Women experience guilt, shame and exclusion in gaming culture, study finds

"ackshually mobile games don't count as real games 🤓" - lemmy users

"women avoid me 🤓" - same lemmy users

“ackshually mobile games don’t count as real games 🤓”
Yeah, that is pretty much true. Or at least you should consider the difference between the types of gaming cultures.
Mobile games: There are several studies out about mobile games and the tactics used to keep you playing. This is a very significant difference, as many are pay to win or as a vehicle for ads, so they are designed to keep you playing rather than an end goal. They are convenient and easy to pick up and often used to "kill time".
Studies have shown a correlation between frustration, loneliness, unsocial behaviours in both sexes for mobile games. In the article they said the women felt guilt and shame, but mobile gaming studies show they are not alone. Although many studies suggest that women play more of these types of games then men, which skews the results.
So I think it is a valid to question the title that uses the phrase "gaming culture" when there is very little "culture" in psychologically driven revenue generators.
Like this comment on hacker news: “...boatload of psychological exploitation tricks that we used to keep people playing (and paying). The game mechanics were literally a rigged slot machine. The meta-game was designed to constantly tantalize you with something just out of reach.”
Just like gambling addiction, a constant dopamine machine will make people feel guilty, irritable, and depressed.
- cool opinion, can you run it through one more time and ask for bullet points so I don't have to read it?

Given where this is coming from, im waiting for the drop where they blame the tranas community for this. Somehow.

I don't play these types of games with randos on open mics anymore, but it definitely felt taboo when a girl was speaking. It's too bad there weren't just as many to normalize it then everyone would finally hopefully move past it... Maybe?

Do mobile games have voice chats? I've never seen one that did.

just like in real life.

online there are the sexual guys who will buy you anything to be theirs.

And there are the annoying sexist ones. I think it often has to do with a primitive feeling in the guy of "there is a female right there that im interacting with but she isnt having sex with me. i am thus annoyed." so the male does mean pokes at the female because it's "her fault" they arent having sex. i've seen it a trillion times. "why arent you MY bitch?" pokes rudely

And lastly there is the good type of male who, just like the good type of female, can have fun with you while playing the game together and enjoying the play; simple as that.

There was that study that found that the men most aggressive towards women in gaming were those less skilled than them, I think about that one a lot
- That same "study" uses evolution psychology which was proven to be not reliable. But hey at least we get to demonize men right as always.

Yeah that's definitely not going to be exclusive to mobile games, but I always feel like mobile games are generally more isolating to begin with.

UK who play mobile games

So not gaming culture.

Shame and exclusion on display. Why do you want to put people down?
- lol, wut?

Who play mobile games

So not proper gaming like on console or PC?

Suuuuuuure buddy, mobile gamers. Very reputable.

It’s not a culture. Don’t play online.

Can you elaborate?

I'm sure the solution to this problem has nothing to do with killing internet anonymity like fascist governments are currently trying to do..

Edit: wow it actually doesn't say that, I was really expecting that to be the angle of this UK article.

Instead it says these feelings of gamer imposter syndrome women feel is most likely a symptom of culture, but not a cause for women to not play games. And suggests that gaming spaces being more inclusive would help women feel less like importers despite playing games and being gamers.

This is pretty clear to anyone who has ever played a game of Counterstrike or whatever and a woman makes the mistake of using voice chat. You'll get the whole gamut from misogynistic nonsense to the most awkward and creepy attempts to hit on them possible, pretty much every time.

I’m not into gaming, but my wife used to be into it. When we were dating, we’d play call of duty together (side-by-side consoles). She’d get on voice chat, get teased a bit by teenage boys, and then proceed to utterly destroy them. Sometimes they’d scream and curse, accuse her of cheating, accuse her of having a guy play for her (lol her man sucks at this), and so on. She’d just mock them, call them horrible names, and then specifically target and spawn camp the little shits until they rage quit.
It was fucking awesome, and it was alway a laugh riot for the other (more mature, less sexist) folks in the match. I love her so much.
It's just one joke, over and over again. I'm a guy, but one of the reasons I stopped going to lan parties was hearing this same few jokes again and again whenever a woman showed up. If it wasn't a woman, it would be something else from the limited number of topics and opinions they had. When it wasn't frustrating, it was simply boring.
- What's the one joke?
I agree that most competitive games tend to go that way. My ex and I played a lot of League of Legends in a small friend group together (where this did not happen, thank god), and if playing with "externals" it was unbelievable what bullshit she had to deal with. and although most of the time the creeps bit off more than they could chew, it must have felt pretty bad, regardless of what me and our friends did or said.
Anyone with experience in non-competitive game settings to share?
- Folks in MMOs tend to be more chill in my experience. In such a large sample of people you're going to find a few dickbags who think they're hilarious or the kind who will DM sexual harassment, but the majority of people just do not care and are happy to play the game. Toxicity tends to crop up around entitlement to loot and perceived performance rather than gender.
But if you just treat them like normal you can make some good friends. I had a group of women I played CS with for quite a while after playing with them as a random and just treating them like regular people for once.
It takes absolutely nothing to just not act like you're amazed at talking to a woman. They're just people trying to have fun in the game, just like you and every other teammate you've had. Don't treat them any differently.
I don't doubt this but now I'm really curious about the numbers. Is it the same on PC? How do women's experience compare to other genders in similar surveys?
- For how other genders fair, it's almost entirely dependent on your voice, so feminine sounding people almost certainly get the same treatment, and masculine sounding people just get treated like normal.
I only ever really saw the clsssic toxic gamer behavior flourish once most games switched from having private dedicated servers ran by the players that almost always had an admin present to handle toxicity to unmoderated developer hosted servers no players have any bit of control over. Counter-Strike: Source vs CS:GO/CS2 is quite a leap in the general attitude of players you would encounter.
Wild how removing people who managed the player's behavior makes the bad behavior intensify.
- Confirmed. Counterstrike specifically was very inclusive and very open to most players of all ages, demographics, and skill ranges especially compared to other shooters of the 00's. Then matchmaking and eventually premier got introduced and any chance of moderating the community died and here we are today.
I suspect the environment is different depending on the game. I never witnessed any of that in overwatch back when I used to play for instance. Though I pretty much never play multiplayer games without at least one friend so the numbers are skewed a bit by having at least 2 non-weirdos on the team
- Alternatively, you had two guaranteed weirdos.

Competitive gaming is a cesspool regardless of gender but I feel for women who have to deal with sexism on top of the default toxicity. Hopefully things will improve over time but i don't have high hope for the near future sadly

This study has nothing to do with that. It only surveyed mobile gaming.

"Researchers surveyed 1,000 women of all ages across the UK who play mobile games."

Shows a picture of a woman holding what appears to be a PS4 controller.

Poifect.

I think it's a black PS5 controller. No light.
- Trackpad looked wrong is why I went PS4, but yeah you're probably right.
- She should be holding a mobile phone. because that is what mobile gaming mostly looks like.

oh dang, women have been telling you for the past like 40 years that video games are an incredibly exclusionary space and turns out they weren't just lying??? crazy, it's almost like we should be listening to people when they have problems in a community. i mean jfc people actually needed a study to prove this? ask any woman who's ever attempted to speak in game chat what happens, just ask.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Mario_Bros.
Oh wow, I didn't knew that Super Mario or Tetris on the NES was an "incredibly exclusionary space" because that's not how I remember it.
I'm glad you taught me that.
- Well you win the most asinine comment I've read today.
  Even I remember girls getting crapped on in the arcades.
- Activities don't need to be inherently sexist for the culture surrounding them to be. Consider the ways things like healthcare, cooking, and hunting have been gendered in different times and places.
- gotta love that you not only completely missed the point, but you quite perfectly encapsulate the kind of "gotcha" rhetoric that women hear every day in gaming spaces from these toxic men.
  it'd be funny if it weren't depressing.
- Being a girl trying to talk about video games with boys was generally horrible, it's not just the multiplayer experience, the 'you like games, then name every X ever!' followed by bullying has been alive and well for over 30 years.
- So, to participate in modern gaming, women should play games from 40 years ago?
- oh yeah i'm sure your half rotten memory is a reliable source, thanks grandpappy

Interesting study. Explicitly about mobile gaming, not PC gaming, though ...

Dr Seán Roberts, who researches gaming at Cardiff University, said: “When I ask people if they play video games, women often say no. But if you ask about playing games on a mobile, many of them will suddenly say yes. It’s like they have an idea of what a real gamer is in their heads, and they feel like they don’t meet that ideal.”
TBF I don't really consider myself a gamer anymore... even though I clock a few hours a week on the playstation. But like I used to play competitive FPS/MOBA/RTS 10+ hours a week.
- So they aren't actually getting excluded from games they just dont view themselves as gamers probaby because that label is cringe. I wouldn't consider someone who casually plays mobile games to be a gamer either. Gamer isnt just anyone who play a games, it describes someone who embeds themselves in gaming communities and culture and engages gaming as a hobby. Same as going for a walk doesn't make you a hiker.
  I play pc games often and wouldnt consider myself a gamer.
- How can you call yourself competitive when you didn't even clock 40+ hours a week? Competitive gaming isn't just a hobby, it's a way of life... Poser.
  //This comment was brought to you by Raid: Shadow Legends! Play now!!!//
- How much RGB do you have?
- ... feel like they don't meet that ideal.
  Well, there's your problem, idealizing the traditional "gamer" persona. I play computer games every day, for a long time, and I also don't feel like a "gamer," because I don't want to be associated with people I would consider "gamers."
  That might be a side effect of my not wanting to be associated with anyone, but there you have it.
How the fuck are they getting shamed and excluded in mobile games?
- Probably by the common mindset that mobile games don't really count for gaming clout.
  If i compare what crap games i've played on my PC sometimes to mobile games, i feel that such boundaries are pretty arbitrary. There are some mobile games that can keep up with PC gaming too - Shattered Pixel Dungeon and Hoplite come to mind.
- We need equality in the gaming space.
  We should shame everyone who plays games on phones equally.
- Self-inflicted wound.
  She plays Candy Crush and feels that calling herself a "gamer" for it amounts to stolen valor.
  Maybe she's right, maybe she isn't. I'm a woodworker, and I'd built several bookshelves, tables, shop fixtures and cutting boards before I felt comfortable wearing the rank. I would insist I was an amateur or a beginner. It was my little porch table that is made with genuine mortise and tenons that I felt I'd earned it.
  And that's without the gender politics of it. Here I'm a man doing traditionally masculine things. I'm not a man taking up knitting or a woman taking up gaming.
just looking at it as a classification of genres, they (men & women) rightly feel shame and exclusion because mobile gaming is to gaming as connect4 is to table top gaming.
-as decreed from the Assistant to the High Stellarch of the PC Master Race 69th Group, Section 420.

i mean of course youre going to have a conclusion like that polling exclusively mobile game players. For example had they polled female MMO players (there are a lot), the results would likely be far different.

Eh, I’m one of those MMO ‘females’. I have to be really cautious when I first join a guild. I’m often seen as a ‘female’ first and gamer second. The amount of times I’ve gotten OnlyFans comments is way too high. I’ve had the best luck in multiplayer FPS games. The downfall of Bungie hits me hard because Destiny in particular was a great place to be a woman gamer. Can you do the mechanic and communicate? That’s all a good team wants.
- Absolutely, in a guild with a female GM and we've collected a fair number of female gamers because of it. But we still end up kicking folks occasionally because they lose their shit when they hear a female on discord.

In other news: the sky generally appears blue.

Gotta have data to do anything with it. Important to actually be able to show and prove problems exist before trying to deal with them. (Need more data on causes)

Many men are emotionally unable to accept things like this. I think the reasoning goes like

i'm a good person
i like my hobby
someone is saying bad things about my hobby
this makes me feel bad, so it must be false
furthermore, the person bringing it up is attacking me

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belief_perseverance

Facts don't matter. There's really nothing you can do if you're not someone they like.

I also think about this comic a lot: https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots1151.html - Some people are too cowardly to grow.

This is the first time I've ever seen someone link an oots comic. Nice pick.
I also think it may be just... sexism... I know people who behave like this towards women, but not other men...

I've been playing a certain well known game for over a decade now. I've developed such skill at never specifying anything that could out my gender I could put it on a resume.

It's actually quite fun. Oh the stuff men talk about when they don't know there's a lass in their raid group lolol

Now that I'm "old", it ain't about guilt, shame, or exclusion, it's about how fun this facade is. Y'all neeeever know. So keep talking.

My first thought was why would anyone know. Granted I pretty much assume no one in the game is female. I know some are but I think my assumption will apply a large majority of the time. I mean I know my wife was on the game.

Do they resize this is the case for al gamers? No matter the gender

it is not equal between men and women. toxicity toward women is usually much worse. and is much more frequent.
- True enough. I’ve steered clear of any games where you interact with other people, I stick with single player.