Raph Koster

Or as Raph Koster puts it: Avatars aren't tokens. They are not just playing pieces, they – just because they look human – are being read and interpreted as human. And with that comes all the prejudicial crust we so heavily rely on.

We have a lot of “specialized hardware” around this in our brains, and avatars tend to trigger a lot of it. For example, the fusiform face area or FFA is a part of the brain that seems to be involved in facial recognition, and also seems to fire off when identifying specific objects with fine distinctions (for example, it fires in birdwatchers when identifying birds, and in car aficionados when recognizing specific makes and models). The interesting thing is that the FFA activates even with iconified faces — with stuff that we just think of as a face.

In effect, our tokens have become rich enough to cause us to subconsciously treat them as people, whether or not we intended it. The magic circle here is quite simply shattered, at a fundamental psychological and biological level. In fact, we can even exploit these these even more: we can “hack the users” by exploiting some of these reactions, in the same way that we exploit classical conditioning with tricks like “ding” sounds.

Just a bunch of links:

• Raph Koster has notes on Sporadic Play
• BoingBoing has the big pictures on the Indie Game Fund
• And a rant by Auntie Pixelante, also at the GDC10.

Seems like all those people have a lot of fun over there. Why am I not there as well? Damn.