Today's 'The Esoteric Beat,' regular columnist Jim Rossignol's look at the esoteric side of game design, examines Standford University's Nick Yee's recent New Scientist article regarding the change in a player's behavior based on the physical appearance of their avatar.

In this extract, Rossignol expands on Yee's research with his own thoughts:

It's all tied into to how humans deal with both abstract interfaces and other intelligences. Games are often decked out with a number of very basic cues that we take for granted from the world - elements of how people look, how they react to us. Fun things are brightly coloured, evil dudes are glowing red, and so on.

How things cohere as part of a world that mimics our own without actually being our own, is essential to the way in which we are predisposed to respond to them. As Yee's work shows, the experience of a game in everyone was taller and prettier than us would be quite different to a game in which we were the taller and prettier one.

While playing a game you appropriate elements of that game, and your game avatar, as a facet of yourself. 'Self' is the important concept here, because gamers, like all people, have an implicit understand of self that is not fixed to that of the body. As Yee's research shows, people's selfhood is plastic, depending on a lot of external scaffolding above and beyond proprioception and personal image."

You can read the full Gamasutra column, including plenty of extracts from the article (no registration required, please feel free to link to this column from external web sites).