The strategic female, gender-switching and player behavior in online games

Information, Communication & Society

ISSN: 1369-118X (Print) 1468-4462 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rics20

The strategic female: gender-switching and player behavior in online games Rosa Mikeal Martey, Jennifer Stromer-Galley, Jaime Banks, Jingsi Wu & Mia Consalvo To cite this article: Rosa Mikeal Martey, Jennifer Stromer-Galley, Jaime Banks, Jingsi Wu & Mia Consalvo (2014) The strategic female: gender-switching and player behavior in online games, Information, Communication & Society, 17:3, 286-300, DOI: 10.1080/1369118X.2013.874493 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2013.874493

Published online: 23 Jan 2014.

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Date: 13 September 2016, At: 18:46

Information, Communication & Society, 2014 Vol. 17, No. 3, 286–300, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2013.874493

The strategic female: gender-switching and player behavior in online games Rosa Mikeal Marteya*, Jennifer Stromer-Galleyb, Jaime Banksc, Jingsi Wud and Mia Consalvoe a Department of Journalism and Technical Communication, Colorado State University, CD 1785, Fort Collins, CO 80521, USA; bSchool of Information Studies, Syracuse University, 220 Hinds Hall, Syracuse, NY 13244, USA; cInstitute of Communication, Culture and Information Technology, University of Toronto, 3359 Mississauga Road, Mississauga, Ontario, Canada L5 L 1C6; dJournalism, Media Studies, and Public Relations, Hofstra University, New Academic Building 413, Hempstead, NY 11549, USA; eCommunication Studies, Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada

(Received 22 September 2013; accepted 8 December 2013) As players craft and enact identities in digital games, the relationship between player and avatar gender remains unclear. This study examines how 11 in-game chat, movement, and appearance behaviors differed by gender and by men who did and did not use a female avatar – or ‘genderswitchers’. Drawing on social role and feminist theories of gender, we argue that gender differences in behavior align with the social roles and norms that establish appropriate and inappropriate behavior for men and women. Thus we complicate questions of ‘genderswitching’ by examining not only player gender, but also player psychological Gender Role as measured by the Bem Sex Role Inventory to examine how gender does – and does not – manifest in digital worlds. Analysis revealed that men may not necessarily seek to mask their offline gender when they use a female avatar, but there is evidence they do reinforce idealized notions of feminine appearance and communication. Movement behaviors, however, show no differences across men who do and do not gender-switch. That is, selecting avatar gender may be less a matter of identity expression, and more a strategic selection of available multi-modal codes that players take up in their navigation of this digital space.

Keywords: gender; video games; digital worlds; identity; gender roles; avatars

In online games and digital worlds, the self is often represented by a customized avatar – a graphical representation of the player used to communicate and move in digital spaces. The avatar has been described as a social ‘proxy’ (Messinger et al., 2008), a ‘second self’ (Turkle, 1984), a ‘narrative’ (Webb, 2001), and a ‘costume’ (Merola & Peña, 2010). Moreover, avatars are understood as a means for conveying player humor, displeasure, intrigue, and interest, via cues that reveal motivation, identity, and background such as gestures, movement, and language. The avatar could represent some aspect or the whole of one’s identity, or be a completely alternative self (Banks, 2013; Messinger et al., 2008). A growing body of work, however, suggests users’ online personas are not so easily divorced from offline identities, especially sex and gender (Banks, 2013; Dunn & Guadagno, 2012; Herring, 1994; Poncin & Garnier, 2012; Spears, Lea, Postmes, & Wolbert, 2011). In some massively multiplayer online games (MMOs), as many as 79% of players have used an avatar of the opposite gender, and about 30% do so on a regular

*Corresponding author. Email: rosa.martey@colostate.edu © 2014 Taylor & Francis

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basis (Hussain & Griffiths, 2008; Yee & Ducheneaut, 2011). Although some research suggests that players can use differently gendered avatars for identity play (Turkle, 1995), recent work has found that for some, avatar gender may not be related to identity at all, but instead is an esthetic or pragmatic choice (Boler, 2007; Yee, 2008). Thus, we ask, when people play digital games, do they play in ways that reveal their offline gender? Do players using opposite-gendered avatars play in ways that reveal their offline gender? Do gender roles account for how players do or do not reveal their offline gender?

We answer these questions through a study of players in the MMO World of Warcraft (WoW), in which we examined chat, movement, appearance, and gender of 375 participants. We hypothesize that men playing female avatars use the same styles of chat, movement, and appearance as men playing male avatars. Further, we hypothesize that psychological Gender Roles, as measured by the Bem Sex Role Inventory (BSRI; Bem, 1974), affect the relationships between avatar and player gender.

Theories of the gendered self Feminist theories of the gendered self suggest that gender can be both internalized and externalized dimensions of identity that influence behavior (Butler, 1990; Chodorow, 1995). Feminist theorists argue that we must draw a distinction between sex as features of the body that we can usually identify as male or female, and gender as performed roles that we recognize as culturally masculine or feminine (Butler, 1990). These roles, which are fluid and context-dependent, are the set of social and individual expectations that establish ‘acceptable’ and ‘unacceptable’ behaviors.

Chodorow (1995) argues that the self is fundamentally relational, and thus gender-based interpersonal roles are linked to norms that depend on social contexts. As such, gender identity can diverge from behavior, but membership in the social classification of men or women is unavoidable, a ‘felt necessity’ because of the ties between behavior and social classifications (Young, 1994). In this view, gender roles can have multiple or contradictory components (such as woman as sexual object and ingénue). Kristeva (1980) proposes that it is impossible to be a purely masculine self or a purely feminine self because the self emerges through language, and all discourse embodies elements of both the masculinized rational/symbolic and the feminized affective/semiotic. She asserts that every subject of enunciation, every self, amalgamates the masculine and feminine, and that the masculine symbolic and the feminine semiotic are indispensable to all speaking subjects. Gender classifications and their constituent roles intersect with other social identities such as class and race, and can be internalized, acted out, resisted, or followed in different ways in different situations via appearance, language, and behavior.

Social role theories, in contrast, posit that roles are exclusively social, and that adherence to or rejection of roles constitutes social interaction and the structure of society (Goffman, 1959). In this view, roles are behaviors and are not internalized because they are intentionally and unintentionally adjusted according to the specific social situation. Goffman calls this, ‘not engaged in giving information but in giving shows’ (1974, p. 508). Although some raise concerns that this view is a highly goal-oriented interpretation of conversation that situates people as opportunistic, insincere, and manipulative (Chriss, 1995), Goffman’s explication of motivations and strategies is helpful in understanding how people address needs in different contexts.

Others who have considered social roles in the context of gender suggest that men and women behave in different ways because they act in accordance with social roles that are generally segregated by gender (Eagly, 1987). According to this view, the roles men and women perform are gender-typed according to associations with different expectations requiring different skills.

These associations are constructed and maintained via descriptive and injunctive social norms.

Descriptive norms lead individuals to look to the behavior of those of their own gender to

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determine the appropriate way to behave in specific situations (Cialdini, Kallgren, & Reno, 1991), especially those that are ambiguous. Injunctive norms are expectations about how women or men are supposed to behave, serving as guidelines to which behaviors elicit approval or disapproval.

Together, descriptive and injunctive norms work to help maintain individuals’ adherence to traditional gender roles because deviations can produce unpleasant social consequences (Luhaorg & Zivian, 1995).

For social role theorists, the gendered self emerges in relation to social context and interaction as part of ‘cultural competence’ in specific interpersonal settings. Feminist theories emphasize how the gendered self can also be internalized and personal, affecting self-concept and influenced by past experiences as well as present perceptions. For both, the gendered self is multifaceted, socially situated, and heterogeneous, and can be actively performed.

When considering how gender is expressed in digital worlds, questions arise about the intersections among gender self-concepts, representations, and social performances. The deeply culturally embedded notions of sex and its relationship to gender may hold in different ways in digital worlds. In a digital world, Butler’s (1990) distinction between what is perceived as the ‘natural’ gender of a specific body and performances of gender conventions can be made literal. Players actively select a gender in their avatar, thereby making visible the artificiality of tying internalized or felt membership in a gender to bodily representations and weakening the ties between the organic body and the self (Haraway, 1991). In other words, the user is unchained from the physical body so that various identities can be signified across various spaces (Boler, 2007; Turkle, 1995), and yet these significations are always tied to an embodied, situated self (Turkle, 1995). For this reason we focus here on gender, rather than sex. It may be that male or female avatar bodies in an MMO serve as contextual stimuli for the player that activate associated behaviors. Alternatively, players may perform their offline gender identity in similar ways in a game regardless of the sexed body of their avatar.

Gender and avatars in digital worlds Behavior in digital worlds has been examined as part of social norms that emerge in those spaces (Consalvo & Harper, 2009; Steinkuehler, 2006; Stromer-Galley & Martey, 2009; Yee, Bailenson, Urbanek, Chang, & Merget, 2007). Social norms have been found to govern textual interactions as well as avatar use, reflecting offline expectations of status, language, social roles, and etiquette in small group social interactions (Spears et al., 2011), as well as gender differences in expectations related to interpersonal distance (Blascovich & Bailenson, 2011; Yee et al., 2007).

Research also suggests real world, gendered patterns of politeness norms and behavior appear in digital worlds, such as women tending to exhibit a higher frequency of honorific and softening linguistic devices such as hedges and questions (Herring, 1994; Martey & Stromer-Galley, 2007). Other gender differences in language found in previous studies include expressiveness and appreciation (Kivran-Swaine, Brody, Diakopoulos, & Naaman, 2012), and emoticon use (Witmer & Katzman, 1997; Wolf, 2000), both of which are more common among women.

Avatars in WoW can be designed by selecting among a limited number of races and esthetic features, and choosing a body designated by the game as male or female. Avatar gender does not affect the character’s skills and abilities, but it has considerable esthetic differences: face, jewelry, and hair options differ for male and female avatars, and clothing often looks very different, such as a specific full breastplate on a male avatar appearing as a cropped bikini-style top when worn by a female avatar. The process of selecting among these options in avatar creation is characterized as the adoption of symbolic codes in to construct a particular identity, including narrative and group membership codes (Salazar, 2009). Avatar design can relate to how

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individuals anticipate interacting, such as creating a more attractive avatar for dating (Vasalou & Joinson, 2009), or creating a more frightening avatar to play a villain (Salazar, 2009). Research also suggests that many people prefer creating avatars that look similar to their offline selves (Bessière, Seay, & Kiesler, 2007; Vasalou, Joinson, & Pitt, 2007), and that players often create avatars reflecting idealizations of their gender according to cultural norms of attractiveness (Dunn & Guadagno, 2012; Martey & Stromer-Galley, 2007). However, some create avatars that depart considerably from their offline physical attributes as a way to reject avatar agency and influence (Conrad, Neale, & Charles, 2010), or to experiment with alternate identities (Nakamura, 1995; Turkle, 1984). Because most players have multiple avatars in WoW (Yee & Ducheneaut, 2011), it is likely many players have avatars with a range of appearances, which may weaken ties between identity in game and avatar appearance. Avatar appearance may also affect how individuals perceive themselves in virtual spaces. For example, research has found that using taller avatars increased players’ confidence, and attractive avatars led players to behave more intimately (Yee & Bailenson, 2007) or be more extraverted (Messinger et al., 2008) with others in chat.

Another important research area examines gender-switching in digital worlds. Early work on this in social multi-user dungeons (MOOs) found that most switchers did so to explore new identities (Turkle, 1995). More contemporary scholarship similarly suggests that many men in WoW play female avatars, although they typically do not have the intention to persuade others they identify as female offline, explaining instead that they prefer the esthetics of watching a female avatar form (Hussain & Griffiths, 2008; Fahs & Gohr, 2012; Yee, 2008). This is perceived as allowing players to receive greater assistance when playing as female (Boler, 2007). Thus male players often gender-switch for practical or entertainment reasons (Fahs & Gohr, 2012).

For example, in their study of 4512 players in the digital world Fairyland Online, Lou and colleagues (2013) found that regardless of player gender, female avatars are leveled up more slowly, are more likely to befriend players of the same gender, and profit more from in-game item sales than male avatars. Overall, they conclude that player personalities and play strategies depend more on the gender of their avatar than their offline gender. Boler (2007) suggests that for many gamers, gender-switching is common enough that it is not a subversive or experimental act, but instead is routine or common. She argues that in fact, gender-switching can reinforce traditional gender binaries because it can be used to evoke gender stereotypes.

Despite these motivations, gender-switching may affect user behavior. Recent experimental research from Lehdonvirta, Nagashima, Lehdonvirta, and Baba (2012) found that men are more likely to ask for help when assigned a female avatar. However, a study of gender-switching in the MMO EverQuest II found male players do not behave differently when switching avatar gender as measured by combat instances, quests completed, encounters fighting other players, or number of chat messages sent (Huh & Williams, 2010). Yee and Ducheneaut (2011) found that players with high emotional stability scores were more likely to gender-switch, but it is not clear if and how this manifests in game behaviors.

This study aims to identify how internal, gendered notions of the self-intersect with gendered social roles performed in context. Feminist theories of gender as well as social role theory suggest that we might expect player behavior in digital worlds to manifest because of expectations around gender roles rather than representations of gender that appear in an avatar body. Thus we complicate questions of gender-switching by examining not only player gender, but also player psychological Gender Role as measured by the BSRI (Bem, 1974) to examine how gender does – and does not – manifest in digital worlds.

Because the research is unclear about the nature of the relationships between player behavior and real world characteristics, we ask:

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RQ1: Do patterns in avatar appearance, chat, and movement differ significantly between male and female players?

To examine if player gender is revealed among gender-switchers, we ask: RQ2a: Do men playing female avatars use the same styles of chat, movement, and appearance as men playing male avatars?

RQ2b: Do men playing male avatars use different styles of chat, movement, and appearance than women playing female avatars?

Finally, to examine whether or not Gender Role accounts for how players do or do not reveal genders, we ask: RQ3a: Masculinity mediates the relationship between player gender and in-world behaviors.

RQ3b: Femininity mediates the relationship between player gender and in-world behaviors.

Methods To test our hypotheses, we used mixed methods to examine the conversation and avatar use of 375 participants as they played a custom-built quest in the MMO WoW developed as part of a larger study on communication and interaction in virtual worlds. WoW is an MMO set in a fantasy world where players perform quests independently and in groups to conquer evil warlords, dragons, and demons, and fight other players, to gain strength and abilities. With about 10 million players worldwide, it is one of the more popular MMOs, especially in the United States. Players can use text to chat with each other in public or private channels, and they can join formal groups to perform activities, including a temporary party of 5–40 players, or more permanent, formal groupings in guilds.

The quest developed for the study was delivered via an add-on (a piece of software that modifies the game interface) that players downloaded and installed on their local machine. The add-on delivered information to the players’ interface in the form of quest windows, interactive buttons, cinematics with music and voice-over, and on-screen text. To play the game, called Menace of the Masked Marauders, participants created a new level 1 character for the study and were teleported by researchers to the level 80 city of Dalaran. They joined a four to five person temporary party with a researcher-avatar who controlled gameplay events through the add-on, but interacted with participants as little as possible. Other researchers served as characters in the game narrative, and they had dialog, exchanged items with players, and engaged in combat with players’ avatars. The game was designed to evoke text chat conversation, group cooperation, and problem-solving through word puzzles, battles with researcher characters, and seeking quest information.

Study procedures Participants were recruited through advertising on Facebook and WoW player forums. They were asked to fill out an online survey assessing demographics, experience with online games, and other characteristics including leadership and social conformity tendencies. The pre-session survey asked participants to select their gender identification, ‘Please select your gender: [male, female, other],’ and used the BSRI, the short version of 30 items to assess levels of Masculinity and Femininity. Then, 375 qualified participants (18+ years old with at least 10 hours’ experience in WoW) were assigned into 110 groups of three to four people each to play a

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custom quest for an average of 1.5 hours. Groups were assigned so that participants did not know each other. After their session, participants filled out a 15-minute post-session survey assessing their experience. Participant movement, chat, and clicks on interactive objects were recorded by the add-on. Participants who completed all stages of the study received compensation of a 30-day WoW gameplay card (∼$15 USD).

Participants were aged 18–59, with an average of 29 years, and 56.5% were men, 43.5% women. They reported an average of 12 different avatars for their routine play in WoW, and 61% play WoW at least once a day, with an average of four years since they first started playing. Ninety-five percent reported they had the most recent expansion (‘Cataclysm’), and 51% played the Alliance faction, 49% the Horde faction on their main character. In addition, 87% considered themselves ‘a gamer’. No gender differences were found in these averages, with one exception: men played slightly more on other MMOs than women, at an average of 4 and 3, respectively. During the experiment sessions, 47% were Horde and 53% were Alliance factions. Sessions lasted an average of 64 minutes, with an average of 82 lines of chat per person, with a range of 12–248 lines.

Coding development and reliability The variables used in this study were developed through human and computer coding of data collected by the add-on, including chat and movement for each avatar, along with screenshots captured by researchers during the sessions. Human coding identified chat dialog acts, movement patterns, and avatar appearance. The chat codebook for this study included over 20 categories and is based on the theoretical discourse principles of Searle (1969) and of Austin (1962) and discourse content analysis projects from Shaikh, Strzalkowski, Taylor, and Webb (2010), StromerGalley (2007), Allen and Core (1997), and Jurafsky et al. (1997). Human coders were trained for approximately 40 hours and intercoder reliability was evaluated on a 10% subsample of the data to meet a threshold of Krippendorff’s alpha of .8 for all measures. Some variables were developed with automatic language processing algorithms that automatically identified and counted occurrences of text or movement elements, including use of punctuation, word length, and use of capital letters. To assess reliability of automatic coding, it was tested against human coding on a 10% subsample of the data to meet a .8 precision and recall threshold. We also examined player logs generated for movement, inter-avatar proxemics, mouse-clicks, and jumping. We used player logs of location coordinates and time stamps collected every two seconds to calculate movement distance, speed, and proxemics.

Measures Variables used in this study were selected based on previous literature examining chat and behavior online and were refined based on their strong relationships with gender in our sample. Chat variables used in this analysis include action-directives, which are statements, usually in command form, that instruct others to perform an action (Searle, 1969). We also analyzed polite phrases, which are statements such as ‘thank you’, and ‘you’re welcome.’ Appreciation phrases are expressions of admiration or approval such as ‘that’s great’, or ‘congratulations’, and emotional phrases are usually a single word or phrase that express emotion, such as ‘amazing!’ or ‘yikes’. The auto-coded chat examined are exclamation points, which is a count of chat lines with one or more exclamation points, and use of smile emoticons (a colon and parentheses or a capital D, written as :) or :D). All chat variables are calculated as the count per 100 utterances by dividing total occurrences by total player chat lines and multiplying by 100 in order to account for differences in chat volume across players.

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Figure 1. Examples of traditional versus non-traditional avatar hairstyles, and attractive versus unattractive avatars.

For analysis of avatar movement, we use move backwards, generated from player logs, which automatically annotate direction of movement. This was calculated as the percent of total movement distance in WoW yards that was backward. Clustering is a measure of average distance in yards as measured by WoW from the group center, which is defined by two or more players standing within 10 WoW yards of each other in the main areas of Dalaran where the sessions were conducted. We also logged the number of times players made their avatar jump.

Avatar appearance variables include avatar gender (male or female) as selected from the two options in WoW, whether or not avatars were attractive (attractive avatar, 0, 1, or 2), which assessed a player’s selection of attractive avatar facial features, and whether or not the avatar was of a normatively attractive race (yes/no). We also coded for use of traditional hairstyle (yes/no) selected in character creation, which are those that reflect normative Western notions of natural hair, such as short hair for males and long curls or ponytails for females as opposed to mohawks, spikes, partial shaving, or others often perceived as non-normative or counterculture (Figure 1).

Gender role in this study is measured using the BSRI,1 which is a 30-item scale that identifies alignment with socially constructed gender roles. It was developed by Bem (1974) based on gender schema theory. The BSRI conceptualizes gender roles as independent dimensions, suggesting that individuals can have varying levels of masculinity and femininity (Bem, 1974).

Although some scholars have argued that the BSRI measures a more narrow set of personality traits such as instrumentality and interpersonal expressiveness (see Spence, 1984), or dominance and nurturance (see Wiggins & Holzmuller, 1981), Gender Roles as measured by the BSRI have been successfully used in a large volume of research in the decades since. It is considered among the most reliable and useful of psychological gender role scales (Lenney, 1991).

BSRI items ask participants to rate from never or almost never true to almost always true on a seven-point Likert scale a series of 10 adjectives classified as masculine (e.g. assertive, dominant), 10 as feminine (e.g. sympathetic, tender), and 10 filler adjectives. Means for the masculine and feminine adjectives are then used to classify participants into one of four categories based on comparisons to a sample mean. These categories are considered the participants’ psychological Gender Role classification: Feminine (high femininity, low masculinity); Masculine (high masculinity, low femininity); Androgynous (high on both); or Undifferentiated (low on both). For these analyses we use mean scores on the Femininity and on the Masculinity dimensions rather than classifications in order to examine variance in Gender Role levels more closely.

The labels that are used to refer to the different dimensions around gender are the following: Masculinity and Femininity refer to scores on the BSRI; men and women refer to player gender as reported by players, and male and female refer to avatar gender as set in WoW.

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Results Correlation analysis of avatar gender and player gender suggested a strong relationship (r = .702, p < .001), and gender-switching correlated with player gender, with men more likely to switch than women (r = −.216, p < .001). As has been found elsewhere of WoW players (Yee, 2011), we found gender-switchers were much more likely to be men: 23% of men and 7% of women gender-switched in our sample. We refer to these players as gender-switchers. It is important to note that these analyses do not reflect players who switch gender in other contexts, and we can draw no conclusions about their gender-switching during regular WoW play. It is quite possible that some who gender-switched in the study sessions did not normally do so in WoW, or that some who gender-switch normally in WoW did not do so in our sessions.

Gender Role in our sample was unrelated to player gender, except for among women who were slightly more likely to have higher Femininity scores (r = .129, p < .05). Gender Role was also unrelated to being a gender-switcher (p > .5).

In order to answer RQ1, that men and women differ in their play behavior, we examined Pearson correlations between gender and the key behavioral variables selected for analysis, shown in Table 1.

Correlations suggest that men and women have significantly different player behaviors.

Action directive statements were more common among men, and the other chat variables were more common among women. All three movement variables were greater among men than among women.

To answer RQ2a and 2b, asking whether men playing male avatars would not differ from men playing female avatars but would differ from women playing female avatars, we used analyses of variance to examine between-group differences. The groups we used were women who use a female avatar (W/Fav), men who use a male avatar (M/Mav), and men who gender-switch by using a female avatar (M/Fav) in study sessions.

Results of simple analyses of variance by group for each variable are shown in Table 2.

Because the group size for men who use a female avatar was small, we used SPSS to randomly sample the 35% of other two groups to make the group sizes comparable.

Table 1. Correlations between key game behaviors and player gender.

Player gender Appearance Avatar attractiveness Traditional hairstyle Chat Action directives Exclamation points Polite phrases Emotional phrases Appreciation phrases Smile emoticons Movement Moving backwards Clustering Jumps Note: N = 375; 1 = female; 0 = male. *p < .05. **p < .01. ***p < .001.

.318** .265** −.108* .119* .120* .157** .178** .227*** −.209** −.287*** −.247***

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ANOVAs for key variables by group.

Appearance Avatar attractiveness Traditional hairstyle Chat Action directives Exclamation points Polite phrases Emotional phrases Appreciation phrases Smile emoticons Movement Moving backwards Clustering Jumps

Partial eta squared

M/Mav mean (SD) N = 50

M/Fav mean (SD) N = 42

W/Fav mean (SD) N = 56

1.0 (0.9) 0.3 (0.5)

1.7 (0.5) 0.7 (0.5)

1.6 (0.6) 0.7 (0.5)

2 15.0 .000a,c 2 10.6 .000a,c

.172 .127

5.1 (4.4) 4.3 (5.7) 5.4 (3.8) 5.8 (4.3) 1.4 (1.6) 1.8 (3.9)

6.7 (4.8) 6.8 (6.7) 5.2 (3.5) 7.6 (5.7) 1.3 (2.0) 1.8 (3.1)

5.8 (3.1) 9.0 (6.7) 6.4 (3.9) 8.9 (5.1) 2.0 (2.1) 4.8 (6.2)

2 2 2 2 2 2

1.6 7.3 1.6 5.2 2.1 6.9

.022 .091 .021 .067 .028 .087

6.4 (4.0) 1.7 (0.3) 127.9 (142.3)

5.7 (6.0) 1.6 (0.3) 187.0 (286.0)

4.0 (4.0) 1.5 (0.3) 70.8 (93.8)

2 2 2

4.6 .012a 6.2 .010a 4.9 .009c

df

F

Sig.1

.199 .001a,b .213 .007a,b .130 .001a,c

.060 .072 .063

1

The specific groups that differed significantly from each other as identified in post-hoc pairwise comparisons are identified with subscripts for each significant model.

M/Mav differed significantly from W/Fav. b M/Mav differed significantly from M/Fav. c M/Fav differed significantly from W/Fav. a

Analysis indicates that there was a significant relationship between 8 of the 11 variables and group membership. Examining mean levels for each variable showed that for the appearance variables avatar attractiveness and traditional hairstyle men and women playing female avatars were different than men playing male avatars, supported by pairwise comparisons (p < .05). Women used the most exclamation points, emotional phrases, and smile emoticons, and men playing male avatars used the least of these chat features; men playing female avatars fell in the middle of the two groups. All three movement variables differed, and post-hoc pairwise comparisons show that men playing male avatars tend to move backward 3.5% more than women. Men playing male avatars stayed .15 more yards from the group compared to women playing female avatars in pairwise comparisons (p = .050), and men playing female avatars fell in the middle of these groups’ means. Action directives, polite phrases, and appreciation phrases were not significantly different (p > .05). For jumps, post-hoc pairwise comparisons show that men playing a female avatar jumped 116 more times than women playing a female avatar (p = .007), but the difference between jumps for men playing a male avatar did not differ significantly from women playing a female avatar.

Finally, to answer RQ3a and 3b, whether gender role would mediate the relationships between behavior and player gender, we used analyses of covariance (ANCOVAs) to examine the relationships between the groups and each variable, controlling for mean levels of masculinity and of femininity (not BSRI classification). Table 3 shows means with standard deviations in parentheses for BSRI mean scores for each group. Table 4 lists the results of the ANCOVAs. Table 3.

M/Mav M/Fav W/Fav

Mean BSRI score by group.

BSRI mean femininity

BSRI mean masculinity

4.7 (.94) 4.7 (.95) 5.1 (.77)

4.1 (1.2) 4.6 (1.0) (.82)

Information, Communication & Society Table 4.

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ANCOVAs on group controlling for mean femininity and masculinity.

Femininity F (df)

Appearance Avatar attractiveness Traditional hairstyle Chat Action directives Exclamation points Polite phrases Emotional phrases Appreciation phrases Smile emoticons Movement Moving backwards Clustering Jumps

Masculinity

Group

Sig.

F (df)

Sig.

F (df)

Sig.

2.2 (1) 1.2 (1)

.139 .276

1.3 (1) 3.0 (1)

.262 .086

18.3 (2)* 13.8 (2)*

.000 .000

0.6 (1) 1.4 (1) 6.9 (1)** 2.0 (1) 2.3 (1) 0.0 (1)

.451 .235 .009 .160 .130 .881

1.6 (1) 0.1 (1) 0.5 (1) 0.1 (1) 0.2 (1) 0.1 (1)

.211 .704 .475 .746 .620 .703

1.0 (2) 6.2 (2)* 1.3 (2) 3.7 (2)* 2.3 (2) 6.6 (2)*

.373 .003 .264 .026 .101 .002

1.7 (1) 0.1 (1) 0.7 (1)

.189 .809 .406

0.0 (1) 0.0 (1) 3.7 (1)*

.983 .916 .050

3.5 (2)* 5.7 (2)** 4.5 (2)*

.031 .004 .012

*p < .05. **p < .01.

Neither femininity nor masculinity mean levels emerged as significant covariates in the relationship between group and these behaviors, with the exception of polite phrases and jumps. Use of polite phrases is significantly related to mean femininity, but not to group, suggesting femininity is a more important factor than the gender of the avatar and player.

Jumps are related to both mean masculinity and group, suggesting an interaction effect. Posthoc pairwise comparisons of jumps show that men playing a female avatar jump an average of 112 more times than women playing a female avatar (p = .009). Neither femininity nor masculinity was significant covariates in the other analyses.

Discussion This analysis sought to identify whether or not people reveal their gender in the way they play the MMO WoW, especially among men who use a female avatar. We compared men who play female avatars – gender-switchers – with both men and women whose avatar bodies reflect their own reported gender. We found significant gender differences in behavior, and that the behaviors of men who played male avatars differed in some ways from men who played female avatars as well as from women who played female avatars. Finally, we also examined whether gender role as measured by the BSRI would mediate the relationships between behaviors and player gender. We found no relationship, except in polite phrases used and jumps made.

Overall, we found that gender-switching men tended to adopt the appearance and some linguistic behaviors typical of women playing female avatars, but they did not adopt women’s movement behaviors. Broadly, these findings align with feminist theories suggesting that although gender is a powerful social category, there are a range of ways it can be performed.

Appearance Among the behavior variables examined, appearance factors had the most striking differences between gender-switching and non-switching men. Avatar attractiveness and traditional avatar hairstyles were tied to avatar gender rather than player gender, and were not affected by gender role. This may be because, as has been found in the literature, women prefer to create

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more attractive avatars to represent themselves (Dunn & Guadagno, 2012), and men design an avatar that is esthetically appealing (Boler, 2007; Yee, 2008). Feminist theories about gender proscriptions suggest that female gender roles require women to be attractive, but male roles do not, which may be influencing both men and women to create attractive female avatars where no such requirement holds for the male digital form. That is, both men and women may feel that the social role of ‘female’ requires an attractive face and natural hairstyle, but the role of man allows for a wider range of appearance, as suggested by Fahs and Gohr (2012). It may also be the case that men playing female avatars choose a more traditional hairstyle to complete the appearance of being female. Selecting a non-traditional hairstyle may go against the stereotypic notions that male players have of what attributes are needed to convey being female. That avatar appearance choices were the behavior variables with the greatest difference between gender-switchers and non-switchers may also be related to the fact that gender is easily and quickly selected in the avatar creation screens, and the cognitive schema people employ in considering male-ness and female-ness are readily available as part of daily life, whereas chat and movement must be actively and continuously performed and their demonstrations more subtle.

Language We found that player gender was a significant factor in chat behaviors, which confirms some of the prior research (Herring, 1994; Lehdonvirta et al., 2012). For example, we found that men generally used fewer exclamation points and emotional phrases than women. We also found that there was a statistically significant difference in use of exclamation points between men who did and did not gender-switch. We also saw trends, although not statistically significant, that men who gender-switch use more emotional phrases in their chat than men who do not switch. Notably, the use of smile emoticons, which also differed by player gender, showed no tendency to change among gender-switching men. Thus men who played female avatars tended to occupy a middle ground between the norms of men’s and women’s chat behavior, incorporating elements of both, as Bem (1974) and Kristeva (1980) suggest.

These trends of chat style differences may also be a manifestation of the Proteus Effect (Yee & Bailenson, 2007), which suggests that avatar appearance can affect people’s behaviors with others online. Although Yee and Bailenson (2007) assigned avatar bodies to participants and found noteworthy communication differences between those with male avatars as compared with those with female avatars, regardless of the human gender, we found similar effects when players choose their avatar body. It might be that using a female avatar leads people to unconsciously use language associated with stereotypical femininity. It is possible that gender-switchers strategically drew on language they perceived as belonging to feminine social roles (Eagly, 1987) in order to ‘play femaleness’. In particular, exclamation points and emotional phrases may be especially accessible ways to imitate feminine language. Alternatively, it might be that those men who choose to play female avatars are themselves somewhat more effusive. That gender-switchers had more female-associated chat features than men playing males but less than women playing females supports both of these interpretations.

Use of polite phrases, which included ‘thanks’, was not related to player gender in this sample, although it differed by levels of femininity. This may be because the BSRI itself includes items such as compassionate and sensitive to needs of others, which are often associated with politeness (Spence, 1984), and thus the instrument itself may in part be measuring politeness per se.

However, as an important component of cultural associations with femininity, and given evidence of gender differences in politeness in prior research (Herring, 1994; Martey & Stromer-Galley, 2007), we suggest that more research is needed to understand this phenomenon in this context.

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Movement Broadly, movement variables revealed somewhat different patterns across the groups. Men tended to stay further away from the group, as has been found elsewhere (Yee et al., 2007), and to move backward more than women. Levels of these differed little between men playing male versus female avatars, and did not change when controlling for Gender Role. This may be because movement-related behaviors are less conscious than chat, and thus may reveal offline gender regardless of cues in the environment or social associations with feminine behavior. That is, in the absence of a physical body, gendered movement patterns are a Goffmanian ‘given-off’ rather than something that may be strategically performed during gender-switching. This pattern could reflect an internalized gender self-concept that is distinct from the role being socially performed in this digital space, as feminist theories would suggest (Young, 1994).

Jumping movements, however, which men did considerably more than women, showed a different pattern. Men who gender-switched jumped significantly more than men who did not. There was also an interaction between levels of masculinity and the group: men gender-switchers with higher levels of masculinity tended to jump even more. It is possible that gender-switcher’s tendencies to jump more are exaggerated performances of male-ness. To the extent that jumping is perceived as a more male behavior, gender-switchers may be attempting to actively signal their offline gender through jumping more than they might otherwise. Alternatively, in light of research that suggests some men use female avatars to get attention, assistance, or kinder treatment from other players (Banks, 2013; Boler, 2007; Lehdonvirta et al., 2012), jumping may serve as an attention-getting move designed to encourage this differential treatment (Vasalou et al., 2007). In other words, jumping may be a form of ‘giving shows’ (Goffman, 1974, p. 508) through the avatar. Finally, jumping may simply be a form of using the avatar for entertainment rather than for the more serious work of fighting in-game enemies. Research suggests that some men gender-switch as a form of entertainment (Fahs & Gohr, 2012), and frequent jumping may be part of signaling the less serious role the avatar is intended to play in the game. As the sessions we ran required players to use new, first level characters, it is likely that players considered those avatars casual, not serious, characters.

Conclusions This project examined whether or not gender is revealed in players’ behavior in the MMO WoW, especially among men who gender-switch. We found that gender differences were evident when players do not gender-switch. We also found that avatar appearance and some chat behavior among male gender-switchers tended to be similar to that of women, but that movement behaviors remained distinct by gender. Although feminist theories and social role theories suggest that gender role is an important factor in these gender differences, we found no evidence of this when measuring players’ psychological gender role. We conclude that player gender is an important factor in differences in player behavior, and that gender-switching does not lead to consistent adjustments in all aspects of gendered play styles.

This study is limited in its conclusions for several reasons. First, the play examined was part of a controlled study in the MMO WoW. As such, our data may not represent players’ regular play and communication habits and cannot be generalized to other digital worlds. Second, the sample size was limited, especially for gender-switchers, and further research is needed to confirm the patterns we observed, especially among female gender-switchers, who were not examined here. Finally, we did not include data on whether or not those who gender-switched in the study sessions usually gender-switch in WoW. Future research on players’ normal use of their regular avatars, as well as on use of avatars in other digital worlds is needed to further explore the ways in which player and avatar gender relate to in game behaviors.

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Overall, this research suggests that although men may not necessarily seek to mask their offline gender when they use a female avatar, they do reinforce idealized notions of feminine appearance when making visual selections in avatar design, and they tend toward certain chat features associated with women – exclamation points and emotional phrases – in a conscious or unconscious imitation of stereotypical feminine conversational style. Movement patterns, however, remain closely tied to player gender even when players are performing a different avatar gender. It is possible that avatar gender is being used as a performance feature much the way that hair, language, or other appearance or movement behaviors can be, as previous research has found (Banks, 2013). That is, selecting avatar gender may be less a matter of identity expression, and more a strategic selection of available multi-modal codes that players take up in their navigation of this digital space.

Note 1.

Although this measure is titled ‘sex role inventory’, we use the term Gender Role to refer to the classifications created by this scale, along with contemporary scholarship and Bem (1993) herself.

Notes on contributors Rosa Mikeal Martey is an Associate Professor in the Department of Journalism and Communication at Colorado State University. Her research focuses on games, identity, social interaction and digital media, and can be found in New Media & Society, Information, Communication & Society, and Games Studies, among others. [email: rosa.martey@colostate.edu] Jennifer Stromer-Galley is an Associate Professor in Information Studies. Her expertise is on communication processes and effects through digital communication channels. She has published over 30 publications that focus on dimensions of digital media around influence, leadership, political communication, and training. [email: jstromer@syr.edu] Jaime Banks is an Assistant Professor in the University of Toronto Mississauga’s Institute of Communication, Culture and Information Technology. Her research focuses on game studies and immersive digital media approached through mixed methodologies. Recent work explores how people have relationships with avatars and other digital objects and how identities are constructed and signified in relation to them. [email: j.banks@utoronto.ca] Jingsi Wu is an Assistant Professor at Hofstra University in Journalism, Media Studies, and Public Relations.

She uses a variety of perspectives and research approaches to study the convergence of popular culture and politics, how entertainment experiences contribute to civic engagement, how people behave in new media environments, such as massively multi-player online games, and how citizens use the social media to connect with others and organize their civic voices. [email: jingsi.wu@hofstra.edu] Mia Consalvo is Canada Research Chair in Game Studies & Design at Concordia University. Her research focus is game studies, with particular interests in players and the culture of gameplay. She is currently working on a book about Japan’s role in the creation of the game industry as well as game culture generally.

She is the author of the book Cheating: Gaining advantage in videogames and of numerous articles and book chapters. [email: mia.consalvo@concordia.ca]

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