So the #GamerGaters are mad about a new study that suggests that some of the most dickishly misogynistic male gamers are quite literally losers. That is, men playing video games like Halo and Call of Duty online tend to lash out at women players when they’re doing their worst.
Looking at the behavior of a number of men and women over the course of 163 games of Halo 3, researchers Michael Kasumovic and Jeffrey Kuznekoff from the University of New South Wales and Miami University found that
lower-skilled players were more hostile towards a female-voiced teammate, especially when performing poorly. In contrast, lower-skilled players behaved submissively towards a male-voiced player in the identical scenario. This difference in gender-directed behaviour became more extreme with poorer focal-player performance.
In other words, the more of a video game loser they were, the more of a misogynistic loser they became.
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.
In other words, they hate losing … to a girl.
The researchers argue that the entrance of larger numbers of women into the dude-heavy world of video games is especially threatening to “[l]ow-status and low-performing males,” who
have the most to lose as a consequence of the hierarchical reconfiguration due to the entry of a competitive woman. As men often rely on aggression to maintain their dominant social status, the increase in hostility towards a woman by lower-status males may be an attempt to disregard a female’s performance and suppress her disturbance on the hierarchy to retain their social rank.
If this all sounds to you like a plausible explanation for a lot of the anger driving #GamerGaters, you’re not the only one to see the connection.
A recent article on the study on Yahoo News suggests that,
[a]s gaming has traditionally been a male-dominated pastime, these findings could go some way to explain 2014′s Gamergate furore. Several high profile female game developers were targeted with a torrent of misogynistic abuse, including rape and death threats, coordinated by factions of male gamers using sites like 4Chan and Reddit.
And this is what has the #GamerGaters on Reddit’s KotakuInAction subreddit pig-biting mad. In a thread complaining about the Yahoo News piece, the regulars show just what losers they really are by lashing out at … women.
Evidently forgetting that the study in question was conducted by two men, a Redditor called Katastic_Voyage won more than 130 upvotes with a lovely rant declaring that
There’s a huge freaking difference between shit talking, and bullying.
But most of these articles and “papers” are written by women, who live in a woman’s world, and don’t understand the first thing about what it’s really like to be a man. The others are by men who are basically women but doesn’t realize it–they were likely forced to grow up in a woman dominated, catty, passive-aggressive world.
Ok, my bad. The researchers might appear to be men, but are probably “men who are basically women but doesn’t realize it.”
And somehow this all has something to do with metal music:
Woman call all men “dumb” because that’s what they call anything they don’t understand. It’d be like someone who likes classical music calling metal dumb. Even if they’re actually related. Even though there’s plenty of beauty and complexity in metal… they don’t ever dive into it so they deride and dismiss it.
It IS real music, mom! (Sound of bedroom door slamming, followed by the muffled intro to “Enter Sandman.”)
So they take things like:
The need to compete? They think it’s violence.
The need to shit talk? They think it’s bullying.
The fact that men can look at other women and not cheat? It blows their minds that men can actually feel pleasure just seeing a woman of beauty… and that’s it.
Uh, I thought we were talking about video games. Did some mean lady just break up with you?
A fellow called Zakamaru, replying to Katastic_Voyage, decided to show how not mad he was about women invading “male spaces” by getting mad about women invading “male spaces.”
It’s what happens when a bunch of women get into male spaces and some fail to understand it.
Gaming has always been competitive. I can’t even begin to count the amount of times I was called various names and derogatory remarks, but it doesn’t fucking matter. You get insulted all the time, and it takes a special type of person to actually take offense to that. …
It’s not that we hate women. With gaming being a predominantly male hobby, it’s going to have elements of masculinity, competitiveness, and testosterone floating about. When people shit talk, they will use any sort of “weakness” that you have and attack it. If you’re unskilled, you’re a noob/scrub. If you’re an obvious underaged child, you get called a kid. If someone needs a quick all-purpose insult, you’re now a faggot.
When some women see this, they immediately think that it needs to change to fit their worldview. To them, these insults are simply unacceptable, and are “x-phobic” or whatever tumblr buzzword they feel like using today. Never mind the fact that gaming was born from a bunch of socially awkward men who carved out their own space with their own culture and lingo. No, now you have to cater to ME, because I’m a GIRL.
Boy, you guys really put those dumb lady researchers (who aren’t ladies, but who maybe sort of really are) in their place.
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@kirby, Fabe:
That sounds great. My mod-fu is weak but if you tell me which ones to get then I’ll get them. I’m in GMT but won’t be able to put a lot of hours in anyway.
Still, it would be awesome to play it with people. Are we going to play survival or sandbox? How do people feel? I like survival mode because it provides just enough difficulty to make me feel good about achieving things.
@katz:
The old sims weren’t so much hard as simply uninterested in being fun when they could be realistic instead. I remember putting in the hours in SimEarth when I was 10-12, and that thing was not a childrens’ game in any sense.
Nowadays games actually want you to enjoy them rather than write your dissertation on them. What madness is this?
@EJ, I’ve also held off playing minecraft with others because I worry about griefers, I can’t believe those guys will target children players. I don’t let SJ play online with other players because of that (besides the usual risks of children being groomed online).
I’m cautious about renting a realm because I already spend too much time online and I’m reluctant to start paying per month. And I only have a vanilla server. But other than that a Mammotheer realm sounds really cool.
I remember when video/computer games became a thing. I never had any at home, my mother hated that kind of thing, but I always wanted to play whenever at my best friend’s house. Remember when it was a matter of putting in a cassette tape? I used to love Lemmings.
Snork Junior is a budding gamer, given he’s four and already he’s moving on from his minecraft obsession to other games. I try and keep him on creative sandbox games like Roller Coaster Tycoon, and Bridge It, I think they’re good for his development.
@EJ, I prefer survival mode too, it offers more challenge than creative mode.
(My apologies for the use of the word madness in that context. I was not thinking.)
Sn0rkmaiden, I can’t speak for anyone else (especially if I’m not hosting the server) but if we had a Mammotheer server then I would have no issues with Sn0rk Jr playing on it.
@EJ, that’s lovely, but I must point out, four year olds not held back by stature, motor skills or physics can be pretty wild. I’ve had to discourage him from deliberately spawning pigs straight into lava, or filling pits with villagers and zombies.
But if I the server happens and I get invited I’ll bring him with me. At least I can trust you guys not to go around griefing each other.
Oh boy, now you’ve got me started. Teal Deer incoming.
I’ve played on a few small multiplayer servers, and it can be fun if things are dealt with the right way. A friend of mine has a brother that owns a server, so I do have the occasional admin backing should things go awry. (Also, the owner thinks my buildings are hella cool, so there’s that.)
I personally think it’d be fun to have a semi-co-op server where we can work together, or we can work alone, or both. It’d be fun for me. I’ve always wanted to run a Minecraft store/bar/tavern on a server! (I’ve tried before, but it never worked out because the server was always too sparsely populated. ; n ; ) Teamspeak would help greatly with that, if anyone’s interested in that idea.
Mods are awesome, but it depends on which kind of mod/modpack you want to play with. There’s mods for everything, really. There’s your basic mods that help the game play/run better, there’s your core mods that help mods run, and then you get into the fun shit like playing God with dinosaurs and shooting lightning from your hands and becoming death and such.
It’s all a matter of what you’re into, and what level of intricacy you want. I could recommend a few packs:
– Yogscast Resonant Rise (Project Flux): This is a balanced mod pack following the current Yogscast server and their videos on YouTube. It has a variety of different mods to cater to all sorts of preferences.
– Natural Magic: This is a modpack that focuses solely on some well-known magic mods, but there’s also dinosaurs, and a few mods to make storage and decorating a house easier.
– FTB Monster: This is a HUGE mod pack with a wide variety of mods. Not for the faint-of-computer.
– Mage Quest: This is another magic-focused mod pack, but this has quests, and focuses on some lesser-known packs, but still has a few of the well-known favorites.
As for some individual mods I could recommend:
– Buildcraft: This adds all kinds of machines and pipes to the game. Very useful for mining and it’s great for people who are more technical.
– Thaumcraft: The closest analogy I can compare Thaumcraft to would be alchemy. You figure out what stuff is composed of, and you can build things from there. (Also, you can make cute little golems that can farm, gather, guard, and do other things for you, and you can have a wand that shoots MOTHERFUCKING LIGHTNING! Pechew!)
– Witchery: This is actually very close to what actual witchcraft is. It focuses on nature, potion making, and crafting.
– Magical Crops: This is a mod that allows you to craft and grow seeds that create any resource in the game! Very useful for a multiplayer server, as resources can become scarce.
– Pam’s Harvestcraft/Growthcraft: Both of these are food mods! Pam’s adds lots of new foodstuffs to Minecraft (MMMM, Nutella!), which is mostly cosmetic, but it adds a lot of fun to the game! Growthcraft adds a few new food items, and allows you to brew alcohol.
– Not Enough Items (NEI): NEI is a mod that allows you to search the item base for whatever item you need, and it will allow you to see how that item is crafted, or what it’s used for with the press of a button! This teams up great with What Am I Looking At? (WAILA), and Inventory Tweaks, which allows you to sort and move your inventory with the press of a button, rather than a hundred clicks!
– Mr. Crayfish’s Furniture Mod/Bibliocraft: Both of these are atheistic mods mostly. Mr. Crayfish’s has lots of usable furniture and house decor, and Bibliocraft focuses a lot on storage, with lighting, chairs, and tables in the mix. (I would recommend Decocraft, but it’s VERY resource heavy, and has drug my computer into the pits of Lag Hell more than once.)
There’s more that I love, but this is getting too Teal for me, and it’s late. : P
@ Paradoxy
That link is brilliant; thank you. I’ll probably still have to get a book for the more advanced stuff, but those vids are a really useful intro.
Pity you don’t do WordPress, we could pay you to do the updates for us. I know, a woman doing tech stuff! But hey, we like to live on the edge 😉
Just because the video game industry was (and still is mostly) marketed to boys/men, does not mean that it belongs to them!! I am not sure why they chose to target men/boys for consumption of video games, but they did. It seems to me that gendered marketing is the key here and it is pretty shady what has happened to all forms of entertainment.
Still, marketing aside, many girls picked up the hobby. The difference is that because of the strong cultural gendering of hobbies and entertainment, there were less of them and they stayed in the shadows for the most part.
I have played video games since I was a little girl, but I have never played online/co-op…ever. Firstly, being poor, secondly being that most of my video gaming in childhood was way before that was an option. Once it was an option, I had already absorbed the message that people online were not very nice and I didn’t want to deal with that. However, I have continued to play and support the industry avidly for many years now.
We have been silent for long enough. It is great that the video game industry is now finally hearing our voices and seeing that they always had us as a market. Sorry boys, you never did own this hobby, you just were lead to believe that by gendered marketing and the silence of the girls. The industry is embracing progress and things are going to change, you can either get on board or be left behind. I for one will continue to love gaming and I will always be a gamer.
Falconer: If you’re still thinking about Fortune and Glory, I can’t really recommend it.
In addition to the problems you’ve noticed, the gameplay is pretty tedious. You have to roll a dice to move (instead of knowing how much you can move like in Pandemic or Arkham Horror) which can slow the game right down and give you one or two turns before you even get to an adventure.
The adventures themselves are a nice idea, but take a comparatively long time to complete. So the turns in which you can’t do anything can drag on. Even at our best it takes hours to win, and they aren’t hours of careful strategy and tense planning because you don’t know in advance who or what you will need to beat an adventure. The only valid strategy is to throw more players at the problem, and hope they roll high enough to all get there…
I know sweet FA about video games, but perhaps I can chip in with this related observation.
We’ve just had the women’s football world cup. The England team did really well. Now football probably fits the “traditional male space” myth (although in the 1920’s women’s football was a much bigger phenomena than men’s).
Now I know as much about football as I do about video games but my mates who are football obsessed and it seems guys generally, have had nothing but admiration for the women. And this isn’t the patronising “Aww, didn’t they do ok for girls” sort; the women’s team is being held up as an example to the men’s teams in terms of determination and guts.
In fact I’ve noticed a new meme consisting of a picture of a woman shrugging off some major injury compared to a guy writhing around in agony after some minor contact; and it’s the men clicking ‘like’.
It’s interesting that women getting a higher profile in sport is seen as inspirational rather than threatening now.
Yes, yes, yes to Guns of Icarus. I love that game so much. My friend group stopped playing it, though, and my one experience with random multiplayer was—er, not a good one. But playing it with friends is pretty much the best (I love playing Engineer).
I played WoW for about a year. I picked it up in Pandaria and played for a few months into the current expansion—I liked it, but I got to the point where I needed to dedicate more time and energy the end-game content than I was willing to. Everything started feeling like a chore after that, and I fizzled out.
I was mega into Minecraft for a long time. I haven’t had much time for gaming lately, but I would happily be an occasional obsessive builder on a Mammoth server. (I’m one of those people who views Minecraft primarily as an excuse to build cool stuff, and the survival aspect as providing interesting obstacles to building cool stuff.)
Thank you to those who have quenched my curiosity about Age of Empires 3. I was a big fan of both 1 and 2 (and currently have the HD release of 2 on Steam), but I never made it to 3. My brother and I sunk houuuurs into 1 and 2, and we would always play cooperatively against the AI. We still occasionally put in a session on the HD version.
Currently my quasi-obsession is Trials Fusion. Does anyone else play that?
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Re: the original post—I think a big, big thing that gamerbros tend to miss about trash talk is that your context is super important. As an example, my gaming friends are currently head over heels for DOTA 2 (which I watch, but do not play). They trash talk each other like no one’s business. But they truly are equal opportunity about it, and they tease each other for their gameplay, throwing around “scrublord” and “n00b” and “tryhard” to any gender, always with laughter, always in response to things that are actually happening in game.
And the “always with laughter” part? That’s key. The thing is, these people actually know each other. They can jokingly call their friends “scrubs”, because it is already well-established that they like and respect one another. They are all well aware that none of them are pros, and while of course they are always pushing to get better, they are realistic about the fact that sometimes they’re going to make game-costing mistakes, because that’s just kinda how this whole thing works. They arrange games with each other because they like playing with each other, and so they have a safe context to be sarcastic and all-in-good-fun-insulting. Everyone gets the lingo, everyone is okay with it, and some even wear their scrublord badge with pride. In short: everyone actually has fun with it.
But when you join a random game, and are stacked with either teammates or opponents that you don’t know, you no longer have that context. Calling a perfect stranger a scrub, even if not deeply hurtful, is incredibly rude. It’s exactly the same way you can’t call a stranger a pet name, even a positive one like “sweetie”—it is WEIRD, because you don’t know them. Just the same, you don’t have permission to call them by an insulting name, even if it’s not that bad, even if you mean it all in good fun. You don’t have the relational context to support it. You don’t know if they will find it funny or offensive. It’s rude. Don’t do it.
And of course, racist, sexist, ableist, and homophobic slurs are a whole other realm of awfulness, no matter the context.
@Koopiepatra:
I haven’t played Guns of Icarus for about a year so my skills will be a little rusty. However, I used to be quite a good engineer – if you feel up to braving online random matches then we can form our own team and take on the world. A Mammoth ship would be a magnificent thing.
(Which is to say that if we’re both engineers, then we just need to recruit a gunner and a pilot and we’re golden.)
@Paradoxy:
Thanks for that! I of all people can’t complain about teal dears, and it was fascinating.
For the Mammoth minecraft server, I’d like to ask that we go easy on the mods, at least at first. I haven’t played anything that isn’t vanilla, so the mod learning curve for me will be fairly steep as it is.
(Kootiepatra, not Koopiepatria. Sorry.)
@ Alan Robtershaw
I don’t remember who said this or where I saw it; might have been here but…Someone was saying that Macy’s in the 50s or 60s had put out a survey to their customers asking whether they’d continue to shop their if Macy’s hired black people. A lot of people answered that they wouldn’t. For whatever reason, Macy’s hired black people anyway and noticed no drop in sales or customer traffic.
I’ve also noticed a similar thing with video games. Douchebros will cry entire oceans over Anita Sarkeesian advocating for women to be better represented in video games, both in terms of numbers of female characters and their portrayal, right? But then games like The Last of Us come out and are hugely popular.
The Dark Souls series also comes to mind for me. Not that it’s particularly feminist but it’s a game where you can be, really any gender. The character creation system uses binary gender terminology but mechanically it’s able to produce a pretty much unlimited spectrum of characters from stereotypically masculine men and feminine women, to completely androgynous characters to feminine men and masculine women. There isn’t much of a plot to them either, there’s just lore you gather by reading descriptions on items you pick up, so the story is very much whatever you want it to be and thus there are (arguably) no sexist tropes to be found. There are definitely more male characters than female but the female ones aren’t hypersexualized. Hugely popular series of games and you don’t hear anyone howling about femicommunizi conspiracies to ruin games in association with them.
TL;DR I think equality is just one of those things where the anticipation of it is far worse (for those who feel threatened by it) than the thing itself. I firmly believe that, if equality could be achieved by some magical means without having to let anyone know in advance that it was happening, none of this wailing and gnashing of teeth would happen. You’d end up with manospherians claiming this was what they were aiming for all along and my, isn’t it a good thing the feminists didn’t get their way while we all experience near-fatal eye-rolls.
Adding to my last post, movies like Gravity also come to mind. There’s no particular reason for Sandra Bullock’s character to have been female. She just was. One of the highest grossing films of whatever year that was. Alien is another example, where Sigourney Weaver’s character was actually originally written as male. You don’t get people grousing about how they just can’t buy Ripley being female.
@Pandapool & spacelawn
Yes, my problem with CoD is basically also what has been brought up earlier: I felt that it got stale and repetitive approximately after the first Modern Warfare, endlessly churning out samey sequel after sequel. Though I’ve heard it said that BLOPS2 was a breath of fresh air; I might have to try that out sometime.
You’ve also mentioned Titanfall as being a good CoD-esque game, but I was personally disappointed exactly by the Titans turning out to be not much more than an afterthought, despite being in the title. As a long-time fan of the MechWarrior games, that was a letdown to me.
(For those not in the know, MechWarrior is a shooter/simulator hybrid focusing on giant stompy robots; it actually feels like you’re piloting a four-storey tall walking tank. Observe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkRnxAs50lU )
@ sevenofmine
Yeah, the ‘Alien’ script was specifically written with the characters gender neutral. Having said that, the notes said and *two* of the characters could be women, so it’s perhaps not a bastion of pro feminism. Probably ‘fair for it’s day’ though to quote TV Tropes; and they did make the lead a woman and that seemed to work ok.
And I still maintain that the “Stay away from her you bitch” scene from ‘Aliens’ passes the Bechdel test.
@ Alan Robertshaw
I didn’t mean to imply Alien was necessarily pro-feminist. Just that when stick you women in roles that aren’t specifically written to be female, nobody bats an eye. Because, lo and behold, women are, in fact, people and the vast majority of shit that happens to people isn’t gendered, nor is the way people cope with it. I honestly think that, if media just stopped pandering to gender stereotypes, like cold turkey, there’d be barely a ripple.
I often think the ideal of equality that a lot of manospherians have in their heads really isn’t all that different from what we’re working towards. The problem is that they’re also working from a whole flock of bad premises and faulty information (helpfully provided for them by hucksters like Paul Elam) which is leading them away from the conclusion they’re trying to reach.
@ sevenofnine
Yeah, I was going to raise the point that Judi Dench was the best thing that happened to the flagging Bond franchise; but I suppose her gender was an issue, albeit one minor aspect of the character. The rest of the time she was just “M”. This reflects the real world situation when Stella Rimmington took over MI5. There was a bit of comment at first (“M” becomes “F” from ‘Yes, Minister’) but after the initial comments it became a non issue and the Soviets didn’t take over so she was presumably good at the job.
I have a bit of a soft spot for the film ‘Doomsday’. It’s a love letter to 80’s action flicks and done very well. Essentially the main character is just Snake Plisken, but played by a woman. It doesn’t make a bit of difference to the film.
Belladonna
Lol I remember my whole family getting together to watch the first Indiana Jones at my aunts house, she had gotten a VCR and we wanted to see how it worked, that was probably 85-86ish. My family didn’t get one for several more years (too expensive), though we would occasionally rent one at the video store. The microwave was a pretty big deal too, we didn’t get one of those until I was probably 14 or 15 and it was so cool! It’s amazing how much the world has changed in one generation, now my kids watch movies on their cell phones and wouldn’t have any idea what a VCR is.
I’m in for any Mammotheer Minecraft server. … I need to stop volunteering my limited free time away.
@Katz: Wow, SimAnt is more hard core than I could tell from the ads in the comic books I saw.
@Bacon: Thanks for the miniature review of Fortune & Glory! I guess my head was turned by the Indiana Jones-looking title.
@Alan Robertshaw: You don’t even have to wait that long. Vasquez asks Ferro about Ripley just after they all thaw out. If Ferro isn’t named in the montage that follows, Hicks calls her by name when he calls for evac and dust-off.
@Sunny: I remember my folks having friends over to watch Raiders. I remember the Paramount mountain dissolving into the actual mountain. I was on my way to bed so I had to wait several years to get traumatized by melty face.
I think that was on a rented VCR, though. When we got our own VCR a couple of years later, the first thing my dad recorded on it was Letterman.
I’ve got to remember to check out Darkest Dungeons, as well.
@Falconer – yes, check out Darkest Dungeon. It is by far the best use of my fun budget I’ve invested in in a LONG time.
The part that has continually baffled me about the “gamergaters” is that they are wrong.
Gaming is not and never has been a “traditionally male only pasttime”. These are young boys rewriting history.
From the beginning of tabletop there have been women who played. I have been one of them and most of my female friends have also played, and when video games came out and brought those games to life as MMOs and FPS, we played those too. I will grant that there was never a 50-50 male female ratio in the early days, but I would say anywhere from 10-25% of players were female. And the shit-talking thing simply wasn’t there. Geeks were shy and sensitive to that kind of teasing, being used to getting it from the rest of the world – they didn’t want it when among their friends.