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When each of us gets up in the morning, we start messing with what might as well be avatar customization tools to change our appearance. We decide what clothes and jewelry to wear, and we decide which hairs to shave and which hairs to style. Some of us occasionally make more radical alterations, such as getting tattoos, piercing various dangly bits with metal, or even going in for cosmetic surgery. In real life, though, we’re often limited in the changes we can make to appear taller, say, or more prosperous. Videogames and virtual realities, on the other hand, are more flexible.
Via The Learning Factor
A l'heure ou le serious game tente de s'imposer dans les processus de recrutement....
“Studies have shown that, in general, people create slightly idealized avatars based on their actual selves,” says Nick Yee, who used to work as a research scientist at the Palo Alto Research Center but who now works at Ubisoft. He should know: before joining Ubisoft Yee has spent years studying the effects of avatars on human behavior in settings such as Second Life and World Of Warcraft. “But a compensation effect has been observed. People with a higher body mass index – likely overweight or obese – create more physically idealized avatars, [which are] taller or thinner. And people who are depressed or have low self-esteem create avatars with more idealized traits, [such as being] more gregarious and conscientious.”
Other researchers have found that the ability to create idealized versions of ourselves is strongly connected to how much we enjoy the game, how immersed we become, and how much we identify with the avatar. Assistant professor Seung-A ‘Annie’ Jin, who works at Emerson College’s Marketing Communication Department, did a series of experiments with Nintendo Miis and Wii Fit.1 She found that players who were able to create a Mii that was approximately their ideal body shape generally felt more connected to that avatar and also felt more capable of changing their virtual self’s behavior – a fancy way of saying that the game felt more interactive and immersive. This link was strongest, in fact, when there was a big discrepancy between participants’ perceptions of their ideal and actual selves.
1. I've ranked this link at the top of the list because it's one of the very few I found while curating my resources that really touched on the exact point I'm trying to make in my online identity project. It alludes to the fact that people have been proven to create online avatars that are based off their actual identities, but are often idealised or improved. It goes on to say that we tend to use avatars to compensate for what we perceive to be flaws and that we may even start to reflect our online avatars. Because the author of the article, Jamie Madigan, has studied psychology (specifically video game psychology) and appears to be highly respected in the video game community, I trust his word to hold a lot of value.