Seeing through the Screen – The Interaction of the Avatar and their Creators on Judgements about them

The current study investigates sexist perceptions of male and female World of Warcraft (WoW) avatars and their creators. Although there is a large body of research on sexist avatar design in video games, there is a lack of understanding on how avatar perceptions and evaluations translate to the avatars’ creators. In the current study, we designed a survey to investigate how sexist avatars are perceived in relation to people's dispositional sexism and with regard to the avatar creator's gender. The data shows that female avatars and their creators were evaluated as less competent, whereas male avatars were judged higher in both hostile and benevolent sexism, revealing persistent gender bias in avatar perception. This pattern of results depended also on the participants’ trait sexism scores. Furthermore, avatars were perceived as adhering more to gender norms when their gender was congruent with the creator's gender. We argue that sexist expressions towards male and female avatars in video games differ and that more reliable and diverse measures are to capture sexism in the digitally mediated reality. Overall, the findings show that offline gender stereotypes reliably transfer to virtual environments, influencing how players interpret both avatars and their creators.