Video Games and Masculinity

Video games have been the targets of moral panics for decades. Many recent waves of panic have come from the political right. Now, some of the same dubious claims are being repeated by The Geena Davis Institute (GDI) on Gender in Media. Their new report on video games and masculinity includes many long-debunked claims about video games.

The GDI report is peppered with progressive terminology and catchphrases throughout. It focuses a great deal on “toxic masculinity,” a term that, I argue, has no scientific value and that may, in some cases, enforce progressive gender role norms on men by shaming those with more traditional values. There are also references to “mass shootings” despite the fact that the link between video games and shootings has been robustly debunked.

The report also insinuates video games are relevant to “white male police violence against people of color.” Not only is there no evidence for this particular claim, but data on police violence finds it is not limited to White officers, male officers, nor people of color as victims.

The selection of research also warrants greater scrutiny. For instance, the report highlights one 2010 study of video games, failing to note the experimental findings were later debunked. The GDI report suggests that playing more violent, sexualized games reduces empathy toward female victims of violence. However, they cite a study that has been discredited for, among other things, claiming to be a randomized experiment when it was not. Some research in this area has been retracted, which they fail to note. The report only refers to only studies supporting its aims, while avoiding an increasing wealth of studies that find video games are associated with neither violence nor aggression, nor sexist attitudes and behavior.

The report does conduct its own analyses. In one part, it purports to be a “groundbreaking” content analysis of sex, race, LGBTQIA+, and other identity representations, as well as masculinity in current games. This would be welcome, as there hasn’t been a “census” of game characters and content since around 2009. However, they don’t conduct a content analysis of best-selling games but rather analyze the Twitch streams (a service that allows gamers to broadcast their own playing to fans who often pay money) of popular players. This tells only about how the most popular Twitch players choose to play in the games they like, not the content of games writ large. Calling this a content analysis of popular games is inappropriate.

The authors try to assess toxic masculinity with a measure of unknown validity and imply games reinforce toxic masculinity because, in action games, many male characters act tough, express anger, or take risks. Some negative statistics appear overdramatized: for instance, claiming that female characters were 35 times more likely to be sexualized than male characters, despite that sexualizing of either was remarkably low (3.5 percent vs. .01 percent). Results for revealing clothing were more convincing (24.6 percent v 2.3 percent) but still suggest that even revealing clothing for female characters is less common than most people likely expect.

There’s also a survey of boys, which seems more a missed opportunity than anything else. No validated scales are employed, nor were there checks for unreliable or mischievous responses (when, for example, participants give extreme answers to be funny). Thus, we don’t know how much of the data is accurate and how much is misleading.

Experiences of bullying appeared to be relatively uncommon (14-27 percent across ages and types). Nonetheless, the authors employ hyperbole, claiming, “Indeed, these [gaming] spaces are rife with identity-based harassment and bullying that reinforce elements of toxic masculinity.” Any bullying is bad, but the report provides no evidence that gaming spaces are more toxic than anything else online, ranging from meltdowns among young adult fiction writers, online knitting communities, or even among scholars who study video games. Some people (male and female) behave badly online, with no evidence that their behavior is linked specifically to video games.

Unfortunately, anti-media pressure groups have a long history of dubious claims trying to tie video games to societal ills. With this report, in my view, the Geena Davis Institute harms its own credibility by indulging its own prejudices of the gaming community. There’s nothing to see here, and we can all move along.