Personality traits and the immersion into Cyberspace

2: Comment on the quality of spatiality in graphical worlds and how this affordance might be related to a sense of ‘immersion’ and presence/co-presence.

Being in a 3D cyberspace environment such as Second Life allows for spatial awareness in terms of your own personal avatar, the camp sites and other buildings that are present in the Second Life environment. Although senses like touch, physical presence and taste are not possible to accomplish in any cyberspace environment, some graphical worlds are better quality than others when concerning spatiality. An example of this would be in games such as x-box Kinect when playing on the games that involves you to be the control, meaning that these games have the ability to gain spatial and physical awareness through cyberspace.  Ultimately, these abilities within cyberspace may be related to a sense of immersion, presence and co-presence: One explanation for this could be the development of the cyberspace environment becoming very similar to the real-world space, therefore making the cyberspace environment more realistic.

 

3: Consider which personality traits (if any) may be related to the feeling, in some, of ‘deep immersion’ in graphical worlds.

Personally, there are not specific personality traits that determine whether one is more susceptible to deep immersion in a graphical world. It depends how much spare time one has to fill in order to become deeply immersed into the cyberspace environment. This therefore suggests that people who have more spare time to interact with the cyberspace environment are more likely to become deeply immersed in that environment. People with less spare time may not become deeply immersed as often, simply because they are spending more of their time doing real-world activities. However, it is more understandable for people of a quiet and shy nature to become enthralled in the cyberspace environment because enables one to increase their own confidence and to say or behave exactly how they want to, whereas in the real-world this may not be the case. Furthermore, people that lack control over their own lives in the real world may become more immersed in cyberspace because they gain control over their cyber-self and can therefore control certain factors in their cyberspace environment.  Another factor to consider is that technology has advanced so much in recent years and has become available to a much wider audience than twenty years ago. This could have an effect on whether people become deeply immersed simply because children now have much more access to the graphical world of games than the generation above them did. This suggests that it is not a specific personality trait but a significant tool that is used vastly in our current society and era.