In one survey, non-gamers agreed with the common stereotypes in all but one category: attractiveness.
Mainstream media and culture is fond of portraying online gamers as being awkward, fat, friendless, and fugly, and that impacts gamers' own perceptions. After all, one of the first things gamers have to deal with is the stereotype associated with the gamer label. This same categorization method was used in other studies, such as allowing people to identify themselves as gamers but then cross-checking that against the variety of genres they play (gamers tend to play more than one genre of games!). To put it another way, it's like researching "obesity" by looking at people who identify themselves as being "unhealthy." The problems are linked, but self-identifying yourself with such a broad trait also allows for other people to be included in the research, which can include people who are on the road to recovery, have lapsed in their progress, or may just have a similar issue. Kowert's paper was the way it explores shyness, not by looking at people who identify themselves as shy but by people who identify as being emotionally sensitive. The sample sizes were diverse in their sources at least, often utilizing paid recruitment websites, Facebook, and even guild sites to find subjects. The other issue is that only people who identified as Caucasian were used in the results, simply because data from other cultures had too few members to really draw strong conclusions from. Self reporting can be tricky, even when anonymous, but one hopes that large sample sizes help fix the problem since some people will be honest.
Kowert and her co-authors in the research described here utilized self-reporting surveys from rather large samples. Note that all of the research conducted by Dr. Kowert herself, but today, we'll have a look at the research to bring us all up to speed. Tomorrow, we'll tackle our interview with Dr. Rachel Kowert, who helpfully provided me with a reader's digest version of recent research in this subfield of psychology. In preparing for this two-part article, I spoke to the research paper's lead author, Dr. Games are what I rely on to help myself meet new people as cultural and language barriers prevent me, an American, from making strong attachments in Japan, the country where I live and work. The topic is of interest to me not just because of the MMO connection but because I myself am someone who used to identify myself as shy but believe online games help me cope with and surmount it. Last month, Massively wrote a short article about research on the relationship between shyness and online game friendships.
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