Attributions of Human-Avatar Relationship Closeness in a Virtual Community

Abstract

As avatars have become increasingly used in virtual communities (VCs) to provide users with a more natural and favorable online experience, promoting a close human-avatar relationship has been a necessity to the sustainable development of VCs. In this study, we intend to explore users' attributions of human-avatar relationship closeness in VCs. We conceptualize human-avatar relationship closeness as composed of activity diversity, interaction frequency, and relational influence, and identify its antecedents (i.e., perceived needs fulfillment, irreplaceableness, resource investment) by extending theories in an interpersonal domain into a human-artifact interaction domain. The hypothesized model is empirically tested through an online survey in the specific context of Second Life (SL), a popular virtual community (VC), and we find that people's perceived needs fulfillment has positive effects on relational influence, perceived relationship irreplaceableness has positive effects on activity diversity and relational influence, while perceived resource investment positively associates with all three dimensions of human-avatar relationship closeness.