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New crossgender play stats

March 4th, 2008 (Visited 3393 times) Tags: game studies

Majority of women, men swap gender in MMOs – Joystiq

A recent study called Gender Swapping and Socialising in Cyberspace revealed that 70 percent of women and 54 percent of men swap their genders when playing online games.

This is interesting because it doesn’t even remotely match the statistics from older worlds, where gender-swapping was done mostly by males — and to a far lesser degree. Interesting to speculate on why it might be different now. I presume that the study is based on WoW…

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22 Responses to “New crossgender play stats”

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Massively wrote on March 10th, 2008 at 1:15 am:

about the report is extremely thorough. Jeff Freeman (of the Mythical blog) follows up with further discussion of the original paper – noting that it can barely be described as research. Sarah Jensen Schubert, in a comment onRaph Koster’s blog, summarizes Freeman’s frustration well: “They surveyed 119 self-selected participants, largely recruited from the Allakhazam off-topic forums. I think it’s crap.” As a closing thought, Ryan Shwayder’s ‘rant’ on this subject

Topic Digest: Online gamers indulge in fantasy sex swap wrote on March 21st, 2008 at 9:06 pm:

Raph’s Website :New crossgender play stats

Ryan Shwayder’s Nerfbat » Bloginati wrote on March 8th, 2008 at 4:45 pm:

Raph Kosterand Richard Bartle and by way of Joystiq via The Inquirer. Each of those has something to do with gender bending in massively multiplayer games, which is a frightening epidemic of at least the same proportions as the black plague. Because, you know, if

Jeff Freeman » Posing Online wrote on March 8th, 2008 at 8:36 am:

[...] Raph Koster, a rant by Richard Bartle, provoked by the misinformative descriptions of ’slapdash and [...]

Ryan Shwayder’s Nerfbat » Role Swapping in Online Games wrote on March 8th, 2008 at 8:46 am:

[...] is an incoherent rant prompted by posts from Jeff Freeman via Raph Koster and Richard Bartle and by way of Joystiq via The Inquirer. Each of those has something to do with [...]

Raph Koster's Amazon Blog wrote on March 10th, 2008 at 4:54 am:

[...] has a thorough examination of that crossgender play paper that came out a few days ago and is getting widely reprinted.� It’s not pretty. This [...]

Reader Comments

Sara Jensen Schubert said on March 4th, 2008 at 10:19 am:
Here’s the full paper (pdf). They surveyed 119 self-selected participants, largely recruited from the Allakhazam off-topic forums.

I think it’s crap.
Michael W. said on March 4th, 2008 at 2:14 pm:
If thats how the study was conducted, I would have to agree.
Skip said on March 4th, 2008 at 3:07 pm:
Well it’s purely anecdotal, but I can’t honestly think of a single female player who played a male toon in any guild I’ve ever been in. I suppose they could hide it, but with vent, etc., it would be pretty hard these days.

Guys playing female toons? I’d suspect that, oh, probably 80%+ have at least rolled them. For me, personally, if it’s a toon I’m considering playing as a main, it will be male. If it’s an alt, it’s female. Why? I don’t know, I’ve just always done that.
Lobosolitario said on March 4th, 2008 at 4:06 pm:
The study methodology does sound fairly rubbish.

Most of the female players in my guild chose female avatars for their main character as well. I wouldn’t be surprised if a female player said she
played male avatars to avoid uncomfortable situations, but I haven’t really seen it happening myself.

It might have something to do with MMO-experience – a lot of the female players I knew in WoW were first-time MMOers, and thus seem to be more inclined to identify with their avatars. People who came from other MMOs seemed to have more of an emotional detachment with their avatars, and thus were more open to the idea of having an opposite-gender avatar. As time wore on, and the aforementioned female players created alts, most of them ended up creating at least one male alt.

I went through much the same phases myself – in SWG I wouldn’t have dreamed of playing a female avatar. When WoW came along, I started off with a male avatar, but the ease with which you can make alts meant that I eventually ended up making a couple of female avatars. When workmates invited me to a different server, I rolled a female warrior, and she stuck with me for the rest of my time in WoW.

Now if I were to play an MMO, I would probably choose a female avatar in any third-perspective game where you see your own avatar. From a gaming point of view, female characters tend to be smaller and easier to see around, and from a personal point of view, if I’m going to spend a long time looking at someone’s backside, I’d rather it was a pretty one.
On the other hand, if it were a game like EVE, where you don’t get to see your avatar much, I’d probably create a male avatar unless I had some compelling roleplay reason to do otherwise.
Michael Chui said on March 5th, 2008 at 12:28 am:
I can never decide whether to be happy people are doing research or sad that it’s useless.

The exact quote is:

Following a small pilot study, an online questionnaire was publicized and placed on various gaming forums hosted on well-known gaming sites: http://www.Allakhazam.com, http://www.eqvault.ign.com, http://www.womengamers.com, and http://www.whitewolf.com. The Allakhazam site was used as the main recruitment forum because of its large audience.

They didn’t bother including their questionnaire instrument as an appendix, or any such. I’m too unfamiliar with any of those sites to say whether or not they act as a representative sample.

Meh. Choose your own. I’m willing to take this as, “Lots of people change their genders. Yay.” They’ll need to do strong follow-up interviews to get anything interesting, though. Gender-swapping doesn’t strike me as news, but I’m jaded.
Michael Chui said on March 5th, 2008 at 12:29 am:
Sorry, I should add that I suspect the main reason there’s no appendices is because it’s not included in the publication. Not because they didn’t provide one; that’s a school thing.
Woop said on March 5th, 2008 at 1:19 am:
Not a great sample rate is it. 83 males and 32 males replied and it appears the questionnaire was posted in order to cover a range of games. Does that make the results representative?

Potentially it is a perfectly interesting area to have some info on. I have always, and probably will, select from the the range of options in character selection screens. So I happily have characters that span the race and gender choices.

What I find strange is that having played different gender characters since Asherons Call (however long that was) I’ve never found preferential treatment from other players based on gender. This is clearly something they are pushing as an outcome of this paper. Infact, I think only once in all those years was I asked (when playing a female character) if I really was a female (and that was in WoW). But then that is still one persons experience.
Brian 'Psychochild' Green said on March 5th, 2008 at 2:25 am:
Too bad this wasn’t a more rigorous investigation. It would be interesting to see if there were a serious difference in what people play.

The reason why people play characters of a different gender are interesting. I’ve played some female characters in modern games, but I’ve not seen quite so much favoritism as I did in text MUDs. The one time I played a female character on one of my favorite text MUDs, I got a lot of (unwanted) attention. At one point a male character I had interacted with before on my male character took my female character off to a secluded area to fight, but then he gave my character a kiss. Quite shocking that he’d be so bold with someone he just met! I didn’t play that character much after that encounter.

I wonder if larger games, and solo-friendly games, help isolate people from these behaviors more. It’s easier to overlook a new female character. Or, perhaps, online gamers have gotten more savvy and realize that a character’s sex doens’t necessarily indiciate the sex of the player behind the character.

Some random musing.
len said on March 5th, 2008 at 7:02 am:
It would be interesting to include study goals that differentiated the choices given the themes and goals of the roleplay of the game world itself. How does this contrast with the choices in free-roamer VR worlds? For example, if the dominant play is combat or the dominant play is solving puzzles to find treasure, or the dominant play is sex, etc?

I intuit the numbers will shift dramatically as the parts of the brain being stimulated and the rewards for behaviors shift. OTOH, that could be dead wrong.
Tess said on March 5th, 2008 at 2:44 pm:
I’m with Sara on this one. It’s wildly inconsistent with all previous studies (even recent ones), and the methodology is poor.
Ben said on March 5th, 2008 at 7:53 pm:
When I rolled my first WoW character, and in fact when I roll my first character in most RPGs (Morrowind, Oblivion, Mass Effect, etc) it’s always a male. I’m not sure why, but I think it’s because it’s the character I am going to experience the game as. I don’t roll play, strictly speaking, but it’s the character I am going to identify with, and the character that (in an online game) others are going identify me as.

Yet when I roll a second character or an alt, it’s usually female and/or a different race. I see this character is less of an avatar and more of a desire to create a ‘character’. Choosing their name, race and features to match a class or back story – often as far removed from my original character as possible, to keep the game interesting.

I thought a wise and dangerous female Draenei mage named ‘Netherseer’ would look pretty cool, as would ‘Sunbreaker’, my human male paladin-tank with dark-golden hair. (Again, not hardcore roll playing names, yet I wanted to express some of the character in the name nonetheless). Also, most characters I make, in WoW or other games, I don’t level very far. I tend to make then for the sake of making them, and don’t often play them more than a few levels.

Interestingly, I now play a human female priest as my main. Despite rolling a male rogue as my first character. I found I enjoyed the priest class more, and this precluded any concerns about whom or what I would be identified as.

Furthermore, the priest was originally to be a healer (reflected in the appearance and name), until I found shadow to be much more fun and thus at level 40 she became my main – too far to consider re-rolling.

To this day I still get people calling me ’she’ referring to the avatar, and assuming that I, ‘Lightspell’, am a healer. So much for that one reflecting any self-identification or character designs :/
Morgan Ramsay said on March 6th, 2008 at 1:44 pm:
Richard Bartle wrote here:

The standard male response is: “if I’m going to look at an avatar’s butt the whole time I play, I’d rather it was one I found attractive”. This turns any covert slights against their sexuality on their heads: hey, look, I’m so masculine I play female characters! The standard female response, in contrast, is that they get hit on so often when playing as a female that they have to play as a male to escape it: hey, look, I’m so feminine I play male characters!

Neither of these excuses stands up to scrutiny, of course. …

I play female characters because they’re smaller in stature, providing a less obstructed view of the gameworld; more elegant in their animations, giving the impression of smoother gameplay; and because of their smaller stature, models of female characters might be smaller in size and thus increase visual and overall performance by consuming less computing power and bandwidth. (If possible, I also try to choose the smallest character race and decrease the body size to the minimum.)

Since character selection is so incredibly politically correct, the gameplay differences between genders is effectively reduced to trivial interactions with specific NPCs; therefore, I see gender in games more as a matter of software performance than anything worthwhile for deeper consideration… I also prefer to look at a female Erudite’s rear-end over a male Ogre’s.

A male player spends a good deal of his time looking at a horse’s backside rather than his character’s…

Get a magic carpet. ;p
Richard Bartle said on March 6th, 2008 at 3:29 pm:
Morgan Ramsay>I play female characters because they’re smaller in stature

Well, that would depend on the game. If you were in WoW, for example, the female gnomes are the same size as the male gnomes (and both are significantly shorter than anything else).

>more elegant in their animations, giving the impression of smoother gameplay;

So that would mean you tend to attack female enemies more often than male enemies, right?

>models of female characters might be smaller in size and thus increase visual and overall performance by consuming less computing power and bandwidth.

It has scant effect on bandwidth, because the client constructs the images from records that are the same size for every character. Well, unless it’s Second Life and you’re wearing hoochie hair or something, but then you most certainly would not want a female character if bandwith were an issue… As for size affecting performance, why would reducing the dimensions of a model have any effect on the time taken to render it? It’s not as if it has fewer polygons, and if the model is small then those pixels it would have occupied if it were large still have to come from somewhere.

Richard

(If possible, I also try to choose the smallest character race and decrease the body size to the minimum.)

Since character selection is so incredibly politically correct, the gameplay differences between genders is effectively reduced to trivial interactions with specific NPCs; therefore, I see gender in games more as a matter of software performance than anything worthwhile for deeper consideration… I also prefer to look at a female Erudite’s rear-end over a male Ogre’s.

A male player spends a good deal of his time looking at a horse’s backside rather than his character’s…

Get a magic carpet. ;p
Morgan Ramsay said on March 6th, 2008 at 5:06 pm:
Richard Bartle wrote:

So that would mean you tend to attack female enemies more often than male enemies, right?

Wait, enemy characters have gender!? In most games, I can’t tell one goblin from the next. Non-player character diversity is usually trivial. I’ve played few games in which the monsters of any particular class differed in physique and appearance. (I usually take out the smallest enemies first and work my way up to the largest.)

As for size affecting performance, why would reducing the dimensions of a model have any effect on the time taken to render it? It’s not as if it has fewer polygons…

I would assume that a bigger object uses more pixels, which equates to more data being transferred to and from the client. Players don’t usually move static objects, so the position of the pixels for those objects doesn’t need to be reported back to the server when the client moves the character. As I’m not a programmer, I could be completely wrong, but that’s the assertion I’m positing. The performance improvement could well be negligible, but whether there is an improvement isn’t necessarily the point. Motivations don’t have to withstand scrutiny to be motivations.

The concept of gender in most games lacks depth anyway. Gender in games seems to only refer to the stereotypical appearance of a character (e.g., strongmen and barmaids.) I guess that’s what happens when people are fearful of making gender meaningful.
Ben said on March 6th, 2008 at 8:17 pm:
You assume wrong, all the character data is stored client side, which is to say on your own PC. All the character information that would be sent over the network would be statistics detailing your appearance, etc. This information will be identical for all characters.

As to whether one character would preform better on your PC than another, this would come down purely to the detail in the construction (number of polygons, number of bones, sizes of textures, etc). In the case of WoW it is safe to assume that the differences between the races and sexes are as near enough as makes no difference. Even the relative polycount difference between a massive Tauran and a little Gnome would be totaly unnoticeable. And in fact once you start equipping gear or riding mounts you’ll quickly be displaying far more detail on your character than a level 1 Tauran.
Ben said on March 6th, 2008 at 8:20 pm:
Bah, just read over what I said. I should have said the character data is stored on the sever, not your own PC. Still, the information sent to the other players would still be of identical size, regardless of race or gender.
Morgan Ramsay said on March 7th, 2008 at 12:39 pm:
Ben wrote:

In the case of WoW it is safe to assume that the differences between the races and sexes are as near enough as makes no difference.

How about EverQuest II, where client-side optimization of everything possible is necessary for smooth gameplay on just about every system configuration? I’m pretty sure hair and cloth rendering are performance beasts, too, so if you have a larger character, there would be more hair and cloth to render, right?
Peter S. said on March 7th, 2008 at 4:26 pm:
Morgan:
Only to the same extent that standing closer to an object, or zooming in on it, would create “more”. Which is to say mostly but not *entirely* no.
Barbara said on March 8th, 2008 at 1:38 pm:
Interesting hearing all the men claiming that women don’t play male characters. I’m a girl, and in EQ and EQII, my main characters have been male avatars. I was part of a roleplay guild in EQ and many females players in there played male avatars. I don’t know how common it is, but don’t write off that it happens.

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