Who is this avatar I see before me?

No, not the blue-skinned kind

Today’s share is one that hits close to home as I work in the marketing industry (not gaming though). It’s this one called 5 Hard to Swallow Pills for Better Game Positioning published on Push to Talk. A lot of this rings true for the sector that I work in, but also in talking about virtually ANYTHING that you want to sell, including yourself (yes, might want to give this a read and (re)position yourself as a content creator!).

Hello Scientist Gamer!

Behind every living thing is a set of instructions that, to some extent, dictates everything about us. We refer to these instructions as genetics or a person’s genotype — a sequence of building blocks (nucleotides) that tell the cell what to do. How those instructions get read and the effects that they produce, like our looks and behaviours, is called our phenotype.

The link between our genes (genotype) and our traits (phenotype) isn’t always clear. Some phenotypes, like eye colour, have a direct connection to specific genes. But most phenotypes are a result of interactions between constellations of genes. It’s hard to pinpoint a single gene that’s responsible for a phenotype.

A classic example of complex interactions between genes to produce a phenotype is cancer. Author Douglas Hanahan, in the updated version of Hallmarks of Cancer,¹ says

…human cancers develop as products of multistep processes.

For cancer to form, one genetic change isn’t enough. A whole host of changes, like evading growth suppression and stopping cell death, need to change for the phenotype of cancer to show.

Figure from the updated Hallmarks of Cancer article. The left circle shows the 8 hallmarks along with 2 enabling characteristics (tumour-promoting inflammation, which is the capacity for tumours to make the body react as to favour tumour growth; genome instability and mutation, which refers to disruptions in how the body prevents chaos from wreaking havoc on its genes). The right circle shows additional hallmarks (in blue) and enabling characteristics (in red).

Phenotypes can tell us about genetics too (sometimes)

Sometimes, looking at a phenotype can give us clues about the genes behind it, especially when the link between phenotype and genotype is direct. Eye colour is one such example: the genes involved with brown, green, or blue eyes follows a straight forward interaction. You can make a reasonable guess about a person’s genetics with respect to eye colour, just by looking at their eyes.

Behaviour is another phenotype that can tell us about what makes us tick; however, because they can be influenced by both genetics and the environment, it’s trickier to pinpoint an exact cause to the behaviour. But behaviours can be great for telling us something about our physical and mental health.

Many of us, myself included, spend a large portion of our days connected to the internet and living a virtual life. Those virtual lives are represented by our chosen accounts and avatars, which act as our digital personas. Like our physical behaviours, our actions and relationships in the virtual world, through and with our avatars, can tell us something about our physical and mental health.

These behaviours in the virtual world, or digital behaviours, are collectively called digital phenotypes, similar to the physical phenotypes that we see. Although these digital phenotypes won’t tell us anything about our genetics, they can be used to assess our health status. And that is exactly what the researchers of these two studies² decided to do.

How are we connected to our avatars?

The researchers focused on the relationship with avatars as the digital phenotype to assess health. To do that, they recruited 565 adult and adolescent gamers and evaluated their relationships with their own avatars using a questionnaire called the User-Avatar Bond Scale.

This scale measures the relationship between a person and their avatar in three dimensions: immersion, identification, and compensation/idealization. Immersion refers to how closely matched a person’s offline needs are with that of their avatar’s (e.g., socializing online as a reflection of the need to socialize offline). Closely related with this is identification, which is how much a person feels they are alike to their avatar. Finally, compensation/idealization is the degree to which a person wants to be like their avatar in their offline life (so they create the ideal version of themselves in the virtual world).

By measuring the user-avatar bond at the start of the study and 6 months later, and assessing their risk for developing depression and anxiety at both times, the researchers hoped to find the types of bonds that could lead to depression and/or anxiety.

Photo by Joice Kelly on Unsplash

Investing a lot in an avatar could signal depression and anxiety

We all get invested in the characters that we create for ourselves, especially in games. The researchers found that the more a person becomes immersed in their avatar, the more likely they were to develop depression and anxiety. Part of that reason is thought to be due to the lines between their online self and offline self being blurred. That blurring can start to create a gap in how they see themselves and who they really are. It’s potentially dangerous because the different needs of each of these personas could be confused. But it’s especially harmful when combined with what the researchers found next.

Creating an idealized avatar could signal depression and anxiety

Part of what makes games (and our avatars) so fun to play is that they allow us to do things we couldn’t do in real life, like flying or shooting lasers from our eyes. But when that avatar starts to be an idealized version of ourselves that compensates for things we can’t do offline, it can cause issues in how we start to see ourselves.

The researchers already found that immersion — how closely matched the online and offline needs of the self are — could predict depression and anxiety. They also found that the closely related dimension of compensation/idealization can also predict depression and anxiety.

Both immersion and compensation work to increase the gap between who we think we are and who we really are. It’s a bit of a vicious cycle: we create idealized avatars that we get immersed in, only to face a reality where our faults are magnified, so we go back to create an even more ideal avatar. Over time, that gap widens, and the realization of that gap could lead to depression and anxiety.

Not everyone is at risk just because they create idealized avatars

It’s important to note that not all players who create idealized versions of themselves will be susceptible to depression and anxiety. Some of us are blessed with the ability to recognize this difference and act appropriately; unfortunately, it's harder for others to do the same. In fact, an argument can be made that without interventions to help those prone to mental health issues, online activities only service the rich to get richer. Those endowed with the ability to separate their online and offline self will benefit from the interactions they experience online; those less fortunate might end up in a cycle that keeps on widening the gap between their online and offline self, leading to reduced mental health.

However, knowing that there is a link between our relationship with our avatars and an underlying mental health condition means health care professionals could use this information as part of an overall assessment of health. This digital phenotype, along with other digital and biological phenotypes, could help create a more accurate view of our health. That, in turn, could lead to faster diagnosis and treatment times.

What’s missing?

These findings are correlational, meaning they show a relationship but not causation. Even so, when combined with other correlated factors, the user-avatar bond could be a powerful data point for assessing health.

Another limitation of these studies is that they relied on self-reported questionnaires, which can be biased. Self-reported questionnaires aren’t necessarily the best way to get answers, as they can be influenced by things like social desirability (“which one is the most acceptable answer?”) and recall (“I think this is what happened”).³

Despite some of these limitations, I’m excited for a world in which my every day actions, including creating an avatar in a game or playing games, could be used to assess my health, without having to book yet another appointment with the doctor to be poked and prodded.

If you want to read the article for yourself, you can access it for free.

The study on the link between the user-avatar bond and depression: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022395623006027

The study on the link between the user-avatar bond and anxiety: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0001691824001756?via%3Dihub

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1. https://aacrjournals.org/cancerdiscovery/article/12/1/31/675608/Hallmarks-of-Cancer-New-DimensionsHallmarks-of
This landmark article describes the key characteristics and genetic changes required for most cancers to form.

2. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022395623006027
This one is about the user-avatar bond and depression.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0001691824001756
This one is about the user-avatar bond and anxiety.

3. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4862344/
This is an article about the types of bias that are seen in health research, including self-report bias. It’s always good to keep in mind where the information and data are coming from, rather than taking the data at face value.