Every time I see a feminine name in a videogame I think the person is just fishing for attention. This is important because most players of both genders use neutral-looking names. The study doesn't account for this.
As a side note, I recommend meditating on why seeing a female name on the internet upsets you, when you should be well aware that 50% of human beings are female. If players didn't get upset and force females to play under male/neutral names, maybe it wouldn't be as shocking to notice when they don't.
You really need to consider how to account for experimental variables that affect each other.
Important: this coming from my background, which is WoW, and not any of these modern games and communities. Maybe things have changed? The average WoW player is definitely older than the average Fortnite/OW/whatever player.
Certainly women play video games, and one only needs to talk to them and ask them why they choose one name over another to quickly accumulate first hand stories. If you do this with people you know in real life, you may find some clues as to what you aren't seeing first hand.
Edit: and, for what it's worth, you may forget that WoW has some unique rules on names compared to other games. No idea how that may affect things.
No idea how that may affect things.
While the GOTIS principle is something that many female players actively apply (they try not to signal that they're female to avoid attention), it's a tragic thing to operate on or defend.
The only reason it's salient is because most users of a community are male, which is self-reinforcing. Female outliers get naturally highlighted in a highly male context, and, whether or not they use this to their advantage, they'll suffer its downsides. It's tragic that they should have to and that we're still so sexually partitioned, culturally.
Is this true broadly? I'd be curious to know if there's any data on that besides for anecdotal evidence.
also, a "neutral-looking" name can be really subjective, I would guess that there's a lot of player names that use adjectives that might be inadvertently related to a particular gender based on the cultural context.
I'd be curious to know what the names are in this case.
"Dragging your personal identity in" only seems to apply when that identity is different than the assumed default (male), hmmm....