Design Provocation
The future of gaming personalization: Street Fighter lab
Gaming behavior influenced by avatars and content
“Hadoken!” “Tatsiumaki senpuktaku!”
I grew up playing the Street Fighter series, the legendary games produced by Capcom. I fantasized that one day I, too, would be able to do the Hadoken like Ryu, my favorite character in the game.
Gaming has come a long way since the days of Nintendo Super Famicom, and now I see interesting trends in both the entertainment and tech industries that make the gaming experience more personalized and interactive than ever.
- Choose your own adventure in movies (Black Mirror Bandersnatch)
- Gaming avatars using real humans (Cyberpunk, Death Stranding)
- More accessible tools to create hyper-realistic 3D representation of humans (MetaHumans)
- Animoji from Apple (link)
- Animal crossing avatars (link)
- Next-gen virtual streamer (Codemiko)
Using 3D scanning data, I wanted to see how it was like to put myself in a game. This was the initial motivation behind the creation of Street Fighter Lab [ストラボ], an imaginary secret lab in Capcom where people experiment with new ideas for one-on-one fighting games.
I created a concept movie with existing 3D data of my wife and I. In the beginning, it was delightful to see our avatars doing acrobatic actions, dancing, and performing physical feats neither of us could ever achieve in real life. On the other hand, I felt somewhat uncomfortable watching myself kicking a loved one and throwing punches in a virtual world.
The psychological effect between player and avatar is well known as the Proteus Effect in the gaming industry and academia. Nick Yee & Jeremy Bailenson (2007) describe it as, “The appearances of our avatars shape how we interact with others. As we choose our self-representations in virtual environments, our self-representations shape our behaviors in turn.”
This makes me wonder if gaming behavior can also be influenced by The Degree of Avatar Personalization and Content Intensity.
The Degree of Avatar Personalization is visual information that characterizes virtual identity.
Content intensity is a measurable degree of violent and explicit content. This is also known as ESRB ratings in North America.
Using a personalized avatar in gaming with high content intensity (violent games) could have a high impact on gaming behavior.
Let’s use Street Fighter as an example. The diagram below depicts scenarios using personalized avatars in Street Fighter.
Using my own 3D avatar (left example) provides a more personalized experience than using a generic robot avatar (right example). Using my own avatar could consolidate the player-avatar relationship that impacts game play and performance.
Having multiple personalized avatars of familiar people, could create more complex influence and dynamics in game play. In the left example below, my performance would be influenced because of a sense of guilt by attacking a loved one. On the other hand, I might feel less guilty using a robot avatar (right example).
The next example is about more explicit games (Grand theft auto, 17+ESRB)
In this example, the influence of using a personalized avatar could be even larger because of the explicit and violent content, especially if I don’t wish to be thought of as a violent person.
In addition to those factors, online/offline visibility could also increase or decrease the psychological effects (e.g., broadcasting in Twitch, offline play with friends & family).
In summary, a combination of the degree of avatar personalization and content intensity could very well influence gaming behaviors. I’m intrigued to see how it will inspire the future of entertainment n.
While I enjoy seeing myself with superhuman capabilities, I would also be interested in capturing my natural physical motions (walking, gesturing, voice and athletic abilities, etc) to blur the boundary between the physical and digital worlds. Another interesting experiment would be to feed my real gaming data into machine learning models in order to create a fully autonomous virtual avatar of myself. This would be a controversial paradigm shift since it would be like creating a digital copy of myself with its own will. Is this still a representation of myself? Or something else?
Credits:
Humans: Hideaki Matsui, Laura Finnerty
Software: Cinema 4D, Mixamo, Adobe, RTFX Generator
3D scanning: Artec3D
Audio hardware: Teenage Engineering pocket operator PO-133
Music samples: Capcom, Teenage Engineering
Background image: Capcom
