Jeremy Brenner-Levoy - The Impact of Gender Identity on Video Game Preference and Within Games Themselves - Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology at the University of Cincinnati
Jeremy Brenner-Levoy (They/Them) is a Ph.D Candidate in Sociology at the University of Cincinnati whose research centers how society shapes peoples’ preferences and experiences with “nerd culture” (video games, cosplay, table-top games, etc.). Currently, they are working on their dissertation that has three main pillars of study regarding video games and gender identity: which games are respected and how the gender stereotype of that game’s audience impacts its prestige; the game preferences of women and queer people; and how a player’s gender identity may result in different playstyles between similar games.
What can you tell us about the work you do as a Ph.D. candidate for the University of Cincinnati?
I started off as a teaching assistant, then I moved into being a research assistant where most of my study time has been. I've done a whole bunch of things that I've been very fortunate to be involved in. The first research assistantship I did was under Dr. Erynn Casanova who’s at UC, and we decided to work together on a study of Cosplay.
Cosplay, if you’re not familiar, is costume play. It, for the most part, happens at conventions such as anime and comic conventions. We looked at the gender, race, and sexuality inequality that happens in interactions with and between cosplayers at conventions. That was a fun study, because my mentor does Body and Embodiment research whereas I'm much more in nerd culture, so it was kind of a natural middle point between the two of us.
From there, I went on to do my master's thesis which was on Queer Men's Experiences with Harassment in Online Video Games. Everyone kept telling me that, for my master's, I needed to trim it down, do the smallest thing that I possibly could. I've never been good at that.
So, I limited my scope, and I only looked at queer men because of some of the stereotypes that float around online. I really hated limiting it, because you run into people who have very valuable stories to tell that you’re cutting out since they don't identify as men. There are lots of non-binary people and women who also have stories that they want to tell in these spaces.
I also worked on the Ohio Policy Evaluation Network which looks at reproductive care access in Ohio and the surrounding states. I was a project manager and also a primary analyst for that. I did many of the statistical models for the papers that we published. And, my proudest moment is that I contributed a report to activists in Louisville that they successfully used to get a safety perimeter around the clinic in Louisville.
After that, I got a dissertation fellowship with the Taft Research Center, and I decided to work on my dissertation study called the Gamer Preference Study, which is the expansion of the Queer Men's Experience with Harassment Study. I've moved on from only looking at harassment, because I didn’t want to only look at the negative but also at the positive aspects that bring us to gaming. I want to move on from just this limited scope of only queer men to include people across the spectrum. I'm looking at the push and pull aspects of video games and what are limitations and draws within these spaces.
How did you know that you wanted to focus your studies on “nerd culture” specifically?
I wanted to focus on nerd culture, because I was involved in it. I grew up a military brat, and we were moving every three years. I got very invested in video games because that’s all I had and my two younger brothers also played video games.
What I find interesting about games is that I always felt pushed out of them. I always felt alienated and harassed throughout various parts of my involvement with it, but no matter what, I always stuck with it. I learned a lot about myself in gaming. I realized that I was queer while playing as the Amazon in Diablo 2 and having people just assume that I was a woman because I was playing as the Amazon. I think being treated as a woman made me realize for the first time that “Oh, I actually like this attention from men.”
Then, later in life, I was playing Dungeons & Dragons when I realized that I was non-binary through playing a character that was non-binary. I'm really interested in how we can learn about ourselves in these spaces. But these aren't neutral spaces. In many cases, they can be quite hostile to outsiders, and yet the push out was never enough to get rid of me. The draw, the allure, always outweighed it, so really, that's what got me into nerd culture.
I know that right now you are working on the Gamer Preference Study that you mentioned earlier. Can you tell us more about your dissertation and why you chose this area of nerd culture?
As I’ve already kind of hinted, what I’m interested in is looking at societal inequalities and how they manifest within video game culture. Part of it is a plea to sociology to take video games seriously, because sociology continues to kind of ignore them or look at them as just a thing that people do on their own when they're actually vast social worlds.
So, what I did was I chose pillars—or large bodies of inequality—and I inspected how they get into video game culture. Dissertations are often organized into three chapters or papers. The first one I’m looking at is how the gender pay gap manifests within video games, such as how prestige might be differently afforded to different types of games; how certain games are seen as more prestigious than others; and how feminine or feminized games actually become subordinated or looked down upon within gaming communities.
Next, I’m looking at the pink collar careers, the idea that there are certain careers that women and feminine people disproportionately come to occupy. So the classics of these careers are elementary school teacher, nursing, these kinds of things. These are careers that are very necessary, have care work expectations baked into them, and are paid less. I'm also looking at how that might happen through a similar mechanism as college major choice which filters us into these different disparate types of work. This paper is where I focus on the push and pull factors: what draws people into certain genres of video games and what kind of pushes them out of certain genres of video games.
The third paper is to see how people playing the same games might be playing them differently, whether there are feminized or feminine types of play, and how that's kind of afforded respect or prestige. I look at the stereotypes that queer people and women prefer playing support or healing roles. These roles are based on care work, they generally focus on other players, while those players complete the objectives. I am interested in this because in online spaces, we could be whomever we want to be. And yet, we, myself included, still end up performing care work even in the fictive worlds of online video games. This can help understand how pleasure plays into care work that these groups do offline and can also help inform how offline inequality and gendered expectations spill into online spaces.
Your studies sound like such a big undertaking! How do you gather your data for your dissertation? Do you talk to gamers, search for their responses to games online, a mix of both, or something entirely different?
I’m a mixed methods scholar, so I mix the quantitative methods with qualitative. What I did for this was I created a survey, and I released it online on social media platforms, such as Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit. I left it open for three months, and within three months, I got 4,600 unique participants after I got rid of all of the bots that participated. From that 4,600, I asked everyone who took the survey if they'd be willing to do an interview and roughly half of the people said they would.
Then, I sampled 60 interviews from those participants, but I made sure that I hit certain quotas of participants; if you've been involved in gaming culture, you probably know that it is very much dominated by cisgender heterosexual, white men so, if you do a kind of a random sample, you're much more likely to really, really just highlight this voice. Instead what I did was I sampled 20 men, 20 women, and 20 non-binary or genderqueer people. From each of those 20, 5 of which are black, 5 are white, 5 are Latino, and 5 are Asian just to make sure that I have diverse racial representation. I included transmen and transwomen in those samples as well. It makes the method kind of complicated, but I want to make sure I got everyone’s voice.
What can you tell us about what you have found during your dissertation and studies so far?
There are certain things that continue to stick out. I’ll cover it like how I explained each of my papers earlier. So, for the first one on prestige in gaming, the moral of the story from interviews was that it seems like games that are associated with women and young people, cozy gamers, and casual gamers, tend to be the games that are subordinated. There is variation though, some participants talked about how sometimes you might play a casual game in a hardcore way, or you might play a hardcore game in a casual way. An example is “what's the difference between someone who plays eight hours of Call Of Duty a week versus somebody who plays 40 hours of the Sims?” It's interesting that the Call Of Duty player is probably more respected in these spaces than the Sims player, because they're considered more “of a gamer,” and they're playing the “right” types of games. Respect in spaces seems to kind of discredit women and feminine or feminized people's involvement.
The second part is that feminine and feminized people preferred to play certain types of games but were also pushed out of other kinds of games like those with much higher levels of harassment. Many people would avoid these games or, if they did participate in them, they would not use voice chat or even text chat, which would limit their own ability to be successful and enjoy the game just to avoid the toxicity that is present in these spaces.
One thing that I find really interesting is that there is a stereotype that when women play video games, they prefer to play healer or support characters. In the quantitative data, that's very much supported. Women, obviously, are represented in all different types of gaming and all different types of roles, but it does seem like there's a draw to playing support and healer roles. It's not just with women, it's also with people who self-report higher levels of femininity and queer people tend to prefer playing these roles. I think it presents the opportunity to understand feminine play.
So often, when we think about play, we think about this masculinized version of play that is aggressive or dominant, and that's especially prevalent in video games. However, rather than playing to dominate somebody else or to be better than somebody else, this preference to play to support other people and play to uplift and work together for the good of the gaming community is really important. For some people, they might dip into support or healing roles when they first start playing, because they don't have the mechanical skills that are necessary for some of the other ones. People who reported that were by far in the minority. It seems, for most people, playing for cooperation was the goal of play and was the whole reason they were involved in play.
The one thing I’m still trying to grapple with is what makes certain games popular with women and feminine people, because there are certain games that were almost universally reported as being something that women are associated with and that women prefer. It often seems that having a variety of different ways to play the same game, having a positive representation of women in the game, having positive interactions with women in the game, and then also a level of aesthetic or art is appealing.
At first, I was thinking that it might just be multiple play styles that were appealing, but Overwatch 2 and Valorant are games that seemed to be really popular with women. While Overwatch has drastically very different ways of playing the game, Valorant has very few different ways of playing the game. Instead, the roles are not super distinct and they're much less impactful. Yet, it continued to be a popular game with the women and the feminine people that I talked to. It also seems that art and strong women in games are other ways that tend to make a game preferable.
Are there any patterns you noticed that you feel that more game developers should be taking into consideration when creating their games?
I think there are certain aspects that pop up as something that is appealing to a feminine audience, which we know has been pushed out of gaming, but that are increasingly involved in all types of games. It seems that having women involved in the development of games is so necessary for actually having quality content for women. That's one of the places that we need to start: having women, queer people, and non-white people in development. What seems to be important for when people are choosing games, especially women, is that a game can be played in multiple ways, and there's not just a single hardcore skill set that is necessary to finish the game like in Overwatch and Valorant. Having multiple different ways of participating play, especially in cooperative play, seems to be alluring as well as having diverse, strong characters and a unique art style.
Moderation is also really important, because there's a feeling with some of my participants, and increasingly myself, that certain games are intentionally benefiting from the lack of moderation around harassment. Some of the women felt that games like Call Of Duty might actually be appealing to some because of the way that they can treat people within the lobbies. The draw to certain first person shooters might not just be that it’s a first person shooter, but also that it is not moderated and that they can talk however they want to whoever they want. A stronger hand for moderators is appreciated, even if it doesn't always yield the result that we want. League of Legends has a reputation for being very very toxic and yet, they've implemented all kinds of moderation to stop people.
Is there anything you wish to highlight about what you have learned over the course of your time studying “nerd culture” that you wish more people knew?
This is such an important field that needs to be studied. There’s so much life and love that’s happening here. With all the bad that can happen in these spaces, there’s also so much good. There’s so much nurturing. There’s so much care. There’s so much love that happens even in these anonymous spaces. I think it’s really important for us to protect them and make sure that everyone is welcome in them.
