Embodying Self in Virtual Worlds

Players project their intentions, expressions and movements into virtual worlds. A dominant reference point for this projection is their avatar. We explore the transfer of a player's own body movements onto their virtual self, drawing on cognitive science's common coding theory as a model for understanding their self-recognition. This chapter presents the results of two sets of self-recognition experiments that investigated the connections between player and virtual avatar. In the first set of experiments, we investigated self-recognition of movement in different levels of abstraction between players and their avatars. The second set of experiments made use of an embodied interface for virtual character control that was designed based on common coding principles. The results demonstrate that this interface is effective in personalising a player's avatar and could be used to unlock higher cognitive effects compared to other interfaces.