A PowerPoint presentation by Raymond Beehler for SOC 235 with Erica Dixon on the subject of Video games impact on adolescent gendered development

1. Video Games and Gendered Behavioral Development of Adolescents A study by Raymond Beehler Erica Dixon, SOC 235 Gender Roles: Diversity 08/16/2010

2. Why I am interested in this subject: I played a lot of video games as a youth, and am curious how it may have affected my gendered development My brother is currently in his teens and also plays a lot of video games, many of them masculine stereotypical in nature. I’m curious how this effects him. I am curious how video games affect gendered development of other children in the world and how it influences society The subject has not received much attention, instead most of the focus has been on video games has focused on masculine-stereotypical violent games, , the feminine side is either ignored or discarded. Furthermore, most studies done in this subject are not peer reviewed or reputable, many are opinion pieces (at least in our databases like Ebsco and Proquest)

3. Some Background info Many articles have been written about video game violence and how it supposedly effects youth behavior, but I am for the purpose of this study ignoring non peer-reviewed sources and opinion pieces. There are very few (if any) peer reviewed studies in Ebsco or Proquest that focus on gender in particular. This is disturbing because studies find more than 92% of children play video games, many of them violent. This percentage is huge and the impact on gender development could be occurring on a societal level.

4. Some more background info The attention from the media is mostly due to public outcry from shootings such as the tragedy at Columbine High. The media was quick to point out that the people responsible for the Columbine shooting had been playing violent video games such as DOOM, a game with very masculine-stereotypical behavior. The media (and most opinion articles) completely ignored the fact that DOOM and similar games of this vein were in fact played by a very large portion of the adolescent population. Since the vast majority of our children have not participated in a shooting of any sort, it would be reasonable to conclude that this connection is weak at best.

5. Ok, how does this relate to gender? While it is unlikely that video games directly correlate to violent acts, we also can’t dismiss their influence entirely. One could theorize that a game that induces masculine or violent behavior in an individual may with over-exposure actually create a more aggressive personality. There is no conclusive study that completely verifies or dismisses this claim. Furthermore, I could find no study that actually examined the gendered behavior of adolescent individuals imediately after playing a gender-stereotypical video game in our available databases. If I could establish such a link in even a small study, this might add some credibility to the above theory, and indicate it is not to be completely dismissed.

6. My Hypothesis In games that have stereotypical roles, I hypothesize the roles presented in the video game will reinforce stereotypical gender behavior in adolescents. That is to say, video games that portray men as violent, and more prone to solve video game objectives via physical force will reinforce the same such behavior in those playing and watching the game, particularly in boys. Likewise, games that emphasize stereotypical female behavior (social activities and other bonding type behaviors) will reinforce that behavior in females playing the game. I furthermore predict females will spend more time playing feminine targeted games while males will spend more time playing games targeted towards a masculine audience.

7. Meet the study group I decided it would be best to keep the study group anonymous, as some individuals may find it embarrassing to be labeled a particular stereotypical gender. To this end each individual was assigned a unique “secret” number known only by me and the participant. 15 numbers were issued for 15 participants, 10 of whom were male and 5 of whom were female. Age data was also collected, but no further information was requested. The study group will appear on the next slide in no particular order (it is intended to be as random as possible)

8. Meet the study group

9. Methods… In my experiment, all participants were observed for a period of 30 minutes. 30 minutes counted as a “session” during which any number of “events” could be recorded. Events were weighted based on the level of friendliness or aggressiveness (my attempt to quantify what usually is an objective set of behaviors), and the tally was added up and input with as much information as possible into a relational database via a laptop on the monitoring site. The individuals were aware they were being watched, but not aware of the purpose of the study. They only knew it was for a school assignment. The subjects consented to having data logged, but the types of data being logged were not disclosed. Sessions had to be at least 30 minutes long to be counted.

10. The Data… The data was stored in a Sqlite database integrated inside a custom application. In terms of raw data, 79 events were recorded spanning over 21 sessions. Other attributes were recorded in related tables managed via a custom program made for this purpose. The total amount of “records” or entries spans over 500 “rows” of data in over 15 “columns”. The data was designed to be made accessible so it could be used by future studies with more resources. The program used to input the data is fairly hard to use and an eventual goal was always to simplify it so non-computer experts could use it to read the raw collected data in unique ways. This goal should have been attained by the time you read this. (You don’t have to understand this, it’s just cool)

11. Examining all that data! The first question I had was which individuals exhibited the most masculine or feminine behavior. To that end, a “query” was run on the logged data to tally all events and tally the sum of their associated weights. Feminine actions counted as a negative weighted value, while masculine actions were counted as a positive weighted value. In keeping with this, individuals graphed to the left are considered “feminine,” while individuals graphed to the right are considered “masculine.” The table returned by our database is presented on the following slide, gender values color coded pink (F) and blue (M) and the associated individuals ID number presented on the left:

12. Masculinity vs. Femininity table

13. Looking deeper… The second question I had looking at the previous chart was whether individuals who crossed the stereotypical “gender-boundary” of their physical sex were viewed negatively or picked on by other members of the group, since a slight majority adhered to gender typical behavior during gameplay. To this end another query was run, this time determining the most “victimized” individuals (that is, the individuals who had the most targeted negative actions directed at them). It was instructed to present the data as a table. The following table was returned:

14. Who’s the victim? The data on the first bar graph showed us that individuals 2,7,13,14 crossed gender typical boundaries. None of these appear as the recipient to an aggressive act, indicating a high level of tolerance. The largest recipient of aggression was actually the most gender stereotypical member of the whole group of the study, member 1, who is a very stereotypical masculine male according to observed events.

15. What does that mean?! This indicates that although gender-stereotypical behavior is what the majority of individuals adhere to, it does not enjoy a very large majority. The difference in net weighted behavior is highly unpredictable and seems to depend on the individual. Also, many individuals cross over or ignore the gender-typical boundary with little or no negative consequences in our study. The next question we need to answer is what games do males and females prefer? Also, what is the aggression level associated with each game. This will allow us to determine if a sex spends more time with a gender-typical game than other games. To figure this out, 2 queries were run, one to determine how many sessions all members of a particular sex spend with each game, and another to determine the sum of the weighted aggressive events from all the individuals who had ever played that game. The following compound chart was generated:

16. The chart shows us that the least masculine game by a massive margin is World of Warcraft, but even so a group of males far exceeding the size of the female group play it. ‘Zoo Tycoon’ is the female sex’s favorite game, and it is the only game where females exceed male players. It’s aggression index is also low, but not nearly as low as WoW.

17. Putting it all together: From the data, it is immediately apparent that there is little correlation between behavior and the games played by this study group. However, it is interesting to note that based on the data, regardless of actual behavior, females prefer to play games with a lower net aggression index exhibited by all participants. This would indicate that females prefer more “feminine” games and males seem to prefer more “masculine” games. This however is only a trend and not a rule; there are numerous exceptions such as the case of World of Warcraft having a huge femininity rating while retaining a larger number of male players. The trend however is that females seem to avoid masculine games, and males seem to avoid feminine games. In general individuals like to stick to their stereotypical market.

18. A Conclusion? Unfortunately, this study is hardly conclusive. My original hypothesis was pretty much shattered, and the only part of it that survived were my thoughts regarding gender preferences to stereotypical-gender games. This was identified as a ‘potential trend’ but hardly a solid or consistent one. In the end, there are still many unanswered questions that I do not have the available data or resources to answer here. I can say that in this study it seems video games have little influence on individual behavior and behavior would appear to be more random than anything else. I can not claim this entirely refutes the “violent-video-games=violent-behavior” theory, as violent games did seem to induce violent behavior (often regardless of gender, but only on a limited scale. At the moment the trend is not strong enough to either refute or confirm any theory I sought to answer with this study.

19. A total waste of time? Not quite… One interesting thing to note here is the success of the apparently highly feminine game titled “World of Warcraft” with both sexes. This game comes closer to being equally effective on both target gendered markets than any game I recorded when male to female ratio is accounted for. Interestingly enough, it also records as highly feminine, perhaps because it is an multiplayer title and rewards teamwork, regardless of an individuals sex? It’s also interesting to note females tend to spend less time on games than males, another phenomena I can only speculate on given my limited resources. Another study is definitely called for, and while this present study is inconclusive it is hardly a what one would call a “waste of time”. The projects data remains available for study in a highly accessible free database format, and contains an excellent record of real world statistics on the matter. While the sample size is small and perhaps a bit biased, it most definitely has its uses to provide a foundation and direction for future research.

20. Your turn? Any help that could be provided in furthering this field of study is more than welcome, and all the resources and data I have gathered are yours to work with. Maybe this question will be answered by someone else, maybe even you? I’d really encourage you to look into your own resources and see if you can’t uncover any sort of explanation for some of the interesting gender-behavioral anomalies discovered here. Of course it would be fulfilling to see my research put to use in a productive fashion, but more importantly, I want answers… Don’t you?

21. Thanks for listening! Thanks for enduring my long blocks of text, tables, and graphs. I am hardly a PowerPoint expert and just tried to get the raw data across in as “human” a context as possible, I hope I succeeded. This projects data and files are freely available upon request. If you would like to get access to the complete “report” including the SQLITE database files, associated full report document, tables, graphs and programs please send an email to 21GunSoftware@comcast.net. Limited support on how to use the database and software is may be provided if I have time (I am a full time student!) Thanks for reading! -Raymond Beehler