Description
This research aims to extend previous work done on the influence of stories on virtual avatar creation and perception. We will focus on the influence of stories on gendered clothing, looks, envisioned personalities and the role sexist beliefs play in enjoyment of playing with the avatar. Past work has shown that increased sexist beliefs correlate positively with increased enjoyment playing with sexist avatars and that stories about virtual avatars shape our imagination of them. In this project we will conceptually replicate and extend previous work by probing the influence of stories on avatar creation and evaluation. This may involve a participant creating an avatar in a game such as The Sims (depending on certain conditions; e.g., a sexist or standard avatar) and talking through the reasoning choosing certain types of clothing or body types. Other variables will be assessed such as the person’s sexist beliefs. This project will most likely entail a lab-based study. As the previous project focused on female avatars and sexist views with regards to women, this project will focus on male avatars (for examples of assessment see Male Role Model Attitudes Scale and the Ambivalence Towards Men Inventory).
Research Questions
What do people think about when creating or playing with sexist avatars? How does the perception of avatars differ based on the gendered clothing they wear and the gender of the avatar itself? Additionally, how does individuals' own sexism and gender identification affect these perceptions?
Some research questions may be subject to change or adapted to fit the students interests. The RQs need to fit the directions of both students working on this project.
Type of Research
Experimental research (on-campus mostly).
Data Analysis
Data analysis will involve both qualitative (e.g., via the thinking-aloud method) and quantitative data (e.g., gathered via questionnaires). The data will be analysed with Atlas.ti and R respectively.
Information
Please contact Lynn Weiher (l.weiher@utwente.nl) when you are interested in this assignment. The assignment is open to two students.
Literature
Bowey, J. T., Depping, A. E., & Mandryk, R. L. (2017, May). Don't talk dirty to me: How sexist beliefs affect experience in sexist games. In Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1530-1543).
Bowey, J. T., Frommel, J., Piller, B., & Mandryk, R. L. (2021, August). Predicting beliefs from npc dialogues. In 2021 IEEE Conference on Games (CoG) (pp. 1-8). IEEE.
Morillo, P., Navarro-Pérez, J. J., Orduña, J. M., & Fernández, M. (2022). Evaluation of an intervention program based on mobile apps to learn sexism prevention in teenagers. ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications (TOMM), 18(2), 1-20.
Rogers, K., Aufheimer, M., Weber, M., & Nacke, L. E. (2018, October). Exploring the role of non-player characters and gender in player identification. In Proceedings of the 2018 annual symposium on computer-human interaction in play companion extended abstracts (pp. 271-283).
Nowak, K. L., Fox, J., & Ranjit, Y. S. (2015). Inferences about avatars: Sexism, appropriateness, anthropomorphism, and the objectification of female virtual representations. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 20(5), 554-569.
Thaler, A., Piryankova, I., Stefanucci, J. K., Pujades, S., de La Rosa, S., Streuber, S., ... & Mohler, B. J. (2018). Visual perception and evaluation of photo-realistic self-avatars from 3D body scans in males and females. Frontiers in ICT, 5, 18.
Bessière, K., Seay, A. F., & Kiesler, S. (2007). The ideal elf: Identity exploration in World of Warcraft. Cyberpsychology & behavior, 10(4), 530-535.
Ratan, R. A., Fordham, J. A., Leith, A. P., & Williams, D. (2019). Women keep it real: Avatar gender choice in league of legends. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, 22(4), 254-257.
Consalvo, M., & Harper, T. (2009). The sexi (e) st of all: Avatars, gender, and online games. In Virtual social networks: Mediated, massive and multiplayer sites (pp. 98-113). London: Palgrave Macmillan UK.
Szolin, K., Kuss, D. J., Nuyens, F. M., & Griffiths, M. D. (2023). Exploring the user-avatar relationship in videogames: A systematic review of the Proteus effect. Human–Computer Interaction, 38(5-6), 374-399.