Children’s Avatar Preferences and their Personalities

Computer games are the most promising tools meeting the children’s needs stemmed from the new digital technologies. Thus, educational games are considered as effective ways providing these. However, to make an educational game more effective, one needs to know children’s preferences and factors affecting their choices. One of the factors is character features of the games because most children place themselves in the characters and may prefer a game for that reason. This study aims to describe general features of the characters in games by comparing the children’s personalities. In order to analyze their personality, children were answered a questionnaire including personality tests measuring openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism. To do this, avatar (game character) was asked to be created from children by using Avatar Studio 1.0 program and a personality test was conducted. Also, demographic data were gathered and semi-structured interviews were conducted to control reliability the created avatars.