Avatar survey: Age

25 July 2008 | PlayOn authors archive

Having considered gender in the previous post, we now turn to our participants’ age. Unsurprisingly perhaps, the participants’ age in the three selected games had significantly different means (F = 67.479, p <.001). The results indicate that Maple Story players (mean age = 18.12, Std. = 6.18) were significantly younger than both the players in World of Warcraft (mean age = 29.78, Std. = 10.48) and the residents of Second Life (mean age = 41.14, Std. = 9.64). In addition, the residents of Second Life were found to be significantly older than the other two games.

We were able to explore the issue of age in more depth thanks to the avatar screenshots uploaded by our participants. Indeed, users can choose to design their avatar to look younger or older than their real age. In our survey the participants were asked how the age of their avatar compared with their real age (1: not different at all, 2: mildly different, 3: somewhat different, 4: very different and 5: extremely different). We found that, according to their own evaluation, most users tended to make their avatar age slightly different from their real age (mean = 2.67, Std. = 1.29).

Moreover, a correlation analysis showed that the relationship between users’ real age and preferred avatar age appearance are significantly positively correlated (r=.231, p <.005). That is, younger users did not really care about their avatar’s apparent age, but older users preferred creating an avatar that appears different in age. Looking at the screenshots, it seems as if older users broadly prefer creating avatars that look younger than they are, sometimes by a very large margin. For instance, several SL residents aged 40 and above had avatars that looked like teenagers or young adults.

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