Want to play better? Try changing your avatar's gender

If you've played any recent videogames, chances are at some point you'll have spent an inordinate amount of time customising your character. Tweaking clothing, facial features, and body builds can add new layers of enjoyment to the gaming experience, and help us connect to the characters that we (at least in some series) play a large role in creating.

As well as changing how your avatar looks, many games now also give the option of selecting your character's gender. As Kim Szolin and colleagues from Nottingham Trent University explore in a new paper published in Entertainment Computing, this particular customisation choice can actually change how we behave in-game – both for better, and for worse.

This study involved 353 adult participants, most recruited from video game forums. Everyone who took part had played one particular well-loved title: Fallout: New Vegas, an open-world roleplaying game in which players act as a courier trying to survive in an apocalyptic landscape. Most participants (276) identified as male, and the rest as female (77).

Participants answered questions based on a save file from a previous game of Fallout to understand how they played and with what avatar. Firstly, they shared their own gender identity and the gender of their avatar, as well as how long they had spent playing. Next, they indicated how many quests they had completed; how many locations they had discovered; and how many non-player characters (NPCs) and enemies they had killed.

Analyses uncovered several interesting relationships between the players' gender, avatar gender, and in-game behaviour. In terms of quest completion, male players with a male avatar completed an average of 76 quests, compared to 66 quests when playing with a female avatar. For women, however, avatar gender had no impact on how many quests they completed.

When looking at the number of in-game locations discovered by players, female players with a female avatar found 30% more locations than those with a male avatar. In this instance, though, there was no significant difference in location discovery rates for male players playing as either gender.

There was no significant interaction between player gender and avatar gender on the number of NPCs and enemies killed – though perhaps counter to expectations, those with female avatars had a higher number of NPC kills than those with male avatars, regardless of their own gender. Men were more likely to kill NPCs than women.

Congruence between the gender of a player's avatar and their own identity seemed to improve game performance in several areas, chiming with other research suggesting that a visual similarity to an avatar can improve gameplay. The team suggests that increased identification with a character may be the driver behind this, engaging the player more deeply and improving their gameplay.

As for why female avatars had a higher NPC kill rate, the team argues that this may be to do with the game's "absence of physical world virtual users to reinforce societal expectations of gender and aggression." So, while in the real world women may be seen as less aggressive than men, a world in which gender roles are more regularly less fixed and binary may give players the freedom to engage in less stereotypical aggressive behaviour.

What wasn't covered in the study was gender identity in a broader sense. The team didn't explore whether participants were cisgender, transgender, or otherwise gender diverse — factors which may influence the exact ways players experience, relate to, or embody their avatars. The reasoning behind choosing different gendered avatars was also not probed, but future explorations of this could open up further interesting insights.

Read the paper in full:
Szolin, K., Kuss, D. J., Nuyens, F. M., & Griffiths, M. D. (2025). The Proteus effect in Fallout: New Vegas: Investigating gender-conforming behaviours in videogames. Entertainment Computing, 52, 100765–100765. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.entcom.2024.100765

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