Good video game players look better: exploring the relationship between game skills, sexual dimorphism, and facial attractiveness

Abstract

Few studies have been done on the effects of video games on social perception, especially on the faces of players. The present study investigated how people’s gaming skill influences their perceived facial attractiveness, and also how sexual dimorphism features (masculine and feminine) interplayed with displayed gaming skill. We asked players (N = 147) and non-players (N = 167) to evaluate the attractiveness of masculinized and feminized facial images, along with perception of gaming skills (high gaming skill or low gaming skill). The results indicated that game players perceived facial images accompanied by higher gaming skill information were more attractive than facial images accompanied by lower gaming skill information. However, for participants without gaming experience (i.e., non-players), gaming skill information did not influence their evaluation of attractiveness. We believe players might consider higher gaming skills as social knowledge which can positively influence people’s perception of their attractiveness; on the other hand, non-players did not perceive gaming skills as important social knowledge, hence attractiveness ratings were unaffected. We did not find any interactions between sexual dimorphism features and gaming skill information. To our surprise, only non-players exhibited classic sexual dimorphism effects in facial evaluations, whereas for players, the sexual dimorphism effect disappeared completely. We speculate that players rely more on social knowledge and less on configuration cues during facial evaluation, hence the effects of sexual dimorphism were obscured.