btw: who/where was the report, just curious. and keep ranting about this! someone has to…

During a UT game I played once, the majority of the game was spent sifting through IM’s of the other players asking what I was wearing and whether or not I was hot. Turns out no matter how you answer these questions, they already have their own ideas as to what you look like or what you’re wearing…they just wanted to confirm their suspicions.

Inevitably, this segues into an online debate on whether or not you’re actually a “chick” where some random player will claim to have seen you at the store or at his school or whatever and that you’re some fat slimy guy who doesn’t shower or something. Gamers are malicious.

The last stage is when, if you’re in a small game, the other players will attempt to “teach” you how to play, because girls don’t know how to play such games, apparently. That’s all fine and good, I guess…it’s always nice to shoot fish in a barrel every once in a while…

However, it ultimately comes down to what population they’re trying to describe or make inferences about. If they set out to just study what/who male gamers do/are, then there’s no problem as long as they’re explicit about it. If, on the other hand, they’re claiming to study “gamers” or “people who play games” as a whole, then they obviously have problems and any inferences about that group are suspect at best and fictitious at worst. I’d lean more towards the latter, but at the very least I’d call their findings inconclusive because of the problems you cited.

Do they specify who exactly they’re trying to examine? Without looking at the report I can’t say for sure, but what I suspect happened was that they got a sample of convenience (customers at a LAN center, people coming into a store, people sending in game registration cards, etc.) that ended up being entirely or almost entirely male. Maybe there were females, but there were too few to do any meaningful analyses. But even still, they should be explicit about it and not make any unsupported inferences about females. …Or non-brown cows.