One Person, Multiple Faces

                       Is Virtuality becoming Reality?

In an article I read from  The Association of Psychological Science titled; "Virtual Avatars May Impact Real-World Behaviors", psychologists experiment on how virtual avatars have a direct impact of behavior.  

Source: Mario Wiki

"Our results indicate that just five minutes of role-play in virtual environments as either a hero or villain can easily cause people to reward or punish anonymous strangers,” says lead researcher Gunwoo Yoon of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign"

In the research done at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, researchers found that using a hero or a villain as a virtual avatar can directly affect your decision making. This is very interesting and I have noticed this to be true. I noticed that whenever I played Assassin's Creed, I was acting more foolhardy than I have ever acted. However when I played in a role that required a very strong sense of justice, I noticed this reflecting into my real life. 

“As Yoon and co-author Patrick Vargas note, virtual environments afford people the opportunity to take on identities and experience circumstances that they otherwise can’t in real life, providing “a vehicle for observation, imitation, and modeling.”

They wondered whether these virtual experiences — specifically, the experiences of taking on heroic or villainous avatars — might carry over into everyday behavior.”

Virtual reality is a way for people to decide how they want to act. Since most games are very realistic and have direct consequences for acting a certain way they provide a good method for people to experiment how they want to act. I remember when I played Infamous, I experienced this dilemma. If you do good acts, your power takes on a blue hue. If you commit crimes, your power takes on a red orange color. I want on committing crimes but I after some while I felt morally wrong by committing them. They game became a place for me to test my own morals.

“The researchers recruited 194 undergraduates to participate in two supposedly unrelated studies. The participants were randomly assigned to play as Superman (a heroic avatar), Voldemort (a villainous avatar), or a circle (a neutral avatar). They played a game for 5 minutes in which they, as their avatars, were tasked with fighting enemies. Then, in a presumably unrelated study, they participated in a blind taste test. They were asked to taste and then give either chocolate or chili sauce to a future participant. They were told to pour the chosen food item into a plastic dish and that the future participant would consume all of the food provided.”

I really enjoy the choices they used. They picked Superman for the good avatar, who has been known to have a absurdly strong devotion to good, almost to the point of stupidity. For the evil avatar they picked nothing else than the the Evil Lord Who Shall Not be Named Voldemort. These choices both are very opposite sides of the spectrum.

“The results were revealing: Participants who played as Superman poured, on average, nearly twice as much chocolate as chili sauce for the “future participant.” And they poured significantly more chocolate than those who played as either of the other avatars.

Participants who played as Voldemort, on the other hand, poured out nearly twice as much of the spicy chili sauce than they did chocolate, and they poured significantly more chili sauce compared to the other participants.

A second experiment with 125 undergraduates confirmed these findings and showed that actually playing as an avatar yielded stronger effects on subsequent behavior than just watching someone else play as the avatar.”

The method they used to test the subjects was very interesting. They noticed that the people who used Superman poured twice as much chocolate than the other groups. Also the people who used Voldemort poured twice as much chili sauce as the other groups. Evidently there is a direct correlation between the avatars people received and how much chocolate or chili sauce they used. In the other experiment they concluded that playing the actual avatar gives a stronger affect than watching someone play it. This has very deep implications for gaming and psychology. Games has been proven to cause a direct affect on human psychology. Video game buyers and producers should realize that the virtual realities they create will cause power imitative tendencies in people.

DISCUSSION QUESTION: Can games promote violence and other unwanted side effects?