Fancy avatar identification and behaviors in the virtual world: Preceding avatar customization and succeeding communication

Abstract

Avatar communication, which provides a wealth of emotional expressions under anonymity, can effectively compensate for a lack of social resources in real life. It enables players to construct close relationships, disclose themselves, and receive social support on the Internet. To facilitate such communication, we focus on fancy avatar identification and its correlates. This is because avatar identification is a bridging factor between avatar customization and social behavior in the virtual world. Therefore, we analyzed the association between avatar customization, avatar identification, and communication behavior. We discovered that 1) embodied identification, one of the forms of avatar identifications, facilitates close relationship construction and self-disclosure with friends in a virtual world; and 2) embodied identification is reinforced by avatar customization when the aspects being customized are also mutable in real-life, such as hairstyle and fashion. This suggests that players’ social lives can be enhanced through a virtual world, for example, an application provider can facilitate such avatar customization by campaigns.

Keywords

• Avatar communication
• Avatar identification
• Self-disclosure
• Behavioral logs