​
​
Behavioral and Social Science Research Methods​
4/20/2024​
Intro to Sociology Draft
The sociological imagination is the ability to make connections between individual actions and
connect them to the wider context or situation. This can be compared to an artist taking a step away from
their piece so they can see all the brushstrokes at once instead of the one they just did. This paper will be
focusing on applying the sociological imagination to the relationship between gender and video gaming
through the lens of sociology. There are quite a few different levels at which people who play videogames
interact with the larger community and gender has quite a heavy influence on these sorts of interactions.​
​
Video Games at their conception used to be considered strictly a male hobby. As it was hard to
get into at large and was largely associated with the culture around computer sciences and programming.
Which are skills that are still largely associated with men but the gap between men and women has
narrowed in recent years despite still being skewed toward men (Wang et al. 119). This is similar to how
video game culture has progressed into what it is today. With it still being heavily associated with
masculinity by now having a growing space for women (Tang et al. 337). To most people it might seem
like the main issue is solved and that sexism in video games is no more. If someone were to just look at
the games being made and the progress being made, it’d be easy for them to conclude that the issue is at
the very least actively being fixed. That conclusion is a result of there being two sets of video game
communities.​
​
There’s firstly the one that most people fall into. These are the people who pick up a video game
and the experience is very limited to an already established social circle. These would be friends and
family. This can still hold a form of subtle sexism as parents are still more likely to share video games
with their male children. (Aierbe et al. 113). So while there isn’t necessarily a barrier to stop women and
young girls from getting into video games, the socialization of young boys to play video games is more
than enough to cause that skew there being more men than women who play videogames. Socialization
being how behaviors are learned from the people around us. Men learn far earlier on that playing video
games is more than fine and are introduced to the hobby a ton more often as well as being more likely to
pass down that hobby to their male kids. This alone could imply that both men and women have an equal
ease of access to video games. Which is true on its own. The resistance however comes in the second set
of communities that video games have.​
​
The second set of communities video games foster are those outside of those initial starting points
of friends and family and more into the online space. The two groups can share a similar space or even the
same space in the cases of online video games. For the most part, however, this would include the purely
online relations. This would include media outside of the games themselves as well as communication
features in game. Things that are created for a way to connect a whole game’s community outside of any
individual play session. These groups are subgroups of video game culture and have their own
socialization and culture unique to themselves. Culture is a set of ideals and behaviors. Which is a huge
factor in how friendly a game is to a woman wanting to play it. It’s also largely anonymous, meaning that
consequences are normally handled in game. For most games this isn’t an issue as most people who play
video games don’t seek out media outside of the game. So the relatively toxic behavior in those areas isn’t
the barrier that makes things harder for women to play games in the first place. Most people who play
games competitively are men (Tang et al. 337), so it’s not like video game communities being geared
towards men isn’t a problem in those areas too. It’s just that out of game media doesn’t stop someone
from starting. The issue is that in game there are quite a few ways for people to firstly identify someone as
a woman and start harassing. This comes mainly in the feature of voice chats that are supposed to be used
in communication. Men experience it too but there’s a different sort of pressure put on women into not
using the integral feature (Vella et al. 924). Which also happen to be the games where online communities
are more prominent. When a man speaks in the voice chat there isn’t any inherent risk. Whereas if a
woman speaks up and has a more feminine voice, it’s more likely to be laughed off, ignored, or brutally
made fun of. This doesn’t even have to be the majority of men doing this consistently as even just once or
twice is more than any misogyny a guy in the same position might face.​
​
These two factors of men getting a headstart and women getting an exclusive form of toxicity that
men simply don’t have to deal with. These two separate factors lead to women being far less common and
far less visible. It’s not an entirely new phenomenon but women are progressively becoming more and
more involved in video game communities as a couple things start to change.​
​
There have been multiple band aid fixes to fix the problem downstream. Downstream problem
solving means to fix the result of an issue by fixing the result itself. Meaning that instead of trying to find
the reason why a game might have a misogynistic community, video game publishers try to moderate the
voice and text chats. Which most players, both men and women, agree as appropriate solutions. (Vella et
al. 924).There aren’t many purely upstream solutions. Upstream solutions being ones that fix the thing
that causes the actual problem instead of mitigating the symptoms. Individual games can either focus
more on individual gameplay, have a casual audience, or just be a single player game where the outside
community is rarely a factor. None of which solve the issue of women in video games media still being
the vast minority.​
​
Overall the problems seem to be fixing themselves as video games move from a niche nerdy thing
and into the mainstream. It’s still a heavily male dominated industry but it's gotten to the point where the
inherent second cultures are becoming less of an issue posed toward women in particular. Casual games
don’t have the misogynistic air to them in the same way and as such don’t tend to be the subject of
studies, at least from a sociology perspective.
Works Cited
Aierbe, et al. “Video Games, Parental Mediation and Gender Socialization.” Digital Education Review,
2019, pp. 100–116,
search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eric&AN=EJ1238924&site=ehost-live.
Tang, et al. “Gendered Esports: Predicting Why Men and Women Play and Watch Esports Games.”
Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, vol. 65, no. 3, 2021, pp. 336–356. EBSCOhost,
https://doi-org.coppermountaincollege.idm.oclc.org/10.1080/08838151.2021.1958815.
Vella, et al. “Making Friends in Online Games: Gender Differences and Designing for Greater Social
Connectedness.” Behaviour & Information Technology, vol. 39, no. 8, 2020, pp. 917-934.
EBSCOhost,
https://doi-org.coppermountaincollege.idm.oclc.org/10.1080/0144929X.2019.1625442.
Wang, et al. ““Gender Gap in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM): Current
Knowledge, Implications for Practice, Policy, and Future Directions.”” Educational Psychology
Review, vol. 29, no. 1, 2017, pp. 119–140. EBSCOhost,
https://doi-org.coppermountaincollege.idm.oclc.org/10.1007/s10648-015-9355-x.
​