ABSTRACT
Affordances are only affordances, though, given that a potential user of the object has the ability to use the object to carry out the action it affords. The user must have what we can call an effective ability, the ability to effect the affordance. Video games with avatars are special and very interesting in terms of affordances. The Players choose skills for their characters or avatars and if they have not chosen the skinning skill, then a deer does not offer the affordance for skinning for this character. Just as we humans do in the real world, avatars in video games have their own distinctive effective abilities that determine what are and are not affordances for them in the game world. There are mixtures and matches, in between cases, between purely aesthetically driven and purely goal-driven processing. Human life and survival is all about finding affordances which one has the effective abilities to put to good use.
