Crowd appearance affects player performance in game combat scenarios
Emma Carrigan, Elena Kokkinara, F. Gheorghe, M. Houlier, Stéphane Donikian, Rachel McDonnell · 2016
The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of non-player character (NPC) appearance in games - specifically, how a character's appearance affects a player's performance, and their perception of the game. We ran an experiment where participants played a mobile game on a 9.7" tablet, the goal of which was to kill all of the enemy characters in the game. The visual appearance of the enemy characters varied in the level of aggression in appearance. One crowd had small, green characters with no weapons and minimal armour. The other crowd had red characters that were large and wearing both weapons and armour. Both crowds had the same level of aggression in behaviour, stance and animations, as well as the same intersection-test capsule to ensure the gameplay was balanced and both crowds were equally difficult to kill. As expected, the second crowd was perceived as highly aggressive and less friendly than the first crowd. We found no differences in the enjoyment levels of the game but interestingly, we found that the visual appearance of the crowd had a direct effect on the player performance in combat. In contrast to our hypothesis, players performed worse (i.e., were killed more often) when in combat against the characters with the less-aggressive appearance.