The Proteus Paradox (15 page)

We've seen how gender expectations are encoded into and sustained as male technological fantasies in both the design of avatars and the powerful rhetoric, which allow women into these spaces but as second-class citizens and sex objects. By allowing players to have fluid bodies, virtual worlds actually go one step further. These online games are uniquely powerful tools for perpetuating stereotypes.

On its surface, gender-bending seems like the perfect counterpoint to my argument that these games provide a false freedom. At the click of a button, men and women can switch their biological sex and experience life from an entirely different perspective. What could be more liberating than that? Indeed, among
World of Warcraft
players, 29 percent of men report having a main character that is female. On the other hand, only 8 percent of women report a main character that is male. When looking across all the characters that a player has, the same pattern remains. Fifty-three percent of men have at least one character that is female, whereas only 19 percent of women have at least one male character. On average, 33.4 percent of men's characters are female, whereas only 9 percent of women's characters are male. No matter how we slice it, men gender-bend roughly three to four times more often than women. On the Daedalus Project, my post on this gender disparity in gender-bending has elicited more than two hundred comments from players trying to explain this phenomenon. By far, the most widely adopted male explanation is that the third-person perspective in these games means that players spent a great deal of time looking at the back of their character. As one male player put it, “If I am going to stare at a butt all game it might as well be a butt I'd like to look at.” Data my colleagues and I gathered at the Palo Alto Research Center provide empirical
support for this. When men gender-bend in
World of Warcraft,
they tend to play races with attractive female characters: Humans, the Draenei, and Blood Elves. Races with unattractive females—the diminutive dwarves or the giant, muscular, cowlike Tauren—are seldom selected by men who gender-bend. In short, gender-bending among men is often an artifact of the sexualized female avatars, rather than an explicit attempt to explore gender roles.
¹⁷

Virtual worlds also allow false gender stereotypes to be made true. In a study of
World of Warcraft
players in which my team combined survey data with in-game log data, we first asked players whether they thought male or female players preferred certain activities in the game. These included different combat roles, such as healing, tanking, and damage-dealing classes, as well as noncombat activities such as crafting. The most strongly stereotyped female game activity by far was healing; players believed that women have a much stronger preference for healing compared with men. We found that this was not the case. We calculated the ratio of total healing output compared with total damage output for each player in the study. This healing ratio allowed us to get around the noise of some players playing more hours a week than other players and get to a comparable measure of healing preference. We found that male and female players had almost exactly the same healing ratios—33 percent for men, and 30 percent for women. Thus, the stereotype that women prefer to heal in online games is false. Men and women have the same preferences for healing.

Where we did find a statistical difference was in
character
gender. Female characters had a much higher healing ratio compared with male characters. This disparity was a direct consequence of how players behave when they gender-bend. When men gender-bend and play female characters, they spend more time healing. And when
women gender-bend and play male characters, they spend less time healing. In other words, when players in
World of Warcraft
genderbend, they enact the expected gender roles of their characters. As players conform to gender stereotypes, what was false becomes true. Thus, when players interact in the game, they experience a world in which women prefer to heal.
¹⁸

Jesse Fox, a communication scholar at the Ohio State University, has found that the design of female avatars can elicit dangerous stereotypes. In her study, students were put into a virtual world and interacted with a variety of female avatars. She found that female avatars that conformed to gender stereotypes—a coy, conservatively dressed women or a dominant, suggestively dressed women—increased sexist beliefs and rape myth acceptance. In short, participants exposed to scantily clad female avatars were more likely to believe that women who get raped deserve it because of their perceived promiscuity. In virtual worlds, false stereotypes are being made true via play.
¹⁹

The things we build often become contaminated with unspoken preconceptions and prejudices, whether this is a technological artifact or something as mundane as a road:

Anyone who has traveled the highways of America and has become used to the normal height of overpasses may well find something a little odd about some of the bridges over the parkways on Long Island, New York. Many of the overpasses are extraordinarily low, having as little as nine feet of clearance at the curb. Even those who happened to notice this structural peculiarity would not be inclined to attach any special meaning to it. In our accustomed way of looking at things like
roads and bridges we see the details of form as innocuous, and seldom give them a second thought.

The highway developer Robert Moses designed these low overpasses for the same reason that he vetoed a proposed railroad to Long Island: his decisions ensured that the twelve-foot-high buses used by the lower class would be unable to navigate the parkways, reserving Long Island's beaches for white, privileged New Yorkers. Political theorist Langdon Winner argues that human artifacts embody politics—the things we build can implicitly regulate who does and does not belong.
²⁰

The fantasy worlds we build also have these unspoken rules. From the moment a woman steps into a gaming store or enters an online game, she receives cues that she doesn't belong. Virtual worlds and online games are crafted by people with certain mindsets and biases that are too often hidden and unquestioned. As with the color of our skin or the national boundaries we happen to fall into, our offline biological sex still matters in virtual worlds. In this instance of the Proteus Paradox, false beliefs and stereotypes of women are not only being perpetuated in virtual worlds, they are being made true via play.

I've focused on online games in this chapter, but sexism isn't a gaming problem; it's a social problem. Although having more female game designers would likely lead to more gender-inclusive games, the dramatic statistics on awarded degrees in the computer sciences illustrate that as a society we have very different expectations of what careers men and women should pursue. In addition to career stereotypes, there are also striking differences in how men and women think of their free time. Studies have consistently shown that women have less free time and that their free time is more likely to be infringed on by gendered expectations of housework and child care.
Because these gender-stereotyped household responsibilities (some ever-present, others unpredictable) are co-located with leisure spaces in the home, women often feel less relaxed and more pressured even when they are ostensibly free. Thus, women are more likely to experience guilt when they engage in leisure activities in the home. This conflicted sense of leisure is exploited quite effectively by advertisers. From body lotion to chocolates, from yogurt to spa treatments, products are often marketed to women as guilt-free indulgences—that just this once, they can indulge in something special without feeling guilty about it. Advertisements for men almost never employ guilt. But this trope reveals an important social message: women are normally expected to feel guilty about leisure and pleasure. The stereotype of gaming as a waste of time likely exacerbates this expected guilt and further lowers women's desire to game.
²¹

Sexism isn't a conspiracy that men carry out against women; it's how we as a society treat men and women differently and shape how they should behave. It limits the life choices of both men and women, and it is sustained by both men and women. The Difference Engine Initiative was a 2011 Toronto-based workshop that tried to support women entering the indie game community. The female president of the initiative, while acknowledging that clients often wanted to talk to her male colleagues rather than her, disagreed that gender was a significant barrier to success in the industry. Instead, she told participants to develop a thicker skin. A human resources executive from Electronic Arts makes a similarly conflicted argument in an opinion piece in
Forbes.
Gabrielle Toledano writes, “The problem isn't sexism. . . . Sexism is an unfortunate reality of our times, but as women we must seek the power and ability in ourselves to change the dynamic.” But arguing that women need to work much harder simply because they are women only reinforces the sexism
that both female executives claim isn't a problem. The last time I checked, no one is telling boys that they need to try much harder to enjoy video games. Sexism in gaming is a symptom of a much larger social problem. Its roots are deep and widespread. This is why it's such a difficult problem to fix.
²²

I was approached by a somewhat rude gnome who was making some rather rude remarks to me, and this lovely paladin (they're always paladins . . .) came to my rescue and scared off the gnome. Then he bought my character some pinot noir and we chatted for awhile.

[
World of Warcraft,
female, 23]

For the past few chapters, we've seen how our psychological baggage and offline politics can carry over into virtual worlds. But having reality intrude into virtual worlds isn't always a bad thing. In this chapter on romantic relationships, I'll describe one example of how the Proteus Paradox can be beneficial. In an online game, how do you get to know someone when he or she is hiding behind the avatar of an elven assassin or undead necromancer? The stunning graphics of today's online games make it easy to forget that people have been creating their own digital personas for more than three decades, well before graphics cards were a standard feature in personal computers. Even in early text-based virtual worlds and online communities, users could reinvent their identities. One striking story from that era still resonates with how we think about online relationships.

In the early 1980s, when the Internet was still in its infancy and restricted to military and educational use, tech-savvy people could interact online via modem networks. CompuServe operated one of these networks in which people could pay an hourly fee to dial in via their modem to access many services, from stock quotes to weather
reports to airline information. There were also social channels on which users could mingle, which allowed users to chat in large groups as well as one-on-one.

In 1983, a woman named Joan gained celebrity status on one of CompuServe's social channels. Joan, a neuropsychologist in her late twenties living in New York, was the victim of a drunk-driving accident that killed her boyfriend and left her severely disfigured, mute, confined to a wheelchair, and suffering intense pains in her leg and back. In the ensuing depression, Joan had frequent suicidal thoughts. But her life turned around when a former professor introduced her to CompuServe, where Joan's physical disabilities no longer mattered and she was able to express herself and develop friendships.

Joan became an inspiring presence on CompuServe. She developed close relationships with many women who called each other “sisters.” Everyone who knew her described her as being extraordinarily generous. When one of her friends became confined to bed rest due to a disability, Joan bought her a laptop. When the same friend mentioned that no one had ever sent her roses, Joan sent her two dozen. And despite her physical limitations, Joan tried to resume her teaching career by using typed lectures displayed on large screens. She worked with a police task force to crack down on drunk drivers. On one of these projects, she met a police officer named Jack Carr. They fell in love, got married, and honeymooned in Cyprus.

But then it all slowly began to unravel. Some of Joan's friends, particularly those with physical disabilities themselves, found her stories far-fetched. They doubted that Jack Carr even existed but took pity on Joan's way of dealing with her own tragic situation. And although Joan's muteness and disfigurement were at first legitimate reasons for why she didn't want to speak on the phone or meet in
person, this reticence didn't align with her amazing stories of traveling to conferences and honeymooning in Cyprus. Slowly, it dawned on Joan's online friends that none of them had ever seen Joan in person in all the years that they knew her.

One of them finally confronted Joan with these doubts. Joan wasn't actually a neuropsychologist. Joan wasn't in her late twenties. Joan wasn't even a woman. “Joan” was a male psychiatrist named Alex in his early fifties who had created a female persona to understand how to interact with his female clients. The public outrage was swift and brutal. One of Joan's friends called Alex's deception “mind rape.”
¹

Stories like this have become cautionary tales for meeting someone online, particularly when it comes to romantic relationships. It is difficult to find studies of attitudes toward online gaming relationships specifically, but in a 2006 survey conducted by Pew Internet on online dating, 43 percent of respondents agreed that this activity involves risk, 57 percent agreed that a lot of people online lie about their marital status, and 29 percent agreed that people who use online dating are desperate. Nevertheless, sociologist Michael Rosenfeld has found that between 2007 and 2009, 21 percent of the heterosexual romantic relationships formed in the United States began online; for same-sex couples, it was 61 percent. But finding love in an online game is a different matter. Yon is a thirty-eight-year-old gamer who recently emailed me. He met his wife in an online game when he lived in the United States and his wife lived in the United Kingdom. They managed to make their relationship work, and they now have two children. Nevertheless, he notes, “This often makes for an embarrassing moment when people ask how we met. . . . The stigma of being a gamer and meeting online is still a strange concept
to some.” In one of her interviews with online gamers, sociologist T. L. Taylor finds this same stigma. Kim met her husband in the game
EverQuest,
but this is “something she does not tell too many people.” Given the stories of deceptive online relationships and the way gamers censor their own successful relationships, it's not hard to see why many people have concerns about finding love in an online game.
²