You are what you play?: a quantitative study into game design preferences across gender and their interaction with gaming habits

Gaming is rapidly gaining popularity as a pastime among women. One explanation for this could be the industry targeting female gamers through specific ‘girl game’ releases. This could imply that there are a priori differences in game design preferences between female and male gamers. The purpose of the present study is to explore these differences to see whether there is a mediating effect of previous experience with certain game genres on subsequent design preferences of male and female gamers. More particularly, we distinguish between ‘core’ genre players (CP) and ‘non-core’ genre players (NCP). By means of a 2*2 ANOVA design using an online survey, we examine the main effects of gender, core genre players (CP/NCP) and the interaction effects between both independent variables. The results show that game preferences of male CP, female CP and male NCP are generally in line with one another whereas those of female NCP differ significantly

Playing with Identity. Authors, Narrators, Avatars, and Players in The Stanley Parable and The Beginner’s Guide

This article offers a comparative analysis of Davey Wreden’s The Stanley Parable (Wreden 2011 / Galactic Cafe 2013) and The Beginner’s Guide (Everything Unlimited Ltd. 2015) in order to explore the interrelation of authors, narrators, avatars, and players as four salient functions in the play with identity that videogames afford. Building on theories of collective and collaborative authorship, of narratives and narrators across media, and of the avatar-player relationship, the article reconstructs the similarities and differences between the way in which The Stanley Parable and The Beginner’s Guide position their players in relation to the two games’ avatars, narrators, and (main) author, while also underscoring how both The Stanley Parable and The Beginner’s Guide use metareferential strategies to undermine any overly rigid conceptualization of these functions and their interrelation

Through Her Eyes: The Gendering of Female First-Person Shooters

While the video game industry has attempted to address their years of mistreatment towards women, within games and how they are produced, by hiring more women and including more female characters as playable options, these fixes have been superficial at best. Not only are there still few females as main characters in video games, but that there are so few female video games. By this I refer to the fact that video games told through the eyes of female characters often do not feature a gendered narrative, unlike multiple games with male POVs in which the storyline directly reflects their gender. This issue, however, is not just about inclusion of more female stories, but also execution. Female FPSs may lack a narrative reflecting their gender, but they often feature gameplay that represents a stereotype of females as weaker and less aggressive than men. The purpose of this analysis is to explore how first-person shooter video games gender (or not) their female texts, through both narrative and gameplay

Resources, capital, and players inside the game worlds: Bourdieusian approach to game cultures

Online gaming is all the time more ubiquitous. With the World becoming increasingly digitized and inter-connected, it is no wonder that the most popular pastime, gaming, is reachable quite literally anywhere. With this popularity comes the multitude of choices to fulfil any gamer’s needs and satisfaction for interactive media as companies are trying to tap into the ever-growing market. Some play to spend time with family and friends, some play to dominate others, some play to become rich, and everything in-between. The online game worlds, especially the games in the genre of Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games, can house inhabitants of all backgrounds, with all types of motivations, and offer more than enough activities for the inhabitants to enjoy. Despite the immense success of certain games that have defined the future of their respective genre, the research into the immersive and complex virtual worlds has been heavily focusing on aspects and effects external to the game and the act of gaming itself. There is a stern lack of focus on the happenings and lives of the inhabitants of the virtual worlds, apart from very few autoethnographies that attempt to go beneath the surface to explain the affordances that exists. Studies still largely focus on the players before and after they play the games where the in-game actions are rather nuance than the focus. This dissertation shifts the focus upside-down and explores, and explains, deeply through the resources circulating in and around the online multiplayer game worlds with the players themselves being rather side-lined. Used methods include quantitative survey, scoping review, qualitative, and frequency count. This dissertation shows that there just as many ways to live inside the game worlds as there are players. Thus, the main arguments of the work are related to: 1) socializing, the numerous ways to do so, and the importance of it inside the game worlds; 2) the ways avatars and players are able to, or willing to, accumulate resources; 3) using Bourdieusian approach to resources as types of capital is feasible and offers unique insight into the happenings of game worlds; 4) the types of capital as they have more nuance to them in the domain of video games than their broad definitions might let one expect. The results promote the view, that despite the sheer power of statistical analysis to categorize players, there can be found unique approaches to the games varying from the motivations and demographical attributes to focusing on the betterment of the game’s community through discussion forums. Every instance and every approach to gaming is just as valid as any other, which might seem like an obvious statement, but it is clear that the player-bases and sometimes even scholars forget about those playstyles that are in the margin. Further, the results increase the knowledge of how resourceful avatars can be, and what are possibly some intra-game and extra-game limiting factors on how well an entity can utilize the possible affordances. The academia has studies about the social life inside the game worlds, and studies about capital as resource around the game worlds, but they are rarely combined. Even more rare are the comprehensive studies taking a wider look on the life of the citizen of the game worlds with specific research aims or questions in mind. This dissertation gives multi-layered insight into this phenomenon with tangible examples to deliver a very precise message. For one to understand the avatars of games, one must think and approach them as conscious entities rather than only as tools for enjoyment. There is so much more going in the virtual worlds than one mere dissertation can ever include within its pages.Resurssit, pääomat ja pelaajat pelimaailmojen sisällä: Bourdieulainen lähestyminen pelikulttuureihin Verkkopelaaminen on enenevissä määrin kaikkialla läsnä. Maailman muuttuessa jatkuvasti digitaalisemmaksi ja verkostoituneemmaksi, ei ole ihme, että suosituin vapaa-ajan viete, pelaaminen, on saavuttanut lähes jokaisen kodin. Tämä kasvava suosio takaa sen, että jokaiselle pelaajalle on useita vaihtoehtoja, miten lähestyä ja käyttää interaktiivista mediaa, sillä yritykset taistelevat siivusta markkinoilla. Jotkut pelaavat viettääkseen aikaa kavereiden ja perheen kanssa, jotkut taas dominoidakseen toisia, joillekin rikkaus on ainoa tavoite, ja kaikkea tältä väliltä. Verkossa olevat pelimaailmat, etenkin massiivisten monen pelaajan verkkoroolipelien genreen kuuluvat, pystyvät tarjoamaan kodin pelaajille taustasta ja motivaatiosta huolimatta, sekä tarjoamaan heille enemmän kuin tarpeeksi aktiviteetteja ja tekemistä. Huolimatta tiettyjen pelien valtavasta menestyksestä, jotka ovat määrittäneet oman genrensä tulevaisuuden, tutkimus mukaansatempaaviin ja monimutkaisiin virtuaalimaailmoihin on keskittynyt voimakkaasti pelin ja itse pelaamisen ulkopuolisiin näkökohtiin ja vaikutuksiin. Virtuaalimaailmojen asukkaiden tapahtumiin ja elämiin keskittyvässä tutkimuksessa on suuria puutteita, lukuun ottamatta hyvin harvoja autoetnografioita, jotka yrittävät mennä pinnan alle selittääkseen kuinka erilaista kahden eri avatarin elämä voikaan olla. Tutkimukset keskittyvät edelleen suurelta osin pelaajiin ennen ja jälkeen itse pelisessioiden, jolloin pelin sisäiset toimet ovat enemmän vivahde kuin painopiste. Tämä väitöskirja kääntää painopisteen ylösalaisin ja tutkii sekä selittää syvällisesti verkkomoninpelien maailmoissa ja niiden ympärillä liikkuvia resursseja pelaajien itsensä ollessa melko sivussa. Käytettyihin menetelmiin sisältyy kvantitatiivinen kysely, kartoittava tarkastelu, laadullinen tutkimus sekä frekvenssilaskenta. Tämä väitöskirja osoittaa, että tapoja elää pelimaailmoissa on yhtä monta kuin pelaajiakin. Siten työn pääargumentit liittyvät: 1) lukuisiin tapoihin sosialisoida ja sen tärkeyteen pelimaailmassa; 2) tapoihin, joilla niin avatarit kuin pelaajat voivat, tai haluavat, kerätä resursseja; 3) Bourdieulaiseen lähestymistapaan, jossa pääomatyypit käsitellään resursseina, on käyttökelpoista ja tarjoaa ainutlaatuisen käsityksen pelimaailmojen tapahtumista; 4) pääomatyyppeihin, sillä niillä on enemmän vivahteita videopelien piirissä kuin niiden laajat määritelmät antavat odottaa. Tulokset tukevat näkemystä, että vaikka tilastollisen analyysin voimasta kategorisoida pelaajia, pelitutkimukseen voidaan löytää ainutlaatuisia lähestymistapoja, jotka vaihtelevat motivaatioista ja demografisista ominaisuuksista peliyhteisön parantamiseen keskustelufoorumeiden kautta. Jokainen tapaus ja jokainen lähestymistapa pelaamiseen on yhtä pätevä kuin mikä tahansa muu, mikä saattaa tuntua itsestään selvältä väitteeltä, mutta on selvää, että pelaajakannat ja joskus jopa tutkijat unohtavat marginaalissa olevat pelityylit. Lisäksi tulokset lisäävät tietoa siitä, kuinka neuvokkaita avatarit voivat olla ja mitkä ovat mahdollisesti joitain pelin sisäisiä ja pelin ulkopuolisia rajoittavia tekijöitä sille, kuinka hyvin he voivat hyödyntää resursseja. Akatemiassa on tutkimuksia pelimaailmojen sosiaalisesta elämästä ja tutkimuksia pääomasta resurssina pelimaailmoissa, mutta niitä yhdistetään harvoin. Vielä harvinaisempia ovat kattavat tutkimukset, jotka tarkastelevat pelimaailmaa asuttavien pelaajien elämää laajemmin erityisiä tutkimustavoitteita tai kysymyksiä silmällä pitäen. Tämä väitöskirja antaa monitasoisen käsityksen tästä ilmiöstä konkreettisten esimerkkien avulla. Ymmärtääkseen pelien avatareja, niitä täytyy ajatella ja lähestyä tietoisina kokonaisuuksina eikä vain viihteen työkaluna. Virtuaalisissa maailmoissa tapahtuu paljon enemmän kuin yksi väitöskirja voi koskaan pitää sisällään

Why girls play digital games: an empirical study into the relations between gender, motivations and genre

In recent years, several studies have explored the motivations for playing different game genres such as MMO (Yee, 2006a, 2006b) and FPS (Jansz & Tanis, 2007). Others have taken steps towards creating an integrated framework for use across genres (Sherry, Lucas, Greenberg, & Lachlan, 2006). Despite the strong gender bias of the game industry, however, none of these studies have tackled the issue of gender differences in motivations. This paper aims to fill this gap by exploring the relation between genres and gamer motivations. For this we draw upon a sample of 983 gamers recruited on online forums to fill out an online survey. On average, the respondents were 23.94 years old (SD = 6.43) and 37% were female. By means of a principal component analysis (PCA) on 23 Likert items, we distinguish between five motivation components: immersion, social contact, challenge, competition and control. Analysis reveals that women have consistently lower motivation scores than men, with a Cohen's d ranging from -.40 for competition to -.99 for social contact. This indicates that women are generally less strongly motivated to play digital games. The picture becomes more complex, however, when we look at playing frequency and differences between game genres. Again using linear PCA, frequency measures of playing 22 different game genres are reduced to five general components: casual games (e.g. puzzle games, board games), heavy action games (e.g. shooters, role-playing games), light action games (e.g. platform games, party games), management games (e.g. strategy games, simulation games) and sports games (e.g. football and racing games). Except for light action, gender effects are found for all game genre components. This shows that female gamers play casual games more often (d = .66), while male gamers spend more time on heavy action, sports and management games (d ranging from -.42 to -1.18). Next, gaming frequency components are regressed on gender, age, gender*age, game motivation and game motivation*gender. Casual gaming is explained by gender (positive effect), challenge and immersion with immersion being a stronger predictor for females. For heavy action gaming: gender (positive effect for males), challenge, social contact and immersion are positive predictors. Again, interaction effects are found as women share stronger effects for these motivations. Concerning light action gaming, a positive prediction is found for females, social contact, and immersion. Once more, immersion yields a stronger effect for females. Management games' frequency is, apart from gender (positive effect for males), positively predicted by social contact and competition. Furthermore, challenge and immersion interact with gender, marking a strong effect of these motivations for females. Finally, no effect of gender is found on the frequency of playing sports games whereas all five motivations yield significant predictions. Except for competition, these predictions are all positive. Again, an interaction of gender with immersion is found, indicating a stronger effect for females. These results indicate that gender as well as motivations can be used to predict genre preferences. Remarkable, however, is that the interactions between gender and motivations consistently show stronger effects for females. This indicates that women who game more frequently are, in comparison, more strongly motivated than their male counterparts. A possible explanation for this phenomenon can be found in the existing stereotype that digital games are ‘boys’ toys’. Consequently, we hypothesize that females are confronted with a higher threshold to engage in video gaming. In other words, their motivation for playing digital games needs to be stronger than their belief that gaming is for men, hence the relatively higher motivational scores for high-frequency female gamers. Next, we look into inter- and intra-gender differences in attitudes towards gaming which confirm this. There are consistent differences between low-frequency gamers, who game less than once a week, and high-frequency gamers, who game at least once a week. Low-frequency gamers generally have a more negative attitude towards gaming than high-frequency gamers. When including gender, however, we notice that these differences are consistently larger for women than for men. This suggests that low-frequency female gamers tend to support the current stereotype of gaming being for males whereas high-frequency female gamers resist this belief strongly. Thus high-frequency female gamers have a relatively more outspoken positive attitude towards gaming than males which corroborates our hypothesis that female gamers face a higher threshold to becoming a gamer than men which in turn explains the stronger interaction effect of gender on the motivational dimensions. References Jansz, J., & Tanis, M. (2007). Appeal of playing online first person shooter games. CyberPsychology & Behavior, 10(1), 133-136. Sherry, J., Lucas, K., Greenberg, B., & Lachlan, K. (2006). Video game uses and gratifications as predictors of use and game preference. Playing video games. Motives, responses, and consequences, 213-224. Yee, N. (2006a). Motivations for play in online games. CyberPsychology & Behavior, 9(6), 772-775. Yee, N. (2006b). The psychology of massively multi-user online role-playing games: Motivations, emotional investment, relationships and problematic usage. In R. Schroeder & A. Axelsson (Eds.), Avatars at work and play: Collaboration and interaction in shared virtual environments (pp. 187–208)

Being a Girl Gamer - A Correspondence with Caitlin Martin V1.0

I promised Jon I’d write about this for the book on gender online, so here’s a first run at my thoughts. I thought it’d be good to put some ideas out there, see what they look like (may even discuss them) before writing something more formal & thought out. Here goes

Girls will be girls : a study into differences in game design preferences across gender and player types

Gaming is rapidly gaining popularity as a pastime among women. One explanation for this could be the industry’s targeting of female gamers through specific ‘girl game’ releases. This would imply that there are a priori differences in game design preferences between female and male gamers. The purpose of the present study is to explore these differences to see whether there is a mediating effect of previous experience with certain game genres on subsequent design preferences of male and female gamers. More particularly, we distinguish between ‘core’ genre players (CP) and ‘non-core’ genre players (NCP). Respondents who play shooters, fighting, action-adventure, sports, survival horror racing, role-playing, strategy or MMO games at least once a week are considered as core genre players. We expect that gender differences in game design preferences diminish among core players because of more similar interests and experience. By means of a 2*2 ANOVA design using an online survey, we examine the main effects of gender, core genre players (CP/NCP) and the interaction effects between both independent variables. We focus upon game design preferences concerning violence, level of game complexity, sexual representation of female game characters, avatar customization, game setting, humor and other ingame elements. The results show that game preferences of male CP, female CP and male NCP are generally in line with one another whereas those of female NCP differ more significantly

Characterizing the Effects of Local Latency on Aim Performance in First Person Shooters

Real-time games such as first-person shooters (FPS) are sensitive to even small amounts of lag. The effects of network latency have been studied, but less is known about local latency -- that is, the lag caused by local sources such as input devices, displays, and the application. While local latency is important to gamers, we do not know how it affects aiming performance and whether we can reduce its negative effects. To explore these issues, we tested local latency in a variety of real-world gaming systems and carried out a controlled study focusing on targeting and tracking activities in an FPS game with varying degrees of local latency. In addition, we tested the ability of a lag compensation technique (based on aim assistance) to mitigate the negative effects. To motivate the need for these studies, we also examined how aim in FPS differs from pointing in standard 2D tasks, showing significant differences in performance metrics. Our studies found local latencies in the real-world range from 23 to 243~ms that cause significant and substantial degradation in performance (even for latencies as low as 41~ms). The studies also showed that our compensation technique worked well, reducing the problems caused by lag in the case of targeting, and removing the problem altogether in the case of tracking. Our work shows that local latency is a real and substantial problem -- but game developers can mitigate the problem with appropriate compensation methods