Massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) involve long term intense social bonds between male players. Still, little is known about how masculinity constructs work as glue in these game communities. This study concerns masculine identities in applications (N=210) for community membership of a MMORPG community in Finland. Drawing on three identity dimensions (virtual, real, and p...

Communication is a critical aspect of any collaborative system. In online multiplayer games and virtual worlds it is especially complex. Users are present over long periods and require both synchronous and asynchronous communication, but may prefer to be pseudonymous or engage in identity-play while simultaneously managing virtual and physical use contexts. Initially the only medium offered for...

Electronic connections allow the individual to be at various global sites while sitting in front of his or her computer. By being electronically connected, one’s participation in virtual worlds raises important questions about the nature of our communities and problematizes our identities. This paper examines how experiences in virtual interactions affect people’s real lives and what impact com...

Telling stories is an important aspect virtual agents designed to interact with people socially over time. We describe an experiment designed to investigate the impact of the identity, presentation form, and perspective of a virtual storyteller on a human user who engages in a story-swapping activity with two virtual characters. For each interaction, the user was given 10 “ice-breaker” question...

This research attempts to describe the identity development of students/teachers who used a virtual social network –Facebook to work with historical mathematics and mathematicians in the frame of a second degree course. Fifteen participants aged from 24 to 53 years old participated in the course in which they were required to attend mathematical Facebook sites involved with math history. The re...

The paper presents approaches to identifying realworld demographic attributes based on language use in the virtual world. We apply features developed from the classic literature on sociolinguistics and sound symbolism to data collected from virtual-world chat and avatar naming to determine participants’ age and gender. We also examine participants’ use of avatar names across virtual worlds and ...

This paper examines the portrayal of disability, gender, and identity in virtual communities where representation is a matter of convenience, style, or whim. A survey was conducted of groups, identifying themselves as disabled, with a focus on gender, in the virtual space, Second Life. Four distinctive categories were analyzed in this study: groups associated with disabilities or being disabled...

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