Thanks to Reddit!
Over 1300 people clicked through the survey after seeing it posted on the subreddits, of those people 992 completed all the way through to the final screen. Of those 992, 785 provided complete responses. My research advisors were blown away, a lot of studies at my school struggle to get 100 participants and then have to stretch statistics as far as possible. Almost all of these responses came during the 24 hours after the initial posts. About 430 people entered the raffle, congrats to winners Zach and Oggy
Guild Wars 2 and ESO provided the best community response which the data shows. My post never made it onto the WoW board so I was kind of surprised that I got 50 participants there, but my guess is that r/SampleSize might have played a role
Masculinity and MMO Playing
Video games are a $30 billion industry according to the most recent industry report by the ESA Recent data by Pew Research shows that if you include mobile phone games and browser based games that men and women play at about the same rate. However video games are generally perceived as a male activity. This project looked at what sorts of connections there are between one specific slice of the video game field (MMOs) and one well-used measure of masculinity
MMO Survey Used
The first half of the survey was the Motivations for Play in Online Games scale created by Nick Yee. This was the best instrument that I could find that measured game motivation: it started from preexisting theoretical frameworks (Bartle's player types), then did qualitative interviews with MMO players to come up with possible motivations, then it did a quantitative validation of the survey which is the version I used. So much video game research uses made up instruments that don't have any empirical basis which leads to bias in the data, so I was happy to restrict my study to just MMO players in order to use a well-validated instrument.
Yee's survey breaks motivation for playing MMOs into three big categories: Achievement, Social, and Immersion. More info about his survey can be found at his website here
Achievement gets broken down into Advancement, Mechanics, and Competition,
Social has subcategories of Socialization, Relationship, and Teamwork
Immersion has Discovery, Customization, Role-Playing, and Escapism
Masculinity Survey Used
The masculinity instrument I chose (the long one which repeated a lot) was the Conformity to Masculine Norms Inventory by James Mahalik. It measures thoughts, behaviors, and actions that fall into traditional forms of masculinity. One reason I chose this instrument was that it offered specific norms to test and it focused on masculinity in a neutral way instead of being slanted negatively or only looking to measure masculinity "problems".
My survey was open to men and women which allowed me to compare whether the areas that the instrument is trying to measure actually differentiate between men and women. Also, women can still endorse the same masculinity values as men and that date would be valuable for correlating with the motivation data.
The specific norms that I included were: Winning (the idea that winning is important), Emotional Control (that emotions should be held in reserve instead of displayed), Risk Taking (being willing to take risks), Violence (being willing to use violence), Dominance (that it was important to get one's own way), Playboy (a conflation of having multiple sexual partners and having less emotional attachment to sexual partners), Self-Reliance (that one should be independent instead of asking for help), and Primacy of Work (that work should be the most important role in one's life).
Hypotheses
This project was partly exploratory since no one has looked at masculinity and motivations for video game use, but there were some specific hypotheses which were pretty obvious to make ahead of time:
H1: Scoring highly on Achievement in the MMO measure would correlate with Winning as a masculinity norm
H2: That scoring highly in Competition for the MMO measure would relate positively to Dominance as a masculinity norm
H3: That Socialization as the main motive for play would be negatively correlated with Emotional Control (more emotional openness would lead to being more likely to endorse social reasons to play
Results
More men took the survey than women, which was to be expected: 610 (78%) male, 157 (20%) female, 18 (2%) identifying Other
Mean age was 25.12 (SD = 6.6) years with no difference between genders.
609 people identified themselves as a gamer (77.6%) with 110 declining (14%) and 66 didn't know (8.4%)
Over half of the sample was from outside of the United States which surprised me. MMOs and Reddit are very international!
The average respondent reported playing MMOs for 23.25 (SD = 15.68) hours a week and other video games 15.44 hours per week (SD = 18.14).
Survey Results
The results found a significant positive correlation between Winning and Achievement (H1) of r = .521, p < 0.001. H2 was confirmed with a positive correlation between Dominance and Competition r = .243, p <0.001. H3 was confirmed with a negative correlation between Socialization and Emotional Control r = - .258, p < 0.001.
The full correlations are below:
Other interesting findings:
The masculinity norms of Pursuit of Status, Emotional Control, Self-Reliance, and Pursuit of Status did not show a difference between male and female groups in this study. This could mean a lot of things, maybe society has shifted since the instrument was created in 2001 so that these sections don't encompass something about "masculinity" anymore. Since the MMO population is a specific group of people that tends to skew younger than society though, the norms might still be valid in a nationwide survey across all ages.
An attempt to measure if knowing someone's masculinity scores could predict if they identified as a "gamer" or not did not find any significant regression equation. Similarly, knowing their scores on the MMO motivation measure could not accurately predict gamer identification
Conclusion
So that was my study in a nutshell, I'm happy to answer questions about it through this blog or through my reddit handle, GameResearchKB. To a limited degree I might be willing to run more statistical tests on the data if anyone has a really compelling question they'd like to examine
Obviously this was only one small slice of two very interesting fields! Both gender norms and video games are very broad areas of life that impact us in a lot of ways. Hopefully myself and others will extend research about it further in the future!
-Kevin
