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Avatars In Second Life

Decent Essays
The Second Life gaming environment is casual and allows for people to interact with each other without having to physically be near each other. This type of environment allows for the possibility of meeting others and interacting with others and would be a possible choice for interacting with other co-workers in an office party session online. Although there are benefits to interacting with co-workers on Second Life, there are some caveats that exist as well. Specifically, the avatars in Second Life both support and fail the necessary feelings of awareness and presence of others, expressing affects or emotions, and communication with others. Virtual reality and actual reality can not ever be completely equivalent to each other because there are limitations of expressing emotion, awareness of the environment and others, and conversing with others. The Second Life avatars both supports and fails the expression of conveying verbal and nonverbal communication between people. The…show more content…
The avatars Emotional actions and affects are supposed by the characters because they can fly and the user can make their avatar perform actions like dancing to express emotions. However, in Second Life, the avatars do not express emotion as much as humans in real life can express and each action must be manually chosen rather than naturally expressing their emotionally-led actions. Also, in real life, one can hear others talking and notice the facial expressions of others and the unique actions of people. The user can receive a wide array of different emotional impressions from the different kinds of avatar appearances that other uses select for their avatar. Some avatars may give off a dreary aura, while others may appear much more pleasant and happy and because of the non-human possibilities, this does make the avatars elicit more visceral responses compared to the physical possibilities of real life
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