Chapter 5 Communication and Culture 137Online Gamers: Women Are Hard-core, Too
The stereotypical view of the gaming community—especially hard-core
players—is that it is young and male. But industry reports note that 47 per-
cent of online gamers are female, and that women over age 18 buy far more
games than younger men (Entertainment Software Association, 2012). So
what are women playing? And do they play differently than men?
Communication researchers studied more than seven thousand players
involved in the Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) game Everquest II and
found several distinct characteristics related to gender. Although they rep-
resented just under 20 percent of the players, female players proved to be
more “hard-core”—they played more often and were less inclined to quit
the game. Their motivations for playing were different too. Men were more
motivated by achievement than were women, whereas women were slightly
more motivated than men by social reasons (Williams, Consalvo, Caplan, &
Yee, 2009). Interestingly, although both men and women tended to under-
report the amount of time they spent playing, women were three times more
likely than men to lie about how much they played.
The single biggest difference between the sexes in the study hinged on
players’ romantic relationships. More than 60 percent of the women in the
study played with a romantic partner; less than 25 percent of the men did. In-
terestingly, male and female players who were in romantic relationships with
other players perceived their relationships differently, with men noting less
contentment and overall satisfaction with their partners, and women report-
ing higher levels of overall happiness and satisfaction (Williams, Consalvo,
Caplan, & Yee, 2009).WIREDFORCOMMUNICATION THINK
ABOUT
THIS❶ Do you play live games
online? Do you consider
the gender of the play-
ers you compete against
when you do? Do you
choose to reveal your own
gender when you play?
❷ Do you or would you
try online gaming with
your romantic partner?
Explain how you think
your communication is
(or might be) altered when
you share games online.
❸ Consider the
discussion of gender as
co-culture in this chapter.
Why do you think women
were so much more likely
to underreport the amount
of time they spent
playing?sense of your unique individual personality, and you have a social identity, the
part of your self-concept that comes from your group memberships (Tajfel &
Turner, 1986). We divide ourselves into “us” and “them” partly based on our
affiliations with various co-cultures. The groups with which we identify and
to which we feel we belong are our ingroups; those we define as “others” are
outgroups. We want “us” to be distinct and better than “them,” so we con-
tinually compare our co-cultures to others in the hope that we are part of the
“winning” teams.
Studies in intergroup communication, a branch of the discipline that
focuses on how communication within and between groups affects relation-
ships, find that these comparisons powerfully affect our communication (Giles,
Reid, & Harwood, 2010; Pagotto, Voci, & Maculan, 2010). For example, group
members often use specialized language and nonverbal behaviors to reveal group
membership status to others (Bourhis, 1985). So, a doctor might use a lot of
technical medical terms among nurses to assert her authority as a doctor, whereas
sports fans use Facebook posts to support their fellow fans, team members, and
coaches, and to denigrate those of rival teams (Sanderson, 2013).
In Chapter 2, you learn that
the self-serving bias holds
that we usually attribute our
own successes to internal
factors and our failures to
external effects. Because
we want to feel good about
our group memberships
as well, we tend to make
the same attributions. So
if your sorority sister gets
an A on a difficult exam,
you may attribute it to her
intelligence; if she fails, you
may assume that the exam
was unfair.CONNECT