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Hypersexual avatars: who wants them?

Published: 15 June 2005 Publication History

Abstract

Women are less dedicated to computer gaming than men. Previous studies show that one reason might be that current games exhibit hypersexualised female avatars: avatars that have exaggerated sexual signals to which female players object. We report on a study in which this hypothesis was tested. The study was performed with men and women aged 17--22 from the Stockholm area. In our study, both women and men showed similar preferences in avatar selections. However, we also found that the women seemed to be more aware of personality stereotypes, in that they were more consistent in attributing a hypersexual avatar to a 'bimbo' personality.

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    cover image ACM Other conferences
    ACE '05: Proceedings of the 2005 ACM SIGCHI International Conference on Advances in computer entertainment technology
    June 2005
    511 pages
    ISBN:1595931104
    DOI:10.1145/1178477
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 15 June 2005

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    Author Tags

    1. avatars
    2. game characters
    3. gender differences
    4. gender stereotypes

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