Why hair matters

5 September 2008 | PlayOn authors archive

In our previous post, we saw how hair style and color were consistently ranked among the most important avatar customization features. They were also the ones users spent the most time customizing. We would like to explore a few reasons why this might be the case and what the implications for future avatar creation and customization systems might be – read on for more.

First, it is worth noting that hair being a “malleable” part of the human body, it is often used in real life to control and build an individual’s personality. Hair styles like dreadlocks, for instance, can be used as identity markers signaling membership in a particular group; hair length and color can be manipulated to dramatically affect someone’s look, sometimes even to the point of making them hard to recognize (note how changes in hair style are often the first consideration of someone attempting to disguise themselves). It is therefore perhaps unsurprising that players would use them in similar ways to reflect their desired age, fashion/style, personality and ethnicity. Interestingly, we note from our survey data that 82.8% of our participants chose not to copy their natural hair color to be their virtual hair color. Quite a few chose colors that would not be easily available in real life: there were 15 users who chose blue hair, 10 who chose purple and four who chose green hair for their avatar.

A second reason why hair may be the most important feature for avatar customization is its visibility. In a game-based world like WoW or Maple Story, a character’s virtual body can be covered by equipment such as armor, robes or gloves. Also, this equipment often has the same color and form across users: in WoW sets of armors look identical, for instance, and they cover most of a player’s body. Therefore, having a unique hair color or style for an avatar will help players be more easily recognizable by other users. Note also that a large majority of users navigate their virtual world of choice using a “zoomed out”, third person perspective (by choice, but also because this tends to be the default setting in most worlds). This makes distinguishing small visual features like the details on someone’s face quite difficult, while hair offers a larger surface prominently displayed at the top of a user’s avatar, where it is most visible using a third-person perspective.

Although users rate customizing their avatars’ hair as quite important, most users still feel that the design options provided by current customization systems for character hair design are relatively weak in the three worlds we studied. Our survey asked participants to assess the richness of each avatar customization feature using a five-point scale from 1: way too few options to 5: way too many options. Hair consistently received low scores compared to other features. The mean score in WoW was 1.97, Second Life was 1.72 and Maple Story was 2.02.

We believe this data points at two possible directions for improving current and future avatar systems in virtual worlds. One would be to take the importance of hair as indicative of a deficiency in the avatar interaction system: for instance, a virtual world’s interface could be redesigned to make an avatar’s facial features much more visible, either by using “cartoonish” and exaggerated faces (in a fashion similar to Japanese Manga characters, for instance) or by changing a user’s viewpoint automatically when interacting with another user, in order for them to see the finer details of their appearance more easily. Virtual worlds designers could also simply provide more options to customize other parts of a user’s avatar, but the fact that hair style and color remain important in SL’s rich customization interface tends to indicate that the problem lies elsewhere.
Another option would be to accept that hair is central to a user’s identity and greatly refine the way it can be customized. Indeed, our participants were quite explicit about the limitation of current systems in their comments:

The hairstyle options were all pretty heinous [Female, 30, WoW]
The hair colors were far too few to begin with. Like with hair style, I’m bored of the color I have at the moment. [Male, 30, WoW]
I’m not really happy with the hair color. They all seem to be kind of solid colors [Male, 38, WoW]
All the colors are bad ones. [Male, 14, Maple Story]
(3 face * 3 hair style) = 9 choices to change your character’s basic appearance is not enough to feel as if your character is your own [Male, 14, Maple Story]
Current system needs prim hair to look good. [Male, 56, Second Life]
It is impossible to make the hair look good. [Female, 52, Second Life]

Simply providing more choices for the current options would therefore seem to be a good starting point. But our participants also suggested possible augmentations:

As a female I change my hair style daily, it would be nice to see something similar reflected in game. [Female, 21, WoW]
After awhile, you get tired of hair styles on characters, and in some games (just not wow) you can change them when this happens. I’m bored of my current style, basically. [Male, 30, WoW]
In the real world, hairdoes can change frequently. Why not in-game. [Male, 65, WoW]
The three free hairstyles are disappointing. Although, there is that quest where you get a random haircut, it most likely ruins your hair even further. Plus, the good hair styles are in the Cash Shop. [Female, 15, Maple Story]

Overall, it is clear that hair matters a great deal in virtual worlds, just like it does in the physical world. This emphasis on hair indicates that, despite the plasticity of virtual bodies and the possibilities they offer for unusual appearances, users tend to favor a single, highly-visible and malleable feature that is immediately recognizable by others – the same one they shape every day in front of their mirror.

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