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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As far as good games to play with friends, I highly recommend Telephone Pictionary. It just takes markers and note cards. There are no points and no one can win or lose. You just have a lot of fun.
Short rules desc:
1. Get a stack of note cards equal to the number of people playing.
2. Give everyone a marker/pen/crayon.
3. The first person writes a phrase on the top card and passes it to the left.
4. The next person reads the phrase and puts that card to the back. Then they draw a picture on the next card to communicate that message. Then they pass the stack of cards to the left.
5. The next person looks at the drawing. Puts the card to the back and writes a phrase on the next card based on the picture.
6. Continue alternating like this, putting phrase on one card and drawings on the next u til the stack gets back to the start.
7. The stack should arrive back to the first person. When they put the last card to the back their phrase will be there. Now you can flip through the cards and see how the message changed.
8. You can actually have everyone pass a stack of their own around so everyone is playing simultaneously.
Reading these cards is hilarious and the game is age appropriate as long as the people who play are.
Also going to call bullshit on the whole idea that women are new to gaming. I’ve been around since Atari 2600 days. Everyone who didn’t already have one, wanted one. It was never a boy thing. Gaming is just another one of those things that just gets labeled a boy thing because boys consider it worth doing. If you’re a boy, you can’t be seen liking things girls like because eww. It’s not a matter of women being new to gaming; it’s a matter of women refusing to be erased from gaming anymore.
I also experienced a near-fatal eyeroll at the guy saying women call everything they don’t understand dumb. Dollars to donuts that guy is first in line to shit on, say Justin Beiber or the Twilight movies, etc.
Ha you can also do that game online:
http://drawception.com/
Pandemic is a fun board game, and yes, it’s wholly co-operative. Either everybody wins or everybody loses.
I got a chance to play it at a convention a while back, and we managed to beat the game. Barely. We were in a situation where everybody knew that when the next round finished we were going to be dead if we didn’t solve this now, and I managed to come up with a sequence of plays where if we all did everything in the right order we could just squeak out a win.
Granted, it’s hardly the first ‘everybody together against the game’ style of game, though agreed that there’s been a serious renaissance of them lately. The original Arkham Horror was published in 1987.
I’ve had some epic games of that.
http://pre00.deviantart.net/6d18/th/pre/f/2015/204/2/2/paper_telephone_by_gckatz-d92i2ck.jpg
Need? Need?
*looks up need*
*double checks Maslow’s*
*Googles “do men and women need different things”*
*gets depressed and stops*
It’s funny, I first started using the term “gamer” in the late 80s or early 90s when I went to science fiction conventions, and gamers were the people who hung out in the dedicated “game” room playing tabletop games of various types. There were always a few women in there. The men didn’t seem to hate them. They seemed happy to see me if I went in.
I met my husband at one of those conventions. He fail in love with me after date when we went back to my apartment, and I taught him to play Cribbage, and I said to him, “I think you are like me and would rather play a game than do just about anything else.”
We own a game store. We raised a daughter and a son who both play games. My daughter and her friend have made it their summer goal to play through all the Final Fantasy games in chronological order. I don’t think they’re going to make it since they’re only on IV now, but I admire them for sticking through it enough to finish II and III.
We all just bought FFXIV and have been casually playing it together when we feel like it. My daughter’s been tanking, my husband healing, I’ve been melee dps, and son’s been ranged. At some point, I’m sure we’ll mix it up.
So, honestly, the last few years, I’ve been pretty confused about where all these guys suddenly crawled out of to come and tell me that gaming is “their” space and has always been “their” space.
It’s true, I’ve always noticed and loved (/sarcasm) the self-fulfilling prophecy argument that “we made a bunch of games mostly to appeal to guys, and more guys bought them, so we made a bunch more like that, because financial reasons.”
Anyway, I’ve played plenty of MMOs, but I’m allergic to talking to or playing with other people outside my family these days. Just don’t want to deal with them. So like, I got a couple of toons to 100 in WoW, but haven’t even played any of the Draenor dungeons yet, let alone the raids. I’ve just resigned myself to the fact that I can pretty much level a toon and play an MMO like a single-player game (I even turn off Trade and General in WoW, usually), then bail for the end game.
Love this game. We still own the original copy my husband bought back then. I think it’s worth some money these days. 🙂
You are so on it! I was just going to tweet you the link to BBC’s article.
Where did this notion of video gaming being male territory come from?
I’m a girl-child of the 80’s, and almost all of my predominantly female friends had an NES/SNES or Sega by the late 80’s & early 90’s.
They were the ultimate child amusement device of the day, and before Nintendo’s incredible domination I could be found playing lock n chase or donkey kong on my Intellivision. I spent every single hard earned cent of my allowance on a new weekly game rental for at least a decade of my life.
Did I miss the “No Girls Allowed” announcement or something? It definitely wasn’t my brother asking for a Sega Game Gear (most underrated handheld ever) or a PlayStation, and he certainly wasn’t spending his paychecks on an N64 or a Game Cube. My console love affair only cooled because of my greater love of MMO’s, and I still own a WiiU, PS4/3/2 and an XBox One/360.
I’ve never had any sort of problem finding or making female (and male) friends with the same gaming interests, when exactly did we become some rare and (unwelcomed) magical unicorn of games?
Admittedly I don’t have much time to play anymore, kids, career, husband and obligations and whatnot, now my gaming tends to come when certain little someone’s need an old pro to double jump a cliff, or help plot out what skill tree to fill out on their elf mage.
We also LARP and play D&D together, gaming is cross-gender and cross-generational and has offerings for every age and interest, anyone who thinks otherwise isn’t doing it right.
@belladonna:
I played Horror on the Hill once. I think it’s the new edition of Arkham Horror. The tiles had all warped terribly, unfortunately, but we still had lots of fun.
The folks on AgainstMensRights pointed out that the study hardly deserves the name as the people running it were basically just looking for something to confirm the bias of their evopsycho bias about genders and didn’t even bother to at least make the experiment a clean one.
It’s really more of an opinion piece dressed in a lab coat.
I said:
So, that was a weird spelling fail.
I think their delight in harassing those they perceive as noobs and children is telling too. They must suck, or they wouldn’t fear being beaten by a beginner.
@Wtfcakes:
1! Contact!
I don’t think there was an announcement. I think some boys hanging out with their guy friends decided they didn’t see a whole lot of girls talking video games, so it must be a guy thing. (Can you say selection bias, children?) Then they felt like they could make themselves at home with video games. Then the women (who’d been there all along) asked them to put their pants on, please, can’t you see us, we’re right here next to you. Cue year-long tantrum.
@Weirwood Just so. Way too many people seem to think shit talking is the same thing as a strategy and if they lose it’s clearly because you weren’t playing right,not just that they, you know, lost to a better player.
@Falconer
Wasn’t Horror on the Hill a D&D-related thing? Maybe I’m not remembering right?
Anyway, I think there’s still a new edition of Arkham Horror itself in print now. With expansions.
That’s interesting. It’s been many a moon since I did anything psych study-related, but don’t most psychological studies generally posit a rough idea of what the researchers expect to find (based on the findings of previous related research) in the introduction/abstract? And then conduct the study to see if the findings support/disprove their hypothesis?
I have been playing Rocket League quite heavily for the last few days and I have found there to be very few people who will talk in-game or after. I have never been trash talked once, even after scoring on my own net. I imagine things might be a little different in ranked matches.
The game is fantastic, you will not regret it.
I really don’t understand this gatekeeper mentality these dudes have. When I enjoy something I will do my damnedest to try to get everyone around me to try it, and be absolutely delighted to find someone who shares my interest. The only time I am even marginally disturbed is when there are people who, say read the book series out of order or something like that. And then it’s not a “You’re not a REAL fan ” thing, it’s a *cringe* “why would you so that to yourself” thing, and I keep it to myself, because I know that just because I’M rabidly fixated on completionism, not everyone is, or has to be.
Why would anyone want to chase off people from the things they love? What do they have to gain from that?
@Belladonna993, well heck, you’re right. B5 HORROR ON THE HILL is a D&D module, and one I have read, at that.
Arkham Horror from Fantasy Flight Games looks like a roaring-20s Lovecraft type thing. Defo not the thing I played.
It was Betrayal at House on the Hill, looks like.
I mean, harassing people for implying they harass people is kinda GG’s bread & buttah.
@Falconer, ah, I never played Betrayal at House on the Hill, but it looks fun.
And yeah, the original Arkham Horror was by Chaosium, so definitely Cthulhu-house stuff.
BA-BA-BA BUM, BA-BA-BA BUM – and then it gets too complicated.
@davidknewton
I don’t understand a single word, but I’m digging it.
http://media.giphy.com/media/qVUJyltHY7ofm/giphy.gif
Fucking love metal. WHO WANTS TO PLAY BRUTAL LEGENDS WITH ME but not really because I don’t have an Xbox Gold account because of harassment and stuff.
@Fruitloopsie
Awwwww, yus, that’s a jam.
Betrayal and Arkham are both a lot of fun. Though I have been banned from playing Betrayal anymore. There was a dynamite incident.