I've played World of Warcraft before back in high school, so I know about most of the basic social rules, how the Leviathan would be enforced, and so on. For this experiment, I thought I would try something that my previous experience wouldn't affect.
I chose a character completely based on appearance as opposed to other benefits. I made my character a male human, which I thought others would consider more attractive than the other classes which resembled monsters. When I entered the game, I was put in a beginner area with other players who had just started. I went around and talked to a few people, asking them if they'd played this game before or if they wanted to go on quests with me. The first person said he had to leave for a little while, but he was polite about it. The next person was also friendly and agreed to go on a quest with me. We did missions together for about an hour and then I said I had to go. Throughout the hour, we had fairly normal conversation.
If I was forced to analyze this situation in terms of the Proteus affect, I would say it agreed with it. My tall, attractive avatar certainly didn't discourage me from going right up to people and being forward. However, I do know how social situations in this game operate. In WoW, the beginning areas aren't seen as too important. Everyone has to go through them, and no real social biases are set up. It's not until much later in the game that players become crazy about who they do quests/interact with.
I know it's not part of this assignment, but I feel that later parts of the game in WoW can give a more interesting analysis of the Proteus theory. In my experiences as a higher level player, I felt that it didn't matter how attractive you looked, but much more how you played, and what kind of equipment you had. In fact, some of the most bold and outgoing people I'd ever met chose their avatars to be as ugly or ridiculous looking as they could.
In the case of World of Warcraft, I would say that the physical appearance of the avatar does not affect a player's actions as Proteus predicts. This is most likely because of the cult obsession with the game and its fighting, as opposed to socializing. I just never saw the attractiveness of the avatar to have significant effects on how I treated other players, or how they treated and interacted with me.
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2 comments:
Rich, good post. I have never actually played WOW myself but analyzing this game does observe a slightly different aspect of the Proteus effect. In a game like this, people are not necessarily looking at how you look, they are more looking at how you play and if you can be useful to them. Beauty being in the eye of the beholder really applies in this case where the beholder is trying to see what equiptment you have and if you could actually be useful to them. It is how you play and what you can do that intitiates interaction and attracts other players. Because most of the avatars do not resemble at all what most players look like in real life, most players tend to ignore if an avatar is good looking or ugly, short or tall, because in most cases they probably realize that you are not a 7 foot tall monster.
Hi Richard,
I loved your post, because in your analysis you considered beyond just the beginning areas and pointed out that the social aspect can change dramatically in the later parts of the game. Although I didn't explore World of Warcraft, I can see that in a large and established world very much focus on gameplay physical appearance would not matter as much.
I guess Second Life (which I couldn't do either) would be different since it's less fighting/quest-oriented. And as Joshua pointed above, in a fantasy setting where your appearance is sometimes expected to be ridiculous the Proteus Effect may be less prominent.
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