Poor gamers are more likely to be hostile with women

Any woman who enjoys gaming, especially online gaming, will tell you first hand that the gaming community has a misogyny problem.

Surveys have found roughly 50 per cent of women have experienced harassment of some kind, with 75 per cent of women between the ages of 18-24 saying they had been harassed and abused in online games.

Now a study is suggesting that a lot of that abuse is coming from low-skilled players. Yes, it seems those men that are bad at gaming can't handle a woman being better than them.

The study, which took place in 2015 coinciding with the misogynistic campaign 'Gamergate', investigated the hypothesises that poor-performing male gamers become hostile towards women who enter an environment built on male-hierarchy.

To test this hypothesis, the researchers chose the game Halo 3. Not only does the game collect key stats - such as kill count, death count, and overall score but it also hides the character's sex.

Meaning the only clue to the gender of the player is their voice.

In the study, the team analysed gameplay recordings and resulting kill and death stats, as well as the overall stats of the players involved. In one series of recordings the researcher was female and spoke, another was male and spoke, and the in third series of recordings the player was silent.

When researchers "spoke" they actually just played pre-recorded phrases, either in a female or male voice.

"These prerecorded phrases were identical in the male and female condition, harmless in nature, and designed to be inoffensive," the researchers explained in their paper. "Phrases included: ‘I like this map’, ‘nice shot there’, ‘I had fun playing that game’, ‘I think I just saw a couple of them heading this way’, and ‘that was a good game everyone’."

Responses were then codified by the team into positive, negative, and neutral, and linked the responses to the gamer's skills. Researchers found players who killed few and died plenty had the most negative responses, usually with a misogynistic element.

"We found that skill determined the frequency of positive and negative statements spoken towards both male- and female-voiced teammates," the team wrote. "In addition, poorer performance (fewer kills and more deaths) resulted in more negative statements specifically in the female-voiced manipulation."

Poor-performing gamers were also less hostile to the male voice.

"As decreased cooperation or behaviours that lead to failure are often punished by teammates, the increase of positive and neutral statements and relatively less-frequent use of negative statements suggests poor-performing, lower-skilled males are demonstrating submissive behaviour towards a male-voiced teammate," the team added.

The worry is that behaviour and misogynistic culture fostered in gaming communities will spill out into real life. Especially as so many teenagers consider themselves gamers.

"Such ideas have the potential to spill over in real-life interactions and promote socially unacceptable behaviours such as sexism," the team concluded.

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