For this assignment I decided to explore Second Life. I had never used Second Life before or any other game requiring me to make an avatar of myself and interact with others. The only online games I had played previous to this were Starcraft and Quake. In Quake you do get to choose a character, but you can't customize it much and there isn't any interaction with others.
When I first started Second Life and I had to choose my avatar, I decided I would try and make myself look like a tall, muscular guy. The basic reason for this choice was that I am an average height, skinny male and choosing this avatar would help me to test Yee & Bailenson's hypothesis. It took me a while to configure my avatar, but in the end, I came up with a person I was happy with.
When I first entered the world, I wasn't really sure what to do. I didn't know how open other people would be to talk to me since I've never been in a situation like this. Luckily after wandering around for some time, observing other conversations, I was approached by a female avatar. This person was very open and when I told her it was my first time in second life, she started telling me about the different things I could do. I thanked her for the help and then went in search of someone else to talk to. I was still a bit shy about it, but I was able to find a few other people to talk to during the rest of my experience in the Second Life world.
The Proteus effect is the effect that in an online space, our personality will conform to our digital appearance. This effect was hypothesized by Yee and Bailenson. My time in Second Life was not really long enough to make and definite conclusions, but it seemed to me that this theory was mostly true. I don't know if it's because people are different online, but I was able to find people to talk to online easier than in real life. Because of this, I was more friendly than usual and had a lot of interesting conversations. I would attribute this mostly to the fact that my character was fairly good looking. Any hesitancy or shyness on my part was more based on the fact that I was new to Second Life and didn't really know what I was doing. In general, however, I did find myself opening up much more quickly online and I found I had more confidence because of my avatar's looks. If I had more time to explore, I should have played longer to gain more experience to take out the inexperience factor, and also try different looking avatars.
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Like you this was my first time using Second Life as well. I had a difficult time getting used to how everything worked and how to explore the different areas. You mentioned that you experienced some hesitancy when using Second Life, and although your avatar was good looking and tall, you still were unsure about you actions because you weren’t accustomed to the “culture” of Second Life. I thought it was really interesting that you wrote that because I wrote the exact same observation to.
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