Destiny, The Game That Could Predict 'Peak Beard'

Destiny players really want beards.

Like many role-playing games, the new 'shared-world shooter' from the creators of Halo lets players customize their character's facial features.

After choosing a race (human, 'awoken' or robot-like 'exo'), you can create a unique avatar by adjusting everything from face and hair style to eye color and skin tone. There's just one thing missing: beards.

Players have been demanding beards ever since Destiny's beta phase (there's even a petition). The game's developers, Bungie, designed prototype beards, but the feature missed the initial release because it wasn't considered a priority. Bungie's director of production has promised it will appear in a future update, recently telling Kotaku: "I don't know when you're going to have beards, but I'm pretty sure by the end of time there will be plenty of beards in Destiny."

But besides being important to players, there's another reason to look forward to Destiny's forthcoming facial hair: it could help scientists predict real-world trends.

"It would make a really good research project," says Professor Rob Brooks, an evolutionary biologist at the University of New South Wales. "It would tell us a lot about the forces shaping men's grooming in the real world."

Peak Beard

Many of Hollywood's hottest stars – the likes of Ryan Gosling and George Clooney – are currently sporting beards, and Brooks suspects some Destiny players are also being influenced by this fashion trend. "It strikes me that the demand for beards in that game may well be a symptom of the fact that beards are still so very popular at the moment."

Not everyone thinks beards are so hot right now. Some journalists tired of the trend long ago, which is why they got excited about a study by Brooks, his colleague Barnaby Dixson and their student (and Miss World Australia finalist) Zinnia Janif.

Published in Biology Letters, the team's research on facial hair preferences seemed to suggest the trend had hit its apex, prompting the media to ask:

Have we have reached peak beard?

The Australian study involved showing 1,666 people (213 men and 1,453 women) a series of photos – 36 men displaying one of four levels of beardedness: clean-shaven, light stubble, heavy stubble, and full beard. For the first 24 photos, participants saw only clean-shaven men, only bearded men, or an equal number from each beard level. This conditioned them to perceive that a given frequency of beardedness was common (e.g. 24/24 clean-shaven). Participants were then shown photos of the remaining 12 men – three from each beard level – and asked to rate their attractiveness.

When the first 24 photos contained relatively little facial hair, participants rated bearded men in the remaining 12 photos as more attractive. When there were initially few clean-shaven men, a fuzz-free face was highly rated.

People therefore find a particular facial hair fashion more attractive when it's rare. In other words, a clean-shaven few will stand out from the hairy hordes, and vice versa.

Evolutionary biologists call this phenomenon 'negative frequency-dependent selection', which simply means that rare features have an advantage over common traits.

One example from nature is rare color patterns on male guppies. Rare males look sexier to female fish, thereby giving them a mating advantage that spreads the genetic variants underlying their rare traits through the guppy gene pool.

But a preference for rare traits has an obvious flip side: once something becomes common, it loses its novelty. A feature that's initially attractive loses its value as more and more individuals jump on the bandwagon. Color patterns on male guppies are ignored by fickle females, beards are no longer cool.

Based on Facebook profile pics, Brooks and his colleagues estimate that about 60% of American men under 40 are currently clean-shaven, whereas the frequency of full beards is around 20%. So has society already reached peak beard?

Unfortunately for fashionistas and pogonophobes (that's those who fear beards), the popularity of facial hair could continue to rise before it falls. The trend is over when scientists say it's over. Brooks predicts that we'll reach peak beard at some point, but that doesn't mean the time is now. "I don't think that beard-growing is on the way out for a couple of years yet,"

Peak beard is the point when the fashion reaches its highest frequency among individuals in a population. And the only way to prove that a trend has actually peaked is to follow changes in its popularity in a population over time – and that brings us back to Destiny.

Tracking trends

Researchers could study Destiny's characters to track the frequency of beards in the game's population. How would they do that?

Ideally, Bungie would collect information on every character's facial features then pass anonymous data onto scientists. To avoid ethical issues, players might be required to opt-in or sign-up to the research project.

Regular surveys are an easier approach. Characters spend most of the game wearing a helmet, which obviously hides their head. (So you probably won't see a researcher tagging along on a public mission or event, wandering around with a virtual clipboard during a firefight and politely enquiring about your choice of beard.) Surveys could also be carried out via self-reporting, asking players to send screenshots of their avatars. Another possibility is recruiting in-game research assistants who would make regular trips to Destiny's social hub, The Tower, and count the different kinds of facial hair.

Even a simple counting approach can provide powerful statistics. One of the best examples of this is a 1976 study by economist Dwight Robinson in the American Journal of Sociology. He flicked through every issue of the London Illustrated News between 1842 and 1972, catalogued the pictures of each gentleman, then calculated the frequency for each type of facial hair.

Robinson's graphs show that facial hair fashions would wax and wane over time, with trends appearing in waves: society reached 'peak sideburn' in 1853, 'peak beard' around 1892, and 'peak moustache' in 1918. When these various 'whisker forms' were combined, he found that by around 1885 over 90% of men had facial hair.

The economist also worked out the length of time between each fashion wave, and was surprisingly prophetic for beards. He predicted a 120-year cycle, and when you add that figure to the previous occurrence of peak beard in 1892, you get 2012. (The New York Times claimed the current trend was started by hipsters in 2005, when Urban Dictionary defined it as the Riker).

But more recent fashion trends suggest there isn't a fixed amount of time between peaks, making Robinson's predictions unreliable. The 'wavelength' of a cycle can also be too short to detect on an annual scale: moustache frequency now peaks every year around 'Movember', for example.

Technology has helped drive grooming fashions. Before the 20th century, many men would have had to visit a barber for a clean shave. Since Gillette's invention of the disposable safety razor in 1904, it's been easy to achieve a clean-shaven look, and today we have electric shavers.

While shaving is quick, it still takes time to grow facial hair. In Destiny, your beard will appear and disappear at the push of a button on your controller. You also have to deal with the consequences of having a bad beard day.

"The costs of the behavior are changed because it's trivial to slap a beard onto a computer game," says Brooks. "You don't have discomforts, you don't have itch, you don't have people changing how they respond to you in real life. So it's got all the upsides of a social dynamic but none of the costs, none of the uncertainty."

In-game fashions should therefore rise and fall much faster that in reality, and studying these virtual trends would shed light on the forces shaping men's grooming in the real world.

Communication through customization

If you've never played a role-playing game like Destiny then you might be wondering: 'Why so much fuss over face fuzz?'

Some players customize their character to look cool, others want an avatar that reflects their real-life appearance. Many men grow a beard because they think it suits them, others do it for religious purposes. And the reasons for facial hair preferences don't need to be mutually exclusive: a giant ginger beard looks awesome anywhere.

Most importantly, the ability to customize your character in a multiplayer online game helps you stand out from the crowd. Unlike color patterns in guppies, however, most gamers don't add a beard so their character looks sexually attractive to other players.

In fact, facial hair preferences in gaming culture and human culture are probably driven by the same natural forces.

Biologists call facial hair a 'secondary sexual characteristic', a feature that marks puberty and communicates the transition from boy to man. Darwin believed that beards evolved in humans because females found them attractive. But in this case, the bearded genius was wrong.

In a 2011 study by Barnaby Dixson, women shown photos of men didn't rate the attractiveness of bearded faces any higher than clean-shaven ones. Instead, both men and women judged that bearded men look older and more aggressive, with a higher social status.

So facial hair preferences aren't simply driven by sex appeal. "That preference is not 'beards are attractive or beards are unattractive', but that beards are a subtle, context-dependent signal," Brooks explains. "And we have a fairly sophisticated set of preferences for picking-up the varied messages that might be in somebody's facial hair."

Subtlety and context is illustrated by a 2013 study by Dixson and Brooks: while women rated heavy stubble as most attractive, they judged masculinity based on the amount of facial hair – an effect that was amplified during the fertile phase of the menstrual cycle. Both sexes assumed that men with full beards would make better dads.

Facial hair therefore communicates maturity and masculinity. Destiny could not only confirm that conclusion, it might also add to existing knowledge of social behavior.

Beards and behavior

As a hybrid of the role-playing game (RPG) and first-person shooter (FPS) genres, Destiny could also be used to study how the relationship between facial hair and behavior is influenced by demographics.

RPGs enable you to do things you wouldn't – or couldn't – do in real life, like wearing a beard to explore the masculine side of your persona. That includes women. Although 47% of gamers are female, it's widely believed the vast majority of FPS fans are male (there are female FPS players but the numbers are unknown).

Data from Destiny could help answer some unconventional questions. Do female players give their male characters facial hair to look more aggressive? Are you more likely to give your character a beard if you're too young to grow a real one? Are Americans more attracted to a magnificent moustache?

Psychologists and social scientists have used virtual worlds like Second Life to study interactions between individuals, but there's been little research on population-scale trends over time. One reason is that such observations can't be done in retrospect.

Following the Corrupted Blood incident in World of Warcraft, where a highly contagious and virulent plague caused a virtual pandemic, epidemiologist Nina Fefferman co-authored an opinion piece in Lancet Infectious Diseases entitled 'The untapped potential of virtual game worlds to shed light on real world epidemics'.

Fefferman concluded that "The Corrupted Blood outbreak in World of Warcraft represents both a missed opportunity and an exciting new direction for future epidemiological research", but pointed out that the incident couldn't be used as a model for disease as "the infrastructure needed to accurately record data on the outbreak ... was not in place".

This could be avoided with Destiny because beards haven't yet been added, so scientists could prepare for their introduction and start tracking facial hair trends from day one.

So how closely would Destiny's fashions match real-world trends?

"It's not going to be perfectly the same, but it would be a very good predictor of how things would happen in the world," says Brooks, adding that games have the advantage of removing or simplifying complicating factors. "So it's very much exactly like an experiment in which you control for – or abstract – certain confounding variables."

If you're willing to help a scientist study facial fair trends, let Professor Rob Brooks (and Bungie) know in the comments. With enough data, Destiny could even predict the next peak beard.