ORCID
Nicholas David Bowman: 0000-0001-5594-9713 | Jaime Banks: 0000-0002-7598-4337
Document Type
Article
Date
2024
Keywords
Sociality, identification, avatar robots, human-computer interaction, scale development
Language
english
Disciplines
Film and Media Studies
Description/Abstract
Avatars serve as embodied representations of user agency in physical, digital, and mixed realities, extending our physical, cognitive, and perceptual abilities into those spaces. From this perspective, there is a tendency to presume that as users assume control of an avatar, they necessarily psychologically merge with and identify as that entity. Borrowing from video game psychology research into player-avatar relations (PAR) and player-avatar interactions (PAX), we present an argument for considering a broader range of sociality regarding user relations with avatar robots: Seeing avatar robots as Object, Me, Symbiote, and authentically social Others. We extrapolate from PAX measurements to tentatively offer a scale for teleoperator/robot-avatar interaction (TARX) and discuss implications of this extrapolation for more comprehensively understanding a future in which avatar robots are more common.
Recommended Citation
Bowman, Nicholas David and Banks, Jaime, "The [Object, Me, Symbiote, Other] in the Machine: Insights from Video Game Psychology for Teleporter-Robot Relations" (2024). Media Studies - Open-Access Faculty Scholarship. 12.
https://surface.syr.edu/msf/12
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
