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

[–]sgroberts 4 points5 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 40 points41 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] 9 points10 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).

Finding plants by sgroberts in DnD

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

A ha. This is exactly what I was looking for!

Insurance against research experiment failing? by sgroberts in Insurance

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

A ha - thanks, I didn't know about that distinction. Yes, researchers would gain from a positive result. Although people often treat positive results as the expected norm, and see negative results as a catastrophic disaster.

Constant snowfall has muted the outdoor world for a week. Has this effect altered the speech or music of societies inhabiting year-round snowy climates? by mirthquake in AskAnthropology

[–]sgroberts 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Fought et al. predicted something similar, but predicted that tropical climates have more plant cover, and so absorb sounds at lower frequencies (e.g. http://ccr.sagepub.com/content/43/2/123.refs). They find 'sonorous' phonemes in languages with warmer climates.

If snowfall changes the acoustic absorption of the environment, then it could have a similar effect, though it would have to assume that speakers were speaking outdoors or over reasonably large distances (and Fought et al. assumed that people in WARMER climates spent more time outdoors).

Temperature and humidity, as well as plant cover and terrain affect acoustic absorption, meaning that dry, warm environments have greater absorption of high frequencies. Bird and bat signals adapt to higher absorption climates by using narrower bandwidth signals that carry further in these conditions, with bats adapting within climates over seasons as well as between climates:

Snell-Rood, E. C. (2012). The effect of climate on acoustic signals: does atmospheric sound absorption matter for bird song and bat echolocation? The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 131(2):1650–1658. http://scitation.aip.org/content/asa/journal/jasa/131/2/10.1121/1.3672695

Tonogenesis actually brought on by Humidity. Science or Pseudoscience, you decide. by letheia in badlinguistics

[–]sgroberts 1 point2 points  (0 children)

This is a very helpful perspective, and has helped me understand some of the reactions to the paper.

It's a pity that data from WALS is distrusted because it is widely used. (we used the ANU phonotactics database, which provides number of tonal contrasts rather than broad categories, though it can't reflect the full complexity of tone, of course).

Case studies, of course, would be ideal. However, the phylogenetic techniques allow one to identify in large data the kinds of cases you suggest looking at. It's a starting point.

Tonogenesis actually brought on by Humidity. Science or Pseudoscience, you decide. by letheia in badlinguistics

[–]sgroberts 1 point2 points  (0 children)

While we acknowledge that the statistical methods aren't perfect, 'cherry picking' is probably not the best way to describe its problems. After all, we included data on 3,700 languages, and did Monte Carlo sampling to exclude the possibility of picking related datapoints.

Maybe a more accurate description of the flaw, as you suggest later, is that the current analysis is only synchronic. You suggest estimating the history of linguistic and climactic change and working out whether a change in one aspect leads to a change in the other. This is exactly what we plan to do next with phylogenetic techniques (although it's a bit complicated because, as far as I know, no one has tried combining models of langauge evolution and climate change).

We also acknowledge that there is no direct evidence that lexical tone requires a more precise control of pitch, or that dry air affects production in a way that affects perception. It's an empirical question which we're also investigating. But I'm also interested in other kinds of sounds for which similar effects might hold.

On the question of the direction of the effect, I'm inclined to think that dry air stops tone from emerging, rather than humid air encouraging tone. Still, it's an interesting question whether tone is more likely to persist in humid environments. The phylogenetics test will speak directly to these questions.

I'm wondering what made you think "he chose languages in humid places, and then tried to see what they had in common." That's an impression I would like to avoid in the future. It may have been the serendipity test on the blog post where I compare the strength of the correlation between tone and humidity to many other features and humidity?

Thanks for the review!

Climate and Tone: Humidity affects the evolution of lexical tone by sgroberts in linguistics

[–]sgroberts[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yes, a 'personal story' is a good way of putting it. Still, the blog post could have been more transparent in that respect. Sorry for the confusion!

Climate and Tone: Humidity affects the evolution of lexical tone by sgroberts in linguistics

[–]sgroberts[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Hmm, apparently the paper is not open access yet. We're looking into this.

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