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At the boring level, people do seem to behave differently based on their avatar, specifically, even when not self-selected. Again, caveat social science research (it's a little hilarious in retrospect how much effort went to eliminating priming as a potential confounder) or anecdote, but Nick Yee's research does try to poke at this and some other alternatives. And anecdotally, I have picked up mannerisms or habits of speech I never used, but the game's animators and designers (or even third-party modders) did -- that's not quite the same thing when I wasn't really pretending to be the character so much as controlling them outside of cutscenes, but it seems like that could be close enough.
At the intermediate level, it's very easy for a character to 'get away' from you, either because of ramifications from other characterization or limitations of a format or type. You might try behaviors you'd normally never consider in those same environments, simply because it's the 'right' or 'in-character' thing. (Or maybe the character just always looks kinda goofy.)
Closer to the central claim, though, I think there is some difference between, for example, playing a character that is foo and doing foo, for wide varieties of characteristics. The latter probably is better at encouraging that specific action! But the former makes you think about the broader characteristics and motivations and how all those things would interact. Which, to be fair, is still a new behavior that's established and getting reinforcement. Just a different one.
Ah, sorry. Multiplicity/plurality is a broad category of self-identification. I don't know the topic particularly well enough to go into detail, and there's a lot of taboo words that may reflect either philosophical positions or community battles that aren't particularly obvious to outsiders: the internal phrasing is usually some variant of multiple people in one body. This seems to be one of the more popular descriptions for outsiders that I've been pointed to, though I don't know how well-regarded it is in general, or to what extent everyone covered by this definition would self-identity (eg, most LessWrong tulpamancers don't self-identity as plural).
MineCraft Quilt is a modloader that forked/derived from a different one for a variety of reasons (link is a lot of unnecessary background info), but while most were long-lasting technical problems, a big triggering incident was about as Culture War as it could get, which meant that most of the founding generation for Quilt either had very strong feelings about dependency correction or were very specifically pro-trans.
Add in some evaporative cooling, and you get a very Blue Tribe community. But there's a lot of subcultures in the Blue Tribe, including some things that weren't well-known even among a lot of fairly strongly left-leaning people to start with. One of the matters that was both very visible (in part because of a couple serious code contributors) and didn't readily slot into widerspread community norms was multiplicity/plurality. (And not just in the funny ways like inviting a bunch of debates over the singular 'they'.)
These were not specific to (or even particularly well-known before within) the MineCraft or modded MineCraft community. There's been some livejournal and dreamwidth communities from these people dating back to the late 00s, to my knowledge -- I'd seen them on the edges of the therian/otherkin communities for a while then. Quilt's just one of the first places I've seen where a) it was taken as a rule that it needed to be honored, to the point of having integrated Discord tools to assist, and b) interacted with people that were majority not-plural, plural-curious, or in a weird adjacent community (eg therians, otherkin, people building tulpas).
As I understand it, this would be in effect only while you wear the avatar. I interpreted the sentence I responded to
as being about long-term effects. The short-term effects are interesting, but I dont see how they would lead to the character taking over in the off-time.
I somewhat agree, depending on what you imagine for "just doing foo". If you get told what to do over earbuds, thats less dangerous than "playing a character" normally. I would say this is because in the latter case youre figuring out what to do, and that way of figuring out can be reinforced. I dont think its essential for that figuring out to involve thinking about some character.
And I think this is essentially the same way normal behaviour changes in an environment: You go in with somewhat different mood/disposition each day, and some of them get more positive reinforcement than others.
BTW, I think often doing a specific action is not the best way of encouraging it. Many actions lie at a point within the decision tree that youd never normally get to, and training that last step more wont help.
There's been some research to check for transfer to offline environments (eg here or, while less directly tied to the avatar, 'game transfer phenomena discussions of behaviors and habits do seem close). I think the science tends to be weaker, especially garden of forking paths problems, and they tend to only measure on scales of days rather than months or years, but it does match my experiences.
Now, these are usually small and fairly trivial things, and sometimes not even matters you'd consider character (or, conversely, are Character in the Calvin's Dad sense), so it's fair to say there's still a long way from the sort of mode changes that the OP was motioning around. But I think it's a quantitative rather than qualitative difference.
That's reasonable.
Well yes, if we believe in reinforcement or some other mechanism like that, that can carry the short-term consequences into the long term. But there the proteus effect is not an alternative way that the character can take over long term. All the stuff about the mechanism of it suggests it doesnt have an independent long-term effect.
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That's a name I haven't seen in a long time. It's a shame he pivoted his academic virtual social research into a gaming market research firm. The rest of the Terra Nova writers had less interesting content over the years. I think Castronova has been flogging the same virtual economics concept unchanged for something like 20 years now.
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