Articles:How Avatar Customizability Affects Children’s Arousal and Subjective Presence During Junk Food–Sponsored Online Video Games

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Contents

Purpose

To determine how children cognitively and emotionally process interactive marketing of snack food products in advergames.

Test Description

  • 30 participants aged 10 to 12 (19 males, 11 females)
  • asked to play advergames with:
    1. avatars that were assigned to them
    2. avatars chosen from a pool
    3. self-designed avatars

What are Avatars?

A representation of a real person (gamer) in a virtual environment (game world). The design and movement of this avatar is under the control of the gamer.

When avatars are controlled by human 3 bodies are present ()

  1. objective body: the physical, observable body of the user
  2. virtual body: the representation of the user inside the virtual environment
  3. body schema: the user’s mental representation of his or her body

Identification

‘‘a process that culminates in a cognitive and emotional state in which the audience member is aware not of him or herself as an audience member, but rather imagines being one of the characters’’ in the game.

‘‘a response to communication by others that is marked by internalizing a point of view rather than a process of projecting one’s own identity onto someone or something else.’’

  • salient characteristics of that avatar may integrate into the user’s idea of self during gameplay
  • the avatar is the virtual body, or the representation of oneself in a virtual world

Presence

‘‘a psychological state in which virtual objects are experienced as actual objects in either sensory or nonsensory ways.’’

The facts/quotes

  • A recent overview of snack food Web sites found that almost three quarters of these sites employed advergames, and 39% of the advergames studied gave players customization options.
  • Giving individuals choices leads not only to better performance and more intrinsic mo- tivation when performing tasks but also to more overall satisfaction.
  • Even trivial choices and the perception of choice are enough to elicit these reactions
  • "Cordova and Lepper found that children given more choices about their representation in a learning game environment exhibited more intrinsic motivation, more en- joyment, and more learning." (pg 2)
  • "When a participant was offered a choice of avatar, in a sense gaining ‘‘ownership’’ of the avatar, arousal, presence, and identification were higher for third-person point-of-view games (games in which the player can see the avatar) than they were for first-person point-of-view games" (pg 2)
  • Research shows that giving individuals more choices concerning their avatars will likely lead these individuals to identify more with their avatars during gameplay.
  • Should a player design an avatar to look like himself or herself, the process may deal less with identifying with the avatar and more with projecting ideas of the self onto the avatar.
  • "if the user is given the option of building an avatar to represent himself or herself, the experience may be made more real and have an effect on the user’s own mental representation of self."
  • individuals who "project their own identities onto the avatar will be more involved in the game than are those who merely choose an avatar."
  • "Because children have been found to exhibit decreased prefrontal lobe activity in conjunction with higher reported levels of presence,28 it is likely that they are more willing to suspend disbelief and become more immersed in the medium and its content."

emotional view

  • Arousal ranges from bored or relaxed to excited or aroused,
  • Valence ranges from highly positive to highly negative.

Note: remember the 2 demential grid on Game Usability book....

physiological measures:

  • facial electromyography has been used to measure valence
  • skin conductance has been used to measure arousal
    1. Skin conductance is a measurement of electrodermal activity indicating sympathetic nervous system activation.
    2. Studies have shown that self-reported emotional arousal and skin conductance correlate well across valence level.

Test Question 1

"Individuals given more avatar customization options within the advergames will exhibit a skin conductance level that is greater over time than will individuals given fewer customization options."

Embodying an avatar within the virtual space of a game may bring about a psychological state known as presence, a feeling of being part of a mediated message.

6 conceptualizations that are central to the explication of presence (Lombard and Ditton)

  1. social richness
  2. realism
  3. transportation
  4. immersion
  5. perception of media personalities as social actors
  6. media as social beings
  • Physical: feeling as though the medium is transcended
  • Social: feeling of social interaction

Test Question 2

"Embodiment will produce more self-reported feelings of presence than identification."

Test Question 3

"Self-reported presence will mediate the effects of customization on skin conductance level."

Design

3x3 mixed design was used in this study, with factors:

  • level of customization
  • game

Independent Variables: This study manipulated avatar customization by three levels:

  • assignment
  • choice from a pool
  • customized design via choice of avatar characteristics.
    • allowed 5 minutes to choose or create their avatars (creation time recorded)

Dependent Variables:

  • skin conductance
    • skin conductance signal was sampled 20 times a second at 167 Hz and averaged over each second of data collection.
  • self-reported presence.

Data Analysis

  • Outliers (~2%) were replaced with the mean of the individual’s closest cells if two or more were in succession. Truncation was used for isolated outliers.


Results

Test 1: individuals who built an avatar diminished the least over time, and those assigned an avatar diminished the most.

Test 2: most presence was reported when an avatar was embodied and the least was reported when an avatar was assigned

Test 3: Not supported

The customization of avatars could effect:

  • subjective feelings of presence
  • psychophysiological indicators of emotion during gameplay (making experience more enjoyable)
  • "creating more customizable games may make the experience more sympathetically arousing, which may in turn affect the strength of the emotional valence experienced, whether positive, negative, or both"

About using subjective reporting: "To further complicate the issue, using a subjective report of presence after the state is effectively over as a possible mediator between a manipulated factor, customization in this case, and an online measure of time-locked physiological responses is less than ideal."

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