Identifying with your avatar... questions for a study

Hello, I'm a doctoral student doing research on avatar identity and gender.

Per the posting rules, I hope this is not considered soliciting.

I appreciate the level of depth that comes from the threads at Giant Bomb, and thought I would ask a few questions here myself.

Please feel free to answer (or not answer) any of the following. I would appreciate any involvement.

1) How much do you tend to identify with your avatar?

2) How does this change depending on:

1st person vs. 3rd person?

Main vs. Alt?

Your own gender vs. opposite gender?

Human vs. nonhuman character?

Single player vs. MMO vs. Co-Op?

First playthrough vs. subsequent playthroughs?

3) Any other comments about avatar identity you would like to share?

If you have any questions or are interested in seeing what comes of the research, please message me.

If any comments are used in an academic forum, I will contact the respondents involved.

Thanks for your participation!

My avatar is batman, because I AM BATMAN!

game avatar or forum avatar?

@rahulricky: Game avatar. Good question.

You should really ask furries this question. You'll get all kinds of fun answers.

The format you provided kinda makes it a little difficult to answer this. For example, I'm not sure what you mean by identify. Are you asking if I insert myself or my personality into my characters? Or if I just feel like "this is who I'd want to be if I lived in this world"? Also, I'll assume you mean custom characters, and not something like Bioshock's Booker or Marcus from Gears of War.

That said, I'll still give this a go.

1st vs 3rd person is a little weird. I can tell you I played wow in 3rd person, and I felt like a baller troll rogue, but I also did that for almost two years so there was more than the average amount of attachment. Similar thing for Dragon Age: Origin I guess. Less so for DA2. 1st person I can only think of maybe Fallout 3/NV and the Elder Scrolls games. Good amount of self-insertion or w/e you wanna call it there.

My main was my main. My dawg. Alts didn't matter for shit. Alts are soulless. Which also meant I had no qualms about making them female, but my main is always male.

Human vs Non-human - I usually prefer making a human, but if that's not an option for some reason it doesn't really matter as long as I can understand that backstory/lore of the race I'm playing

SP/MMO/Co-op - I can tell you that what I play in co-op pretty much doesn't matter. An example would be Left 4 Dead. I played Zoey pretty much every time just because I didn't care who I played. Can't really think of a custom character co-op, but maybe I'd care more then, like with an mmo.

Depending on the game, a subsequent playthrough can go either way. I can either try and go even deeper into my own character, or make something completely different just to see what happens. The latter usually doesn't go very far though.

As a final thought I just want to say you should really bring in some more rigid definitions for the things you want. For example, I might make a character that's based off of me appearance wise, and I can answer questions "the way I would answer them", but all I'm really doing is making the story play out in a way I would want it to happen in a book or movie. Does that mean I identify more with the character?

Depends on the game usually. I rarely consider the avatars I play as being virtual representations of myself. More often than not I see them as their own characters that I influence and roleplay, which is why I usually don't feel much difference between playing a male or female character. To a certain extent I do roleplay my characters as an extension of my own personality, in that I tend to react how I would react more often than how I feel my character would react, but not always. There are times where I will do something specifically because it's what I think my character would do.

1st person and third person usually doesn't change much, but it is easier to place myself in the role in first person than third person, where it's more common I will see the character as their own entity. But the only first person games that I can think of that really fit that description are Bethesda games though, since you roleplay as one specific character. First-person dungeon crawlers like Etrian Odyssey I don't ever feel like I'm one of the characters.

Human/Non-human makes no difference.

It's definitely way easier to identify with a character in single player than multiplayer. If an MMO has a story than it tends to be a split between roleplaying the character like single player during story moments and then treating them like a mere avatar I'm controlling everywhere else.

The first playthrough is usually the one I identify with the most. By the time I got to Mass Effect 3 I couldn't even play male Shepard anymore since female Shepard had become so ingrained in my identity of that game. But I'm playing Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen right now and even though I already finished it once with one character I'm actually much more attached to my new character.

But ultimately it's very situational. I will say that even though I don't usually identify personally with my characters I do often get very invested in my custom characters anyway, if the game is good enough to give me a reason to.