Bad players = Bad people?
I came across an article on Yahoo! yesterday (yeah, Yahoo! News isn't always terrible). I can't find the original article that I read, but I assume this one is similar: http://www.cbc.ca/news/trending/men-who-harass-women-are-losers-video-game-study-says-1.3162310 And since I tend to be skeptical of news stories based on scientific studies, I read (most of) the original paper: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0131613#sec011
Basically, the paper is trying to find a correlation between male player behavior towards female players and their skill level. From the data, the major points are that "low performing" players are more likely to make negative comments towards female players, while "high performing" males are more likely to be positive and supportive. The researchers go into a hypothesis about social ranking structures and how low performing players are threaten by having their position replaced while high performing players are secure and are going into some sort of mating behavior. And this supports the researchers hypothesis where they attribute hostile sexism towards some sort of evolutionary or tribal reasoning.
First of all, I wish the paper defined its terms and expressed its data better. Apparently, the data is based on a previous study so the researchers are just analyzing other people's data and using it to support their hypothesis. Maybe that's a reason the data isn't presented in what I'd think is a clear and strong manner. So maybe I should try to find the original paper from the original study... someday.
Another thing that I think I'm not sure about is the hypothesis that high performing males are exhibiting some sort of mating pattern when they are being positive. But the article mentions that high performing players are generally more positive to both males and females and there is a correlation for male players, just not as strong as female ones (Figure 2). So I guess good players are generally trying to help their teams over yelling at people. That's good to know.
And its extremely amusing how this article is mainly confirming that bad players are typically sore losers. Figure 3 basically just shows that players make more negative comments (towards males and females) when they die more often. The correlation seems actually stronger towards male players. But the second half shows that when these bad players are also not getting kills, they are blaming it on women over men for some reason. Again, I'd like to see a better representation since I think the figures are composites and predictors instead of raw data (like a scatter plot would be nice to see the correlation).
I think I have minor issues with the study which skew the results. First, I think 163 games is kind of a small sample set. Secondly, I don't know if Halo 3 on Xbox Live, years after release was the best choice. Besides Halo and Xbox Live being known for being notoriously poor mannered, I wonder how relevant Halo 3 was in 2013. And its just one game in a particularly bad mannered genre. Maybe that was the point (to ensure negative comments), but I think it'd be interesting to see if these trends are accurate across genres and platforms.
But its an interesting study (not sure how much I'd go into evolutionary rationale) so remember, if you're someone who attacks people, especially women online in video games, you're probably just a bad player and sore loser =P
(Also, LOL at the "example comments" of the negative-female variety: "Should've made me a sandwich, bitch." Its so stereotypical! Thanks you, Xbox Live. Also for the negative-male has a nice "I liked your lag trick, jackass" since people love to blame lag.)
In other news, Angie and I watched the poor Red Dawn remake yesterday. The good thing was that it wasn't very long (probably around an hour and a half) and the action scenes weren't terrible. But it definitely wasn't a good movie. It was actually bad enough that it was good. Standard badness was basically the nonsensical arrangement of things like why were some citizens in prison/camps while others could just move around freely. And why didn't the Chinese, I mean Koreans secure any sort of perimeters ever? And it was kind of comical how Thor just decided this move sucked and was too long so it was like he decided to die almost off-screen randomly. "Dude, there's still 15 minutes left? I thought I was done. Just kill me." And then they just leave that random guy (the last minority from the original group) to die even though the marines or whatevers were going to fly away. But whatever, it definitely wasn't good, but wasn't terrible.
Basically, the paper is trying to find a correlation between male player behavior towards female players and their skill level. From the data, the major points are that "low performing" players are more likely to make negative comments towards female players, while "high performing" males are more likely to be positive and supportive. The researchers go into a hypothesis about social ranking structures and how low performing players are threaten by having their position replaced while high performing players are secure and are going into some sort of mating behavior. And this supports the researchers hypothesis where they attribute hostile sexism towards some sort of evolutionary or tribal reasoning.
First of all, I wish the paper defined its terms and expressed its data better. Apparently, the data is based on a previous study so the researchers are just analyzing other people's data and using it to support their hypothesis. Maybe that's a reason the data isn't presented in what I'd think is a clear and strong manner. So maybe I should try to find the original paper from the original study... someday.
Another thing that I think I'm not sure about is the hypothesis that high performing males are exhibiting some sort of mating pattern when they are being positive. But the article mentions that high performing players are generally more positive to both males and females and there is a correlation for male players, just not as strong as female ones (Figure 2). So I guess good players are generally trying to help their teams over yelling at people. That's good to know.
And its extremely amusing how this article is mainly confirming that bad players are typically sore losers. Figure 3 basically just shows that players make more negative comments (towards males and females) when they die more often. The correlation seems actually stronger towards male players. But the second half shows that when these bad players are also not getting kills, they are blaming it on women over men for some reason. Again, I'd like to see a better representation since I think the figures are composites and predictors instead of raw data (like a scatter plot would be nice to see the correlation).
I think I have minor issues with the study which skew the results. First, I think 163 games is kind of a small sample set. Secondly, I don't know if Halo 3 on Xbox Live, years after release was the best choice. Besides Halo and Xbox Live being known for being notoriously poor mannered, I wonder how relevant Halo 3 was in 2013. And its just one game in a particularly bad mannered genre. Maybe that was the point (to ensure negative comments), but I think it'd be interesting to see if these trends are accurate across genres and platforms.
But its an interesting study (not sure how much I'd go into evolutionary rationale) so remember, if you're someone who attacks people, especially women online in video games, you're probably just a bad player and sore loser =P
(Also, LOL at the "example comments" of the negative-female variety: "Should've made me a sandwich, bitch." Its so stereotypical! Thanks you, Xbox Live. Also for the negative-male has a nice "I liked your lag trick, jackass" since people love to blame lag.)
In other news, Angie and I watched the poor Red Dawn remake yesterday. The good thing was that it wasn't very long (probably around an hour and a half) and the action scenes weren't terrible. But it definitely wasn't a good movie. It was actually bad enough that it was good. Standard badness was basically the nonsensical arrangement of things like why were some citizens in prison/camps while others could just move around freely. And why didn't the Chinese, I mean Koreans secure any sort of perimeters ever? And it was kind of comical how Thor just decided this move sucked and was too long so it was like he decided to die almost off-screen randomly. "Dude, there's still 15 minutes left? I thought I was done. Just kill me." And then they just leave that random guy (the last minority from the original group) to die even though the marines or whatevers were going to fly away. But whatever, it definitely wasn't good, but wasn't terrible.