The Common Player-Avatar Interaction Scale (cPAX): Expansion and Cross-Language Validation ABSTRACT: The connection between player and avatar is understood to be central to the experience and effects of massively multiplayer online (MMO) gaming experiences, and these connections are most comprehensively understood to emerge from the interplays of both social and ludic characteristics. Some approaches focus on the merging of players’ selves with characters’, such as character identification (Klimmt, Hefner, & Vorderer, 2009) and wishful identification (cf. Hoffner & Buchanan, 2005). Other approaches examine how avatars’ characteristics affect players’ self-concept and behavior, such as the Proteus effect (Yee & Bailenson, 2007) and self-presence (Lee, 2004; Ratan, 2012). As these approaches consider discrete relational mechanisms and effects, yet another approach considers the degree to which the player-avatar relation is holistically similar to a fully realized social relationship. This approach, called player-avatar interaction (PAX; Banks & Bowman, 2016) situates player-avatar relations along a comprehensive continuum of sociality—from non-social to fully social—and incorporates key phenomena in other approaches. Techniques for measuring features of variably social relations, however, face two challenges. First, the comprehensive PAX metric includes dimensions that are operationally and methodologically limited. Second, as is common among measures of player-avatar relations more broadly, the metric is linguistically and culturally siloed, available only in English and developed via intra-cultural data. The present study addresses these challenges by first expanding the existing PAX metric to enhance and refine its sub-dimension measures, and then to develop and validate a (to draw from MMO role-playing parlance) “common” version of the expanded scale in English, German, and traditional Chinese.