A new study from Stanford University has found that female gamers who use sexy avatars such as Lara Croft from "Tomb Raider" and other sexualized virtual characters are more likely to objectify themselves in real life, and perhaps, more likely to accept our culture's "rape myth."
"We often talk about video game violence and how it affects people who play violent video games," Jeremy Bailenson, the director of the Virtual Human Interaction Lab at Stanford, said in a news release. "I think it's equally important to think about sexualization."
Bailenson is interested in particular in the Proteus Effect, or how the experiencing of acting in a virutal body, such as a video game avatar, can change the behavior of the individual. By the Proteus Effect, a person's behavior may conform to their digital reality as they adapt to model their in-game avatar's behaviors.
Previous research has found that people whose avatars exercise often and get see the effects on their bodies, such as "Grand Theft Auto" players, are more likely to take up exercise in the real world.
Published in the journal Computers in Human Behavior, the new report by Bailenson and co-author Jesse Fox had 86 women between the ages of 18 and 40 don virtual reality helmets and wrist and ankle motion sensors that fully immersed them in 3D enviornments.
Once "inside" the game world, participants looked in a virtual mirror and saw either a provocatively or conservatively dressed avatar that they would then play as for the remainder of the time. The avatar's movements perfectly captured their own, allowing them to feel as though they fully occupied the fictional body.
The researchers then had participants meet a male accomplice in the game, whom they had a get-to-know-you conversation with. Women wearing the sexualized avatar were more likely to talk about their bodies, hair and dress more often than their non-sexualized counterparts.
Afterwards, the participants were given a questionnaire to fill out in which they rated how much they agreed with several statements, one of which included the "rape myth," which perpetuates the notion that "in the majority of rapes, the victim is promiscuous or has a bad reputation."
Women who "wore" the sexualized avatars were more likely to agree with the "rape myth" than those who wore conservative, non-sexualized ones. Women whose sexualized avatars' faces resembled their own the most were more likely than anyone else in the study to agree with the myth.
While many insist that video gamers can keep their true identities and character identities separate and mutually exclusive, Bailenson insists it may not be so simple.
"It changes the way you think about yourself online and offline," he said. "It used to be passive and you watched the characters. You now enter the media and become the protagonist. You become the characters."
Click here to see a photo of the sexualized and non-sexualized avatars used in the study.
