PlayOn authors archive - PARC blog

PlayOn 2.0: Number of characters and level

23 July 2010 | PlayOn authors archive

How do people split up their time among all their characters? Are some players more focused players than others? Let's find out. [Go to Full Article]

Collaborative building in Second Life

29 September 2008 | PlayOn authors archive

When people build things together in real life, they frequently have to collaborate synchronously around individual objects: for example one person might hold two pieces of wood in place while another screws them together. In previous research, users were sometimes forced to collaborate in this way, by implementing gravity and friction into the virtual environment. But gravity and friction are usually not necessary in virtual worlds. Experienced Second Life builders make use of the fact that objects will stay hanging in the air, or even pass through other objects. Rather than force real-world modes of collaboration, it might be better to embrace the non-physicality of virtual worlds, allowing people to avoid the kind of synchronous 3d collaboration that the physical world forces upon them. Rather than tweak the environment to force real-world styles of collaboration, more might be gained by improving aspects of collaboration that users find troublesome, such as the permission system which currently prevents objects which have been made by different individuals from being linked together.

Why hair matters

5 September 2008 | PlayOn authors archive

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.

What are the most important avatar customization features?

20 August 2008 | PlayOn authors archive

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.

Avatar survey: Time spent in-world and customizing avatar

4 August 2008 | PlayOn authors archive

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...

Avatar survey: “Mains” and “alts”

31 July 2008 | PlayOn authors archive

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.

Avatar survey: Age

25 July 2008 | PlayOn authors archive

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...

Avatar survey: Gender demographics

21 July 2008 | PlayOn authors archive

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.

Survey: How do players create and customize their avatars?

5 May 2008 | PlayOn authors archive

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...

Guild name generator

21 August 2007 | PlayOn authors archive

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.