Toward Telemetry-driven Analytics for Understanding Players and their Avatars in Videogames.

A great deal of research has gone into understanding the relationships between social behaviors, player preferences, and identities in both real-world and virtual environments. In this works-in-progress report, we describe AIRvatar, a tool that telemetrically collects data such as session-based time durations and click events during the process of avatar customization within a videogame of our own creation. We present results from a user-study of 181 players, highlighting how social phenomena such as gender-related stereotypes of users can be revealed, particularly when players' self-identified real world genders contrast with the gender identities of their avatars.