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August 20, 2008

What Are the Most Important Avatar Customization Features?

Avatar customization systems vary greatly across virtual worlds: some allow users to customize a few high-level features from a limited list of options, while others give the users almost total control over their appearance. We wanted to assess the relative importance of each customization feature to uncover which parts of a user's virtual body matter most to them. To do so, we asked players in each of our three games to evaluate the importance (1: not important to 5: essential) of each character design feature provided by the avatar customization system in their environment of choice. Also, participants were asked to answer how much time they spent customizing each of those features (1 = almost none, 5 = a great deal). The results were more surprising than we anticipated - read more below for a detailed description of our findings.

Our results showed that the most important avatar customization features in WoW were hair style (mean=4.16, Std. = .941), facial characteristics (mean = 4.16, Std. = 1.094) and hair color (mean = 4.04, Std. = 1.040). Character skin color (mean = 3.08, Std. = 1.233) was the least important feature. The rank amount of time spent customizing each avatar feature was similar to the importance. In other words, users spent the most time customizing the features they think matter most.

In Maple Story the most important feature was, again, hair style (mean=3.93, Std. =1.104), followed by hair color (mean = 3.37, Std. = 1.356) and weapon (mean = 3.38, Std. = 1.480). Shoes (mean = 2.38, Std. = 1.192) was the least important feature. As before, users spent the most time customizing features that were most important to them.

Finally, the most important features in Second Life were the avatar’s body (mean = 4.35, Std. = 1.01), torso/legs (mean = 4.20, Std. = 1.10) and hair (mean = 4.18, Std. = 1.20). Skin tone (mean = 3.92, Std. = 1.256) was the least important customization option. Interestingly, Second Life users spent a great deal of time on almost all of the possible character features, to the exclusion of skin tone (mean time = 3.33, Std. = 1.405).

Overall, it seems as if hair style and color are considered "high impact" features by users across the three environments, and this despite wide differences between the capabilities of each customization system: given the dozens of options offered by SL, for instance, it is interesting that hair style/color was still listed as the most important option, just as it was in WoW or MS with their much more limited systems. In our next post, we will discuss possible reasons why "hair matters" so much.

Posted by nicolas at 10:45 AM | Comments (6)

August 04, 2008

Avatar Survey: Time Spent In-World and Customizing Avatar

Gaming experience and time spent playing were not significantly different across the three environments. WoW players had a mean experience with this particular game of 2.15 years (Std. = 1.16). They played 4.36 hours per day (Std. = 2.32) and 5.53 days per week (Std. = 1.67). Maple Story players had a mean experience of 1.82 years (Std. = 0.98); they played 5.12 hours per day (Std. = 4.16) and 5.60 days per week (Std. = 1.88). Second Life residents had a mean experience of 1.71 years (Std. = 1.01); they played 4.55 hours per day (Std. = 3.56) and 5.91 days per week (Std.=5.91). Note that our respondents' experience was not limited to these three environments: their total MMO gaming experience ranged from an average of 3.5 years for MS players to 4.4 years for WoW.

However, Second Life residents spent significantly more time (F=9.434, p <.001) customizing the appearance of their avatar (mean=92.75 minutes, Std. = 208.70 minutes/week), compared to WoW players’ 9.99 minutes (Std. = 15.185) and Maple Story players’ 12.95 minutes (Std. =16.18). This result makes it clear that avatar customization is a very important activity in Second Life compared to the game-based virtual environments - in fact, one could even argue that avatar customization is the game in SL.

Posted by nicolas at 09:51 AM | Comments (4)