Jeff Freeman

Via Raph Koster, a rant by Richard Bartle, provoked by the misinformative descriptions of ’slapdash and slipshod’ research.

Raph provides a quote which represents the substance of press report summarizations:

A recent study called Gender Swapping and Socialising in Cyberspace revealed that 70 percent of women and 54 percent of men swap their genders when playing online games.

Richard Bartle explains the problem with the journalism. He also explains that even where the journalism is accurately reporting the findings of the research, there are problems with the research.

If it happened there was a happy accident of inaccurately reporting incorrect information in such a way that a detail turned out to be correctly described, Richard Bartle did not mention it.

As Richard Bartle employs written communication the old fashioned way (by sticking to the point and the evidence which supports it, and then summarizing the point in close), re-blogging a summary is unusually convenient.

This Nottingham Trent paper is very reminiscent of what we saw in the mid-1990s. People came to virtual worlds with an incomplete understanding of what they are, conducted some half-assed surveys, gave unsupported and occasionally damaging explanations, and then left. Their research was regarded as a joke by specialists, and ignored. I thought we were past all that now, but apparently not. This Nottingham Trent paper means well, but it’s 15 years out of date. Nevertheless, news editors are happy to misinterpret its misunderstandings and comment on what really should have been left to its own, quiet backwater. I don’t know who courted publicity on its behalf, but academically they’ve done more harm than good.

Yay.

I have a point to make about how the phrase “gender swapping” gets used, and so took the unusual step of following all the links back to the articles they were describing to the research paper itself. Before ranting about how the phrase being used in a manner that is entirely inappropriate, misleading, untrue, and otherwise bullshit, I wanted to be sure this was indeed that.

No problem, there.

Reading the paper, however, I sure found a lot more to rant about.

Not much of this research is about gender swapping.

This is a document in pdf format explaining the authors’ analysis of results (we are not provided) from a survey (we are not shown).

It will be referred to as “research results” by anyone with a point to make that they can claim it supports, by journalists as evidence of its news-worthiness, and by academics who don’t mean the term “research results” to be taken as evidence of authority.

The rest of us will take the term “research results” as evidence of authority, as usual, because we’re idiots.

If we disagree with the results anyway, the pdf format makes rebutting it enough of a pain in the ass not to bother.

The aims of the study were to examine:

1. the impact of online gaming in the lives of gamers
2. the effect of online socializing in the lives of gamers
3. why people gender swap

Maybe you can understand my surprise upon reading the above aims, given it had been presented as research results of a study on gender swapping in online games.

The effect of online socializing in the lives of gamers cannot be separated from gaming, nor can their gaming be separated from socializing online. Indeed, it’s pretty clear they are talking about MMORPGs exclusively.

So it’s really just:

1. an examination of the impact of MMORPGs on the lives of players
2. why people gender swap

Calling this “gender swap research” seems ridiculous.

Even presenting that as an aim of the study alongside such an epic research goal as the first is laughably absurd.

Stripped to the nuts, the basic hypothesis isn’t all that crazy. Summarizing it in my own words:

For some MMORPG players, gender swapping increases their level of satisfaction.

Of course, stripped that bare, the basic hypothesis isn’t all that interesting, informative, or intelligent, either. Even a journalist might respond to that one with a hearty, hardy, “No shit, Poindexter. Could that be why some players do it?”

That waif of a concept is pretending to be alongside a much heftier companion.

The Impact of MMORPG Play is one hell of a topic, wouldn’t you say?

Is there even the slightest chance that if this pdf document delivered on that front, it’d still be reported as “a gender swap study”?

Of course, it does have some things to say regarding that topic, too.

Online gaming may be bad.

Online gaming may have drug-like qualities

(the bad kind, not the kind you should ask your doctor if are right for you).

Gender swapping is epidemic.

And therefore, we come to the real point being made here.

Gender-swapping may increase the bad, drug-like effect of online gaming.

That is why this is newsworthy and important. If gender-swapping were rare then it wouldn’t be. If it resulted in nothing, it wouldn’t matter.

But if it has an effect on particularly a negative thing, especially in a negative way, and for a lot of people, then the summary is this:

Gender-swapping in MMORPGs is a global health crisis!

 

Man.

Comments at Raph Koster’s former MMORPG blog are critical of the methodology, the sample-size, the contradictory details regarding gender-swapping ratios of males to females, and then breaks-down to some silly bickering over nerdy stuff just barely related to the original topic.

Richard Bartle adds to that some irritation at having his decades of work in this field disappeared (along with nearly everyone else’s), by the paper’s assertion that online gaming and the socialization therein are some great savage wilderness the White Man has yet to conquer.

I normally complain about pdf format, which a lot of academics are very fond of using, but which, nevertheless: Will you guys freakin’ stop it, already?

The news articles are all stuck on reporting, “Boys pretend to be girls online, and vice versa!”

Well, though all of these complaints are valid, I am so glad for each and every one of them. If the findings were solid, the analysis peer-reviewed, the format web-friendly, and if rather than the harmless tease, there - the terrifying research results were being reported… well, that would suck way more than this.

My original rant?

It’d have been all about how playing a male or female character in an MMORPG is not, in itself, gender-swapping. Female FPS players have not been “gender swapping” in every one of the almost all of them first person shooters they’ve played over the years. Not even if they played a lot online, and were assumed to be males even if they weren’t very good at it, because girls don’t play FPSs.

All the boys playing Tomb Raider weren’t gender-swapping, and wouldn’t have been if it were an online game, either.

Gender-swapping means you tell people that you are of the opposite gender regardless which gender you chose for your toon. Real gender-swappers probably answered their freakin’ survey on gender-swapping as the opposite sex, maybe even confessing to gender-swapping back to their original sex in-game.

This survey made no distinction between playing a character which is displayed as a different gender, and socializing as a different gender.

My feeling is that if a player isn’t posing, then he or she (or she or he?!) isn’t doing anything, and it is no scientific mystery what it impacts.

My feeling on posing as the opposite gender is that it’s by no means game-specific, and probably not much more common in MMORPGs than offline (though I’d think much more common in chat rooms than anywhere else).

Worthy of research? Maybe… but it has fuck all to do with MMORPGs and their impact on the lives of players, whatever that may be.

But see? My original rant topic just doesn’t seem that important now.