Researchers chose to collect a record of specific characters in the video games. They kept a record of every female character in the games to collect measurements of their appearance. The general research method would be quantitative because the method uses a larger population of characters in the gaming world and because they select a specific gender in the characters this becomes a sampling frame that helped them measure the female body sizes to uncover a pattern we see in video games.
To choose the game consoles and video games, they obtained data from The National Purchase Diary, an American market research company. Their data came from March 2005 to February 2006 and this included the major game systems sold in the United States which include Xbox 360, Xbox, PlayStation 2, PlayStation, Nintendo Gamecube, and PlayStation Portable, Nintendo Gameboy Advance, and Nintendo Dual Screen. The sampling frame contained the top 150 that were played within the game systems. About 17 games were available on multiple systems, which lead to 133 games out of 150 being tested io in the research.
These 133 games were the most successful in the business from March 2005 to February 2006. A game player, who was an expert but not one of the coders, would play each game for the first 30 minutes on the easiest setting. The rest of the game would not be recorded for data. They did this because the first 30 minutes of the game is content every player goes through and views since they start in the same location. During the thirty-minute content, every character that appeared was recorded in the sample as an individual unit and then later coded.
There was a total of 8,572 characters coded. For the analysis, only the female characters that had enough details (because some characters were too small to obtain reliable measurements) were kept which ended up being 134 female characters. After the female character was imported to Adobe Photoshop to obtain body measurements such as heights, head width, chest width, waist width, and hip width which were measured in inches.
After documenting the female body measurements four research questions were asked. Research Question number 1 asked if the female body sizes in the video game portray the body sizes of the average American female. After conducting the data the female video game characters were reasonably different in every aspect compared to real females in the US. The female characters had larger heads, smaller chests, smaller waists, and smaller hips. Research Question 2 asked whether female videogame characters’ proportions would change by the level of realism. They discovered that the more realistic the game was the more perception of female bodies was greatly and falsely advertised with the smallest waist, bigger breasts, and wide hips. The less realistic the video game was still had a false body image but less dramatic than those realistic video games. Still false. Research Question 3 asked if artifacts of processing power would emphasize or deemphasize certain body proportions. This questions if video games can perfectly display human shapes. They mentioned how the Xbox 360 may look drastically different in detail versus the Nintendo DS because of the screen size. Smaller screens have less processing power which will lack in detail of body parts. Therefore games with higher processing power have a better screen for displaying the body. More realistic video games tend to be available to X Boxes and consoles connected to the television so it is not a surprise that these characters result in having smaller waist and sizes versus those portrayed in the Nintendo DS with smaller screens. Research Question 4 asked whether children’s videogames games would contain different body imagery rather than games not suited for children. It was found that even though the image of the female bodies did differentiate from the real world it also did not compare to those video games made for adults. Characters in games rated for children had larger heads, smaller chests, smaller waists, and smaller hips compared to the higher-rated games. Characters in the games for children were proportionally smaller and less dramatic than characters in games rated for adults.
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