September 29, 2008
Collaborative building in Second Life
We recently completed our first study of collaborative building in Second Life. We asked groups of 2 or 3 people to work together on two building tasks and participate in a focus-group discussion. We observed people with all levels of expertise from novice to expert, in order both to capture cutting-edge practice as well as non-expert reactions to the user-interface. Some of our participants had not used SL before but were experienced with other virtual worlds or CAD software.
Each group carried out two building tasks. The first was to assemble a "house" out of parts we gave to them. A completed house is illustrated in the screen-shot above. This was effectively a 3d jigsaw puzzle. Groups used voice for communication, and could organize themselves any way they wanted. For the second task, one person was made group leader. They couldn't use the editing tools, but instead had to direct their team-mates to build an outdoor scene of garden furniture arranged around the house. Only the leader saw the photo of how the garden should look. This arrangement forced groups to reference objects and places a lot, either verbally or by whatever means they could devise. We recorded the groups' screen video and speech so we could examine their references to objects and their use of "alt-zoom", Second Life's free-moving camera. Read on to see what we found.
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September 05, 2008
Why Hair Matters
In our previous post, we saw how hair style and color were consistently ranked among the most important avatar customization features. They were also the ones users spent the most time customizing. We would like to explore a few reasons why this might be the case and what the implications for future avatar creation and customization systems might be - read on for more.
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August 20, 2008
What Are the Most Important Avatar Customization Features?
Avatar customization systems vary greatly across virtual worlds: some allow users to customize a few high-level features from a limited list of options, while others give the users almost total control over their appearance. We wanted to assess the relative importance of each customization feature to uncover which parts of a user's virtual body matter most to them. To do so, we asked players in each of our three games to evaluate the importance (1: not important to 5: essential) of each character design feature provided by the avatar customization system in their environment of choice. Also, participants were asked to answer how much time they spent customizing each of those features (1 = almost none, 5 = a great deal). The results were more surprising than we anticipated - read more below for a detailed description of our findings.
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August 04, 2008
Avatar Survey: Time Spent In-World and Customizing Avatar
Gaming experience and time spent playing were not significantly different across the three environments. WoW players had a mean experience with this particular game of 2.15 years (Std. = 1.16). They played 4.36 hours per day (Std. = 2.32) and 5.53 days per week (Std. = 1.67). Maple Story players had a mean experience of 1.82 years (Std. = 0.98); they played 5.12 hours per day (Std. = 4.16) and 5.60 days per week (Std. = 1.88). Second Life residents had a mean experience of 1.71 years (Std. = 1.01); they played 4.55 hours per day (Std. = 3.56) and 5.91 days per week (Std.=5.91). Note that our respondents' experience was not limited to these three environments: their total MMO gaming experience ranged from an average of 3.5 years for MS players to 4.4 years for WoW.
However, Second Life residents spent significantly more time (F=9.434, p <.001) customizing the appearance of their avatar (mean=92.75 minutes, Std. = 208.70 minutes/week), compared to WoW players’ 9.99 minutes (Std. = 15.185) and Maple Story players’ 12.95 minutes (Std. =16.18). This result makes it clear that avatar customization is a very important activity in Second Life compared to the game-based virtual environments - in fact, one could even argue that avatar customization is the game in SL.
Posted at 09:51 AM | Comments (4)
July 31, 2008
Avatar Survey: "Mains" and "Alts"
Before asking our participants detailed questions about how they chose to customize their avatar, it was important to assess whether or not they had one they considered to be their "main" identity (as opposed to alternate characters or "alts"). Indeed, if participants split their time between several avatars it would be more difficult to link their in-world appearance with their physical world demographics. Broadly speaking, we found that a large majority of users across the three environments focus their energy on one main avatar. The extended entry below presents our findings in more detail.
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July 25, 2008
Avatar Survey: Age
Having considered gender in the previous post, we now turn to our participants' age. Unsurprisingly perhaps, the participants' age in the three selected games had significantly different means (F = 67.479, p <.001). The results indicate that Maple Story players (mean age = 18.12, Std. = 6.18) were significantly younger than both the players in World of Warcraft (mean age = 29.78, Std. = 10.48) and the residents of Second Life (mean age = 41.14, Std. = 9.64). In addition, the residents of Second Life were found to be significantly older than the other two games.
We were able to explore the issue of age in more depth thanks to the avatar screenshots uploaded by our participants. Indeed, users can choose to design their avatar to look younger or older than their real age. In our survey the participants were asked how the age of their avatar compared with their real age (1: not different at all, 2: mildly different, 3: somewhat different, 4: very different and 5: extremely different). We found that, according to their own evaluation, most users tended to make their avatar age slightly different from their real age (mean = 2.67, Std. = 1.29).
Moreover, a correlation analysis showed that the relationship between users’ real age and preferred avatar age appearance are significantly positively correlated (r=.231, p <.005). That is, younger users did not really care about their avatar’s apparent age, but older users preferred creating an avatar that appears different in age. Looking at the screenshots, it seems as if older users broadly prefer creating avatars that look younger than they are, sometimes by a very large margin. For instance, several SL residents aged 40 and above had avatars that looked like teenagers or young adults.
Posted at 09:29 AM | Comments (0)
July 21, 2008
Avatar Survey: Gender Demographics
After several months of data collection we have begun analyzing the responses to our survey on avatar customization. A big thank you goes to the 180 participants who took the time to go through the questionnaire and provided us with some very interesting information! In the coming weeks we will be posting regularly about what emerges from our analyses.
In this post, we will start with some basic demographic data about our participants, in particular, their gender. While this is not directly related to avatar customization per se, it gives us a sense of how representative our sample is. Interestingly, our participants data broadly confirms the player profiles that have been reported by others in previous research and in industry data. Read on to learn more.
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July 17, 2008
Visit from Greg Wadley
Greg Wadley from the University of Melbourne, Australia, has joined us as a visiting researcher from July to October 2008. Greg teaches in the Information Systems degree at Melbourne and has spent the past few years researching for his PhD on how people use different communication media in virtual worlds. At PARC Greg will conduct research into group collaboration around complex 3d objects in Second Life. For more details about Greg and his work please see his
staff page or email him on gwadley at parc dot com.
Posted at 03:31 PM | Comments (0)
May 05, 2008
Survey: How Do Players Create and Customize their Avatars?
The PlayOn group is starting a research project on avatar personalization systems in multiplayer games, including World of Warcraft, Second Life, and Maple Story. As part of this research we would like to invite volunteers to participate in an online survey.
The purpose of this study is to explore how users of massively multiplayer online environments customize the appearance of their virtual body (avatar). During this survey, you will be asked to upload a screenshot of your avatar's appearance to our research website and to answer survey questions related to your gaming experience. The questionnaire should be fun to answer and we estimate it takes only 15 to 20 minutes to complete it.
If you'd like to help, please follow the links below depending on your game of choice:
- World of Warcraft: [http://blogs.parc.com/limesurvey/index.php?sid=59117&lang=en]
- Maple Story: [http://blogs.parc.com/limesurvey/index.php?sid=77654&lang=en]
- Second Life: [http://blogs.parc.com/limesurvey/index.php?sid=35489&lang=en]
Note that you will be asked to provide an email address, where we will send you a unique participant code. Your email address will be kept strictly confidential and will be used only used to assign you a unique identifier; we will not sell or otherwise disclose it to any third party. Note also that we will never ask you to download software and/or enter your game account information at any time, we simply ask for a *picture* of your avatar. Due to the recent key-logging epidemic (esp. in WoW) players are understandably worried about clicking on links but you can rest assured we are only interested in research data.
We thank you in advance for your help and look forward to sharing the survey results with you!
Posted at 11:25 AM | Comments (0)
February 08, 2008
PlayOn welcomes Don Wen
As I am sure many of our readers noticed, PlayOn has been lying dormant for a while... but fear not, we plan to be much more active this year. Some of our new energy comes from the addition of Don Wen to our group. Don, originally from the Human Factors Laboratory at the National Chiao Tung University (NCTU) in Taiwan, is visiting PARC for a year. His recent research has been focused on the design factors influencing a player's experience in MMOs, and the impact of these factors on things like fun and addiction. He will continue exploring these topics and others with our group.
Welcome Don!
Posted at 11:48 AM | Comments (3)
August 21, 2007
Guild Name Generator
In our analysis of guild names, we found that a basic grammar was able to parse about 90% of the names. This allowed us to create a guild name generator that used the grammar to create new guild names based on the weighted vocabulary of World of Warcraft guild names.
See full article for description of the guild name grammar we used.
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March 12, 2007
PvP vs. PvE: Pressure to Level
After looking at the data on general post-BC leveling patterns and speed, we wondered whether the post-60 distribution would differ between PvP and PvE servers. I suggested that it might be harder to level on a PvP server because of the general level of ganking and interference. Eric suggested that the potential for ganking would actually encourage PvP players to level as fast as possible - especially to stay ahead of the level curve. The data showed that Eric was right.
On both PvP and PvE servers, roughly 20% of the population was level 61 and above, but the distribution was significantly different. Players on PvP servers tended to be higher level than players on PvE servers. The graph below shows how clean that break is. The difference is especially clear for level 65 and above, and particularly for level 70.
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March 02, 2007
Accumulated Leveling Times
The timing of the expansion gave us a very interesting opportunity to estimate leveling times. In the past, we could estimate each individual leveling event, but it was impossible to know the accumulated leveling time of a character if the character was created before we started capturing snapshots. But even if we only included characters created after the snapshots began, we would have to aggregate across different months to get a sizeable pool of characters, and that introduced potential time event confounds (i.e., a certain class was balanced).
What the expansion did was it encouraged many players to start a new character at the same time - specifically with the Draenei and the Blood Elves. We know that all Draenei and Blood Elves were created after January 17th, and there are many of these characters. This allowed us to use a large sample of actually accumulated leveling times to estimate the overall curve.
We started by calculating the average accumulated playing times of Draenei and Blood Elves for each level. The blips in the graph (especially post-50) are due to low samples and potential breaks in the data collection process. However, the graph did hint at an underlying curve.
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February 21, 2007
Characters in BGs after Burning Crusade
The Burning Crusade changed the WoW landscape a lot. One area that was significantly impacted was the number of unique characters in the old BGs (Alterac, Ararthi, Warsong, & Eye of The Storm). The end-game BGs which many level 60 characters spent time in were suddenly almost deserted and back at almost pre-cross-realm queue times. Now, it's intuitive that post-60 content is more appealing to many players than the same old BGs. What may be less obvious is the added pressure for those level 60 players to get the expansion pack. Level 60 players who were content to just PvP now have to endure much much longer wait times to get into BGs. In other words, level 60 life without the expansion pack became difficult. Anecdotally, it also soon became clear to the BG stragglers that the people stuck in those BGs were the ones who didn't have the expansion - yet. It's also interesting to point out this caused a large shift from a competitive orientation (in BGs) to a leveling/achievement orientation (in BC content) for many WoW players.
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February 09, 2007
New Races Level Progression
We tabulated the levels of all the characters of the two races for each day in January after the expansion roll-out. The following flash widget shows the average level progression by day for the Draenei and the Blood Elves across the 5 servers we monitor.
Posted at 04:34 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)
