Effects Avatars Have On Female Players

Jesse Fox, Jeremy N. Bailenson, and Liz Tricase have conducted an interesting study about avatars and the effect that hypersexualized avatars have on the player. The point of this study was to see how women’s attitude and self-perception changed after playing as these types of avatars. The two types of virtual humans are avatars and agents. Avatars are controlled by the player, and agents are controlled by the computer. This study focused solely on avatars because the point was to see the player’s attitudes based on the character they are playing as.

The four types of avatars they chose to look at are the ones that resemble the player, in both a sexualized and nonsexualized way, and ones that are don’t resemble the player, in both a sexualized and nonsexualized way. Players tend to relate closer to avatars that are similar to them. According to other studies referenced, players can suffer from both short term and long term effects from exposure to objectifying depictions of women, such as violence against women or rape myth acceptance, which is when the victim is falsely blamed in rape cases. A study conducted by Yao, Mahood, and Linz found that male gamers who play a game as a sexualized female character indicated a greater likelihood to sexually harass women. Behm-Morawitz and Mastro found that when female gamers played as sexualized female characters they started to have the belief that they could not achieve the goal.

The two goals of this study were to find if the Proteus effect was present when women played as sexualized characters and if self-resemblance of the avatar moderates the Proteus effect. The Proteus effect is a theory that states that the behavior of a person changes because of visuals aspects of their avatar. The experiment was conducted on women between the ages of 18-41 and of all nationalities and races. The participants were placed in the virtual world by a head-mounted display where they could see the virtual world. The participants were randomly assigned one of four types of avatars: sexualized self, sexualized other, nonsexualized self, and nonsexualized other. 

Here are examples of the avatars. The top two are the sexualized ones and the bottom two are the nonsexualized ones.

Months prior to the experiment, the participants’ pictures were taken and the developers used these faces to develop avatars that resemble the participant’s own face. When they were put into the virtual world they were told to turn and face a mirror in order to see their avatar. They were told to perform a series of motions so that they could see how their avatar acted. After the experiment, the participants were given a questionnaire. They were asked on a scale from one to five, how sexy the avatar they saw in the mirror was and how closely the avatar’s face represented their own face.

After the questionnaires were completed and reviewed, they found that the sexualized characters were the ones the participants said were sexy and the characters with similar faces to the participants are the ones they said resembled themselves. The study did end up supporting the Proteus effect and that there are effects present in sexualized avatars. Women who controlled sexualized avatars that resembled their face demonstrated greater rape myth acceptance. Women who controlled sexualized avatars had more thoughts about body-image than the women who controlled nonsexualized avatars. This shows the idea that sexualized characters promotes self-objectifiction. The question that arises is why women who’ve played as a sexualized character, have negative attitudes toward rape victims. It could have been self-defense, meaning that they did not want to imagine themselves in that situation. It also could have been that seeing themselves triggered thoughts about parents telling them that it’s their fault since they chose to dress that way. The two issues that I find with this study is that they should have also asked younger girls to participate since there are a lot of female gamers that are under the age of eighteen, and that they should have also given the players a choice after the experiment to see who they would have chosen to play as. Now I am curious about if these types of female avatars have any effects on men.