from Hacker News

Randomized Trial on Gender in Overwatch

by bjornstar on 6/7/20, 3:25 PM with 9 comments

  • by saagarjha on 6/7/20, 4:20 PM

  • by colossal on 6/7/20, 4:34 PM

    It's somewhat pointless without a female voice though. I don't think most players will assume you are anything but male unless you speak...

  • by fish45 on 6/7/20, 4:42 PM

    In the past few weeks I've been a bit more conscious of this since I've been playing games with voice chat. In csgo the majority of women who used their mic were treated terribly. On the other hand, in valorant, which I've played a lot more of in the past weeks, I haven't noticed a single instance of extra toxicity because of gender. I'm not really sure why that would be as the communities are theoretically pretty much the same, but the biggest difference is that in Valorant I'm usually 3 to 5 stacking with friends whereas in csgo I was only 2 stacking. Regardless and without any numbers to back me up I feel like valorant is much friendlier to girls

  • by tmpz22 on 6/7/20, 5:23 PM

    I took the time to read the full post and it does a good job mentioning flaws in its own methodology.

    They played 339 games total. 58 games of competitive mode. 281 games of quick play mode.

    Roughly half (184) as a female user and (155) as a male user.

    Most games were played in 2018 when quickplay mode did not lock players into a 2-2-2 role queue to keep teams more even.

    They did not use voice chat.

    "My mechanics are pretty much as bad as it's possible to get."

    The male account had a higher competitive rank (~2000 ish? placing in the middle tier of player skill) then the female account (~1500-2000?).

    ---

    With 2k+ hours in the game this study could go a lot further with better control groups, but is still interesting due to Overwatch's position as a very culturally diverse game that had been lauded for its ability to attract and maintain a large female playerbase in a genre that is notoriously masculine-dominated (competitive FPS games).

    My top 3 controls I'd like to see are:

    * Having a larger data set evenly distributed across major skill rankings (gold, plat, diamond, master, etc)

    * Having a larger data set evenly distributed across characters (main-tank, off-tank, main-support, off-supprt, roles)

    * Have each player engage in voice chat with a neutral tone

    My anecdotal prediction based on my own experiences would yield:

    * Women who talk in voice receive a flood of friend requests and sporadic sexual harassment (1/8 games?)

    * Players of low impact heroes receive a larger set of criticisms across genders

    * Both male and female participants inject toxicity into their own games during the study

    * Certain ranks (silver, diamond) inject more toxicity then others

    Finally, though these are my predictions and I do regularly play with a group of friends who are majority female, I have nowhere near a "full woman's perspective" on playing this game and my predictions could be way off across the various controls (or all controls).

    EDIT: A soundboard with male and female voices would solve for the voice chat problem very well.

  • by oh_sigh on 6/7/20, 4:46 PM

    Why don't these games just let users report abuse like sexism and racism and then permaban the abuser? Overwatch is apparently $20, how many people are going to keep paying $20 a pop so they can call one woman something horrible?