Contours of virtual enfreakment in fighting game characters
研究了《街头霸王V》和《铁拳7》等格斗游戏中角色设计的虚拟怪奇化现象，发现性别和肤色导致设计差异，反映种族主义和性别歧视，但近期与来源地开发者合作设计的角色怪奇化程度较低。
Characters in fighting videogames1 such as Street Fighter V and Tekken7 typically reveal a phenomenon that we define as virtual enfreakment: their bodies, costumes, and fighting styles are exaggerated (1) in a manner that emphasizes perceived exoticism and (2) to enable them to be easily visually and conceptually distinguishable from one another. Here, using both quantitative and qualitative methods, including crowd-sourced surveys and analyses of game mechanics, we report on the contours of virtual enfreakment in those games. We specifically examine differences in character design across gender, national-origin, and skin-color lines. Disappointingly but not surprisingly, we find racism and sexism manifest as stark differences in character design by gender and skin color. This has strong implications because taking on the roles of these characters can have impacts on users in the physical world, e.g., performance and engagement, behavior, and understandings of others (Lim and Harrell 2015; Şengün 2015; Yee et al. 2012, Şengün et al. 2022a; Harrell and Veeragoudar Harrell 2012; Kao and Harrell 2015; Şengün 2014; Kocur et al. 2020). Although the differences are not always straightforward, female characters and darker-skinned characters (typically, characters of color) are enfreaked differently than their light-skinned male counterparts. Our results also reveal the strategic use of “unknown” as a country of origin for villainous characters. Through our mixed-methods analysis, we examine in detail how virtual enfreakment is influenced by sexism and racism, and our findings are compatible with information about the development history of the Street Fighter and Tekken franchises. However, we also find that recent characters designed in dialogue with developers from their regions of origin are some of the least enfreaked and most positively portrayed—suggesting the possibility of designing and deploying such characters for implementing anti-bias character designs within popular videos..