Second Look: A Research Platform for Second Life
Anthony Cocciolo, Hui Soo Chae & Gary Natriello
Teachers College, Columbia University
Overview
The purpose of this paper, and its accompanying project, is to investigate the question:
how do we do research in virtual worlds? This paper will begin by reviewing some of the ways
that research has been conducted in virtual worlds, followed by identifying a need within this
domain, and concluding with an thorough analysis of Second Look, the project meant to attend
to this identified need.
Literature Review
Despite the potential of virtual environments, creating a working understanding of how
people engage in them can be a challenge. One of the greatest obstacles associated with creating
a working understanding of behavior within Second Life must take into account the dual physical
environments, one of which is the actual environment, where the human individual interacts with
an Internet-connected computer, and the other is where the same user is projected into threedimensional space as an avatar. Both environments can be infinitely complex, where the realworld actor and avatar are confronted with other individuals, groups, advertising, and
communication in the form of verbal speech, instant messages, group chat, and telephone. For
example, a user connected to Second Life, in addition to other Internet applications, while seated
in a crowded Internet café may confront an onslaught of stimuli and requests for communication
from both physical and virtual actors. Parsing the stimuli entering from the senses, and
determining where the attention of the user is, can be near impossible for the researcher. In fact,
much of the research on virtual environments only study the action performed in the virtual
environment, and usually only a thin slice of virtual activity, and rarely attend to the factors the
physical environment might present. Fully understanding perceptual and attentive issues within
a virtual environment are paramount in forming an understanding of behavior.
In addition to the challenges that virtual worlds present to the human perceptual system,
virtual worlds present several problems for the human cognitive system. The environment
requires extensive cognitive skills that some users may not have yet acquired. For example,
Andrews (2007) describes the difficulty of designing an orientation island in Second Life that
will teach users to use the environment while simultaneously keeping them engaged and
motivated to use the environment. Despite ardent design attempts, many users give-up and do
not return to Second Life after visiting orientation island. Some of the skills that Second Life
requires are the ability to navigate three-dimensional spaces, such as within and amongst islands,
flying in space, navigating a building, and using maps at varying zoom levels to teleport to
different parts of the world. With such complex spatial information presented to the user and
extensive motor skills needed to navigate such spaces, researchers need to take into account their
target audience’s cognitive skills. For example, an activity that is too easy for some may lead to
boredom and disengagement, while too complex may lead to frustration. For researchers,
understanding which cognitive skills are required at what times are necessary for an adequate
predictor of future behavior.
A further challenge in forming an adequate model of behavior within virtual worlds
involves the dilemma created by technological innovation, which leads to structural changes
within the environment that can influence behavior and sociality. For example, in August 2007,
full voice-over-IP was introduced into Second Life, which allowed users to communicate with
other users using voice. This caused numerous cultural and social issues within the environment,
especially for users who adopted avatars who diverged from their real-world persona. For
example, a male acting out the role of female would be faced with a problem with the
introduction of voice communication. In essence, understanding consumer behavior within a
virtual world can be challenging because the evolving technological environment creates
conditions that may not hold over time.
Despite these challenges, some research has been pursued using a variety of methods and
approaches. Steinkuehler (2004) employs a discourse-analysis-based ethnographic method to
uncover the ways that massively-multiplayer online role playing games (MMORPGs) are
educational. To accomplish this task, she deeply embeds herself in the virtual environment and
interacts with the community members as if a fellow member, and it doing so carefully analyses
the transpired discourse and activity. Other researchers have employed other methods for
understanding interaction in a virtual environment. For example, Clark and Maher (2003)
analyze communication within an educational virtual environment and looked for the ways in
which the particular space impact the communicative exchanges. Other research has focused on
more elementary aspects of communication, such as gaze. Garau, Slater, Bee and Sasse (2001)
conducted an experiment where they compared three conditions: subjects listening to an audioonly track, avatar plus audio with random eye gaze, and avatar plus audio and naturalistic eye
gaze. The experiment found that the avatar with random eye gaze did not improve upon audioonly communication; however, the avatar with naturalistic eye gaze did have a positive impact
on communication. In sum, their research found that “an avatar whose gaze behavior is related
to the conversation provides a marked improvement on an avatar that merely exhibits liveliness”
(p. 309).
In addition to understanding communication, both discursive and behavioral, experiments
have been conducted which use virtual environments as simulation for real-world settings. One
such example is a study conducted by Slater, Pertaub and Steed (1999) which used a virtual
audience of avatars as a way of understanding and helping those with a fear of public speaking.
In their study, they used a well-behaved audience and a poorly behaved audience (an audience
which gets up and leaves in the middle) and had subjects read aloud with the different types of
audiences. Their study found, among other things, that participants perceived the poorly
behaved audience as having a higher interest rate as opposed to the well-behaved audience.
The field of consumer research (in both academia and commercial sectors) is beginning
to look into ways of doing research in virtual worlds and conducting studies of them. One of the
largest and most comprehensive pieces of marketing research has come from Global Market
Insite (GMI), which found that the two major reasons that people use Second Life are as a
creative outlet and as a way of escaping their real-life (see Table 1 for other usage factors). This
study is significant because it has a fairly large sample population (N=479). Global Market
Instite also conducted another study of the market’s perception of Second Life and 56% of US
respondents regarded Second Life as a good promotional vehicle (Global Market Insite, 2007).
Table 1: Reasons for using Second Life (N = 479 Second Life users), from Global Market Insite, retrieved
from Novak (2007)
Percentage Reason
24%
24%
15%
11%
3%
3%
3%
2%
1%
Because it is a creative outlet for me
To escape real life which I am not satisfied with
To be someone else and create my own cool avatar
To play and interact with other online community members
To enable me to fulfill the fantasies I can’t fulfill in real life
To buy/evaluate products that help me in my real life
To get freebees
To search for information that helps me in my real life
To make money
Commercial market researchers are also at the fore-front of developing methods for
conducting research in virtual worlds. For example, Menti (2007) has created survey bots, which
are robots that administer surveys to Second Life users. Figure 4 illustrates that these robots
look like avatars with real-humans behind them, but are rather automated and controlled by a
server. An advantage of Menti’s system is that monetary rewards can be given instantly in the
form of Linden Dollars. Since Linden Dollars can be relatively easily exchanged for real U.S.
currency, this makes taking surveys more appealing to survey respondents. These survey robots
are used to supply data to the Global Market Insite market research reports.
Figure 1: Menti (2007) created survey robots (or bots) to administer surveys to Second Life users
Academic research related to consumer behavior in Second Life is also in progress. For
example, Tom Novak at the Sloan Center for Internet Retailing is in the process of creating an
island in Second Life called eLab City, where consumers will live, work, and play, and data gets
collected regarding their activities. Figure 5 illustrates the layout of eLab City.
Figure 2: eLab City island layout
And finally, other research has used large scale surveys to understand the motivations,
demographics, and experiences of those who invest in virtual environments and MMORPGs.
For example, Yee (2006) conducted a three-year survey of the demographics, motivations, and
derived experienced of N=30,000 MMORPG users. One interesting aspect of this research is
that the solicitation to take the survey was made within discussion forums on websites that cater
to MMORPG users, rather than within the MMORPG itself. These surveys were hence deployed
on the web rather than within the graphical interface of the MMORPG. Such a solicitation
mechanism may create a selection bias: a survey of those who frequent the discussion forms as
opposed to those who visit the MMORPG. It would seem that one way to reduce the possibility
of selection bias is to include the solicitation to take the survey directly within the MMORPG.
Additionally, by deploying the survey directly within the graphical interface of the MMORPG,
the user wouldn’t have to task over to a web browser, potentially increasing the number of
people willing to respond. In the next section, Second Look will be discussed, which will aim to
address the issue of surveys within virtual environments.
Description of Intervention
Second Look aims to address the logistical survey issues that present themselves in such
research projects as Yee’s 2006 study. Second Look is a survey tool that deploys itself directly
within the virtual environment, in this case Second Life. It will interact with users via the chat
interface, which is a simple to use interface that most users will already be familiar with. For
simplicity’s sake, the survey itself will be designed in the web, as well as the feature for viewing
participant responses.
To use Second Look to deploy a survey, a user will first have to have a copy of it in their
inventory, and then drag it from their inventory to the space where they would like the users to
take the survey (see figure 1).
Figure 1: Second Look presence within Second Life
The user will then click on the Second Look plaque, where a dialog box will present them with
an option to navigate to a page where the survey can be designed. After confirming yes, the user
is allowed to create a title for the survey and indicate the number of questions (see figure 2).
Figure 2: A user specifies a title and number of questions to include on the survey
After hitting “OK”, the user can enter the question and answers (see figure 3).
Figure 3: A user will enter the question and answers.
After entering all the questions, the user is informed that the survey is ready to be deployed to
subjects.
Figure 4: The survey is ready to be deployed.
The user can click on the Second Look plaque and is given the option if he or she would like to
take the survey (see figure 5).
Figure 5: The survey is deployed to the user via the chat interface
The owner of the survey is also provided an option to view the results when they click on the
Second Look plaque (see figure 6). The results page shows the aggregated response totals (total
number of people who answered a-e from questions 1-n), as well as the avatar names of the
people who have taken the survey.
Figure 6: Viewing the participant responses
This paper will report on some observations of using SecondLook as a data collection
utility within Second Life.
Research related to Intervention
A survey was designed that looked to ascertain respondent’s interest in using Second Life
as a platform for conducting research and what types of research they were interested in doing in
Second Life. Requests to complete the survey were made to members of the EdLab (a research,
design and development unit at Teachers College, Columbia University) via the EdLab blog
(http://edlab.tc.columbia.edu). The survey was completed by N=2 survey respondents.
Although this is a very small group, our interest was to ascertain the ability to use Second Look
as a way of collecting data within virtual worlds, rather than addressing the research questions
reflected in the survey questions. We then discussed the experience of taking the survey with the
two survey respondents.
5. Results and/or conclusions/point of view
Results of our study indicate several things worth noting. The most interesting of which
is the notion that since the survey is contained within the environment, we can conclude that the
survey respondent has reached a baseline presence in the virtual world. Specifically, we can
conclude that the user has a working Second Life account, has access to a computer that can run
the virtual environment, has passed through the orientation island, and is able to use basic inworld functions, such as teleporting and moving within the environment. If a respondent did not
have these skills, they would have never been able to complete the survey. This eliminates the
need to ask basic questions that would be necessary in a web-based environment, such as, “Do
you have a working account in Second Life?”
Another interesting aspect about rolling-out surveys in Second Life using the chat
interface is that it has the potential to become social (or lead to privacy concerns, depending on
your perspective). Since anyone within a certain number of feet of the Second Look plaque can
see the survey questions and the responses, this can make the completion of a survey a social
activity. For example, someone can be talking to someone else using Second Life’s voice-overIP system, while completing the survey. However, this leads to a number of privacy concerns,
such as a situation where someone is completing a survey and they don’t want anyone to see
their responses. Further, the social elements may influence how a survey respondent responds.
However, the privacy concerns could be addressed by the design of the environment, such as
putting the Second Look plaque in a place where there are not a lot of other people, or designing
the space so that the survey respondent can have more privacy. However, making the
completion of the survey a social activity could make it a more enjoyable for the respondent. For
example, people like to share their opinion on any number of topics, and in many cases would
not mind having friends see their survey responses for many types of research questions.
However, sensitive survey questions would not be amenable to a more social situation. The idea
of taking surveys in a more social context should be more fully explored because of its potential
to make survey taking more enjoyable, and address the widespread difficulty of finding people to
take surveys (Tourangeau, 2003).
An additional benefit of having the survey contained within the environment is that the
survey can ask questions that refer to specific objects within the immediate environment. These
types of questions would be difficult to ask in a Web-based environment because of the difficulty
of clarifying what is specifically being referenced (e.g., in Second Look, you can ask questions
such as what do you think about X to your left or Y to your right). Additionally, you can design
the placement of the survey within the context of the environment such that you can be certain
that users have completed some set of activities. For example, you can have a designed space
that you want users to go through, and then place a survey at the end to collect user feedback.
Additionally, the look of the Second Look plaque can be easily customized by uploading a new
texture, which is simply a JPG that gets displayed. This can make the Second Look plaque fit
better with the look and feel of the designed space. In sum, you have greater control over when
and where a survey gets taken.
One limitation with this method of deploying surveys is that since the Second Look
plaque needs to be placed in a space from an avatar’s inventory, in some areas of Second Life
there are restrictions on who can place items within the space. And even in spaces where placing
items is allowed, it may be removed by the owner of the space. In the case where a researcher
wants to place a plaque in someone else’s Second Life space, it is best to get permission first.
6. Educational or scientific importance of the study
The importance of this study is that it presents a new way for conducting survey research
within virtual environments, in this case, Second Life. It also adds to the thinking on how
researchers should pursue survey within these virtual environments.
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