Nonverbal Communication in Virtual Worlds: Understanding and Designing Expressive Characters

In this book, we begin the work of articulating the challenges and possibilities for non-verbal communication in virtual worlds. Drawing on a wide range of disciplines and perspectives, we consider the past, present, and future of human communication online.
“Tanenbaum, Serif El-Nasr, and Nixon have done an outstanding job of assembling scholars from a wide range of disciplines to explore an essential yet under examined topic in digital media studies. The result is a book in which the authors draw upon a powerfully diverse array of theoretical frameworks from the arts, sciences, and humanities to help us begin to understand how we communicate in these technologically mediated spaces. While not every chapter in this book will prove essential for every digital media scholar, there is clearly something here for everyone with a scholarly interest in the array of related fields concerned with virtual worlds, virtual reality, video games, and other spaces for online interaction. For scholars concerned with video games and play, where so many of our digital landscapes are occupied by individuals using humanoid avatars to interact with both non-human and human actors, this book is a definite must read. Nonverbal Communication in Virtual Worlds certainly isn’t the definitive tome on the topic, for as the authors themselves note, the area of study is itself too new and the technology that shapes these spaces continues to advance. Rather, this book serves as an excellent point of departure for continuing work that can help us better understand how human interaction is re-mediated through digital worlds, and how those mechanisms of communication will continue to evolve with the ongoing development of technology.”