- The results also applied on the other side of the equation. Players with higher relative skill rankings were more likely to make positive comments to the "female"-voiced experimenter than the "male"-voiced experimenter. Players with lower relative skill were more likely to make positive comments to the "male" than the "female." In fact, the number of positive comments a male player received barely budged as player skill changed.
Here's the study. I already find the opening of the abstract worrying. That's the beginning of an abstract. A completely unqualified sweeping statement that sexism is ubiquitous. For that matter, the abstract in general sounds as though it's a whole lot of thinking about stuff and not very much actual research. They've done a lot of untested speculation on what their numbers mean right there in the abstract and they admit to setting out to find exactly what they claim to have found. There are also confounding factors in the very nature of the experiment. Was the researcher playing well? Playing poorly? Were they doing so consistently? We can see that they started out with a very low rank and after only 168 matches managed to get to 50. To me that says that 50 isn't a significantly higher rank than 10. I'm not exactly sure where they're getting their ranking system anyway, as it doesn't seem to resemble Halo 3's multiplayer ranking system. Personally, I'm not a fan of the Halo series, but I do play other FPSes. If 168 matches gets you to a ranking that other players would consider to be "high" then the ranking system is completely meaningless. People who get into FPS games play them frequently for hours at a time, and ranking systems are typically designed to reflect that. So we have someone whose level of actual playing ability we have no idea of and who only ever gets to a rather low skill rank as our "control" as well as both of the factors we'd like to test. I'm also not sure how not saying anything and thus failing to provoke a response constitutes a control. Especially when they say they only had their coders examine instances in which someone responded to them. So they recorded some control sessions and then just threw them away? This whole thing sounds dicey. Drawing conclusions from 168 matches, ignoring all confounding factors, no matter how well documented, feels a lot more like using personal experience to argue something you already believed than anything with actual scientific merit.Gender inequality and sexist behaviour is prevalent in almost all workplaces and rampant in online environments.
They did a study on 126 matches of Halo 3 and only in TDM. That's such a ridiculously small sample size to be painting the entire gaming community with such a broad brush stroke.
I'm confused by this comment. (1) The paper contains the statistical analysis, and it's a significant difference. It could be noise, but that's unlikely (because statistics). (2) This isn't about the gaming community. The discussion clearly hopes to apply this principle (that misogyny is often an attempt to compensate for some social threat by attacking another group) to other settings. It's just a lot easier to mine for misogynistic comments in a game setting than elsewhere. (3) This paper actually is kinder to gamers than 2013 publication the data came from. It's not about how gamers are all misogynists. It's about how gamers who are bad at games are more misogynistic than gamers who are good at games, because they're insecure.
Can you expand on what you mean with the regards to painting the gaming community with a broad brush stroke? The abstract doesn't seem to be making overbroad claims, although perhaps the title of the story is overstated. I think hogwild gave a pretty good explanation of the paper's emphasis. It's of course dangerous to extrapolate from anecdotes but does your personal experience run contrary to this?
Warning: Lots of cursing ahead - mostly for explanatory purposes. TL;DR hogwild is right. I posted based on article title. FPS gamers are mostly angry teens. Other games exist with a more mature player base.
That said, the original researchers picked Halo 3, which is going to be popular with the teenager crowd, just as any FPS is going to be. CoD, Halo, CS, TF2, etc. are going to be largely dominated by the young teen to young adult crowd. They're probably guys and they're probably assholes. Combat is fast-paced, reactionary, and most people aren't worried about employing any real strategy. It's spawn, run, spray, and die. People are amped up and very hostile to friendly and enemy players. If you're better than someone, you're a no-life cocksucker who lives in mom's basement. If you're worse, then you're a scrub-ass retarded bitch. That's probably about 75% of the people I get matched with in CSGO. The other 25% either don't talk or aren't assholes when they do. Totally pulling these numbers out of thin air, but that's my guesstimate based on nearly 900 hours in CSGO alone. I personally am much more hostile when I play FPS over other types of games. I found one of the alternate explanations for hostility towards females the most plausible. It's a novelty to have a female actually talk in-game. It's like turning on a bug zapper or shooting off a flare. Everyone's been calling each other a faggot all day, but now there's a female here! We can call her a bitch or a cunt! It's new and exciting! I don't at all blame females for staying silent on the mic, or staying in alternate communication programs with their friends. I've witnessed maybe 2 or 3 games ever where the female didn't get hounded by people calling her names or dudes trying to get e-laid (or whatever the point of trying to hit on females on a game is.) Do this study with RTS, TBS, or 4X games and I imagine that you'd see a much different story. My only real data point on this are Scarlett and puCK, two professional StarCraft II players that are widely loved by the community. They're both transgender, and though you'll see a few hateful comments, both players have displayed such vast amounts of skill that nobody can really say anything against them. My hypothesis is that these games are focused on individual rather than a team effort, so the blame for winning or losing is resting squarely on the players shoulders. From my experience (~15 years playing StarCraft and StarCraft II) most players are more relaxed and simply don't care if you're male or female. You're either good or bad and your skill is what you're judged by. Maybe it's the people I choose to hang out with, or I could be very biased, but that's what I've found to be true in the vast amount of time that I've sunk into gaming. I think that I just don't want everyone in the gaming community to be viewed the same as FPS players. We're not all basement-dwelling neckbeards or tweaky 16 year-olds hopped up on Mountain Dew and Cheetos. Edit - I also really don't think that the researchers got to rank 50, or even played with rank 50 players in only 163 (I think was the number) games. Teammate response to prerecorded messages is also going to be much lower as you advance in rank because your team expects you to actually make accurate callouts.
Admittedly, I didn't realize that the article contained a paper. I just read through it between rounds of CSGO and it wasn't until hogwild mentioned the paper that I went back and read through it. I wrote my previous comment based on the title and content of the article and not the actual paper. After reading through the paper, I don't see the researchers attempting to apply their findings to the entire gaming community. In fact, they mention trying to use games as a learning opportunity to show that being bested by a female isn't the soul-crushing experience that men have evolved to believe it to be. I don't disagree with their findings for FPS games. They're certainly accurate based on the type of game they picked. However, I don't think that they quite understand that the gaming community is actually many much smaller communities that are all grouped under the umbrella of "gaming." I also don't think that people see themselves in a hierarchy where they are either dominant or submissive, but I do understand how one could come to that conclusion.
You'll also note that they supposedly recorded some instances in which they said nothing as a "control" but then only analyzed those 106 instances in which someone responded to them. In other words, they didn't include the control in their analysis.
It is a small sample size, and I didn't like the detour into evolutionary psychology ("Mating!" as the Bloodhound Gang say) in the original paper. Still, it would be interesting to see if this holds up. Maybe society could be nicer to people in a fail spiral so they stop lashing out. Probably a good idea anyway.
A part of me tells me that the type of statements that the experimental female or male was issued to say was too generically unsatisfying and not unique/gamer oriented enough to really entice the other players. If the statements were more about specific situations (Theres a guy at x or something unique about the particular team death match they were in) than generic statements such as "Alright let's do this team" then I feel they would have produced a much more nicer/sympathetic response, regardless of the gender of the experimental.Matches were divided into a control group—where the player was silent throughout—and two experimental groups where the researchers played the same set of inoffensive prerecorded statements (e.g., "Alright team let’s do this" or "That was a good game everyone") in either a male or female voice.