Understanding Children's Avatar Making in Social Online Games

要旨

Social online games like Minecraft and Roblox have become increasingly integral to children's daily lives. Our study explores how children aged 8 to 13 create and customize avatars in these virtual environments. Through semi-structured interviews and gameplay observations with 48 participants, we investigate the motivations behind children's avatar-making. Our findings show that children's avatar creation is motivated by self-representation, experimenting with alter ego identities, fulfilling social needs, and improving in-game performance. In addition, designed monetization strategies play a role in shaping children's avatars. We identify the ''wardrobe effect,'' where children create multiple avatars but typically use only one favorite consistently. We discuss the impact of cultural consumerism and how social games can support children's identity exploration while balancing self-expression and social conformity. This work contributes to understanding how avatar shapes children's identity growth in social online games.

著者
Yue Fu
University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, United States
Samuel Schwamm
Boston Children's Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts, United States
Amanda Baughan
University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, United States
Nicole M. Powell
Boston Children's Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts, United States
Zoe Kronberg
Boston Children's Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts, United States
Alicia Owens
Boston Children's Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts, United States
Emily Renee. Izenman
Boston Children's Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts, United States
Dania Alsabeh
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States
Elizabeth Hunt
Education Development Center, New York, New York, United States
Michael Rich
Boston Children's Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts, United States
David Bickham
Boston Children's Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts, United States
Jenny Radesky
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States
Alexis Hiniker
University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, United States
DOI

10.1145/3706598.3713262

論文URL

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3706598.3713262

会議: CHI 2025

The ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (https://chi2025.acm.org/)

セッション: Children and Youth

G314+G315
6 件の発表
2025-04-30 23:10:00
2025-05-01 00:40:00
日本語まとめ
読み込み中…