 Okay, let's see. La la la la. Good. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you are. I am Moose Main and welcome to the Virtual Ability 2019 Mental Health Symposium. I am Moose Main. I am very new to this public speaking so if I tripping over my own two feet laugh. Eight years ago I had a stroke, aphasia, and epilepsy. I have been in second life for about 13 years. I enjoy being on beginner DJ so don't make me sing. In real life I have been a senior network engineer for Dell and a variety of Fortune 500 companies. Today I'd like to introduce Professor Nick Bowman. Nick Bowman has been an associate professor, part of the integration lab for the Department of Communication Studies, West Virginia University in the US. He's interested in how people, communications, difficulties affect the way we interact. In particular the impact of video games and social media. He views entertainment technology as a way for learning and community case discourse. Please hold your questions and comments to the end so as not to interrupt our presenter. Welcome Professor Bowman. The floor is yours. Alright thank you very much for having me today. So my presentation, as he said I'm a researcher who studies interactive media at West Virginia University and I'm going to cut through some of my details here. The presentation today is called How Do I Relate to Me and on the next slide I will share a abstract with you from the talk today. In most virtual environments users experience the generated digital world by means of a character or avatar that is under their control. As such avatars become the primary mediator and facilitator of the user's digital interactions both with the world itself as well as the people who populate that world. However, given that avatars occupy bodies distinct from their users there is an inherent dyadic relationship between user and avatar. As with any relationship this dyad can be remarkably complex and can involve several different mechanisms. This presentation will discuss at least six different mechanisms by which users can come to associate with understand their on-screen avatars and explain how these differences these different mechanisms might have very different emotional components and outcomes. During the presentation I'll ask you to share your experiences with your own avatars. Okay, so on the screen behind me you see a few of my avatars and you'll notice immediately that they're not all digital in the sense of being polygons right. If we start from top to left you've got a picture from my Facebook profile. During the 2008 World Cup when I was living in Germany and for a brief period of time I spent an amazing amount of money on a German soccer team jersey only to watch my team lose the very next day and I haven't worn that shirt since. You see my Twitter profile at Bowman Spartan where I've sent over 42,000 tweets which is just a little more than the real Donald Trump. Here I talk about academics I sometimes just complain about things and I share weird chats ongoing in my life. You see my pandarian warrior in World of Warcraft where I spend the majority of my time fishing in fact it drives my partner insane because she wants to beat the game and all I want to do is catch largemouth bass. You see my old aim account which is dead in fact aim was shut down but this was my first experience on the world wide web as an identifiable person. So even when I used ProdigyNet I didn't have a profile because I was too young. You see me in second life although my appearance has changed since two hours ago when I was completely new and three hours you know maybe an hour ago when I decided to put some clothes on and my character Niko from Fallout 76 where I've been researching since 2018 and as a professor at West Virginia University it's a very natural place for me to get engaged with the many people who are playing this. Me in the office during a recent Skype interview is a guest lecture for a class overseas. For sure when we start to exist in multiple spaces we start to take on multiple persona this is not a surprising thing. If we look at what an avatar is you know it comes from the the Sanskrit avatar a deity coming from earth to fulfill some purpose in a sense engaging digital worlds for a purpose requires an avatar right it requires the embodiments that all of us in this auditorium are in right now right for sure avatars become important because they represent our primary agency in digital worlds without our avatars we really have no way of existing in cyberspaces and as I say this I should note that an avatar doesn't necessarily have to be made of polygons you know at Bowman Spartan is a I think a perfectly robust avatar that exists on Twitter and yet doesn't have any real dimensionality to it other than whatever personality I choose to show that day just as Vishnu took on many different avatars I think we've got a couple other people here um just as Vishnu took on many different forms and engaged many different tasks we all have multiple identities that we engage in our lives and each one for a very different function for situation so for this it's not really so odd that we'd have at least one of these identities in the digital space and perhaps even more than one in the same space golfmen talks quite a bit about how audiences were communicating with and the audiences that were in front of play a very big role in the front stage so when I dressed today for for a second life I had a bit of a existential crisis of a sort that I didn't necessarily understand how I was going to be portrayed by the audience right if I wear a suit maybe they'll see me a square or if I come in and wear a goofy clown costume that may people wouldn't take me seriously or from this case I'm still employed by university and if I'm going to do this from my office today I someone said be a squirrel I should do this I my favorite is a cephalopod I ended up not doing it but I think I might later I chose a west virgin university shirt a pair of jeans and boots which isn't that far off what I wear every day part of that was because today I wanted to be in front of you as I am every day as a researcher of digital world who cares deeply about our experiences in there on the screen behind you see all of my other identities soon to be a Texan professor a partner a gamer very privileged in my socioeconomic status and I have to recognize this a mentor a multiracial child from Taiwan and the United States these are all things that I engage with every day and I say this to you now because if we can take that seriously and accept the fact that people simply have different versions of themselves that they share in different environments well then suddenly the idea of having an emotionally bound avatar in the digital space is no more strange or weird than me putting on a suit to go to work or putting on yard gloves to cut the yard most importantly each one of these identities is as relevant and authentic as all of the others it is not appropriate for someone to tell you that way you're dressed right now in the sojourner auditorium in front of me is somehow an inauthentic way of presenting yourself because that's not how identity works on the screen behind me we know that avatars also provide us with this on-screen agent that we can temporarily borrow attributes from and this works on several different dimensions the model behind me is some empirical results from research I've done but I'm going to go on the next slide and kind of explain how these different little dots and pieces all lead into this thing we call identity because later I'm going to talk about how those different identities might matter for other particulars so as I've said there are at least six different ways that we can come to feel a sense of identification with our avatar and to give you a few examples as to what do these mechanisms might look and feel like so there is the idea of value homophily that the avatar on screen shares many of the same beliefs that you do someone just posted that they don't always feel the same way about their avatar in many ways that's going to be my point today is that you don't always have to score highly on every single one of these dimensions that to me is what makes them so you can see values in your avatar being values you have and of course it can be the opposite you can take on a completely different value system I don't punch people in real life but you get me in a video game and I'm pretty violent because I like to win there is embodiment there's the idea of being transported into the avatar almost as like your dimensional meat stack in digital space right um the avatar in front of you today and maybe Michelle can back me up on this because we're friends and and sort of you know physical space as well looks a bit like me um he's a little thinner and a little more handsome but I think for the most part I dress this way more often than I like to admit so I would feel a high level of transportation to the avatar in front of you today I almost dressed like my avatar but it's too warm outside so I wore shorts we can look at physical similarity and this is the idea that it that it physically renders me and I physically resemble it so embodying it doesn't always have to be a look it can be a feeling so a vehicle in a video game you can be embodied into but physical similarity is sharing properties of the object in front of you and the object in front of the computer there's wishful identification and this is something that sandar may have just commented on sometimes you wish you could be more like the avatar on screen you might create a idealized version of yourself or just a different version of yourself or just some kind of vision or fantasy of a functional agent in a particular world that you might feel represent you in that space in pandaria I'm a hulking panda who carries an axe in one hand and a fishing pole in the other if I carried those two things here in West Virginia I would probably go to jail right it's it's more of a wishful thing for that particular scenario then we have the idea of perspective taking and sometimes what happens is that we see these avatars on screen and we want to kind of see what the world's like through their eyes to see how they see the world and if we can reconcile that and feel empathy for that and engage in these in these different types of interactions I'm loving some of the comments I think they speak to these different mechanisms and all of these have come you know I give my citation on the slide and the last presentation here has references for all this information but I should be clear that this is the research done from many many many other scholars in this field and in the including Tony and Michelle and then finally there's just liking the extent to which you have a positive affect towards your avatar not everybody does for any number of reasons and so I submit these six different mechanisms to you is ways to sort of not treat identification as a unidimensional and monolithic and singular thing it's not just that you either are or you aren't your avatar it is far more complex than that and that's what makes so much of this experience so interesting because not all of us have the same dimensions of identity with our avatars as other people sitting in the same room have with their avatar and that adds a layer to these social interactions that is fantastic to me and I think to many of you so I suspect that if each of you thought about your avatar that you're occupying right now you might agree with the mechanisms and you might disagree with others so something interesting about avatars is that as we engage them and as we engage other people who also have avatars we can actually see this as a bit of a quartet that there's a conversation that takes place in a sense we see four people we see the avatars mine and yours and then there's the people behind those avatars me and them this is something that my partner Jamie Banks has researched with her colleagues that when we're talking about these interactions the user's avatar is also relating to another user's avatar and I would only submit that that's a lot of communication and it's what makes online spaces fascinating and sometimes very confusing and maybe not the kinds of things that we necessarily know how to cope with or handle because to some extent we may not have these things in our physical space although I might contest that because certainly when I talk to my boss and and and she's wearing a power suit it's very different than when I see her at the grocery store simply you know wearing sweatpants and buying milk to go a little further in the model shown behind me we can also recognize going from left to right four different player avatar relationships and different types and these have happened in several studies from our own research lab and also from my colleagues here at West Virginia including my partner Jamie so for example we can see the avatar as object in which I see my avatar is a tool or a game piece that's it it's just a functional object to get me to do something so when I first engaged this second life invitation I didn't think that I was going to put a lot of time into my avatar not because I wanted to disrespect the audience but I simply saw it is I have to have something for people to look at in order for them to understand that somebody's talking and it was very much just like a object and then like many of you in the auditorium I started playing around I started walking around I started feeling out my avatar and developing a little bit of personality and suddenly I found myself shifting into the next category the avatar as me in which we see our avatar is an extension or a representation of ourselves in that digital space we focused on social and ritual interaction we focused on the fact that this could be fun to play with right and we shift but the funny thing is that's not where it stops I think many scholars stop there it's either an object or it's me somebody does reference google gobble and I'm laughing right now inside because that's one of my favorite skits in any movie the point of this model however is there's even more to it than that it doesn't have to be an object and it doesn't have to be a me so another one is the symbiote in which people see themselves as and their avatar as part of each other one thing that ends up happening is that you might create a authentic social other because maybe you're not comfortable with what's happening in your life right now but you also don't want to abandon who you are so the symbiotic relationship this is the third one over what we've often seen are people dealing with intense socio-emotional pain will go online to experiment with other sides of themselves they didn't realize they had a lot of people who have been abused people who have gone through divorces or people who have had fundamental life changes have engaged this symbiotic relationship quite a bit and the last one we'll talk about is the avatar as another and this is the idea in which a person tends to see their avatar someone mentioned trans people and that is definitely an area where we saw the avatar symbiote the avatar is other we start to see the avatar as a completely separate social agent in other words your avatar is not you it's another thing that you communicate with and you talk with almost as if it were an external social interaction and this is something that we're seeing more and more of in our research where people in the beginning of our studies we saw almost entirely object and me relationships but just like lin just said the way authors talk about their characters some people differentiate between themselves as the creator and their avatars as social agents and the key here if you look at the arrows on this chart is that in the avatar is other relationship the avatar has its own agency its own needs its own desires and you as the sort of puppet master are really there to take care of it there's still a lot of self differentiation for like the object and the other but as i was kind of saying earlier in the panel they serve very different functions this also tends to be a very intimate relationship what is particularly interesting about these is that we see some distinctions between them and a few quick examples people who play video games like an object where they treat their avatar is an object they see their avatar is really just something that they have control over that's really it it's a chess piece it's the pawn they move from space to space in order to accomplish a goal it's no different than a piece of tape or a screen people who see their avatars as an other tend to see it as a separate thing but they feel a lot of intimacy they feel like it has its own agency i've kind of said a little bit of this already and they're probably more likely to use personal pronouns we see people who see their avatar as an other refer to he she they names whereas object players talk about it this is kind of an interesting thing in our research me people folks who see the avatars themselves tend to be very low in self differentiation of course they don't distinguish between themselves in their chair or in front of their computer and themselves on the screen they maintain the control and then the avatar is basically a vehicle for the player's experience but it doesn't exist on its own when they log out the avatar is dead when they log back in the avatars i didn't prepare uh notes for this one for the tell the prompter and i apologize but all i'm showing you here is i took my avatars from earlier and i were to put them on this screen on this chart i probably say my fallout avatar even though he looks really really handsome it's an object i go into fallout and all i do in there is eat berries and make guns and build houses and go hunting i really don't feel an attachment the character he's probably died 50 times because i've knocked him off of ledges and i don't pay much attention and i get frustrated because it means i wasn't playing very well the twitter accounts and perhaps my my avatar in front of you now these are my me players this is me i am on twitter i am in second life i'm sitting in my desk it's a one-to-one relationship and i think both my german fantasy as well as the player above him you see a baseball player his last name is mangosteen that's my alter ego when i play mlb the show he's a first baseman for the hartford yard dogs that is another player another human and my job is to raise him through the minor leagues to the major leagues to win the world series but he is not me it's a separate social being really quick on this chart behind us it's a bit hard to see but the short version is that when we look at how people rates the human-like connectedness that they have with their avatar as well as their agreement with different adjectives that they use to describe their avatar we see some cool things we see that when folks use words like toy tool puppet object they tend to have very low levels of human-like connectedness someone asked about the slides i'm happy to share the entire deck with anybody who asked that's no problem whatsoever as people have higher scores on this idea of human-like connectedness you start seeing folks use avatar of adjectives extension representation peace of me mirror identity all of these things talk about an avatar as me and then finally the highest levels of this notion of having a human-like connectedness with your avatar these are folks who use adjectives like person partner they're very much using language that distinguishes them from their avatar so here i've suggested just a couple of different scenarios that could happen in a digital world in which our emotional reactions might change quite a bit depending on the relationship that we have with our avatar these are speculative and they're not perfect but there are a few examples if a person were to fail in a digital world maybe they lose a video game or they die in a fight in the game an object player would probably be frustrated or angry because they lost and it was a barrier to winning a me person might be disappointed or self-loathing or they might see the failure as an ego threat it's a very different reaction and the other player might feel sorrow or grief because they just watched something die and they were responsible for it of course remember you know these people do not feel as if they have any control over the avatar but they feel an intense connection with it like a pet or a loved one of course where it gets tricky is when folks are engaging the same virtual world or digital world but they have different sorts of relationships with their avatar and as a result they feel very different emotions in a way of course this may not be so different than first life as a professor i see lots of students reacting to things very different it kind of speed things along a little bit how we relate to our avatars can also impact our behaviors when we're in those avatars so i've done some research just to give one example if we don't see our avatar is real or if we don't feel responsible for our actions we tend to be more antisocial so folks who might see their avatar as fake tend to be more aggressive online however if we feel like we're in control of the avatar we might be more pro-social and that's a finding from a video game but there's a lot of work on this called the Proteus Effect and i've put a link in the transcript for later when folks use avatars in digital worlds they can take on attributes and properties of those avatars that can spill over to digital physical space and a point i want to make a critical a critical aspect of all of this we don't engage digital worlds separately from physical worlds our emotions online impact our emotions offline and this is something that i think gets forgotten quite often when we talk about studying second life or living in second life it's not that things can't be different it's that humans themselves don't fundamentally change when they go from one space to the next one of the most dramatic examples of this is a rape in cyberspace i don't know how many people here have read this article i've shared the link here and i would heavily encourage you to read this story i'm going to read you an excerpt from the opening paragraph they say he raped him that night they say he did it with a cunning little doll fashioned in their image and imbued with the power to make him them do whatever he desired they say that by manipulating the doll he forced them to have sex with each other and do other things and horrible brutal things to give their own bodies and though i wasn't there that night i think i can assure you that what they say is true because it all happened right in the living room right there amid the well stocked bookcases and sofas in the fireplace the house i came for a time think of as my second home for those you who have not read the rape in cyberspace this was a story from an early chat room in the 80s where one user of the chat room found a script that forced other users to do whatever he wanted to do this wasn't a polygon environment it was text only and in all of that text what we ended up finding is that um in this experience people felt raped because they could not control their actions and when they interviewed the guy who did it when they investigated his response was essentially i was just having fun it's just a game whereas the other users who sought out this place for solace and comfort and community engagement felt as if there is a pedophile in their midst and it's a great example of what can happen when one person has an avatar as an object and other people have an avatar as a me or as an other and when those things mix and combine some very dark things so for a takeaway to offer a few takeaways avatars mediate our experiences online and represent us in many different ways as we interact with other avatars those interactions trigger authentic emotional re experiences that are influenced by the user avatar relationship that's what i have now i would love to chat more and i really hope we could spend the next 10 to 15 minutes talking about some of this boy that's a lot to think about but there have been several things that have occurred in the chat i'm going to call your attention back to them let me see if i can find them real quick here we go yeah please lots lots of applause this was amazing okay sandar said way back when i am sandar now nick you're a researcher how do you as a researcher determine who i is when you get responses like sandars sure so the shortest possible answer is we use a lot of multi methodologies a lot of mixed methods so we've developed some some self-response scales where folks can fill out different questionnaires and we can take the pattern of those answers and kind of hone in on what it is they're talking about we also pair that with a lot of open into discussion of what it is the person is describing so we can usually see if they're describing a certain avatar and they're describing themselves in this they want a certain way and then maybe we actually have a photograph of the avatar some of the pronouns that are used we can sometimes get at whether or not they're talking about the avatar or themselves at the same time it's not always that relevant right and what i mean by that is we don't always necessarily care who is behind the screen because one of the things we don't have to assume is that that necessarily matters if you're in a community in second life and in that community you're a particular person we want to know who you are in that space we don't always need to assume that there's a discrepancy between the person on the screen and the person in their computer no more than if i went to a workplace and i interviewed employees about you know their feelings about the workplace that i have to know what they do what they're in their home space and i point that out because it's something that i think we struggle with as humans that we assume there is a true self now there are many researchers who would agree there is a true self i'm not one of those researchers i take very much an Irving Goffman approach that suggests that the self is a collection of the faces we want to provide to the people in front of us based on the context and it's no more inauthentic to be you know sandar in second life than it is to be somebody else at the grocery store there are just different types of interactions but it's a bit of i guess it was a long answer and i'm happy to share the scales and the past data with you but usually it's the combination of conversations and scale responses and Lynn had a comment he said in second life if you do not like your avatar you have many options to change and some people wear different avatars depending on their mood and so i want to know what is the impact of this mutability on a sense of self so it's i guess it depends on whether or not you see it as an expression or you see it as something that's influencing you right because in a way i wear different clothes to represent who i am right i wore a hockey jersey yesterday because the blues were beaten the dallas stars and i wear collared shirts but i'm feeling confident and i wear slummy clothes when i'm feeling lazy i don't know if it reverse impacts my long term sense of who i am however what i would say is one of the things we could study is how the people respond to the way you present and that could impact who you are right you try on a new avatar and for some reason everybody likes that one and not the one that you feel represents who you are it's natural that you would take those experiences back into your worldview and from there probably make some alterations and decisions um it is a fascinating thing in second life that we can expose people to given off cues that are impossible to replicate in physical space right maybe i could wear a mood ring like you know back in the 70s but i can actually just grow an extra tentacle in here if i want to show you how i feel about things so i guess for me it's really just like i said in the panel earlier it's kind of same song second verse the difference being the extent to which the second life community or the community and the virtual the digital space how do they make sense of those cues because that's the part that's going to impact you it's going to be you know communication is not intention oftentimes we communicate unintentional those things often are more powerful than what we think we're saying okay i'm going to ask you to comment on this interpretation of authenticity anna is saying that they have a controversy in the virtual church world they want to talk about whether non-human avatars can take a leading role in worship because they are somehow role playing or inauthentic anna i absolutely love this question so years ago i gave a presentation to a group of clergy in north carolina about whether or not you can authentically have any sort of church service online and we had a discussion about the sacrament and what it means to you know our our and i'll use catholicism for a moment you know um is that the physical embodiment of the objects themselves in the relics that matters you know sort of a traditional view of religion being from st louis a lot of my neighbors went to catholic they went to latin mass because if you didn't do it in latin it wasn't authentic they saw the english language short versions of mass as being inauthentic and exactly your language and so it's amazing to think that there'd be a debate that because you're a horse you can't receive communion and i get your point they see that as somebody who's goofing around they see it as it's some dumb kid who wants to come to service this sunday and they somehow want to move off in this virtual world and that is sort of exactly what i am driving at it really gets into a miscommunication someone said may between how just because i see my avatar is me doesn't mean other people don't also see their avatar is them you might need a authentic one to one high fidelity embodiment to express yourself but it doesn't mean that other person needs an authentic one to one embodiment to represent themselves i'm going to go back a moment to see if i can get the slides to render this is where i think our model is so important uh this one here hopefully it's rendering for you all all six of those different slices of identity all of them can make somebody feel as if they have a high level of identification with their avatar so one person's embodiment could be another person's wishful identification but i think what i would say to that that congregation is to be careful because you are now telling people they can't be spiritual unless they do it a certain way of course ironically that is how many physical churches work if you don't wear a certain outfit you cannot worship your god and if you go back and read luther that was one of his big gripes at the end of the day which is why i often say that the issues we're facing digitally are not new issues they just look different someone wrote it's better to be a horse in virtual chores church than the horses rear end and then the other church and i would agree with that not any church i won't demean religion but i'd rather you be something gentle and nice online than not thank you um marley had a comment she said she's never had an interest in alts and she has always wanted her avatar to be as much like her out there self as possible her main message is she's an artistic person she loves creating outfits jewelry artistic environments and workshops using art processes how do you see the difference between changing your avatar appearance and making alt avatars marley that's a great question because it's something that scientists are horrendous at we don't define our terms very well so everybody in the room knows what an alt is except there is no definition of an alt right um some people might argue that the fact that my avatar on screen is wearing boots is an alt because i don't often wear boots when i'm walking around that's a really deep question i think it i think the answer would be an alt would be an avatar that falls outside of the avatar as me relationship so if we go back to that chart and hopefully it renders here in a moment it's less about the appearance of the avatar being authentic it's more about the extent to which you view that vehicle is an extension of yourself as an as a mirror as a me when that avatar starts becoming self-differentiated and starts having its own identity and its own agency that's when it becomes an alt if you go to the baseball player for example that player actually is fairly close in shape to me in the game he's five foot nine a hundred ninety pounds that's about me um and yet when i play that baseball game he's an avatar as other and there's one really big reason for that i can't hit a baseball to save my life nico mango steam can oh someone posted did we think we sometimes discover who me is when we perform via our avatar of course i think we don't know who we always are in fact even golfin would say this that there's a lot of our hidden self in our backstage that we're never quite familiar with and sometimes we don't trigger those things until the audience around us forces us to trigger them to use myself as an example um i never thought i'd be a good public speaker until i started teaching college classes i i ended up in a classroom not because of my speaking ability i ended up in the classroom because i was a researcher and part of being a researcher is also teaching and it wasn't until the audience in front of me triggered me to think more about how i present myself and how i make sure that communication is not about me it's about them i became a better speaker and so certainly exposing parts of our me through our avatars and assessing people's reactions to those slices of me and help us understand who we think we really are or more importantly who we think we want to be well and i think you're also going to want to talk to carlis question carlis says she met more than 15 sl friends after she knew them in sl in physical art and they are all exactly as she knew them in second life personality wise and she too is actually is that most of the case or not i don't know if i could speak to prevalence rates i do love that you focused on who they were people and not as physical persons because that is probably the thing that we're talking about in these social interactions that tony talked about and michelle talked about and our first speaker also talked about there's a common theme here of social presence that we're often not meeting objects we're meeting people and those people happen to exist in different objects and we can absolutely get to know who they are through the amount of time and care we spend with them i think that there's a bit of an assumption that because we're all digital we're always lying to each other and that's just not true um there's research showing that networks like this in which people have extreme levels of control over how they present themselves well you do and you don't if this entire group of people hung out every day for a year we would eventually recognize vocal patterns typing patterns we would see adjectives get used something that mook just said it's just less work to be yourself that's pretty much accurate we are motivated to engage with the folks around us and their reactions to our engagements shape our reactions to their reactions so because of that it's not surprising that when you meet somebody in real life and you met them in second life it's very much the case that you're likely to find people be relatively non-discrepant the shell just mentioned there's also a selection issue right we probably gravitate towards certain individuals in both spaces so for all of these reasons i think it speaks to the power of these environments to simply be treated as another way of talking and i guess for me it's just not that much different than going to the park it's just that i could have tentacles if i wanted well once again i'm forced to break off some wonderful conversation nick thank you for so many more different ways to look at ourselves and our avatars or maybe i should say to look at ourselves as our avatars i want to remind the audience to take the note card from the giver box by the podium before i take the giver box away and i want everyone to please stretch your legs go to the bathroom get another drink whatever you need be back at the top of the hour dr colacaris is going to present on video games social interactions and mental health i'll see you guys are back in about 10 minutes thank you so very much this was this was a real honor