What is a social actor is probably a good place to start. A social actor is some "one" you interact with socially. Normally that's another person of course, hence the someone... but it's not only a person in this day and age.
You're interacting in a social sense with this blog. Some of the readers know me in SL, some in RL, some probably don't know me at all, a very few know me in both. We can argue about how similar and different I am as a person in SL somewhere else. But you have a sort of social relationship with this blog, with the browser you use to view it, the computer on which you view it and the like. You make assumptions about my gender, my extraversion (whether I speak first or you do, whether I give firm orders or tentative suggestions etc.) and my friendliness quite quickly. You may also, over time, make judgements about different bits of my character. But, really, you're reading words not seeing me or my representation even. Your brain, and mine, is hardwired to make these judgements because for most of our evolutionary history the ONLY way we could socially interact was face to face and the subtle distinctions of writing, virtual world, appearance on TV/Radio etc. were irrelevant. If you remember the paperclip (or whatever you used) from Word, that's a classic example of an extravert social actor - it pops up and tells you what to do, and, although it's a picture of a paperclip with very short sentences you react it as you would a person doing the same thing.
The book "The Media Equation: How People Treat Computers, Television and New Media Like Real People and Places" summarises, in a fairly light style, the results of a series of experiments that basically underline the points in the paragraph above. You can make a computer and a person feel like a team by some simple processes basically identical to quick team building among humans. A face that is larger, whether because it is filling a screen or it's projected on a giant screen, is more "attention worthy" and evokes stronger emotions than a smaller face or the same face painted smaller. We like things that have a consistent voice - particularly for gender, extraversion and friendliness, but we like even more something that starts different and changes to match us, even if it occasionally messes up. We like things that praise us, even if we think the praise is flattery. We dislike things that criticise us, although we tend to also think they're smarter than things that don't. We discount random criticism quite quickly, but process justified criticism quite heavily.
There's a whole lot more in the book, and it's well worth a read if you're thinking of designing software or a virtual environment. But there are some quick take-home lessons:
Try to get the social interactions consistent. Ideally have one person write them all for a single element. If the house is going to talk to you, that's one element. The barrels of sherry in the house might be the same voice or a different one, but they should be consistent too whichever route you go down. And so on.
Try to be friendly and polite (add please, thank you etc.) and include praise as well as criticism. (They suggest a spell-checker that praises you for spelling hard words as well as pointing out misspelt words, or more complex one that praises you for learning how to spell words it used to have to point out to you for example.)
Consider mixing your extraversion - this is harder in a virtual world, and takes more processing power, but might well be worth it.
Bigger images cause stronger emotions. This isn't entirely controllable in SL because the target can move the camera position, but might be interesting.
Things that just appear, or just appear, or enter from the periphery towards the centre grab the attention hard. They're potential threats after all. Again tricky to organise in SL because you can move the camera, but interesting. Things that fade in, and in particular fade out to the periphery are less attention grabbing. That genie shrink to the dock is not only pretty, it might well help you pay attention to what's going on by not forcing your attention down there.
There's a lot more, most of it not really useful for virtual worlds at first glance, but still interesting. Give it a go. And if you're interested in the hard data (I am for a couple of bits, because there are some conclusions they've drawn I think aren't justified as they've written the experiments up in lay terms) they include a big chunk of relevant references at the back of the book.
Toodle pip, see you soon!
I've more or less finished the build of Willow Springs on
Montclair State CHSS and, just in time, finished the book too!
Herewith, one review:
This is a story in parts - Mama Day strides across most of it like a colossus. I want to call her the matriarch, but she's not a mother. Perhaps the high priestess is a better description. Cocoa, her grand-niece, and George, Cocoa's husband who ultimately sacrifices himself to save Cocoa's life are the other two main characters - although there's a cast of dozens of strongly realised characters around and about. In brief you could summarise the plot as Cocoa leaves Willow Springs, comes back with her husband, eventually, gets cursed and is saved the hard way by George because he can't or won't understand the rules of the world he is in.
And that's the other part of this story. Mama Day lives in a world that we might call magical, although she denies she "does that Hoodoo nonsense." Cocoa crosses from that world to the everyday world of job hunting, marriage, dinner parties and the like. George is firmly based in the mundane - he's an engineer who never has the grand idea, but takes the grand ideas of others and turns them into hard reality.
The clash of these ideas and worlds makes for a compelling, fascinating book. Unlikely though it seemed at first, to my mind George is the character that I strongly suspect most of us will relate to - he's the everyman that relates to this wild, old, confusing world in which his wife grew up. Having lived, worked and loved pagans and moving in that mind-space I'm comfortable with Cocoa too, but Mama Day scares me as much as I'd love to meet her.
