As the gaming industry continues to grow, female gamer numbers are on the rise. Research has shown that females have been disproportionately underrepresented and inaccurately portrayed in video games. The research findings also reveal the many negative effects misrepresentation can have on women's self esteem and body image. This project hypothesizes that the use of a more realistic and responsive in-game character creation tool will help assess the impact of female character models on the enjoyment and self-concept of the players. The project produced six model templates with accurate body proportions and a character creation tool with customizable slider features, standard deviation visual feedback, and game telemetry data capturing based on literature review that can be used in future projects for collecting body proportion and mouse over data on player avatar preferences. The models are created with data sets from the 2012 U.S. Army Anthropometric Survey (ANSUR) and the Center for Disease Control (CDC) Anthropometric Reference Data for Children and Adults: United States, 2007-2010. This tool can be helpful for game developers and gender studies researchers studying the media effects of 3D character models and players' choice.
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Details
Title
Realistic avatar creation and player choice
Creators
James Lee
Contributors
Stefan Rank (Advisor) - Drexel University, Drexel University (1970-)
Awarding Institution
Drexel University
Degree Awarded
Master of Science (M.S.)
Publisher
Drexel University; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Number of pages
50 pages
Resource Type
Thesis
Language
English
Academic Unit
Digital Media; Drexel University; Antoinette Westphal College of Media Arts and Design
Other Identifier
991021889071504721
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