What are video games showing about sexism?

Popular video games like Halo or Call of Duty may show how sexism emerges in competitive, male-dominated communities, suggests a recent psychological study.

The study examined the way in which male players of Bungie's Halo 3 video game interacted with their male and female counterparts over the course of 163 multiplayer games of the bestselling title. It was spearheaded by University of New South Wales professor Michael Kasumovic and Jeffrey Kuznekoff of Miami University of Ohio's Middletown campus.

Kasumovic and Kuznekoff were able to track the number of negative and positive comments directed toward their own player, via the game's integrated voice chat system.

The research team's player "conversed" via a pre-recorded male or female voice throughout various games. The study found that the majority of negative comments made were directed toward the team's female-voiced player and that these attacks came from players who were performing badly in the game.

"Poor performance and poor rank being taken out on female players isn't surprising," said Nicole Lazarro, game researcher and founder of XEODesign. "There's generally chemical behavior in the body that has a lot to do with this. One common behavior is to push down other people. Calling people out makes the losers of these games feel good. By making women feel uncomfortable or of a lower status these players seek to make these women slip underneath them in the social hierarchy."

Through the team's metrics they were able to chart a pattern that showed how the 189 players they interacted with, all of whom were male, reacted to their own player based upon his or her perceived gender.

Ultimately, the study showed that male players who performed well were more complimentary of the team's female-voiced player, while male players who performed poorly often directed most of their negative attention toward her.

Conversely, the male-voiced player generally received fewer negative or positive comments, regardless of his performance or the performance of the other players.

"The online space removes a lot of characteristics that affect performance," Kuznekoff said. Your reaction time and skill in video games is all that matters. We argue that this might be analogous to how people behave in the workplace. We might see some of the same effects occurring in face to face spaces, and it does show a need for further research. However, one of the caveats to the story is that we don't know the demographics of the players."

If video games are analogous to single-sex dominated workspaces, than the study could demonstrate a very serious problem of sexism in these types of environments.

Kuznekoff and Kasumovic have managed to quantify the difficulty faced by women in predominantly male communities, arguing that the way in which these male players interact with female counterparts in the game may be part of a hardwired biological mating and dominance response.

However, Lazzaro also argues that video games, and even aggressive, violent ones like Halo, are not necessarily examples of "social ills." While this study may be representative of one online gaming community, she says, it is not necessarily representative of all such communities. In fact, she noted, many online gaming communities, have well-integrated systems of self-policing created by their developers.

Kuznekoff also conceded that the study does not necessarily mean that the young men playing these games will make the leap from the virtual world to the workplace with this sort of sexism and negativity.

"If this is what young people are exposed to and they normalize it, and that this is the norm of how you respond to the opposite sex, it could be troubling if young men make the jump from what they're exposed to, to how they behave," Kuznekoff said.