Randomized trial on gender in Overwatch

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2022-05-14 07:00:16

A recurring discussion in Overwatch (as well as other online games) is whether or not women are treated differently from men. If you do a quick search, you can find hundreds of discussions about this, some of which have well over a thousand comments. These discussions tend to go the same way and involve the same debate every time, with the same points being made on both sides. Just for example, these three threads on reddit that spun out of a single post that have a total of 10.4k comments. On one side, you have people saying "sure, women get trash talked, but I'm a dude and I get trash talked, everyone gets trash talked there's no difference", "I've never seen this, it can't be real", etc., and on the other side you have people saying things like "when I play with my boyfriend, I get accused of being carried by him all the time but the reverse never happens", "people regularly tell me I should play mercy[, a character that's a female healer]", and so on and so forth. In less time than has been spent on a single large discussion, we could just run the experiment, so here it is.

This is the result of playing 339 games in the two main game modes, quick play (QP) and competitive (comp), where roughly half the games were played with a masculine name (where the username was a generic term for a man) and half were played with a feminine name (where the username was a woman's name). I recorded all of the comments made in each of the games and then classified the comments by type. Classes of comments were "sexual/gendered comments", "being told how to play", "insults", and "compliments".