Attachment to fictional video game characters in Pokémon Sword and Shield
Abstract
“They may be pixels but they’re my pixels” (Lewis, 2008, p. 1). Players do not realise how easily they get attached to the in-game characters they interact with, nor how they get so invested in them. Within this study, it was explored three possible ways of developing attachment to fictional, video game characters that the player has not directly made but rather, interacts with. An online survey was used to gather participants (N=45) for the experiment. The survey included several demographic questions, an edited Parasocial Interaction Scale (Yee, 2012) Interpersonal Reactivity Scale (Davis, 1980) and a Ten Item Personality Inventory (Gosling, 2003). Two Mann-Whitney U tests as well as a Spearman’s correlation were conducted to analyse the results. However, there was only a significant result regarding attachment and naming. There had been no prior quantitative studies in the field of fictional character attachment, so this study expands the possibilities in terms of research and furthers the understanding both on attachment and in relation to the use of qualitative measures in terms of experiments surrounding human emotions.
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