I suspect that in tournament contexts, the otherwise ‘high ranking’ players, playing in a field of similarly skilled players, are experiencing a greater risk of status loss than usual - exacerbated by the presence of an audience. They are also likely to be at the competitive-spirited end of the spectrum and therefore not above a bit of ‘gamesmanship’ when it will offer an advantage.
bingo! bingo!
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Alternately, high-status, dominant personalities learn how to apply their aggression in the real world and parlay that into positions of power, so they don’t spend much time in the gaming world, where this study focuses.
Yeah, that’s an awkward paragraph. To make it more coherent: often, the reaction to sexist assholes is to shame them. That’s an appropriate response to sexist assholes - they should be ashamed of their behavior. Many breeds and styles of feminist criticism is thus rhetorically and wisely confrontational - “what you are doing is wrong and you should feel bad about treating other human beings this way, stop being an awful person.”
However, the study suggests that this might not be the most effective approach if the goal is to get them to stop being sexist assholes. If the sexism comes from the fact that they’re insecure little men-children, pointing that out and criticizing that isn’t going to make them stop, it’s just going to make them worse. The insecurity and self-loathing they feel is fueling their hate machine.
Or to put an example out there: Anita Sarkeesian correctly and acutely points out a place where videogames are being misogynist, and low-status dudes see that and think, “she is calling me a misogynist! I must defend myself against her attack, or people will not like me because I play Mario or whatever! Time to issue a rape threat!” Someone who is less insecure maybe thinks instead “Yeah, it is kind of crappy that saving the princess is the narrative of the most widely popular game series of the last 20 years.”
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As @popobawa4u noted, it’s very easy to overgeneralise, and thus fail to ascribe appropriate weight to data - anecdotes aren’t worth shit, because there’s variation everywhere so a sample of one or a few tells you nothing. What actually counts is the big data; the aggregate effects. Actually, I think it’s probably fair to say that if you’re Asian, you’re less likely to be a good driver unless you’re Japanese, because that’s what Gran Turismo sales figures suggest. Likewise, the stereotype of white male dominion is fair as a net accounting, despite the countless counterexamples.
But of course it goes beyond that; the simple fact of being white and male is something we tend not to notice the effect of… it’s kinda invisible. We take for granted sharing the race and sex of the vast majority of the protagonists of books, telly/movies, and games, for example. Shitloads of little things like that add up to being a first-class citizen, despite our individual fortunes. So much of this stuff just goes unnoticed, unarticulated. And despite the potentially vilifying net effects, it’s often not easy for the under-represented and oppressed to catch the details and express it either - but I think fair-minded folks can tell when such complaints are warranted, at least once fairer-minded folks have pointed out one or two things…
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Actually did have a guy argue that to me the other day. That when women “knew how to handle getting hit” (by … not doing anything to get hit, apparently) the world was a better place. And also that we can’t negotiate on equal footing with men, we have to use our “feminine wiles” to manipulate them into doing things they think are their own idea. Or we get divorced. Which is bad, for some reason.
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It’s not something that I’ve usually encountered, but a lot of women say they won’t talk at all in online games because they get hit on or harassed as soon as people know they’re a woman. Now that evidently isn’t the case here, because the guys had to know somehow they were female even though they were silent, right?
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Yes, well, try getting into a position of trust and sincerity with an angry, bitter loser, especially online.
But it’s a feedback loop with those people. I’ve tried to explain, I get shit on by them, and I exclude them from my life. Assuming sincerity of dialogue is a mistake, if we could find an angle to get through their armor of wounded hate, we wouldn’t be forced to be so dismissive of them.
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The study describes this.
“Three Xbox LIVE (XBL) accounts were created and assigned to a respective experimental manipulation: control, male, and female. The control condition simply played in matches of Halo 3 as one normally would; however, this condition did not use the real-time voice channel to communicate with other players, and as a result, was not further analyzed here. For the male and female manipulations, the researchers also played in the matches as expected, but also developed a list of roughly a dozen phrases that were recorded separately by a male and female voice (S1 Text). These phrases were broadcast, during the games, to other players using the real-time voice channel. These prerecorded phrases were identical in the male and female condition, harmless in nature, and designed to be inoffensive. Phrases included: ‘I like this map’, ‘nice shot there’, ‘I had fun playing that game’, ‘I think I just saw a couple of them heading this way’, and ‘that was a good game everyone’.”
The “female” character was given a voice.
I didn’t get that from the study. My reading was that if you’re both (1) sexist and (2) a loser, then you’re likely to express that by harassing women. This seems plausible; it certainly fits in with some things I’ve observed in real life.
(Presumably a sexist winner would see no reason to harass women and would maybe condescend to them instead; the study didn’t really track that. Non-sexist players would probably treat opposing players as social equals, so they’d try to be humble in victory and gracious in defeat. The study wasn’t set up to track that, either.)
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Being face to face, and not safely anonymous behind a screen probably help people be more polite too.
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Of course, the guy probably wouldn’t think of himself as sexist or a misogynist. He loves women, as long as they do exactly as he says… Ugh.
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I read it as perhaps you’d been flogging that particular gif a bit, and it did seem a bit suddenly familiar…
Huh… he only got like a year long ban.
Humans like familiarity, though. I mean, bravo to you for engaging the dude, but you know it gets so tiring to have to constantly remind some men that, yes, I am a fully functioning human being, capable of the same level of respect and compassion as you, and sometimes, you just have to treat people with the level of contempt they deserve.
But you know… the REAL crime here is apparently that I use a gif a bit too much…
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I’m a little surprised by the year-long ban, as he didn’t strike me as being offensive to a high degree–just another sad GG type with no self-awareness/empathy/etc who was, I thought, rather effectively disarmed (by @LDoBe in particular, IIRC).
Which is why I’m not mod-worthy.
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The aren’t capital-‘M’ “Meaningful” in some platonic-ideals sense; but arguing that ‘status’ and ‘dominance’ in social contexts aren’t meaningful is sort of like the argument that fiat currencies are an absurd delusion and nonsense.
Yes, none of those have the sort of Universal Objective Meaning that their biggest enthusiasts, and passive adherents who can’t even imagine things being otherwise, tend to credit them with; but from the perspective of a social organism it is pretty hard to argue that factors that change how the people around you behave toward you to such an extent are ‘non-meaningful’. Magic green paper is an illusion; but it’s an illusion that turns walking out of a store with an armload of merchandise from a crime into a purchase. ‘Status’ and ‘dominance’ are all intersubjective and whatnot; but all but the most seriously cognitively impaired among us has little difficulty in distinguishing who is the designated ‘shit flows downhill’ target in a social environment and who has the status.
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I dunno… I thought he was pretty offensive… The whole “all feminist are evil” nonsense just really gets to me.
Yeah, @LDoBe did good to engage. I just get so tired of doing so.
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Understood. I’m spending too much time on twitter lately, or, as I’ve taken to calling it, the Hatemachine. The people there don’t even offer the benefit of words other than basic congealed hatred, so I’ve been dumbed down a bit for witnessing it.
I can empathize sympathize–watching from the outside, it’s exhausting and sad.
As for the slurpy-Snow gif:
Totally. @codinghorror’s comment led me on a fruitless search for that Simpson’s scene where someone is telling Homer…Don’t…touch…the XYZ (don’t recall what it was)…and through every step Homer keeps moving toward the thing and eventually grabs it (as we knew he would). I had the GIF queued up, but did not give in to that base childish impulse…Oh, dopamine! Where will I get thee now?
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