Tracing Gender Affordances in Avatar Customization: A Methodological Framework

Han's paper proposes a methodological framework for analyzing gender affordances in avatar customization systems, arguing that gender is not encoded in a single toggle but is distributed across interacting options, boundaries, and defaults. Motivated by recent games such as OlliOlli World and Saints Row that remove explicit gender selection in favor of sliders and modular choices, the study contends that existing approaches, particularly McArthur et al.'s Avatar Affordance Framework, focus too narrowly on visible widgets to capture how gender is actually constituted in these systems. Drawing on Butler's conception of gender as performatively constituted, the author builds on Iantorno and Consalvo's analysis of intersecting class, race, and gender in CRPG character creators.

The framework is organized around four analytical lenses: Gender-Related Options, Option Interactions and Navigational Distance, Boundaries of Gender Expression, and Defaults and Invisible Rules. Together these lenses direct attention from explicit options to the dependencies, restrictions, and hidden assumptions that shape which gender expressions emerge readily and which remain difficult to realize. The method is applied through four flexible exploratory pathways, namely free exploration, interface hierarchy mapping, boundary testing through preset recombination, and tracking of default and fixed attributes, which researchers can iterate in non-linear order.

The framework was developed through a comparative analysis of twelve games spanning multiple genres, platforms, and developer locations, released between 2020 and 2023, with the sample weighted toward recent titles to reflect growing customization complexity. The study is methodological rather than quantitative, and it does not report aggregate statistics or survey data. Its stated contribution is to decenter the single "gender option" as the unit of analysis, offering scholars a structured means of comparing customization systems and giving designers a basis for evaluating how their systems enable or constrain players' gender expression.