[MUD-Dev] Re: The Price of Being Male

[Richard A. Bartle]

On 01 July 2003, Edward Castronova wrote:

> its smaller than the level effect, but statistically
> substantive. i would argue the effect is also substantively
> meaningful: 10 percent discounts are not inconsequential.

I agree; indeed, a figure of 10% sounds entirely plausible.
However, I have reservations that the mechanisms you have employed
are flawless given the way that the raw data items were selected.
That 10% could be 0% or 20% when other factors are fully taken into
account.

Most of my complaints concern loose ends that should be tidied up
for completion (plugging small holes rather than boarding over
gaping chasms). However, there are some things we really do need to
know before we go jumping to conclusions. In particular, I'd like to
find out what the difference in prices was for characters bought
under the "buy now!" system. I suspect that female characters will
still come out lower, but until someone produces an analysis of
prices under the mechanism by which the great majority of characters
is sold, we're in danger of building on false foundations.

Can you be certain that the price of female "buy it now!"
characters will be less than that of their male counterparts?  If
so, how? If not, why is this irrelevent to the suggestion that male
players undervalue female avatars?

>>  The problem is, in the speculative part of your conclusion you
>>  suggested that one explanation for it may be for reasons of
>>  real-world discrimination.

> yes. "may be." that's all i wrote: the data do not rule out
> cultural factors, such as discrimination.

I know; it's not you I'm having a go at here. You wrote a working
paper, you gave several possible explanations for your data, and
then you presented it for comment. That's the appropriate course of
action. The trouble is, people look at the title, see all the lovely
stats, read one line from the conclusion, then begin to rant on
about sexism in virtual worlds.

There are lots of possible explanations for the price difference.
Discrimination by EQ players who take too much of the real world
into the virtual may indeed be an important factor. You can't say
that from your data, though. All your data says is that there's a
price difference (all else being equal) between female and male
avatars bought and sold at auction. You're within your rights to
propose some possible explanations for this in your conclusion.
It's when people take your results as "proof" of one particular
explanation that we get the arguments.

The reason this is happening, by the way, is partly because of your
status as author of perhaps the second-most famous paper on virtual
worlds to date (after Julian Dibbell's "A Rape in Cyberspace"). This
is hardly your fault, of course, but if people know you as the
"Norrath is as rich as Russia" guy then what you write will be given
more attention than if some regular Joe Economist were to write the
same thing.

> i don't get this. im wondering who you think has an axe to grind,
> what that axe is, and what bad things are going to happen if the
> axe is ground.

Well you only have to look at this MUD-DEV list to see that people
are already talking about sexist attitudes of players as if your
paper proved that these exist. They're already giving
clutching-at-straws defences of their own points of view, and
pulling anecdotal evidence from their vast experience of playing to
explain why although your paper may be right it doesn't apply to
them personally. They're describing why they believe male players
are or aren't discriminatory - irrespective of what your paper
actually says on the subject. They're no longer (all) discussing
your paper; they're discussing what they fear/hope it proves.

Whether you like it or not, people are taking your paper as saying
that women are mistreated in virtual worlds. The axes they will
grind on this depend on their point of view; to enumerate these
would only encourage them, so I shan't do it. I shall, however,
present an example of where an early paper on a subject did become
accepted as canon for saying something it didn't actually say.

Pavel Curtis's 1992 "Mudding: Social phenomena in Text-Based Virtual
Realities" http://www.ics.uci.edu/~jpd/moo/curtis92mudding.pdf
introduced virtual worlds to the social sciences. Unfortunately, it
had the effect of introducing social scientists primarily to
LambdaMOO - not exactly representative of virtual worlds, but then
Curtis never claimed it was. Curtis made several points in the
paper, some of which were picked up (cross-gender play, treatment of
female characters, pseudonimity, addiction) while others were
ignored.

Most of Curtis's original points were used at some stage or other as
hooks upon which people could hang the banners of their own
particular bandwagon. The pseudonimity one, for example, led to a
series of papers by influential authors that established (social)
virtual worlds to be supportive, co-operative, discursive,
democratic and generally more utopian than the real world, because
of the lack of physicality and the mask that pseudonimity affords.
This view became standard, but actually it was idealistic, grounded
in the particular beliefs that the various early authors wanted to
promote. Quotes had been used selectively, evidence had been ignored
or over-signified, and few authors had actually played the virtual
worlds themselves. People referenced Curtis's paper in the context
of its having said more than it actually did say.

A 1998 paper by Elaine Raybourn
http://www.cs.unm.edu/~raybourn/moo5d~1.htm debunks a great deal of
the mythology that grew up around virtual worlds in the few years
following Curtis's paper. Although researchers may have wanted to
believe that places like LambdaMOO were the embodiment of some
counter-cultural ideal, actually they were just as competitive and
their communities just as undemocratic as in real life and in
adventure-oriented virtual worlds. The end result is that many of
the explanations that social scientists have for how and why virtual
worlds work as social systems are just plain wrong.

What people see can depend to a large extent on what they want to
see. With your paper, the people who want to see it as proving that
female players get a raw deal will do so, and will draw inferences
that use this as their premiss. Those whose best interests are that
your paper doesn't show this will try to undermine it using other
methods (and may succeed, because it is actually underminable as it
stands - not that this will stop the first group quoting it).

> what damage will be cause by writers assuming that there's the
> same kind of male-female interaction in EQ as there are everywhere
> else?

There's no damage in "assuming" so long as people know it IS
"assuming"; the damage is in taking your paper as stating that what
is assumed is proven.

> and by the way, this isnt so much about individual males being
> sexist, its more about a system of male-female interaction thats
> nobody's fault

It isn't even about that. All it's about is economics.  People who
read the economics may postulate that it's about male/female
interaction, but the paper itself doesn't say that (or rather it
does, as a speculative point, but alongside other explanations).

Besides, if there were no female players in EQ but still female
avatars, there would be no male/female interaction involved - yet
the price would (by your argument) still be lower.

		Richard
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