This is amusing. A simple study watched people playing the game Halo, and correlated skill at the game with how they treated other men and women players. It turns out that losers tend to be more disparaging of women.
As they watched the games play out and tracked the comments that players made to each other, the researchers observed that — no matter their skill level, or how the game went — men tended to be pretty cordial to each other. Male players who were good at the game also tended to pay compliments to other male and female players.
Some male players, however — the ones who were less-skilled at the game, and performing worse relative their peers — made frequent, nasty comments to the female gamers. In other words, sexist dudes are literally losers.
A chart from the Halo study that shows how nice male gamers were to other males (dotted line) and females (solid line) during gameplay. Men always treat each other about the same. But the better a player gets, the more likely he is to be nice to ladies. (Kasumovic et al)
I did detest part of the conclusion, though.
In each of these environments, Kasumovic suggests, a recent influx of female participants has disrupted a pre-existing social hierarchy. That’s okay for the guys at the top — but for the guys at the bottom, who stand to lose more status, that’s very threatening. (It’s also in keeping with the evolutionary framework on anti-lady hostility, which suggests sexism is a kind of Neanderthal defense mechanism for low-status, non-dominant men trying to maintain a shaky grip on their particular cave’s supply of women.)
That evolutionary argument is also in the original paper, and it’s not much better there.
We suggest that low-status males increase female-directed hostility to minimize the loss of status as a consequence of hierarchical reconfiguration resulting from the entrance of a woman into the competitive arena. Higher-skilled players, in contrast, were more positive towards a female relative to a male teammate. As higher-skilled players have less to fear from hierarchical reorganization, we argue that these males behave more positively in an attempt to support and garner a female player’s attention. Our results provide the clearest picture of inter-sexual competition to date, highlighting the importance of considering an evolutionary perspective when exploring the factors that affect male hostility towards women.
Argh. There are assumptions galore in there: that the human ancestral condition was a male-dominated hierarchy in which low-status males could obtain access to sex by oppressing women. Why should we think that, rather than that the behavior is a consequence of contemporary culture? This was a study of anonymous video game players, by scientists in Ohio. You can’t make evolutionary conclusions from that!
(Also, the lines in that graph are artificially clean: you look at the raw data, and you see a whole bunch of noise, with some losers being gracious and some winners being assholes. As you’d expect.)
But that’s what evopsych is all about, making sweeping conclusions from limited data and small sample sizes.
I kind of figured that something like this would be more because the High skill players tend to be so because they love the game the most and are happy that people of the other gender like the game too. Low skill players tend to be more casual gamers who are just doing whatever seems fun at the time.
This doesn’t even slightly surprise me. The gamers who run their mouths and think it’s cool or “edgy” to trash-talk women tend to be so-so at best.
To clarify the chart given is about a rank obtained in the game. There is also a chart showing in the article:
1. Men give more positive comments to women that have a much lower skill rank than them and give much less to those with similar rank.
2. Men give out many negative comments the more they are dying more in the game, and men are much less negative towards women when they are getting more kills.
It is all incredibly interesting and rather telling.
Hate to be a stickler here, but “gaming skill” isn’t a monolith. Each genre requires unique skill sets, and someone good at one kind of game may still suck at another type. I for one am great with adventure games, but am only barely competent at shooters (like, single player).
That said, my own bias says that “gaters” probably are all dudebros who play nothing but call of duty, so this seems a fair assessment.
Hmm that’s weird, the reference to the #gamergate hashtag must have been removed from the original paper.
Also, I wonder if there’s a confounding variable here… Could it be age?
Lachlan, the title is somewhat tongue in cheek (PZ is saying that gamergaters would be a subset of the ones spewing negative remarks disproportionately at female players. Gamergate was not explicitly investigated or implicated by the study).
Speaking as a game enthusiast, when you play a team-based game, you can find toxic players everywhere. The big problem is that those players tend to break down social cohesion. If you’re being stuck on a team for somewhere between minutes to an hour, usually the team that wins is the one that makes a plan and most players cooperate to execute it effectively.
Some players get angry when they start to lose, and they immediately start blaming other players. This tends to cause a backlash even among people who are a little less high strung, and I’ve seen a lot of games just degenerate into pointless bickering, and even a winning game can come crashing down after a minor setback causes a huge chain reaction of temper tantrums.
So, in general, assholes tend to cause lost games. I can’t necessarily tie this directly into the unequal treatment of men and women, except that asshole gamers are very likely to be misogynists as well. Hence correlation.
@1
making sweeping conclusions from limited data and small sample sizes.
To be fair, some of paleontology makes pretty sweeping conclusions from very limited data (often single fossils represent a species and they are far from complete). I’d stick with the criticism that the researchers used a lot of unfounded assumptions that presupposed their conclusions, because it looks to me like they sure as hell did, although I have not read the full paper to confirm.
Well yea. The trash-talkers play the game for the trash-talk. The gamers play the game for the game.
#8, Russell: Yeah, I played WoW for a while, and totally gave up on dungeons and raids for that reason. One wipe, and there was almost always a subset of assholes who’d get acrimonious and start cussing out other players, rather than trying to fix the problem and help coordinate people. The exceptions were wonderful — what? people just trying to have fun and talking to each other? — but they were too rare to make it worthwhile. One guy whining about stupid losers after a wipe pretty much guaranteed you’d get a string of wipes.
There were also the people who’d start in with the sexist/homophobic/racist comments the instant you got in a group with them, but I’d always drop instantly, so I don’t know how well they did.
Yeah, gotta be something something back in the Stone Age that caused this. Couldn’t be that those dudes were raised to believe themselves superior to the people with girl cooties so that when they start losing against girl cootied people they get very angry and frustrated.
Couldn’t be that they subscribe to “winning is the only way to play” so they take personal value from how well they perform in a silly video game*. Gotta have something to do with mamoths.
*Some MRA GG dudes actually believe they could pull of a military invasion because they’re good a playing first person shooter games.
Dark Jaguar, #5
I wish it would be limited to that. But you’ll find rabid Gamergate support among niche gamers and PC enthusiasts. They may not be the one doing the harassing and threatening, but they do echo all the talking points.
It is unavoidable to some extent. I find the best way to deal with players like that is to try to remain polite and calm initially, but then let them know “We all want to win, but if you keep this up I will have to block your chat, and I don’t want to do that.” Then follow through, and suggest other players do the same. Also, do NOT respond to trash talkers on their own level, even if you are clearly a better player than they are.
Sometimes diplomacy works and sometimes it doesn’t. But IMHO being a stabilizing influence on your own team can greatly increase your win rate in the long run. It’s unfortunate that we have to deal with that, but sometimes it’s unavoidable. Games are fun and winning is satisfying, but quite apart from that, the interpersonal stuff is a separate skill to master and it carries across games of all types.
Incidentally, if anyone is going to be at the Gateway to Reason on Friday afternoon, I’m touching on some of these issues in the first talk of the weekend, which I’ve titled “Playing to Win.” Anyone who finds themselves in the general vicinity of St. Louis, the Friday after next, should try to come! :D
I’m currently playing Final Fantasy 14. What Russell and PZ mentioned indeed happens in this game but it feels more like the exception rather then the norm.
The game is really good at rewarding players for working together. I can’t tell you the number of times we’ve kicked the asshat out of the group, found a new player then stomped all over the dungeon.
The people who work against the social cohesion of the group don’t get stuff done.
@Russell
Will your talk make its way to youtube sometime?
@jehk I am hoping it will, but every time I think it’s getting recorded, there’s some kind of snag that prevents it from being posted. I gave the talk in LA in April, but the recording was only available on DVDs that you have to pay for, so I couldn’t put it online.
There’s some research suggesting that frustration with games is linked to aggression. I’d suggest this study is just another demonstration of this correlation. The worst Halo players would be the most frustrated. Lashing out with sexist garbage is aggressive behavior.
Why are they lashing out at women? That’s just the product of a sexist culture. Put a black man in the game, and I expect racial slurs would fly. The entitled always attack the vulnerable.
That’s my personal experience with Xbox Live, at least. The culture there is so toxic, I just muted everyone. We talk about Reddit, Twitter, and YouTube trolls, but they’re nothing compared to Xbox trolls.
It seems a lot of people base their assumptions about how our ancient ancestors behaved on the old cliché of a caveman with a club dragging an unconscious woman by the hair.
Data point: Last night I was at a gaming center with my 13 year old son Ben, playing Left 4 Dead 2 on a couple of computers next to each other. We had fun playing a campaign on easy mode, but he decided he wanted to play Versus mode so we could be zombies sometimes. I told him it probably wouldn’t be that fun but he insisted.
Turns out that he had an open mic and we couldn’t figure out how to switch it off. So when he was talking to me, the other players on our team were typing “Tell that little kid to shut the fuck up.” Sometimes, players are just mean and will latch on to any characteristic that is most noticeable.
I wonder how you separate attitude from skill. I mean, would the high-skill male players verbally harass female players if they were doing poorly and the low-skill male players stop if they were doing well?
I can’t tell if this would actually make a difference to stopping it, since the idea of a hierarchy — that male players feel like they can put female players below them — still exists and that’s what we need to dismantle.
There’s a much simpler conclusion than the one they drew. Losers lash out, and see women as easy targets. People winning the game don’t generally feel the need to lash out.
Maybe but I think skilled players try to improve and work out problems when something goes wrong. Just throwing around blame and slurs doesn’t help someone improve. It’s stops the process completely.
If you like games like WoW but don’t want to deal with other people, just play Dragon Age!
In my experience, losers in games also tend to make assumptions about the people they are losing to/with. I play online games from time to time, not very often, but when I do they’re usually team-based games like DOTA or Team Fortress. My username is gender-neutral, and I never never never use voice chat, and I’ve noticed that when our team is not doing particularly well, or I’M not doing particularly well (which happens relatively often), I get gendered insults (guess which gender is the target).
When winning, it’s all “good game, bro.”
Sigh.
But that’s what evopsych is all about, making sweeping conclusions from limited data and small sample sizes.
…with big sweeping conclusions compensating for small sample sizes.
Also, note that the graph plots number of positive comments, not number of negative comments. It doesn’t show that male gamers of high skill insult women less, it shows that women of higher skill get more positive comments than men of higher skill. So it shows that the gaming community patronises women. Unless I’ve read it wrong.
You’ve read it wrong, Thumper. Or, rather, it’s strangely worded and I can see where that interpretation could be made, especially with the line:
The mix-up of pronouns is I believe unintentional, and would read better if “a player” were replaced with “he”. Interpreted otherwise the graph wouldn’t match the conclusion of the study, and may be an entirely different study.
@26, you’ve read it wrong it doesn’t show how many positive comments someone gets, it’s the number of positive comments someone gives. It’s actually right there in the graph description…
So, taking for granted that the artificially smooth graph is correct, why do high-skill gamers direct more positive comments towards women than to men? That doesn’t seem like a good thing exactly to me.
Flirting because of self-confidence?
@11: I used to play WoW, and yeah, that was a thing that I ran into more than a few times.
Mr current drug of choice in that genre is Final Fantasy XIV, though, which has a far less toxic community in most aspects. (Plus, in keeping with the grand tradition of JRPGs, you spend like half of the game killing gods.)
Russell Glasser @ 8:
Yup, yup, yup. I play a lot – and I mean A LOT, like over 2000 hours – of Dota 2, and I see this all the time. Once someone starts the temper tantrum spiral (often by blaming the team for their own fuck ups*, with plenty of slurs thrown in for good measure), the game is pretty much lost. It is possible to sometimes calm them down, and I’ve even turned a losing game into a winning game a few times that way, but it’s rare.
(* DOTA jargon time! I play hard support almost exclusively, and my “favorite” fuck up is a carry whining about needing wards, when there’s already 4 out on the field and they just didn’t pay attention to the map and got ganked.)
Expecting to see that graph on Skepchick’s Bad Chart Thursday soon.
This looks like junk science.
As a gamer for the last 20 years, 15 of which have been online, this doesn’t ring true for me. Shit players and shit attitudes certainly go hand in hand, but those players are awful to everyone. They will use extra gendered language for women, and make with the rape threats and such, very similar, using almost as much gendered language, with fewer rape threats but plenty of death / assault threats.
At the high end of the team game skill level, you see better treatment of both genders. Praise, constructive criticism, tips and advice, commiserations when things go wrong… these are typical at high levels, and they are directed towards both genders again. I think Thumper’s #21 is much closer to the mark than this ‘study’: losers lash out. I’d quibble that they don’t see women as being notably easier targets – because all targets are pathetically easy when you’re online and anonymous – but the language does emphasise sexual violence toward female targets, somewhat replacing the generic violence used against males.
My main experience with strangers in WoW was being assigned to a PUG already underway, where the desperate healer would ask, “You know how to tank, right?” Fortunately, I would pass muster, and was usually brought to as many more dungeons as the healer could manage. Somehow being compared to a line of frustrating players makes you a saviour, and that defuses a lot of the tension. I was never that good, it’s more like stop-and-go traffic finally starting to flow; it doesn’t matter how fast you’re going compared to the speed limit, just that you’re progressing again.
I’ve also been on the other side, included in raids because I was punctual, but chronically under performing. I practiced hard for hours every week, running third-party addons that analyze performance and pouring over the data, trying in vain to improve my DPS. The hostility takes a toll, especially when you agree with the underlying complaint. I wound up logging in to raid, and logging out immediately afterwards. On days without raids, I wouldn’t log in at all.
Even with the success I had tanking, I felt the sting of the scorn I dodged. I had horrible performance anxiety about queuing for new content. Everybody else would be a day or so ahead of me in experience, so they’d be impatient and hostile. I’d put it off to do something less stressful, and wind up even farther behind.
And I’ve also been on the other other side, tilting with retrospectively humiliating fury. I managed not to unload on other players, though. My rage was always displaced from my poor play onto even less threatening targets: the game’s design/implementation, and the ‘unfairness’ of not succeeding in what I was trying to do. The funny thing is I knew I was full of shit the whole time. I guess it’s not your conscious mind that’s tilting, it’s from somewhere else, you’re simply handed excuses that you grasp tightly to avoid accepting inferiority. I regret it deeply, and thank fuck I grew out of it.
The moral seems to be that reactionary hostility hurts you no matter where it’s coming from or where it’s going.
I don’t care for the ‘ev-psych’ nonsense but as far as the graph goes I’d be inclined to think that shouldn’t be surprising – after all, who wants to hang out with losers?
Why does this surprise anyone? Gamergate wasn’t (isn’t) about games it was a raid against a woman organised by right wing trolls from 4chan’s /pol board who already had a reputation for organizing raids against women and others they deemed uppity. Membership in /pol doesn’t correlate with gaming in so much as it correlates with reactionary, right wing political beliefs and a vicious tendency to lash out against women.
Gamergate was never about games, that’s not to say that there aren’t douche bag gamers – take a gander at http://fatuglyorslutty.com/, but GamerGATE is an entirely separate bag of nuts.
@ vytautasjanaauskas #28
Oh yeah. D’oh.
As siggy says though, “why do high-skill gamers direct more positive comments towards women than to men?” That still smacks of patronizing to me, or possibly flirtation. still, I guess both are miles ahead of misogynistic harassment, so it’s a start!
madscientist wrote:
Plenty of people. There’s enough game for people of all skill levels. No, the thing people don’t want to hang out with are the sore losers.