Australia, along with research assistant Amalia Badawi, who plan to share the results from their research with New World Notes and the public at large. Ms. Badawi has this to say on the importance of the project:

"Many people are using avatars more and more, such as in Second Life which, unlike MMORPGs, there is more freedom in choosing who your avatar is and what it represents, whether it is you, and ideal or some character you have always wanted to role play. This study will explore whether your personality factors may influence why you may choose to be (or not to be!) and avatar of the opposite gender. Maybe it is because you are open to trying new experiences, or maybe it is because you identify more with the stereotyped gender roles that are still lingering in our society...

Take a Short Survey for a Academic Research on SL User Personalities

Click here to take a short confidential survey on real life personality (if you're an active SL user and over 18, of course), which is for an academic study looking into whether "there are over-representations of particular personality type preferences." (Click here to teleport to an SL site with more information on the study.) The research is for a graduate student in Applied Psychology at Athabasca University in Canada, and the supervisor, Dr. Paul Jerry, promises to share what should be the interesting results on New World Notes.

The Importance of Virtual Artifacts in Virtual Societies (Excerpt from Ethnography and Virtual Worlds)

In this fascinating excerpt from Ethnography and Virtual Worlds: A Handbook of Method by Tom Boellstorff, Bonnie Nardi, Celia Pearce & T. L. Taylor from Princeton Press (a sponsoring partner to this blog) the authors explain the importance of virtual artifacts in the virtual worlds they study as academics -- among them, Uru Live, Second Life, World of Warcraft and Dreamscape.

When ethnographers conduct research in the physical world, artifacts play an important role in understanding culture (Appadurai 1988; Spyer 1997; Hoskins 1998; Miller 2005). The artifacts of a community—how they circulate, are incorporated into everyday life, and are given meaning—help illuminate culturally specific meanings and practices. When we speak of “virtual worlds,” the term “world” is not just a metaphor. One way in which virtual worlds resemble physical world fieldsites more than other online contexts (like blogs or social networking websites) is that they have place and space, embodiment, and objects.