Understanding Children's Avatar Making in Social Online Games

TL;DR

This paper investigates why children aged 8–13 create and customize avatars in social online games and how monetization designs influence those choices. Through semi-structured interviews and gameplay observations of 48 participants across Roblox, Minecraft, Fortnite, and other platforms, the authors identify four primary motivations: accurate self-representation, experimentation with alter egos, social connectedness, and perceived gameplay advantages, alongside a distinct wardrobe effect where many collected avatars are underused. The study demonstrates that monetization mechanisms—free versus paid options, branded content, and collection incentives—shape avatar decisions and broader identity exploration, with implications for both engagement and potential overconsumption. The findings offer design implications for fostering healthy digital self-expression and social interaction in children, including strategies to balance individuality with social belonging, mitigate harassment, and align monetization with creativity; an anonymized avatar-visual dataset is also provided to support future work.

Abstract

Social online games like Minecraft and Roblox have become increasingly integral to children's daily lives. Our study explores how children aged 8 to 13 create and customize avatars in these virtual environments. Through semi-structured interviews and gameplay observations with 48 participants, we investigate the motivations behind children's avatar-making. Our findings show that children's avatar creation is motivated by self-representation, experimenting with alter ego identities, fulfilling social needs, and improving in-game performance. In addition, designed monetization strategies play a role in shaping children's avatars. We identify the ''wardrobe effect,'' where children create multiple avatars but typically use only one favorite consistently. We discuss the impact of cultural consumerism and how social games can support children's identity exploration while balancing self-expression and social conformity. This work contributes to understanding how avatar shapes children's identity growth in social online games.

Figures (10)

• Figure 1: An image board displaying diverse avatars created by children: the top row features Roblox avatars, while the first three on the bottom left are from Minecraft, and the rest are from Roblox.
• Figure 2: Avatar customization in Roblox's Avatar Editor. Children can customize their characters, clothing, accessories, head & body, and animation. Recommended items usually cost Robux (shown as a small coin icon bottom of items), the in-game currency.
• Figure 3: Avatars created by three child participants to represent themselves. From left to right: Avatars by P250, P59, and P222.
• Figure 4: Avatars created by three child participants to experiment with alter ego. From left to right: Avatars by P111, P140, and P12.
• Figure 5: Participant 81 felt the avatar could improve their camouflage and strength.