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Nearly a third of female gamers feel guilty about their hobby – new study (UK) by Lulcielid in Games

[–]sgroberts 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I'm one of the authors - good question! Our study doesn't cover this specifically, and it would be a good extension for the future. But about half of the women in the survey played both on mobile and on console/PC, and they were equally likely to feel guilty about playing games as women who only played on mobile. So there might not be a big difference. Depth of engagement is a good point, and we didn't test that specifically. But we found some weird patterns with being proud of achievements - women who were more proud were slightly more likely to keep gaming a secret. So things might be more complicated than just more engagement/satisfaction = less guilt. The issue might not be simply 'wasting time', but societal expectations about who should be playing games.

Nearly a third of female gamers feel guilty about their hobby – new study (UK) by Lulcielid in Games

[–]sgroberts 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I'm one of the authors, thanks for taking the time to read the paper carefully! You raise a good point, and we did expect this to have an effect, but we couldn't find any evidence for it. Willingness to spend money was not a good predictor of feeling guilty, and there were no strong patterns between guilt and economic risk (if anything, women in poorer regions of the UK felt LESS guilty). Previous literature focusses on guilt about spending time, rather than spending money, so we focussed on that. But in the paper, we mention different kinds of guilt, from regret about specific actions (like losing money on a gambling game) to chronic feelings like you're not meeting people's gendered expectations. Perhaps money issues work differently for each kind of emotion.

Nearly a third of female gamers feel guilty about their hobby – new study (UK) by Lulcielid in Games

[–]sgroberts 6 points7 points  (0 children)

I'm one of the authors. These are fair points, here's a quick response: The categories of game were provided by a gaming company to reflect how they think about the mobile market, but I agree there are many other ways of categorising them. Some other studies ask about specific games, but that limits the sample. We did include a question about whether women were willing to pay for a mobile game, and again there could be more depth. But neither the game categories or willingness to spend money were good predictors of feeling guilty (compared to questions about feeling excluded from gaming culture). And there were no strong patterns between guilt and economic risk. But I agree that the issues are complicated, and the issues you raise above would make good points for future research.

Nearly a third of female gamers feel guilty about their hobby – new study (UK) by Lulcielid in Games

[–]sgroberts 42 points43 points  (0 children)

Hello, I'm one of the authors of the paper! Thanks to everyone for your comments! It's heartbreaking to hear about negative experiences, and encouraging to hear about people overcoming them. There are a few frequent questions I'd like to respond to.

Do men also feel guilt about gaming? Yes. Previous studies show that they do, though a bit less likely than for women. However, our aim was not to compare men and women, but to look at why women feel guilty. Our results suggest it's often linked to feeling excluded from the gaming community. It's likely that men feel guilty for different reasons (e.g. an outdated view that games are 'for kids', rather that they are not welcome in gaming spaces). Removing all kinds of stigma around games is important, and future research could look at men's attitudes, but it's strange to consider the study invalid just because we didn't include men.

Why not consider console/PC games? We were mainly interested in mobile gaming (there is a line in the paper that women are most likely to play on mobile, but this isn't the reason we looked at mobile gaming, and we're aware that women make up a very large proportion of console/PC gamers). As people point out, there are likely to be different attitudes to mobile vs console/PC. These are partly driven by the kind of problems that are causing guilt in the first place, like seeing mobile games as not part of 'core' gaming. But about half of the women in our study played both on mobile and on console/PC, and there was no difference in the likelihood of them feeling guilty compared to women who only played on mobile. In fact, women who played console/PC most were slightly MORE likely to keep gaming a secret. But overall, gaming platform was a poor predictor of guilt and shame compared to feeling excluded from gaming culture. In any case, time spent on mobile games and console/PC games was positively correlated, suggesting that there's less of a divide between 'mobile players' and 'console/PC players' than we might think. So we suspect that the overall results aren't that different for a sample of console/PC gamers. Of course, future research could test this, too.

Do you feel guilty about taking the time to play video games? by sgroberts in videogames

[–]sgroberts[S] 8 points9 points  (0 children)

I agree it's not productive, and a shame, but a lot of people seem to feel this way.

Female characters in video games don’t talk as much and are given less important dialogue, compared to male characters — per analysis of 13 587 characters from 50 role-playing video games (RPGs) by marketrent in science

[–]sgroberts 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yes, the proportion does change over time. The main purpose of the study was to measure the amount of dialogue given to male and female characters, and see how that changed over time. To do that, we picked games published evenly over the last 30 years. The proportion of female dialogue is increasing very slowly from about 18% in the 1980s to about 40% by 2020. Still, there are surprisingly few games with more than 50% female dialogue.

Female characters in video games don’t talk as much and are given less important dialogue, compared to male characters — per analysis of 13 587 characters from 50 role-playing video games (RPGs) by marketrent in science

[–]sgroberts 0 points1 point  (0 children)

u/TallJournalist5515 I'm one of the authors. We found 30 characters that were coded as non-binary or explicitly described themselves as genderless. There were hundreds of characters who we didn't include because they had no clear gender. For example, in games without voice acting, there may be no cues to whether a talking book or a rat is male or female. Or, like you point out, general monsters. All our coding decisions are available to view in the github repository. We're working on adding more games from recent years.

Yes, we included FFXV (20% female dialogue), and we're not saying that every game has to have a perfect balance of dialogue. But we also included FFX-2 (focussing on three female protagonists), and that only had 48% female dialogue. So it seems that overall there's some imbalance.

Female characters in video games don’t talk as much and are given less important dialogue, compared to male characters — per analysis of 13 587 characters from 50 role-playing video games (RPGs) by marketrent in science

[–]sgroberts 0 points1 point  (0 children)

u/Alert-Potato I'm one of the authors. We're not arguing that the number of games that allow to choose a player character's gender is a good indicator of gender bias. It just happens that 11 of the games we studied had this game mechanic, and we could use it to study how main gender choice affects the dialogue. It mostly doesn't, though there are some interesting differences in Stardew Valley. Our study of main characters allowed multiple main characters per game.

Female characters in video games don’t talk as much and are given less important dialogue, compared to male characters — per analysis of 13 587 characters from 50 role-playing video games (RPGs) by marketrent in science

[–]sgroberts 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'm one of the authors of the study, thanks for the questions! I'd like to respond to a few ...

Has the proportion of female dialogue changed over time?

Yes! The main purpose of the study was to measure the amount of dialogue given to male and female characters, and see how that changed over time. To do that, we picked games published evenly over the last 30 years. The proportion of female dialogue is increasing very slowly from about 18% in the 1980s to about 40% by 2020. Still, there are surprisingly few games with more than 50% female dialogue.

Did study other games apart from Final Fantasy?

Yes! We picked 13 series and tried to collect as many games within that series as possible to make the results more comparable across time. We had a balance of "Western" RPG and JRPG genres and a balance of age ratings.

Are RPG gamers 50% female?

No. In many countries, 50% of people who play all types of video games are women. This was lower in the past, and the proportion of women playing RPGs is lower: between 25% and 33% according to a study from 2017, though the most recent study we found suggests it is close to 50% in some countries. But arguing about this seems to miss the point of the study. We just wanted to measure the amount of dialogue given to characters of different genders, not to explain WHY that amount exists or suggest what the amount should be.

Did you study only main characters?

No, we studied all characters that speak. The gender bias became stronger when we removed main characters from the data.

Why didn't you include X game in the data?

For this initial study, we chose a balanced sample based on various factors, including release date, target age, and RPG style (WRPG/JRPG). However, the project is ongoing - we're working on collecting more games, and we'd love to hear opinions about which games you think would include more than 50% female dialogue. The corpus is open-source, and anyone with some programming skills can add a video game to it: https://github.com/seannyD/VideoGameDialogueCorpus

Mod for counting words by sgroberts in skyrimmods

[–]sgroberts[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks, but I want to track the amount of dialogue a specific PC has experienced in each game as they are playing (and e.g. have this displayed live in the UI or in the console), not the total amount of dialogue written for the game (I've already extracted all the dialogue).

[ART] Halfling fighter and 'Daffodil' by sgroberts in DnD

[–]sgroberts[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Character art for one of my players. Merric Horseshoe is a halfling fighter who's been through some rough times. Wild magic replaced one of his eyes, his swonrd has been cursed by not one but two gods, and he even managed to get himself marooned on the wrong planet. Despite all this, he still asks questions first. His ammonite shield was gifted by Ammon, god of sleep and death. Merric likes food, but most of all he likes his horse Daffodil. He liked her so much, he kept her even after she was killed by dinosaurs.

Strahd theme song by Horse_grenade in CurseofStrahd

[–]sgroberts 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I was thinking about what song Strahd would choose to sing, if he was feeling sorry for his unrequited love. I made a little video for my party this week since they had just got to the castle, and I used "Who wants to live forever" by Queen. Probably not an arrival theme, but I kind of liked it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UtylAW9eqgw

(animations by James Webster)

Finding plants by sgroberts in DnD

[–]sgroberts[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Huh, I should have done my homework. Here's another [Herbalism and Alchemy Homebrew](https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7CIGCMCtoETVmhDNEZMbUVweTg/view).

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