Plans and co-situated factions: An evaluation of Avatar Affordances in Rift’s character creation interface

Abstract

Plans and co-situated factions: an evaluation of avatar affordances in Rift's character creation interface abstract This article sets out a new analytic framework for the systematic analysis of character creation interfaces (CCIs) in Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs)and Virtual Worlds (VWs), the Avatar Affordances Framework. To model this framework, we present an analysis of the CCIs from Rift (Trion Worlds 2011) and explore the pragmatics of avatar customization through a micro-ethnographic user study involving 39 participants. Our motivation is to highlight the agency of interfaces; to make visible their participation, via affordances, in self-representational practices that have hitherto been taken as a kind of direct relationship: one is as one represents oneself online. 78

E is for Everyone? Best Practices for the Socially Inclusive Design of Avatar Creation Interfaces

“…We have continued to explore its use in the study of gender [23] and understanding how situational affordances impact selfrepresentational practices [24].…”

Playing Trans Stories, Generations, and Community

“…In this sense, games have always been trans for me-not by any inherent virtue of their own, but because they were a sort of adaptable, configurable mirror that helped me see and know myself better. In so many ways, from limited character options to toxic player communities to requiring expensive technology to play them, the playful mirror of games is an imperfect one (Brett 2022;McArthur & Jenson 2015;Salter & Blodgett 2017). Yet I think there is a potential for emergence, fluidity, and transformation in games that becomes unmistakably and radically trans when trans people are playing.…”

Challenging the User-Avatar Dichotomy in Avatar Customization Research

“…Using the term "situated action", Suchman proposes that the actions we take when interacting with interfaces depends on "material and social circumstances" (2006, p.70). In the context of avatar creation, even if users do arrive at these interfaces with customization strategies in mind, the avatar they create is a result of situational circumstances that contributed to the creative process, including co-situated players and interface affordances (McArthur and Jenson 2015;McArthur 2017). For example, as noted in our previous work, players of faction-based MMOGs who wish to play together must choose avatar races that are technologically afforded such collaboration (e.g., races from the same faction).…”

“…Finally, the fourth theme is co-situated play-defined as two or more players who are playing the same game together. Co-situated play has been demonstrated to have an impact on self-representational practices (McArthur and Jenson 2015). In multiplayer spaces where there is faction-based segregation amongst the game's playable races, how does this segregation affect self-representation when we have chosen to play with someone else?…”