cyber.2014.pdf

RIGINAL

RTICLE

Sexist Games

= Sexist Gamers?

A Longitudinal Study on the Relationship

Between Video Game Use and Sexist Attitudes

Johannes Breuer, PhD,

Rachel Kowert, PhD,

Ruth Festl, PhD,

2,3

and Thorsten Quandt, PhD

Abstract

From the oversexualized characters in fighting games, such as Dead or Alive or Ninja Gaiden, to the overuse of
the damsel in distress trope in popular titles, such as the Super Mario series, the under- and misrepresentation of
females in video games has been well documented in several content analyses. Cultivation theory suggests that
long-term exposure to media content can affect perceptions of social realities in a way that they become more
similar to the representations in the media and, in turn, impact one’s beliefs and attitudes. Previous studies on
video games and cultivation have often been cross-sectional or experimental, and the limited longitudinal work
in this area has only considered time intervals of up to 1 month. Additionally, previous work in this area has
focused on the effects of violent content and relied on self-selected or convenience samples composed mostly of
adolescents or college students. Enlisting a 3 year longitudinal design, the present study assessed the rela-
tionship between video game use and sexist attitudes, using data from a representative sample of German
players aged 14 and older (N

= 824). Controlling for age and education, it was found that sexist attitudes—

measured with a brief scale assessing beliefs about gender roles in society—were not related to the amount of
daily video game use or preference for specific genres for both female and male players. Implications for
research on sexism in video games and cultivation effects of video games in general are discussed.

Introduction

hile the representation of women

in the popu-

lation of video game players has changed substantially

over the last decades—a recent publication by the En-
tertainment Software Association (ESA), for example, reports
that around 48% of players in the United States are female

—

their representation in the games is still contorted. A large
number of content analyses have found that female characters
in video games are both largely underrepresented

2–8

and more

likely to be portrayed in an oversexualized manner than male
characters.

3–5,7,9–13

Despite differences in the samples of

games that were studied, several of these analyses consistently
found a proportion of female characters

< 20%, with the share

of games featuring a female protagonist being even lower.

2,8,9

The report by the advocacy group Children Now,

for ex-

ample, indicates that out of the 16% of female characters they
found, 50% appear only as props or bystanders in the game.

The under- and misrepresentation of females in video

games is not only potentially off-putting for female players,

but may also have an impact on the players’ beliefs and
attitudes. The APA Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls
suggested that media, such as television or video games, can
shape and affect beliefs about and attitudes toward gender
roles in society.

Cultivation theory posits that long-term

exposure to media content can affect the perception of social
realities and the attitudes toward those.

15,16

More specifi-

cally, it assumes that the perceptions of social realities be-
come more similar to the way these are portrayed in the
media, the more heavily the medium is used. These so-called
first-order cultivation effects that relate to an individual’s
perception of reality are assumed to be complemented by
second-order effects relating to personal beliefs and atti-
tudes.

Cultivation theory has been widely used in research

on the effects of mass media. A recent literature review
found more than 500 published studies that used cultivation
theory.

Despite the criticism that the theory has faced over

the years—including the debate over whether it can actually
be called a theory—it still ranks among the most popular
theories in communication and media research.

19–21

Department of Psychology, University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany.

Department of Communication, University of Mu¨nster, Mu¨nster, Germany.

Department of Communication, University of Hohenheim, Stuttgart, Germany.

YBERPSYCHOLOGY

, B

EHAVIOR

AND

OCIAL

ETWORKING

Volume 18, Number 4, 2015
ª Mary Ann Liebert, Inc.
DOI: 10.1089/cyber.2014.0492

While originally developed to assess the effects of tele-

vision viewing, cultivation theory has also been applied to
video games. In line with the origins of cultivation theory,
the majority of this work has focused on the effects of vio-
lence in games. Overall, the evidence for cultivation effects
of video game violence is rather limited. Anderson and Dill

found no correlation between amount of video game play and
estimations of crime likelihood and feelings of safety after
they controlled for gender. Another cross-sectional study by
van Mierlo and van den Bulck

only yielded some evidence

for first-order cultivation effects of violent video games re-
lating to estimates of serious crime and the proportion of
policemen in the workforce, but none for any second-order
effects. An analysis using data from the same project as the
current study found no relationship between the use of video
games in general or preference for first-person shooter games
and militaristic attitudes.

A long-term experimental study

by Chong et al.

also found no second-order cultivation

effects and only partial support for first-order effects. Simi-
larly, the longitudinal field study by Williams

only found

first-order cultivation effects for real-world dangers relating
to situations that are also present in the world of the partic-
ular game that was used.

With regard to sexist video game content, there are even

fewer studies that have investigated its potential cultivation
effects. A cross-sectional survey by Stermer and Burkley

showed that men who play video games featuring sexist
content show higher levels of benevolent sexism. An ex-
perimental study by Dill et al.

found that men exposed to

stereotypical representations of women in video games were
more tolerant of sexual harassment after playing the game.
Another experimental study by Fox et al.,

looking at the so-

called Proteus effect, revealed that participants who saw their
own faces on a sexualized avatar in a VR environment ex-
pressed more rape myth acceptance than those confronted
with a nonsexualized avatar. In sum, unlike the studies on
violence, the limited evidence for cultivation effects of sexist
video game content point more toward second-order ef-
fects. However, these studies have exclusively enlisted cross-
sectional designs or assessed only the short-term effects of
video game exposure. At the same time, the longitudinal
studies on violence have been limited to periods of no more
than 1 month, and all of the studies in that area have relied on
self-selected or convenience samples composed mostly of
adolescents or college students.

The aim of the present study was to investigate the impact

of video game use on real-world attitudes relating to gender
roles. As the evidence for cultivation effects of video games
can be called mixed at best, a research question was for-
mulated instead of a directed hypothesis:

RQ1: Does increased video game exposure cultivate
sexist attitudes?

However, it might also be possible that the previously

established cross-sectional links are indicative of selection,
rather than cultivation, effects. As a longitudinal design was
used, this complementing question was also posed:

RQ2: Are sexist attitudes conducive to an increased
engagement with video games?

Methods

Participants and procedure

The data for the present paper comes from a three-wave

longitudinal panel study on the uses and effects of gaming in
Germany. The recruitment procedure for this study consisted of
two phases. In the first phase, a representative sample of 50,012
individuals aged 14 years and older were asked about their use
of video games in an omnibus telephone survey. Approxi-
mately 25% (N

= 12,587) of the respondents in the omnibus

survey could be identified as active video game players. Out of
these 12,587 game players, a random sample of 4,500 players
was recruited for the first wave of the main study.

Participant recruitment and the computer-assisted tele-

phone interviews (CATI) were conducted by a professional
German market research institute. The first wave of the study
was conducted in 2011, the second in 2012, and the third in
2013. Due to financial constraints and in anticipation of
panel mortality, a random subset of about 50% of the re-
spondents from each previous wave was recruited for waves
2 and 3. Hence, out of the 4,500 active game players inter-
viewed in wave 1, 2,199 were interviewed in the second
wave, and 902 were also interviewed in the third wave. As
the items on attitudes toward gender roles were only included
in waves 1 and 3, the current analyses are limited to data
from these two waves.

Measures

As the survey included many different topics and to

minimize respondent burden in a telephone interview, ab-
breviated scales were employed for most of the constructs
that were measured, including sexist attitudes. As the list of
measures would otherwise be too long, only those that were
used in the analyses for the present paper are reported here.

Sociodemographics.

Respondent sex (male

= 0; female =

1), age, and highest educational degree were assessed. The
options for the answer to the education item reflected the
German educational system and were coded into an ordinal
variable ranging from 0

= ‘‘no school leaving certificate’’ to

= ‘‘university degree’’.

Video game use.

Participants were asked how often they

play computer or video games: every day, several times a
week, several times a month, or less often. Depending on their
answer to this questions, they were asked how many hours per
day, week, month, or year they play on average. From this,
the average number of hours per day was computed. In ad-
dition, respondents were asked to indicate their preference for
different video game genres, including first-person shooter,
role-playing, and action games, on a scale from 1

= ‘‘I do not

like it at all’’ to 5

= ‘‘I like it very much,’’ with the additional

option to note ‘‘I do not know the genre at all’’.

Sexist attitudes.

Sexist attitudes were measured with

three items from the German translation

of the sex-role

orientation scale by Brogan and Kutner,

using a scale

ranging from 1

= ‘‘strongly disagree’’ to 5 = ‘‘agree com-

pletely’’. The items were slightly rephrased to make them
more easily comprehensible in a telephone interview and to
adapt them to modern realities of gender roles. Higher
agreement with the items indicated stronger sexist attitudes.

BREUER ET AL.

The scale showed high internal consistency in both wave 1
(a

= 0.80) and 3 (a = 0.79).
The items of the sexist attitudes scale as well as the de-

scriptives for all variables used in the analyses can be found
in Appendix A.

Data analysis

A cross-lagged structural equation model with sexist at-

titudes as a latent factor and video game use in hours per
day as a manifest variable was estimated using the lavaan
package for R.

Age and education were entered as cov-

ariates (see Fig. 1 for a schematic illustration of the cross-
lagged model with third variable control). While education
was an ordinal variable, according to Finney and DiS-
tefano,

the use of ML estimation methods yields valid

results, if the ordinal variable has at least five levels, which
was the case for education. It was decided to enlist a mul-
tigroup model, instead of simply using respondent sex as a
covariate, to assess potential differences between female
and male players in the relationship of video game use and

sexist attitudes. The data used in this analysis came from
waves 1 (time 1) and 3 (time 2). Missing data were excluded
listwise, resulting in a sample of 825 (360 female). Using
Mahalanobis distance, an extreme outlier was identified who
reported 23 hours of play per day at time 1. It was decided
to remove this outlier, so the final model included 824 (360
female) cases. Since even after removal of the outlier the
video game use variables deviated from the criteria for
univariate normal distribution according to West et al.,

the

MLM estimator with Satorra–Bentler scaling correction
that is robust to nonnormality was used. Invariance tests
revealed that the item loadings for the sexism factor were
fully invariant for the two groups, but only partially in-
variant over time. Accordingly, the factor loadings were set
to full metric invariance across groups and partial metric
invariance over time. The final model showed a very good
fit according to the cutoff criteria by Hu and Bentler

: chi

square (Satorra–Bentler scale correction, df

= 49) = 99.5,

< 0.001, comparative fit index = 0.97, standardized root

mean square residual

= 0.03, root mean square error of

approximation

= 0.05.

FIG. 1.

Cross-lagged structural

equation model with third variable
control.

FIG. 2.

Cross-lagged structural equation model: relationships between sexist attitudes and video game use. Upper row:

standardized coefficients for the female respondents; lower row: standardized coefficients for the male respondents.
*pp0.05; **pp0.01; ***pp.001. MLM estimation, v

(Satorra–Bentler scale correction, df

= 49, N

female

= 360, N

men

464)

= 99.5, p < 0.001, comparative fit index = 0.97, root mean square error of approximation = 0.05, standardized root mean

square residual

= 0.03. For the sake of readability, the third variables that were controlled for in this model (age and

education) and their coefficients are not shown in this figure.

VIDEO GAME USE AND SEXIST ATTITUDES

Results

For both male (r

= –0.20, p < 0.001) and female (r = –0.30,

= 0.001) players, education showed a significant negative

correlation with sexist attitudes. Age was also negatively
correlated with sexist attitudes. However, this was only
significant for male players (r

= –0.17, p = 0.001), indicating

that younger male players were more likely to hold sexist
beliefs and attitudes. Education and age also displayed
negative correlations with video game use, with less edu-
cated female players (r

= –0.19, p < 0.001) and older male

players (r

= –0.17, p < 0.001) being found to engage less

frequently. No longitudinal associations between age and
education at time 1 (year 1) were found with video game use
or sexist attitudes at time 2 (year 3).

The results of the longitudinal analyses are shown in Figure

2. To ease the interpretation of the model, the included con-
trol variables age and education at time 1 are not displayed.
The autoregression coefficients indicated that sexist attitudes
were stable over time for both males (b

= 0.74, p < 0.001) and

females (b

= 0.60, p < 0.001). The stability for video game use

was slightly lower for the male (b

= 0.57, p < 0.001) than fe-

male (b

= 0.64, p < 0.001) game players. More interestingly,

however, there was no cross-sectional association between
sexist attitudes and overall video game use for both men and
women. On the longitudinal level, the only statistically sig-
nificant finding was a negative association between video
game use at time 1 and sexist attitudes at time 2 for males
( p

= 0.027). However, the size of this effect (b = –0.08) can be

considered negligible. All other longitudinal associations
were both small and nonsignificant (b

< 0.13). As previous

research on television

and video games

23,26

has suggested

that cultivation effects might be more specific and limited to
particular contents, additional models were also estimated in
which hours of play per day were replaced by preference
ratings for genres deemed especially prone to the underrep-
resentation of females or sexist content according to the re-
sults of previous content analyses: role-playing, action, and
first-person shooter games. However, no cross-sectional (T1:
r

< 0.1) or longitudinal links (b < 0.11) were found between

genre preferences and sexist attitudes.

Discussion

Concern over the cultivation of beliefs and attitudes

through media exposure has been an actively debated topic
for decades. The popularity of video games has reignited
interest in this topic. While the issue of sexist content in
video games has been well documented in numerous content
analyses,

2–13

the cultivation of sexist beliefs and attitudes

over time has yet to be examined. The current study ad-
dressed this issue by examining the influence of video game
exposure on sexist beliefs and attitudes over a 3 year period.
However, no evidence for a cultivation effect on sexist at-
titudes was found. At the same time, the study also showed
no signs of a selection effect. These findings conflict with the
results of previous cross-sectional and experimental work
that found some evidence for links between sexist video
game content and benevolent sexism

and tolerance for

sexual harassment.

However, these studies were either

cross-sectional

or looked at short-term effects.

28,29

They

also focused on very specific games and types of sexism,
whereas the present study was longitudinal and looked at

general beliefs about gender roles in society and overall use
of video games. Both the design of the current study and its
main findings are more in line with previous cultivation
studies on violence in video games that found no

22,24

or only

very limited

23,25,26

evidence for cultivation effects. The

weak—and mostly nonsignificant—effects that were found
in the current study also do not deviate too much from av-
erage cultivation effect found for television exposure ac-
cording to a meta-analysis of 97 studies that reports an
average correlation of 0.1 and an average partial correlation
of 0.09.

Although the findings from the present study are

certainly not conclusive, the absence of any longitudinal
links between video game use and sexist attitudes at least
suggests two things. First, similar to what has been suggested
for aggression,

it is likely that there are factors, such as

personal experience and family and peer influences, that
affect the development, proliferation, prevention, or reduc-
tion of sexist attitudes more strongly than (fictional) media
content. Second, general and broad cultivation effects of
video games are somewhat unlikely, as players differ in the
games they play, and the interactivity of the medium also
causes the experience of the same game to differ between
players.

While the current research was the first to evaluate culti-

vation effects of video game use on sexist attitudes em-
ploying a longitudinal design using data from a large-scale
representative sample, there are several limitations to con-
sider when interpreting the findings. First, the current study
was conducted within Germany. As such, the results cannot
be generalized to other countries and cultures. Furthermore,
the youngest participants within the study were 14 years old
when they were first interviewed. Therefore, it cannot be
concluded from the results of this study alone if cultivation
effects may be prevalent for younger players who might be
more impressionable by media content in general. Ad-
ditionally, as already noted by other researchers,

23,25,26

given

the broad range of gaming systems, genres, and games, and
the differences in the users’ personal preferences, it cannot
be assumed that there is a typical media diet for video games.
Accordingly, there is also no universal ‘‘video game reality’’
that could uniformly affect perceptions of real-world social
realities. As no relationship was found between sexist atti-
tudes and the preference for specific genres, future cultiva-
tion research on video games might be best advised to focus
on specific subgenres or even an individual game (series), as
Williams

and Chong et al.

have done in their studies on

violent content. Lastly, in line with previous studies on the
effect of sexist contents in video games that have found some
evidence for second-order cultivation effects,

27–29

this study

exclusively focused on second-order effects on attitudes to-
ward gender roles. However, it may be that there are first-
order effects on the perception of gender roles in society or
second-order effects on attitudes that do not relate to gender
roles, but, for example, body image, sexual harassment,

benevolent sexism,

or rape myth acceptance.

Even though the current study failed to find evidence to

support the cultivation of sexist beliefs or attitudes due to
video game exposure, there might still be merit in applying a
cultivation perspective to the effects of video games on
sexism, especially if the focus is more on particular sub-
genres or individual games (series) and, ideally, multiple
dimensions of sexism pertaining to gender roles, body

BREUER ET AL.

image, and sexual harassment are assessed on both first-
order and second-order effects levels. Corroborating previ-
ous findings on video games and cultivation, this study
clearly shows that overall exposure to video games or pref-
erence for specific genres are not predictive of player atti-
tudes toward real-world issues. Still, as indicated by the
limitations of the present study and the tentative evidence
from previous work, it may well be that, similar to television,
‘‘some genres/games have some [cultivation] effects on
some players.’’

Acknowledgments

The research leading to these results has received funding

from the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme
(FP7/2007–2013) under grant agreement number 240864
(SOFOGA).

Author Disclosure Statement

No competing financial interests exist.

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Address correspondence to:

Dr. Johannes Breuer

Department of Psychology

University of Cologne

Richard-Strauss-Strasse 2

50931 Cologne

Germany

E-mail: johannes.breuer1@uni-koeln.de

Appendix A

Table

A1. Variables and Descriptives at Time 1

Item

Scale

Min

Max

Skew

Kurtosis

Sexist attitudes
The man should be responsible for all

major decisions made in a family.

1–5

1.86

0.98

0.90

0.09

In a group of male and female mem-

bers, a man should take on the
leadership.

1–5

1.75

0.96

1.23

1.07

Even if both partners work, the woman

should be responsible for taking care
of the household.

1–5

1.84

0.99

0.32

Video game use
Overall video game use

h/day

0.003

0.84

1.37

2.75

11.73

How much do you like to play the following gaming genres?
Role-playing games

1–5

2.51

1.52

0.43

- 1.32

First-person shooter games

1–5

1.98

1.4

1.09

- 0.35

Other action games

1–5

2.16

1.23

0.59

- 0.92

Sociodemographics
Respondent sex

Female

= 1; male = 0

0.44

0.5

0.26

- 1.94

Age

Years

38.17

14.75

0.4

- 0.25

Education

0–5

3.17

1.37

- 0.1

- 1.44

Table

A2. Variables and Descriptives at Time 2

Item

Scale

Min

Max

Skew

Kurtosis

Sexist attitudes
The man should be responsible for all major decisions

made in a family.

1–5

1.55

0.86

1.58

2.09

In a group of male and female members, a man should

take on the leadership.

1–5

1.67

0.92

1.34

1.36

Even if both partners work, the woman should be

responsible for taking care of the household.

1–5

1.75

0.93

1.15

0.86

Video game use
Overall video game use

h/day

0.003

0.81

2.59

10.1

How much do you like to play the following gaming genres?
Role-playing games

1–5

2.34

1.46

0.63

- 1.03

First-person shooter games

1–5

1.93

1.37

1.13

- 0.23

Other action games

1–5

2.13

1.21

0.63

- 0.82

BREUER ET AL.