Tag Archives: Avatars

Posted on by

Articles for Edge Magazine Online

Last year I wrote several articles for Edge Magazine about the psychology of various video game topics. Somehow I missed that Edge put these online for viewing, so in case you didn’t catch the print editions I’ve helpfully aggregated them all here in one post. Wait …hang on, I’ve got to check something. Okay, yes. “Aggregated” is the right word here. Sorry.

Simply click with as much authority as you like on any of the images below to read the full article.

The Psychology of High Scores

The Psychology of High Scores

The Psychology of Nostalgia

The Psychology of Nostalgia

The Psychology of Genres

The Psychology of Genres

The Psychology of Avatars

The Psychology of Avatars

The Psychology of Free to Play Games

The Psychology of Free to Play Games

Enjoy!

Posted on by

The Psychology of Avatars in Edge Magazine

I have a new article about the psychology of video game avatars in issue #240 of Edge Magazine. It’s this one:

Look for this issue with the subtle, easy to overlook green color. It blends right in.

This article was a lot of fun to write. My standard operating procedure is to look at some body of psychological research or theory that has nothing to do with video games, and then figure out how to apply it to games. Sometimes it’s a short hop in logic, sometimes it’s an inferential leap that requires a running start. For the psychology of avatars piece, though, I actually got to read up on research that was being done about video games, using video games and similar experiences (e.g., Second Life and virtual reality). There’s a lot of interesting stuff going on in this part of the field right now, and I enjoyed trying to sum up some of it.

Here’s a bit that our friend Bobo the Quote Monkey thought you might be interested in:

Researcher Nick Yee started his career by taking the precepts of social identity theory and using them to understand how people behave depending on the virtual avatars they assume. In one of his earliest experiments, Yee had experimental subjects don a wicked head-mounted display that let them perceive and move around in a simple virtual environment. There was just a virtual room, another virtual person controlled by someone else, and a virtual mirror. The mirror was important, because it obviously wasn’t a real mirror and the researcher could use it to show whatever “reflection” of the subjects’ avatars they wanted. In fact, Yee randomly showed subjects one of three types of reflections of their avatar: ugly, normal, and attractive.

What Yee was interested in was how this would affect how subjects interacted with the other person in the virtual room. After following directions to inspect their avatars in the mirror, subjects were asked to approach the room’s other occupant and chat with him or her. This other person was controlled by a research assistant and followed a simple script to get the conversation going, saying something like: “Tell me a bit about yourself.”

What the study revealed was how attractive a subject’s avatar was affected how he or she behaved. Relative to those with ugly avatars, people assigned attractive avatars both stood closer to the other person and disclosed more personal details about themselves to this stranger. Then, in a follow-up study using the same setup, Yee found that people using taller avatars were more assertive and confident when they engaged in a simple negotiation exercise. …Like in the real world, we first make an observation about our avatar, infer something about our character, and then continue to act according to our perceived expectations. We needn’t make a conscious decision to do it.

As usual, I demand that you possibly consider thinking about buying the magazine if you’re so inclined. I think it’s an interesting piece and I’m glad that Edge is willing to publish something relatively unusual for the world of games journalism. Also, my favorite thing about writing for Edge, which is a UK based magazine, is seeing that my editor for this article replaced the word “soda” with “fizzy drinks.” That’s absurdly charming for some reason.

Posted on by

Self-Perception Theory and Marketing through Avatars

I recently found out, via this article on Mindhacks.com, about an interesting paper by researcher Jeremy Bailenson in The Psychologist. ((Balenson, J. (2012). Doppelgangers — A New Form of Self? The Psychologist, 25, 36-38.)) In it, he reviews recent research on how viewing online representations of ourselves –like our avatars on the Xbox 360 or our Miis on the Nintendo Wii– can affect our behavior. He talks some about modeling healthy behavior and implanting false memories, but to me the most interesting and possibly the most grim part of the article was where he discussed how to advertise products through avatars and by doing so affecting consumer behavior. Even if we know perfectly well that it’s happening.

Citing research presented at a professional conference, ((Ahn, S. and Balenson, J. (2011). Embodied Experiences in Imersive Virtual Environments. Paper presented at the 97th Annual Conference of the National Communication Association, New Orleans, LA.)) Balenson describes how he and a colleague blatantly Photoshopped subjects’ heads onto the bodies of actors in advertisements. One participant in the study, for example, might have viewed an image of himself holding up a particular brand of soda and smiling like a idiot as if to endorse it. After the study, subjects tended not only to remember the (fictitious) brands better, but actually indicated greater preference to them relative to other options. This despite the fact that they were pretty sure they had never drank “Blorf brand soda” or sat in a professional photography studio and posed for the advertisements in question. ((Interestingly, social/professional networking site LinkedIn is apparently taking this concept to heart and running an ad campaign where they insert users’ profile pictures directly into representations of a client companies’ recruitment literature in an attempt at getting people to apply for jobs there.))

Okay, I fixed the eyebrows. NOW how much would you pay for this stupid bird?

And this sort of thing may be thanks to what some psychologists call “self-perception theory.” In a nutshell, this theory refers to how we tend to look at our own actions to infer our own attitudes and beliefs. It’s kind of a “I’m doing X, so I must be the kind of person who likes X.” In one study ((Frank, M., & Gilovich, T. (1988). The Dark Side of Self and Social Perception: Black Uniforms and Agression in Professional Sports. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 52, 74-85.)) researchers dressed subjects in either black or white uniforms. Those in the black uniforms were observed to act with more aggression and toughness, keeping in line with their stereotypically villainous wardrobe. The researchers also argued (and showed with data) that this is why referees in professional sports are biased against teams that wear dark colors and are more likely to call penalties against them. Think of your avatar as a kind of uniform you wear (a notion supported by research, by the way), and you see the connection.

So, given all this I’m going to once again give out some evil ideas to those people in marketing. This kind of marketing-via-avatar thing could so easily be incorporated into video game avatars like those used by the Xbox. It’s not unusual for games to give out “avatar awards” for completing in-game actions. My little dude has a Locust mask from Gears 3, a sombrero from Red Dead Redemption, and a little Guilty Spark toy from Halo 3. Fun! But what if instead of watching my avatar play with a miniature RC Warthog I saw him chugging a can of Mountain Dew? Or perusing the latest issue of Wired magazine? Or gobbling fries from Burger King? According to the research described above, I’d be more likely to remember or even favor those brands over traditional advertising because there’s something psychologically important about seeing a representation of me interacting with them. Another study reported in the journal CyberPsychology & Behavior ((Bailey, R. Wise, K., and Bolls, P. (2009). How Avatar Customizability Affects Children’s Arousal and Subjective Presence During Junk Food-Sponsored Online Video Games. CyberPsychology and Behavior, 12(3), 277-283).)) found that “advergames” designed to advertise junk like Pop Tarts and Fruit-By-The-Foot snacks to children were rated as more enjoyable when they let the player customize his or her avatar.

Heck, we don’t even have to bury this kind of thing in the Xbox dashboard. I imagine games could easily pull our likeness in the form of our avatar ((Assuming, of course, you’re not one of those people who make ridiculous looking avatars that look nothing like you.)) and display them to us holding up boxes of Stay-Free feminine hygiene products or Kibbles ‘n Bits dog food while we wait for levels to load or matchmaking to happen.

Well, maybe those are extreme examples. But you’d think that game companies would at least start using this kind of thing to cross-promote games. If I were EA, I wouldn’t include a snowboard with a SSX logo as an avatar reward in that game. I mean, the customer has already bought that game, right? I’d include a N7 jumper from Mass Effect 3. That’s what you want your customers envisioning themselves playing at that point and that’s what you want them associating with themselves when that game hits the shelves. Or you can show them holding up a box of dog food. Your choice.

Posted on by

Ideal Self Image and Game Choice

So why do you think you choose to play the games you do? NO! WRONG ANSWER! Well, actually, you’re probably mostly right about that, but an recent article in Psychological Science ((Przybylski, A., Weinstein, N., Murayama, K., Lynch, M. & Ryan, R. (2012). The Ideal Self At Play: The Appeal of Video Games That Let You Be All You Can Be. Psychological Science, 23(1) 69-76.)) suggests that your choice of games and your motivation to keep playing them may have something to do with how well they allow you to experience something deeper and more personal.

In the article, Andrew Przybylski (whose work I also cited in my article for GamePro on the appeal of shooters that’s sadly no longer online) and his co-authors hypothesize that we’re motivated to play video games to the extent that they allow us to sample our “ideal self characteristics,” especially when there’s a large gap between our ideal selves and who we actually think we are. This could help explain why people are attracted to games in a way that’s unique to the medium.

Przybylski and his colleagues tested this theory in a couple of experiments in which they had gamers self-report their personality (using a standard “Big 5” measure) in three contexts:

  1. As they think they are IRL
  2. As the type of person would like to ideally be IRL
  3. As the type of person they felt like while playing a certain game

They found that we apparently enjoy games most when they let us feel like an idealized version of ourselves (i.e., #2 and #3 above are similar), and that effect is greatest when there’s a big discrepancy with our ideal self and our perceived self (i.e., #1 and #2 are dissimilar). So if I fantasize about being a loquacious, extroverted type of person, I feel better about myself when I’m able to play a game that lets me do that even though in reality I get tongue-tied in public. Or if I strive to be a more conscientious master of details and micromanagement, I might prefer a real-time strategy game over a first person shooter.

Hmmm... Should I put my augmentation points into Conscientiousness or Emotional Stability?

You may think this is a bit obvious, but I think some of the implications are profound for game designers, especially those working on role-playing games. We’re all probably familiar with the binary “Do you murder the puppy or do you help the puppy?” morality choices in some such games. Many of my favorite games in this genre include choices or developments that were much more complicated than that. Taking Przybylski’s research to heart, effective choices in these games are going to be the ones that allow let players adopt a much wider spectrum of personality, desires, values, and judgments.

I won’t share any spoilers, but those of you who have made it to the end of Deus Ex: Human Revolution will be familiar with a good example of this. It provides choices that allow you to have Adam –and through him yourself– weigh the importance of freedom, progress, purity, justice, honesty, and the like. Similarly, many paths in Dragon Age 2 ask you to create a persona that reflects varying emphasis on loyalty, dogmatism, anarchy, and justice. And while there’s something to be said about “playing the dark side” in these games for fun ((Dark Brotherhood quest line in Skyrim, anyone?)) one could hypothesize that that kind of thrill comes most strongly from playing something equally complicated, just in the opposite direction from your ideal self.

Okay, for extra light side points, kill this thing using only passive agression.

But there’s more. I haven’t played Bioware’s new Star Wars: The Old Republic MMORPG yet, but from what I’ve heard there are some improvements to that game suggested by the above research. In keeping with the Star Wars tradition, the game lets you play on either end of the “light side” or “dark side” morality spectrum. But as is with common with such systems, meeting certain thresholds of good or evil are required to use certain equipment and abilities. You get light or dark points by role-playing certain actions, so most players are on the lookout for ways to boost their standing. The problem with this is that it may not only over simplify the role-playing in the game, but by dangling a carrot from such choices the game may actively discourage players from exploring more subtle choices and consequences that let them feel more like their idealized self and thus motivate them to continue playing.

So, game writers take note. When you’re dreaming up your game’s stable of complex supporting characters, don’t leave the player character out of the action. We all love trying on different hats in the way that only video games allow, but some of us have very oddly shaped heads.