Talk to women who play games online, especially first-person shooters, and you'll quickly hear tales of them being bombarded with gender-focused harassment if and when they decide to speak up on a groupchat channel. Now, a new study suggests that the players most likely to engage in this kind of harassment are the ones who are actually worst at the game itself.
In the study, published last week by the Public Library of Science, two researchers from the University of New South Wales and Miami University of Ohio looked at player reactions during 126 recorded matches of Halo 3 team deathmatch. Matches were divided into a control group—where the player was silent throughout—and two experimental groups where the researchers played the same set of inoffensive prerecorded statements (e.g., "Alright team let’s do this" or "That was a good game everyone") in either a male or female voice.
For each experimental match, the researchers transcribed any responses to these prerecorded snippets from their teammates (all the responses came from male-identified voices—if there were any other women playing in these matches, they stayed silent). Those responses were then hand-coded into positive (e.g., "Do ya thing, girl"), negative (e.g. "Should've made me a sandwich, bitch"), and neutral (e.g., "You wanna jump in the jeep?") groups. The researchers also kept track of the responding players' overall Halo 3 skill ranking (as determined by Xbox Live) and game-specific metrics like kill/death ratio and whether the team won the game. These performance metrics were also compared against the experimental player to create a relative skill ranking.
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