Virtual-self Identity Construal in Online Video Games: A Repertory Grid Study

INTRODUCTION

Since the appearance of online videogames, there has been a growing interest in how people behave socially on virtual media that grants people the possibility of adopting a whole new identity as a customized character. A previous study observed a tendency from players to create their videogame character so that it would resemble more their ideal selves than their actual ones, and actually reported their virtual avatar as having more desirable personality traits than their actual self. Additionally, in a more recent study, it was observed that the level of immersion during gameplay and a high discrepancy between the ideal and actual selves favored that people created their virtual characters as more similar to their ideal self. Thus, people who are already satisfied with their actual self may instead tend to create a virtual self that is entirely different from both their actual and ideal selves. The mere fact of exploring different identities has been shown to be rewarding by itself, without the need for the new identities to fulfill any perceived limitations.

However, none of these studies has been conducted using a constructivist framework. Theories based on that framework, such as the Personal Construct Theory (PCT), provide a tailored assessment for each individual's perception of the world and themselves instead of classifying them into pre-established dimensions that may, or may not, belong to their meaning system. Based on this theory, the Repertory Grid Technique allows the assessment of the degree to which people perceive themselves as similar or different from other people, and their representation of what they would like to be (i.e., "ideal self"). Moreover, in the videogame research field, the PCT also permits to explore gamers' construal of their virtual self, and whether it resembles more their ideal self, their actual self, or none. From the repertory grid, other measures can also be extracted that will help on this research, such as their self-ideal discrepancy, which represents the distance between the actual self and the ideal self, the presence of cognitive conflicts within participants' construct systems, or their interpersonal construct differentiation, defined as the tendency of a construct system to perceive the self and other elements through several dimensions, with different nuances (an indicator of cognitive complexity). For this project, the researchers will extract two additional measures as a result of including the virtual self in the participants' grid. These measures are the self-virtual discrepancy, understood as the distance between the actual self and the virtual self, and the virtual-ideal discrepancy, which is the distance between the virtual self and the ideal self. These measures will allow to assess to which degree the participants' videogame virtual characters are perceived as similar or different to their actual identity outside the game and to their idea of how they would like to be.

Other factors may affect players' identity exploration by means of their virtual selves. Therefore, other instruments will be included to measure participants' psychological distress, as well as more specific ones such as those targeting the level of immersion during the game and the main motivations that draw them to play.

As mentioned before, there are no empirical data regarding this issue yet. However, from a theoretical perspective, there can be several configurations of the relationships between actual, ideal, and virtual selves, leading to four types of online videogame players' virtual-self construal. The researchers have labeled each type of player according to how they would construe their virtual-self in relation to their actual and ideal selves.