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You can be too rich: mediated communication in a virtual world

Published: 23 November 2009 Publication History

Abstract

Internet-based virtual worlds (VWs) have emerged as a popular form of collaborative virtual environment. Most have offered only text chat for user communication; however several VWs have recently introduced voice. While research has demonstrated benefits of voice, its introduction into the popular VW Second Life (SL) was controversial, and some users have rejected it. In order to understand the benefits and problems that voice brings to virtual worlds, we used qualitative methods to gather data from SL users and analyse it. We discuss our results in the light of media-richness theory and its critiques, arguing that preferences for voice or text reflect a broader problem of managing social presence in virtual contexts.

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    cover image ACM Other conferences
    OZCHI '09: Proceedings of the 21st Annual Conference of the Australian Computer-Human Interaction Special Interest Group: Design: Open 24/7
    November 2009
    445 pages
    ISBN:9781605588544
    DOI:10.1145/1738826
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Publication History

    Published: 23 November 2009

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    Author Tags

    1. Second Life
    2. media richness
    3. virtual worlds
    4. voice

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    OZCHI '09 Paper Acceptance Rate 32 of 60 submissions, 53%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 362 of 729 submissions, 50%

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    Cited By

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    • (2022)Audio Matters Too: How Audial Avatar Customization Enhances Visual Avatar CustomizationProceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3491102.3501848(1-27)Online publication date: 29-Apr-2022
    • (2021)The Effects of a Self-Similar Avatar Voice in Educational GamesProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/34746655:CHI PLAY(1-28)Online publication date: 6-Oct-2021
    • (2020)Transferability of Voice Communication in Games to Virtual Teams Training for Crisis ManagementImproving the Safety and Efficiency of Emergency Services10.4018/978-1-7998-2535-7.ch018(399-433)Online publication date: 2020
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    • (2018)Leveraging Icebreaking Tasks to Facilitate Uptake of Voice Communication in Multiplayer GamesAdvances in Computer Entertainment Technology10.1007/978-3-319-76270-8_14(187-201)Online publication date: 21-Feb-2018
    • (2017)Transferability of Voice Communication in Games to Virtual Teams Training for Crisis ManagementInternational Journal of Sociotechnology and Knowledge Development10.4018/IJSKD.20170101019:1(1-25)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2017
    • (2016)Avatars and Behavioral Experiments: Methods for Controlled Quantitative Social Behavioral Research in Virtual WorldsHandbook on 3D3C Platforms10.1007/978-3-319-22041-3_7(179-213)Online publication date: 2016
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