Video game study finds losers more likely to harass women | Hacker News Reader

Video game study finds losers more likely to harass women

bbc.com

"The results also suggest that video games may be reinforcing gender segregation and potentially promoting sexist behaviours, especially troubling since so many "gamers" are teenagers."

What in this study suggested that?

The base study is very interesting, but basically seems to say that losers seek to make someone else feel bad so they look for an easy and lower status target.

Seems like it's not the video games as much as society and culture, with video games just being one of MANY places you can see this behavior.

For instance, domestic violence spikes among fans of the losing teams in NFL[1]

[1] http://www.slate.com/articles/business/the_dismal_science/20...

Haven't you heard? People that play videogames are evil misogynists and sexism doesn't exist elsewhere.

Sarcasm aside, this is actually what the article is literally suggesting:

> The results also suggest that video games may be reinforcing gender segregation and potentially promoting sexist behaviours, especially troubling since so many "gamers" are teenagers.

I got knee jerk downvoted for that so hard I have whiplash. I rtfa, it ignores anything else and pretends gamers exist in a vacuum.

It's also much too narrowly scoped. Even if it were a random sampling across a variety of XBox Live games, it would still only be representative of XBox Live gamers, which is its own demographic.

The HN crowd tries to discourage sarcasm. It doesn't matter if you are correct if you are sarcastic about it. If you had started your comment with something like "The article implies" instead of "Haven't you heard?" you probably would have been upvoted.

Why did you feel the need to reiterate the exact quote that the grandparent post quoted?

For the same reason the grandparent post reiterated it: the readers downvoting the parent post seem to have missed it.

No, it doesn't say that. You are oversimplifying in order obfuscate and ignore what the article is actually saying.

This is a very common sophistry tactic. You are lowering the level of discourse on HN by not attempting to fully understand what is being said.

Studying harassment on XBox Live is a bit like going to the Dead Sea to test oceanic salinity levels.

The article is available here http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....

How about a rule title change to "poorly performing video gamers more likely to harass women". Not only is the title inaccurate and click baity, but as someone who was physically bullied in school for being an actual loser, it triggers me.

"Study finds less skilled Halo 3 players more likely to harass women in-game" would be the best title.

I've been playing games long enough to know that certain games attract certain types of people. The demographics can even vary widely from platform to platform within the same games, especially when online play is also segregated by platform.

This study's dataset is much too narrowly scoped to be making the sweeping statements in this article.

Because the author is a poorly performing writer more likely to harass gamers, thus continuing the cycle.

News flash: the same concept can be demonstrated in real-life.

In related news, miserable people apt to project their pain onto innocent bystanders.

Study: People who are not taking things seriously are more likely not to be serious.

Link to the paper anywhere? (Can't tell if I'm just not seeing it.)

I didn't see it anywhere either. Found it here http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....

thanks

I mean... Isn't that already the definition of a loser? Harassing people?

EDIT: Yes, I know. HN seems to put far less effort into detecting sarcasm than any other online community.

Not really. David Miscavige is well known for harassing (both indirectly and through proxies) and physically beating people and he's generally been pretty successful.

It's a different definition. The operative definition in this case is "a person that loses".

Men have a fear of other men, so they're much less likely to insult them. Throughout our evolution, getting angry and insulting men is more likely to get a male killed. Because men naturally don't fear women they're more likely to express anger and blame on them. "But they're on Xbox live" you say. The evolutionary response is ingrained permanently.

Source?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com