Exploring the Impact of Avatar Color on Game Experience in Educational Games

Abstract

The color red has been shown to hinder performance, motivation, and affect in a variety of contexts involving cognitively demanding tasks [16, 47, 49, 22, 11, 32, 44, 64, 41]. Teams wearing red have been shown to impair the performance of opposing teams [7, 28, 57, 21], present even in online gaming [27]. Although color is strongly contextual (e.g., red-failure association), its effects are posited to be subconscious [15] and operate powerfully even on nonhuman primates, e.g., Rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta) take food significantly less often from an experimenter wearing red [39]. Here, we present one of the first studies on avatar color in a single-player game. We compared players using a red avatar to players using a blue avatar. Using the Game Experience Questionnaire (GEQ) [26], we find that players using a red avatar had a decrease in competence, immersion and flow. Our results are of consequence to how we design and choose colors in single-player contexts.

The effects of observation in video games: how remote observation influences player experience, motivation, and behaviour

“…Levels 10-12 require using all preceding commands in addition to conditionals (See Figures 1 and 2). Mazzy has been used previously as an experimental testbed for evaluating the impacts of avatar type on performance and engagement in an educational game (Kao and Harrell 2015b, 2015c, 2015d, 2016a, 2016b, 2016c, 2017Kao, 2018).…”

Exploring Help Facilities in Game-Making Software

“…HCI and games researchers have long been interested in games and learning [40-42, 48, 50, 56, 60, 62, 103, 118, 120]. This includes studies on tutorials [3], differences in frequent versus infrequent gamers' reactions to tutorials [82], leveraging reward systems [32], encouraging a growth mindset, or the idea that intelligence is malleable [55,86,87], avatars [57,59,63,66], embellishment [58,65], and many more. AI and games researchers have also begun to take interest, such as the automatic generation of video game tutorials [36,37], and the adaptation of tutorials to individual user skill levels [8].…”

Magnet: exposing abusive relationships with interactive narrative

“…Studies have shown that the color of the avatars takes a very important role when it comes to the player's identification with the characters [Kao and Harrell, 2016]. Aiming to avoid reinforcing stereotypes and, mainly, to make it easier for the player to identify with the story and the characters displayed, all of them were drawn in a shade of blue, as shown in Figure 1.…”