Internet personas and self perception

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Time for our bimonthly article on how playing as a female character in an mmo helped someone come out as trans.
Hey, if something helps you to discover yourself, then it's a great thing, there are people who spent thousands of dollars just to go to the tibet and do so, wackos.
 
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Ultimately this whole thing is as nonsensical as those wiccan witch thots saying they won't date men with ascendants in virgo. The younger generations are more interested in finding points of contention than unity. Ask yourself if this is the right path.
Look into psychological studies on the effect of game avatars on players. The human brain cannot distinguish between the real and virtual world as easily as you think. Calling it astrology tier bs is ignorant.
 
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Chen

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Look into psychological studies on the effect of game avatars on players
There are either people who were mentally well to begin with, and people who weren't. For the second group we will look for all sorts of explanations, but IMO it's all for naught. I see this issue not as different as blaming video games or metal music for violent attitudes in the past. People are just flawed, and while nurture is important, sometimes we miss the forest for the trees. A guy drawn to his online avatar who acts weird online might just simply be a guy who gets bullied in school, has no friends and has terrible parents. But we'll blame his inadequacies on the avatar because it's the only thing he communicates to the rest.

I think the sooner we do away with grand narratives easily explained by one single factor, the better.
 

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There are either people who were mentally well to begin with, and people who weren't. For the second group we will look for all sorts of explanations, but IMO it's all for naught. I see this issue not as different as blaming video games or metal music for violent attitudes in the past. People are just flawed, and while nurture is important, sometimes we miss the forest for the trees. A guy drawn to his online avatar who acts weird online might just simply be a guy who gets bullied in school, has no friends and has terrible parents. But we'll blame his inadequacies on the avatar because it's the only thing he communicates to the rest.

I think the sooner we do away with grand narratives easily explained by one single factor, the better.
This does not explain why tall people who play with midget avatars become less confident and get screwed over more in trade deals in the real world for 30 minutes after logging off. Both of these phenomena are observed in IRL short people. When a tall person uses a short avatar for some reason their brain makes them think they're short and the same effects apply. Even with video games there is conclusive evidence that they desensitize you to violence even if they don't cause it. Maybe ill do a formal write up on this stuff at some point because people seem to think its conjecture but its basically proven fact that your brain is retarded and cant tell real and fake apart even if your conscious mind can.

The virtual world has effects on your brain you cant account for or understand and thinking you're above it is arrogant.
 
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This does not explain why tall people who play with midget avatars become less confident and get screwed over more in trade deals in the real world for 30 minutes after logging off. Both of these phenomena are observed in IRL short people. When a tall person uses a short avatar for some reason their brain makes them think they're short and the same effects apply. Even with video games there is conclusive evidence that they desensitize you to violence even if they don't cause it. Maybe ill do a formal write up on this stuff at some point because people seem to think its conjecture but its basically proven fact that your brain is retarded and cant tell real and fake apart even if your conscious mind can.

The virtual world has effects on your brain you cant account for or understand and thinking you're above it is arrogant.
Look mom, i'm a manlet now.
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Jessica3cho雪血⊜青意

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There are either people who were mentally well to begin with, and people who weren't. For the second group we will look for all sorts of explanations, but IMO it's all for naught. I see this issue not as different as blaming video games or metal music for violent attitudes in the past. People are just flawed, and while nurture is important, sometimes we miss the forest for the trees. A guy drawn to his online avatar who acts weird online might just simply be a guy who gets bullied in school, has no friends and has terrible parents. But we'll blame his inadequacies on the avatar because it's the only thing he communicates to the rest.

I think the sooner we do away with grand narratives easily explained by one single factor, the better.
I think a large majority of today's issues can be explained by mental unwellness as the underlying factor. It is a science we still know so little about, even with all we know. Often times these issues will find whatever pathway they can, like water, and some mediums are simply easier to express in than others. (Picking any online avatar you like vs buying any car you want).

I think if we were to strip away all the fearmongering about "Guns bad, video games violent, anime for rapists" and focus on what might be going on in the head of the person, we might fare better as a society. Its easy to blame a painter for choosing an inappropriate colour in their art, its harder to understand why they chose that colour in the first place.
 
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This does not explain why tall people who play with midget avatars become less confident and get screwed over more in trade deals in the real world for 30 minutes after logging off.
That is a remarkably specific statistic to claim. Can you direct me to the study?
 
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Who cares, an anime profile picture isn't grounds to judge a person. As long as a person remains a healthy social life, something as trivial as their pfp won't change anything significant about them. Humans fundamentally look towards other people's perceptions of themselves, so If a person has a healthy social life with friends who aren't toxic assholes, that is where they will base their personality. However, if a person does not have "actual" friends or any friends at all, then they will start looking for other things to define themselves like the way they display themselves online. So in that sense, I guess you are correct.
can confirm, i am more influenced online than i am in real life, and my social circle stretches noticeably farther online than irl
 
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This does not explain why tall people who play with midget avatars become less confident and get screwed over more in trade deals in the real world for 30 minutes after logging off. Both of these phenomena are observed in IRL short people. When a tall person uses a short avatar for some reason their brain makes them think they're short and the same effects apply. Even with video games there is conclusive evidence that they desensitize you to violence even if they don't cause it. Maybe ill do a formal write up on this stuff at some point because people seem to think its conjecture but its basically proven fact that your brain is retarded and cant tell real and fake apart even if your conscious mind can.

The virtual world has effects on your brain you cant account for or understand and thinking you're above it is arrogant.
I think if you already start playing with midget avatars you kinda have a thing for people being above you in some shape or form. But then again, how the fuck do you even measure this? Do they like pick a random selection of people, force them to play as midgets, and then have them go make trade deals?
 
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I think if you already start playing with midget avatars you kinda have a thing for people being above you in some shape or form. But then again, how the fuck do you even measure this? Do they like pick a random selection of people, force them to play as midgets, and then have them go make trade deals?
Check the study I linked in my other post
 
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Chao Tse-Tung

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I think it mostly comes down to two camps, those who create an internet persona primarily associated with things they like, vs. those who create an internet persona primarily to dissociate from themselves. This isn't a perfect explanation, but it's a pretty good generalization, I think.

If you're in camp one, I'd say you're far less likely to be affected by your internet presence, because it's mostly an extension of things that are already you, simply written under an alias, which isn't really anything new. Camp two, however, is more akin to being an actor and playing the same character on the same show for years on end, wherein there's a disconnect in how you have to act that will, eventually and gradually, both level out somewhere in the middle, depending on which half of you is the more "temporally dominant" so-to-speak.

In general, I think the concept of "act differently in different situations" is pretty easy for people to grasp, i.e. the difference in conduct between a party and your workplace could be considered different "personas," but they more than likely are both extensions of your alone-self's desires and personality. The concept of "be a whole different person entirely and then go back to myself" is, well, significantly harder to grasp, when you have to remodel an entire thought process separate from your own, it's natural that the messy meat-computer we run on would integrate some of those thought patterns into your "base" self.
 
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Jessica3cho雪血⊜青意

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After reading over the study again it was 15 minutes not 30 but here: https://www.researchgate.net/public...Representation_on_Online_and_Offline_Behavior

This applied to both VR and World of Warcraft characters btw. The effect they talk about is this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proteus_effect
This is quite fascinating and I will have to look into this Proteus affect more. One issue I find with the study is that they did not seem to gauge any sort of pre-immersion negotiations and, therefore, have no metric to base the post-immersion negotiations off of. I do think that results of having the height of your avatar directly correlate to how aggressively you negotiate is interesting, but without any metric to lean it against, we have no idea how much that affected the person's actual level of agreeability. On top of that, the tall avatar users actually displayed no change in percentage of people who accepted the unfair deal. So, I'm not really sure what we can really glean from this study, other than: We need to study it more.
 
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I do think that results of having the height of your avatar directly correlate to how aggressively you negotiate is interesting, but without any metric to lean it against, we have no idea how much that affected the person's actual level of agreeability. On top of that, the tall avatar users actually displayed no change in percentage of people who accepted the unfair deal. So, I'm not really sure what we can really glean from this study, other than: We need to study it more.
They compared this to decades of studies that consistently showed that tall people IRL were more confident and got better deals than short people. After using a short avatar they perceived themselves as short and took worse deals like actual short people did for a while even after logging off. Its pretty clear evidence that virtual environments can at the very least affect your self perception if not make it worse. The tall people performing worse after using short avatars is proof enough of a link here.
 
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