TY - JOUR AU - Bakan, Ugur AU - Bakan, Ufuk PY - 2021/07/15 Y2 - 2024/03/29 TI - Examining the uncanny valley effect in virtual character design for digital games JF - Journal of Print and Media Technology Research JA - J. Print Media Technol. Res. VL - 10 IS - 2 SE - Scientific contributions DO - UR - https://jpmtr.org/index.php/journal/article/view/26 SP - 119-132 AB - <p>Today, games, where visuality is at the forefront, have similar features with a cinema project in terms of both the content&nbsp;and the technologies used. When the realistic appearance of robots and digital designs that do not fully resemble&nbsp;humans exceeds a point, the images created leave their place to negative emotions such as disgust, fear, and hate.&nbsp;The feeling of disgust emerges when the level of affinity reaches the highest level. The negative mood status which&nbsp;took its place in the literature as an uncanny valley is an important reference for game designers and researchers.&nbsp;Masahiro Mori’s uncanny valley theory about humanoid robots is used by animators and video game designers in the&nbsp;content creation process in video games, every day. In this study, the design evolution of Lara Croft, who has found an&nbsp;important place in the video game world, has been evaluated in terms of exposure to the uncanny valley. This study&nbsp;has used images and videos representing Lara Croft, the strong and smart female icon of the Tomb Raider games. A&nbsp;total of 67 undergraduate students (32 for experiments and 35 as a control group), 34 male (50.7 %), and 33 female&nbsp;(49.3 %), voluntarily participated in this study. In this study, the quasi-experimental design was used with experimental&nbsp;and control groups, since the data collection tool used to compare the experimental and control groups did&nbsp;not allow them to reflect the student’s past game experiences. The findings of this study suggest the following design&nbsp;principles: to use a high polygon count to design attractive, ideal faces that are not spooky.</p> ER -