Avatar hair style

During my ongoing literature review I often discover interesting facts about things I’ve never thought about. Sometimes I can connect these facts with my own observations: The result is mostly a completely new idea why things are as they are. Maybe these ideas are new to you, too. Therefore I’ll share my new science based knowledge with you!

This week: I read the paper „Body and mind: a study of avatar personalization in three virtual worlds“ [1]. The authors investigated the customization of avatars in virtual worlds (Maple Story, Second Life and World of Warcraft) and the choices the users made during their process of creating an own avatar. Additionally the authors investigated the attachment of the users to their avatars.
This „finding of the week“ is all about the World of Warcraft results found in this investigation and the recommendations the authors made.

Creating a WoW avatar is quite simple: You can customize your character using only five design options: Hair style, hair color, facial characteristics, facial modifications (beards, piercings, etc) and skin color.

Creating an avatar

The results of the investigation have shown that there is a significant difference between the importance of these design options:

1. Hair style (most important)
2. Facial characteristics
3. Hair color
4. Skin color (least important)

During gameplay the avatars are mostly wearing some kind of armor like robes, plate armor, etc. Therefore most of the body is covered and the skin color isn’t visible anymore. Additionally most players are using a third person perspective with a great distance to their avatar to gain a better overview about the world. So the facial characteristics are becoming, in comparrison to the other characteristics, unimpressive. A fancy haircut instead, at least when the display of the helmet is turned off, is visible over a great distance and helps to distinguish the own virtual presence from the other avatars.

The recommendations of this paper follow two different ways: On the one hand, it’s mentioned to improve the visibility of facial characteristics. Users should be able to see easier the appearance of their avatars. On the other hand, the paper suggests to improve the customization features of the hair style.

Barber’s shop in Stormwind Citiy

As I read this option, suddenly the barber’s shops added in patch 3.0.1 reached a completely new dimension in the whole context of avatar customization in WoW. Until this point, I was considering the barber as a really cool thing but I’ve never recognized the hair style as a very important feature of improving my avatar. To me, the facial characteristics and skin color were more important than the hair style of my avatar.

Getting a new hair style

Science improved my knowledge – players like to customize their hair style! Maybe I should try a new hair cut as well … oh wait … I’m a worgen …

„Alright: I’ve got hairy palms. So what?“

[1] Ducheneaut, Nicolas; Wen, Ming-Gui; Yee, Nick; Wadley, Greg (2009): Body and mind: a study of avatar personalization in three virtual worlds, in: CHI 2009 Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human Factors in computing systems.