Abstract
Digital gaming’s many benefits starkly contradict its well-cited toxicity. To accurately understand and compare how players cope with discriminatory stress in the context of play, 241 U.S. players were surveyed on recurring sources of discrimination during gameplay and strategies for coping across ranging experiential prompts. Qualitative analysis created a taxonomy of discriminatory targets, discriminatory acts, and coping strategies specific to online digital play. We compare experiences, perceptions, and beliefs around coping across intersections of race, gender, and class (with notes on ability and age), and describe how player identities inform in-game behavior, exposure to types of discrimination, and how coping strategies are navigated. We discuss the accumulative, anticipatory, and intergenerational nature of discriminatory stress in gaming, its stratified effects on wellbeing, and the role of discrimination in belief formation as well as ability to advocate for oneself and others.
Highlights
Before considering how to conceptualize, measure, and quantify health consequences of discrimination, one caveat immediately is in order: the purpose of studying health effects of discrimination is not to prove that oppression is “bad” because it harms health
Recalling that generalized harassment leads to less rumination than sexual harassment in games (Fox and Tang, 2017), we find that the targeted nature of identity violence in games is a form of adverse stress burdening players already burdened across gender, orientation, ethnicity, race, class, ability, age, culture, attraction, body type, and/or nationality
Privileged players access lower burdens of stress to react across a greater range of interpersonally directed coping behaviors, while those more impacted by discriminatory stress are forced to cope inwardly, with more severe forms of anticipatory coping deployed earlier
Summary
Before considering how to conceptualize, measure, and quantify health consequences of discrimination, one caveat immediately is in order: the purpose of studying health effects of discrimination is not to prove that oppression is “bad” because it harms health. As a form of play, gaming’s unique appeal transcends many gendered, cultural, ethnic, national, ability, and socio-economic divides. This nearly universal endorsement is largely due to gaming’s social (Koivisto and Hamari, 2014; Domahidi et al, 2018), cognitive (Baniqued et al, 2013; Oei and Patterson, 2013; Granic et al, 2014), and affective (Olson, 2010; Boyle et al, 2012; Dennis and O’Toole, 2014) benefits, combined with its ability to cater to diverse ways to play (Kafai et al, 2010; Gibbons, 2015). Playing games provides benefits to well-being by helping players recover from daily stressors (Reinecke, 2009), repair noxious moods (Bowman and Tamborini, 2015), build self-esteem (Bessière et al, 2007), promote mindfulness (Collins et al, 2019), combat loneliness (Depping et al, 2018), cope with life’s challenges (Iacovides and Mekler, 2019), and practice emotional regulation (Villani et al, 2018)
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