Effects of Color of Clothes on the Impressions of a Male Character in a Video Game

Abstract: Clothes are one of the important factors which express personalities. It is true in the cases of characters appearing in video games. It is thought that colors play an important role to determine the impressions for the clothes and the person who wears them. In the present study, effects of color of the clothes on the impressions of a male character appearing in a video game are investigated. In the video game “CODE VEIN,” a player selects a human　avatar and the design of the clothes the character wears. The avatars and the clothes are produced by 3D modeling. In the present study, a male character and three shapes of clothes were selected. The clothes were painted in one color. The color was selected from the set of ten fundamental colors in the Munsell’s hue circle (red, yellow-red, yellow, green-yellow, green, blue-green, blue, purple-blue, purple and red-purple) and three achromatic colors (white, gray and black). In total, 39 different stimuli in which a male character wearing different clothes were constructed. Fifteen students of Kanazawa Institute of Technology participated in the perceptual experiment. The participants sat in a darkroom and watched a monitor display EIZO Flex Scan SX2462W. Each stimulus was presented on the display and the participants were requested to rate their impressions for the stimulus using 25 semantic differential scales. The rated scores were averaged over the participants and the averaged scores were used for factor analysis. The results of the analysis showed that the impression space was spanned by activity, potency and evaluation factors. The stimuli with warm colors (red, yellow-red, yellow and red-purple) were perceived as active. In contrast, cool colors and achromatic colors (blue-green, blue, purple-blue, grey and black) were perceived as passive. The results of the multiple-comparison tests showed that activity was greatly affected by hue. Red and black clothes were perceived as powerful. In contrast, green-yellow, green red-purple clothes were perceived as powerless. Among the achromatic colors, black was powerful, white was powerless and grey was intermediate. This implies that the brightness of the color affects the potency. On the evaluation factor, blue-green and white clothes were perceived as pleasant but purple-blue and purple were perceived as unpleasant. These results may reflect the cultural background. White colors are used for white coats of doctors, which should be clean. In contrast, purple-blue and purple are often used as the symbol colors of poisons. This might evoke the unpleasant impression for these colors. Then a multiple regression analysis was performed with the degree of preference as the criterion valuable and three factor scores as the explanatory valuables. The results showed that preference was determined by the evaluation and potency factors: The character wearing pleasant and powerful clothes were preferred and vice versa. Achromatic colors also tended to be preferred.

Keywords: Impression, Color, Video Game

DOI: 10.54941/ahfe1004996

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