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Good video game players look better: exploring the relationship between game skills, sexual dimorphism, and facial attractiveness

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Abstract

Few studies have been done on the effects of video games on social perception, especially on the faces of players. The present study investigated how people’s gaming skill influences their perceived facial attractiveness, and also how sexual dimorphism features (masculine and feminine) interplayed with displayed gaming skill. We asked players (N = 147) and non-players (N = 167) to evaluate the attractiveness of masculinized and feminized facial images, along with perception of gaming skills (high gaming skill or low gaming skill). The results indicated that game players perceived facial images accompanied by higher gaming skill information were more attractive than facial images accompanied by lower gaming skill information. However, for participants without gaming experience (i.e., non-players), gaming skill information did not influence their evaluation of attractiveness. We believe players might consider higher gaming skills as social knowledge which can positively influence people’s perception of their attractiveness; on the other hand, non-players did not perceive gaming skills as important social knowledge, hence attractiveness ratings were unaffected. We did not find any interactions between sexual dimorphism features and gaming skill information. To our surprise, only non-players exhibited classic sexual dimorphism effects in facial evaluations, whereas for players, the sexual dimorphism effect disappeared completely. We speculate that players rely more on social knowledge and less on configuration cues during facial evaluation, hence the effects of sexual dimorphism were obscured.

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Data availability

The data that support the results of the present study are openly available in Open Science Framework at: https://osf.io/b6ukf/?view_only=5155d45b0a1f482a9ab34f99e16edda0.

Code availability

The R code that supports the results of the present study are openly available in Open Science Framework at: https://osf.io/b6ukf/?view_only=5155d45b0a1f482a9ab34f99e16edda0.

Notes

  1. See the SuperData’s “2020 Year in Review” report, available at https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2021-01-06-digital-games-spending-reached-USD127-billion-in-2020, accessed on 26th June 2022.

  2. See the report of “Gaming Market - Growth, Trends, Covid-19 Impact, and Forecasts (2022–2027)”, available at https://www.mordorintelligence.com/industry-reports/global-games-market, accessed on 26th June 2022.

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Funding

This research is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 32100852 and 72002123).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Psychology, Shanghai University of Sport, Shanghai, China

    Xiangqian Li

  2. Laboratory of Social Psychology and Behavioral Science, Fudan University, Shanghai, China

    Xiangqian Li & Chen Xu

  3. School of Business Administration, Zhejiang University of Finance and Economics, Hangzhou, China

    Xue Lei

  4. School of Arts and Sciences, Rutgers University, New Jersey, USA

    Ruxue Xie

  5. Department of Psychology, Hangzhou Normal University, Hangzhou, China

    Shitao Chen & Chengyang Han

  6. School of Management, Shanghai University of International Business and Economics, Room 216, Lequn Building, No.1900 Wenxiang Road, Shanghai, 201620, China

    Shichang Deng

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  1. Xiangqian Li
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Xiangqian Li and Xue Lei share first authorship.

Appendix

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Table 3

Table 3 Results of the ANOVA that only includes fixed effects (no random effects), using Face Gender (male, female) and Sexualized Characteristics (masculinized, feminized) as within-subjects factors, and Gaming Skill (high, low) and Play Group (game player, non-player) as between-subjects factors
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Li, X., Lei, X., Xie, R. et al. Good video game players look better: exploring the relationship between game skills, sexual dimorphism, and facial attractiveness. Curr Psychol 42, 23206–23215 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-022-03454-8

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