Hiding or priding? A study of gender, personality, and game context within avatar selection

The present research explores the impact of gender, personality, and game context on avatar selection. The experiment is a 2 (gender: men vs. women) x 2 (game context: online vs. single-player) between-subjects factorial design. Quantitative comparisons between participants and their avatars were made in terms of attractiveness, skin tone, girth, chest size, waist size, hip size, and height (measured two ways) and were used as dependent variables. Other dependent variables included four self-reported survey items assessing participants' relationship to their avatars. Game context and gender were found to have a significant interaction in terms of avatar metrics. Game context had few main effects. Gender, however, did yield main effects both alone and with certain aspects of personality functioning as moderators. Skin tone, race, attractiveness all also had effects on avatar selection.