Slashdot Mirror
Gender Inequality In Everquest
daimou writes "According to a study done at California State University, women avatars sell for 10% less than men. Also look how rich Everquest would be if it were a real country. The New Scientist is carrying the full report." Update: 06/26 14:15 GMT by S : This New Scientist article adds commentary/summary on the original paper the author, Edward Castronova, sent us info about a couple of days ago.
See http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/06/23/ 056204&mode=thread&tid=127&tid=186&tid=209
According to a study done at California State University, Slashdot editors post the same story over 100% more times than other editors.
Overall, male avatars sold for an average of $346, while the generally lower skilled female ones went for $281. The discrepancy notably mirrors differences in wages earned by men and women in the real-world, says Castronova.
Well, if they are generally lower skilled, doesn't that justify the lesser price?
English is not my native language, maybe I misunderstood that?
Do these guys have brains larger than dogs? Obviously there is less of a demand for female avatars because there are more male users. Thus, there are fewer bids, and the avatar sells for less.
"Although the vast majority of EverQuest players are male, around 20 per cent of players choose a female avatar to represent them online."
Translation: There is a 60% lower demand for female avatars than male avatars. Hmm.....
It disturbs me when reports begin to come out regarding usage trends/statistics about games... and people take them seriously. Worse yet, they extrapolate theorems from the data and apply them to reality.
IT'S A GAME! Ok so the male avatars are more expensive. One could easily apply the law of supply and demand to the statistical data. But, that would be taking this GAME waay to seriously.
I'm sure someone is going to post about how insignificant the reported statistics are in the face of the statistics about how many people get far too involved in rpg's, and Everquest in particular, to the point of losing touch with reality, committing suicide, etc. Again, people who take the game waay to seriously.
Please stop reporting such bunk as news, thereby ceasing to encourage people to push the game beyond what its intended purpose. It's a game. It's just there to entertain us.
The english language is in beta. It's evolving but has not yet reached a level of usability.
The New Scientist article references the quotes of someone who is a 'Computer Games Researcher.' What kind of job is this? It's just a GAME!!!!
In every field I have noticed gender inequality.
In Soviet Russia, The Everquest Economy Per Capita Income, ummm, I can't really think of anything.
Hmmm lets see you have a Male player..
who plays a Female Character..
MP+FC= FAG
at least that is the mentality of alot of players I have met in Everquest,Dark Age, Shadowbane.
Of course there is alot of exceptions to this..
"I am a kernel in the linux army"
Updated to make it a lesser dupe. There's commentary!
If I had something intelligent to say, I would have said it.
All the female charachters in Everquest, just like the female charachters in lesbian chatrooms, are actually fat old men pretending to be hot young girls. WTF?
How ya like dat?
"EverQuest would then be the 77th wealthiest in the world, just behind Russia."
I am dissapointed in the EQ players, I hope they work harder next year and surpass russia.
Capitalism: unequal distribution of wealth
Socialism: equal distribution of poverty
People are not who they represent themselves in EQ? If that's true, then maybe people on /. are representing themselves as humans because they get treated differently than off-worlders! That would explain a lot.
I've been thinging about this since this article was originally posted. the common sence explanation holds true, most EQ players are men, so male characters are more in demand.
However, on further contemplation, there are a couple of other things going on here. Looking at the original article reveals that only about 20% of teh characters for sale are female, thus that should make up for the difference in demand. But if this makes up for the differnece in demand, we need to think of other reasons why female characters sell for less.
Some possibilities might lie in looking at the whole process of buying and selling a character in teh first place. It seems to me that the process of leveling up a character just to sell it seems something a bored teenaged boy would be likely to do, rather than a)teenaged girls or b)older people of either gender.
Then there is the question of who is buying these characters? beyond the resaonsable assumption that most of them are male, what kind of men are they? It seems that someone who would buy a premade character is looking for a sort of status item, a vanity character so to speak. Sounds like some mid-30's former buisness major to me.
Anyway, it seems that this fact that female characters sell for less than male has more to it than it would first appear, and it would be neat to seem a bit more research done on the buyers and sellers themselves, rather than just what they buy (of course our possessions speak volumes about our identity, but that is another post...).
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players