Entries Tagged 'psychology' ↓

While recently playing World of Warcraft I came across the following situation.

Player A and player B decide to create new characters. Player A wants to have engineering as a profession, because that will allow the player to “build cool stuff”; player A decides to be a gnome in order to have better engineering abilities. Player B decides then to be dwarf, for variety’s sake. Players create their characters and start playing.

After an hour or so of playing with these new characters, player A declares “We are short and fat, I don’t like it”. Player B suggests, “Well, we can create new, human characters. We would be taller and slimmer then.” Player A agrees, and new (human) characters are created. Player A still sticks to the “will become engineer” plan. Upon seeing player B’s new avatar, player A remarks “Oh, it looks just like you in the Real World (TM)!”, which is fairly accurate, except that A doesn’t usually carry a mace around in the Real World (TM).

I think this story is a nice example of the importance we attach not only to the image we have of ourselves, but also to any kind of representation of ourselves. We don’t want to appear short and fat, even if it is inside a game. And we are surprisingly attached to whatever we consider to be our “core” characteristics (e.g. “I am an engineer”), too.

Technorati Tags: image, self, wow

Joi Ito has a post about gender of World of Warcraft characters, where he asks if anyone has studied this issue academically. The comment thread is very interesting.

One of the gold nuggets from the comment thread is Nick Yee’s Daedalus project, where he explores the psychology of MMORPGs. Among other things, on Nick’s site I find some interesting data on World of Warcraft Character Race Demographics. Nick writes that night-elves and gnomes significantly more likely to be played by a female player. This is a particularly interesting thing to me, as I started playing WoW last week, and I chose a night-elf as my first character. When I have some more experience I will see how do people treat my character, and if it matters that is female.

According New Scientist article Dear diary, you make me sick:

Keeping a diary is bad for your health, say UK psychologists. They found that regular diarists were more likely than non-diarists to suffer from headaches, sleeplessness, digestive problems and social awkwardness.

Although she does not have proof, Duncan speculates that diarists buck the usual trend because instead of a single, cathartic outpouring to offload trauma, diarists continually churn over their misfortunes and so never get over them. ?��Ǩ?�It?��Ǩ�Ѣs probably better not to get caught in a ruminative, repetitive cycle,?��Ǩ�� she says.

But the results are not at all conclusive:

But she acknowledges that her experiment could not demonstrate which came first - the diary writing or the health problems.

The NYTimes publishes yet another article (free registration required) about the European work and quality of life models. Nothing new, but still interesting to read an American article about this. Some excerpts:

” [...] Or as Joaqu?ɬ?n Almunia, European commissioner for economic and monetary affairs, put it, for Europeans, economic growth is a tool, not an end in itself.

“We are not in a race with the U.S.,” he said. “Our goal is not to grow as fast as the U.S. or anybody else, but to do what we need to protect our economic and social model.”

[...]

“Americans move from the 20,000 -square-feet house to the 30,000-square-feet house to the 40,000-square-feet house. It’s a different mentality,” said Kenneth S. Rogoff, an economist at Harvard University and former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund.

[...]

Giuseppe Roma, who conducts society studies at Censis in Rome, says European shoppers are increasingly rejecting status-quo purchases to buy quality-of-life products.

The new attitude, he says is: “I care about the real quality of life. I may not buy Prada, but I will buy organic olive oil.”

[...]

More significantly, measures of happiness in the America and Japan has been flat over the last 30 years, while they have been rising in most Western European countries.”