The awesome team at Kindea Labs put together this great video summary of my avatars research!
See the SPARTIE Lab Site for Research Updates
My research-related updates are now being posted on my SPARTIE Lab site. Please check them out!
Augmented Reality vs Virtual Reality in Education?
I’m excited to announce the (open-access!) publication of our recent article comparing the educational effects of augmented versus virtual reality. We found that visual learning was higher in VR, and auditory learning was higher in AR (likely due to spatial presence).
Click here to read the full article!
My TEDx Talk
Interview about Avatars, Virtual Worlds and Stereotypes
Had a nice interview with Dr. Zeldes from our School of Journalism on some of my topics of research interest (e.g., psychology of avatar race and gender stereotyping, ethics in Second Life, etc.).
Conference Rapping
Me and my antics …did some rapping at the International Communication Association conference in Japan.
I’ve done this final rap a few times now, but this has a new beat (which I think I like this more)…
Gender Performance Gap – JCMC Article
A journal article I wrote with some colleagues, “Do Men Advance Faster Than Women? Debunking the Gender Performance Gap in Two Massively Multiplayer Online Games”, was published in the Journal of Mediated-Computer Communication and has received more press than anything I’ve written previously (which was not hard to beat). This is likely because we put out a piece about the journal article on TheConversation, a site where researchers try to make their work more publicly accessible. That article was picked up a few other sites, including ifuckinglovescience, and this led to a few other articles (MSU, LSJ).
Now, if only people cared about the psychology of avatar use as much as they apparently care about video games and gender…
This article nicely articulates an argument I make
ARE GIRL GAMERS REALLY WORSE THAN GUYS?By Nick Fouriezos
WHY YOU SHOULD CARE: Because false stereotypes in gaming can lead to fewer girls in STEM, too.
Belinda Van Sickle was scared. What had started as an online debate over media ethics in video game journalism had erupted into a visceral campaign of harassment toward women in the industry. Threats to dox, rape or even murder were consolidated by certain gamers under the Twitter hashtag #GamerGate. It got so bad that Van Sickle, executive director of Women in Games International, bought motion-detector lights for her home and added multilevel password security to all her financial sites. Even today, two years later, Van Sickle says she sees how the controversy hurt the recruitment of female gaming pros, and the episode fueled perceptions of rampant sexism throughout the gaming world. “It was a scary time for the industry, and it really hasn’t ended,” Van Sickle told OZY. “If you were on the fence about staying, this pushed you over the edge.”
The misogyny that boiled over then, and simmers today, has many roots, but much of it stems from the idea that women are impostors. Never mind that there are more adult women playing games than teenage-and-younger boys, according to the Entertainment Software Association’s 2016 report. Demographics aside, the assumption that women are less suited for gaming is on shaky scientific ground. Sorry to tell you, boys, but …
CQ Researcher: Does video gaming have a gender gap?
I wrote part of a “pro/con” piece for CQ Researcher about whether video gaming has a gender gap. Although we were on opposite columns, Dr. Kishonna Gray and I made similar arguments: the gap seems to have closed in casual gaming, but not in more competitive, online gaming spaces. This is likely because of the hostility toward and stereotypes about women and girls that are prevalent in these spaces.
Here’s my half of the piece.
“The statistic that nearly half of gamers are female is dangerously misleading. It ignores significant gender differences in game genre preferences and veils a gender gap that detracts from equal participation within and beyond gaming writ large. Recent research shows the multiple consequences of this gap. Women and girls are more likely to be harassed by other players and perceived as uninterested and low-skilled. Female characters are less visible in games (especially as protagonists) and often are hypersexualized. Possibly contributing to this is a gender gap in the industry, with a significantly smaller proportion of women employed in game-development than men. These gaps are not caused by inherent sex differences. For example, studies have shown that boys have better spatial or mental rotation skills — the capacity to orient two- or three-dimensional objects in the mind — than girls. However, researchers also have found that those initial skill differences are neutralized after a short amount of action gameplay. Similarly, studies have found that men are no better than women at playing certain games (such as “EVE Online” and “EverQuest II”) when controlling for total time played. So why are women often relegated to the “girlfriend gamer” stereotype, playing support roles and healing their boyfriends instead of reaping the benefits of gameplay? The answer lies in a vicious stereotype-driven cycle. Research has shown that exposure to gender stereotypes in gaming reduces women’s self-confidence and ratings of their own skills. It also increases self-objectification, aggressive thoughts and acceptance of the rape myth. In my own recent study, women who believed they were playing against a man as opposed to a woman (the actual opponent was a bot) not only performed worse in a first-person shooter game but also rated men as better suited for careers in computer science, technology, engineering and math. This leads to two conclusions. First, the stereotype that women and girls are not true gamers prevents them from participating equally in video games, hindering their ability to combat the stereotype. Second, the gender gap in games leads to gender inequality in technological fields. Recognizing this, we should encourage our daughters, sisters and mothers to play more video games and we should demand that our sons, brothers and fathers not act cruelly or lecherously to the females they meet in gaming spaces.”
