User-Centered Design for the Girl Gamer Experience
In my Masters of Information Management Degree in the User Experience specialization, I had the opportunity to take a Design Methods for Interactive Systems class which consisted of teaching us about the theory and practice of user-centered design. We Examined design methods for identifying and describing user needs, specifying and prototyping new systems, and evaluating the usability of systems. We examined various design methodologies such as contextual design and value-sensitive design, and focused on the human-information interaction. In this course we were assigned teams and conducted a quarter-long project to create a solution for an identified problem space. My team and I were all interested in the Girl Gamer community at UW, specifically looking into the PC=girl-gamer community who praticipated in online multiplayer games such as League of Legends or Valorant. Through this research we identified a problem space and implemented a prototype solution to see if we could use user-centered design to help this community.
Our design space explores the female gaming experience. Though research has shown that “over the past decade, a growing number of women have started playing digital games” (Vermeulen & Van Looy, 2016), there still exists a sentiment in the gamer community that female gamers “should not be considered ‘true’ or ‘hard-core’ gamers because they play more casually and less skillfully compared to their male counterparts” (Paaßen et al., 2016). This encourages male gamers to take part in the “general harassment and sexual harassment in online video games” against gamer girls they come across (Fox & Tang, 2016). In response to this, many female gamers experience “feelings of stress and anxiety that they felt had developed from their experience of negative interactions whilst involved in online gaming” (McLean & Griffiths, 2019) and often leads them to “disguising their gender through the use of neutral pseudonyms and avatars and in particular ... not using their voice online” in order to “manage negative behavior they had encountered previously and anticipated occurring again” (McLean & Griffiths, 2019).
To explore this idea further, we chose a community we believed could give us insight into this phenomenon. Our design space consists of female-identifying PC gamers at the University of Washington who play multiplayer games. We wanted to explore how this community experiences online gaming since “international evidence indicates that the number of females involved in video-gaming is increasing” (McLean & Griffiths, 2013) and historically “the representation of females within computer games is consistently sexualized and stereotypical, potentially reinforcing societal objectification of women” (Bryce & Rutter, 2005). We chose this specific community due to our interest in the topic and the fact that every member in our group could get access to the individuals in this community.
Through our research, we discovered multiple factors contributing to the deep-rooted misogyny in gaming including the popularization and marketing of digital games in the 1980s and the erasure of women from the game development process. Although the Atari console in the late 1970s was initially directed “at families, marketing across gender and age,” the marketing soon shifted to focus on “young men and boys.” This shift “reflecting in the work environment where the games were made and also evident in the design of the games themselves” (Bjørn & Rosner, 2021, p. 5).
Perhaps not so coincidentally, the contributions of women and other gender minorities who developed Atari games during this era are notably missing from the narratives surrounding these games (Bjørn & Rosner, 2021). Building on this, researchers connect the drop of women in computer science in the 1980s to the popular belief at the time asserting that “computers are for boys” (Henn, 2014); stating that “despite the fact that women helped to create popular games such as Centipede, computer games were marketed to boys and young men – a strategy that several researchers believe has contributed to the fact that women began slipping out of computer science” (Bjørn, 2020).
Working alongside this notion of computers and games being a male-dominated space are the observations demonstrated within families “that males often assume the role of ‘expert’ and undermine female skills and knowledge with domestic gaming spaces” (Rutter & Bryce, 2006, p. 159). In the figure above, one can see characteristics outlining feminine and masculine game preferences and playing styles that further contribute to the stereotypes that female gamers are not adept or interested in “masculine” types of games. Although female representation in games continues to change and deviate from “sexualized and stereotypical” representations as modern culture advances, “this must be considered within the context of the continuing strong identification of gaming culture as masculine” (Rutter & Bryce, 2006, p.164).
Through this research, we recognize how gender roles have siloed female gamers into positions of not just gamers, but of “girl gamers” or “gamer girls.” Although the connotation of the terms tends to vary amongst different groups, what we consider to be “feminine” gamers reflect the “wider societal conceptualizations and representations of masculinity and femininity” (Rutter & Bryce, 2006, p. 153). Digital gaming — especially in the context of multiplayer competitive or combat-based games — has been historically designed for male gamers. The cultural push for more visibility from girl gamers into these spaces threatens these cultural identity roles, which we believe is a contributing factor to the harassment and toxicity of certain male gamers in this design space.
We sought to find individuals in our community that would be willing to speak on their overall gaming experiences. By attempting to get a range of individuals from our community who participated in different PC multiplayer games, we hoped to experience varying perspectives to avoid potential biases that might arise from a certain game generally creating a more toxic environment than another. Five stakeholder experiences are highlighted below:
Faliha Amjad identifies as female and is an engineering sophomore at the University of Washington who shared her PC gaming experience with us. She is a relatively new gamer and just started gaming about a year ago. She plays games everyday now and mostly plays Valorant and Minecraft and Fortnite either with a few friends she queues with or alone. When asked in the formal interview about the general environment she experiences while playing Valorant online, she replied:
“When I am on my own, it can get pretty toxic and annoying to play in. That is why I prefer playing with friends just because I am more comfortable and I’m not going to get off the game feeling like I am annoyed.”
When asked if she has experienced a toxic environment while gaming she responded that:
“Either they’ll start being annoying and calling me babe and asking for my snapchat or something, or try and ask if I want to have sex with them. Or they'll just say that I’m trash and then start saying ‘you’re a girl, you suck, why are you even playing.’”
When experiencing these stereotypes and toxicity, Faliha said that depending on her mood, she’ll either speak back at them to protect herself or — more often than not — she’ll just mute those players that create a bad environment for her. She said that watching guys interact with each other online is vastly different than when they interact with her. She feels as though the guys have each other's backs and are just nicer in general to one another than when they are to her.
Kayla Pyo identifies as female and is studying to be a political science major and is a freshman at the University of Washington. She started gaming only a few months ago and mainly plays Valorant and Genshin Impact. When asked in the formal interview what kind of environment Kayla experiences online while gaming she responded with:
“It’s scary because you don’t know what other people are going to be like. Especially as a girl, you don’t want to say that you’re a girl upfront otherwise you’ll get hated on because of the toxic culture online.”
Ruotong Zhang identifies as female and is a sophomore majoring in both psychology and oceanography at the University of Washington. The contextual inquiry and formal interviews were conducted in Chinese, because that is her first language and translated into English. She has been gaming since 2016 and mainly plays League of Legends and other smaller games on Steam. When asked in the formal interview about the general environment she experiences while playing League of Legends, she replied:
“The general environment is very friendly. However, sometimes there would be verbally abusive players.”
When asked if she encountered sexual harassment online, she replied:
“Of course I have. When I just started playing online games, I met people online who would make dirty comments based on your gender. Later I hid my gender identity and things got much better.”
She also said that:
“People would say that you are bad at the game if you are a boy but they would think it’s the gender problem when you are a girl and had a bad game.”
Yin Ting Pang (Ting) is a nineteen year old sophomore at University of Washington studying informatics. She started playing Valorant a year ago. It’s the first first-person shooter game she’s ever played, but it’s how she was able to find community online during the pandemic and her first year in university. She knows she isn’t the best player, but she enjoys the competitiveness of the game. Ting tries to stay positive when she’s in a bad or toxic gaming environment, while also recognizing that being female has an effect on her experience as a gamer:
“There are times where I would do bad, meaning bad [in quotes] where I have lower kills than other people and all of a sudden two or three random people would start talking shit to me. It becomes pretty obvious that they’re queueing together and being really toxic together. It’s just really hard when you have three people coming at you.”
Zixuan Wang is a senior studying biology and art at the University of Washington. She has been playing different online PC games since a young age. She mainly plays League of Legends and Pummel Party now because that’s what most of her friends play. When playing League, she said she basically only plays ARAM, which is the casual and less competitive game mode. She said that online games are social platforms for her because she gets to talk to her friends and meet new people. When I asked her what she think about the current gaming environment, she replied immediately that:
“(The gaming environment is) Very poor. Online games connect the world like never before and this means that you get to meet the best and worst people out there. People would troll or send negative messages but I usually just ignore them. It would be a waste of my time if I bothered to reply”
In terms of online gaming gender stereotypes, she commented that:
“It depends on the game, you know? When I played Overwatch, people would use nasty terms to call you when they know that you are a girl, but when I played Escape from Tarkov, people don’t expect you to do anything. Your teammates would protect you and be super nice but you will think that you have nothing to do with the game.”
To gain more insight into these experiences our users were describing, we conducted contextual inquiry interviews and got to experience these gaming environments firsthand. Our observation sessions consisted of the individual streaming the game to us either over popular online streaming services Twitch or Discord. We told our users to play as if they normally would and that we would silently watch until the gaming session was finished, in which then we would follow up with a few questions. Due to the randomness of environments that can be experienced while gaming, we conducted multiple observation sessions for each user; depending on the game; the length of the sessions and amount of rounds in the games varied.
Faliha, more-often-than-not, experienced little-to-no in-game community while playing; meaning she didn’t experience a toxic environment for the majority of the sessions I watched. However, when she did experience it, the effects of this negativity far out-weighed the normality of the rest of the gaming session, and led to her feeling more pessimistic after the game.
When spoken to after the sessions with a negative environment, Faliha seemed to recount those periods of toxicity with greater detail than the other games in the session. It was evident the effects of a toxic gaming environment are long-lasting and weigh heavily on Faliha's overall mood of the gaming session. This aligns with her description of the environment described in her formal interview.
The only times Kayla experienced a toxic environment while gaming was when she solo-queued.
The only negative gaming experience I observed from Kayla came from when she queued alone. She shared the same sentiment as Faliha where even though she experienced a relatively tame and wholesome gaming environment for the majority of the session, the period of toxicity far outweighed the normality of the rest of the session as she recalled those periods of toxicity with greater detail and emotion.
Ruotong only plays League of Legends with her friends and never solo-queue for any mode of matches.
Ruotong said that it is not fun playing the game alone, partly because of the toxic environment. She said that people cannot easily guess the gender of one player just by looking at the person’s profile so gender bias is not that obvious within the game. She stated that the toxic environment is more about people trolling and cursing in the game. When she queues with players who misbehave, playing with friends she knows gives her mental support. She is able to complain to her friends and this makes her feel a little better.
Ruotong would communicate with her friends through Discord voice chat.
Ruotong would communicate with her friends through Discord voice chat. She does not use the built-in voice channel in League of Legends because she said Discord is more inclusive and has better voice quality. She would chat with her friends about gameplays and make random jokes. She played in a light-hearted environment.
Ting will queue by herself even when she doesn’t know if the experience will be a toxic one. However, she is more expressive (by talking casually or laughing) when she is able to play Valorant alongside a friend and talk with them on a separate Discord than she is in in-game chat.
Ting maneuvered her environment well and seemed to focus more on concentrating on the game rather than communicating. Ting didn’t seem too upset when her player got continually hit upon respawning. One of the few times she spoke directly in chat, she continually yelled, “What spawn?!” in response to one of her teammates before her player died.
She will only play when at least one of her friends plays the game with her. She played League with one of her guy friends and they communicated through Discord’s voice channel. Discord is their main gaming channel even though League has an in-game voice channel.
She seems very relaxed when playing the game. She and her friend discussed gameplays and other random things about the game through the chat. She said that one of her teammates in this game played really well and she was really calm when she respawned.
Zixuan didn’t seem to like the emote and chat system. She said that she would only use it when she wanted to be sarcastic. During the gameplay, no one used the chat channel but some players sent emotes within the game.
The experiences from these individuals lead us to map out the following in a systems diagram:
From our contextual inquiries, we learned that our community shares similar sentiments with those in the broader female gamer design space. Reflecting our original research, we found that our specific community acknowledges the bias against girl gamers and has experienced toxicity from this firsthand. They recount negative gaming environments due to their gender, which often leads to harassment in their games, making them hesitant to speak out or participate in in-game conversation.
From our contextual inquiry, we confirmed these negative emotions came from a toxic gaming environment. When our users have a community to play with, they experience a less toxic environment in their games and overall have a more enjoyable gaming experience than if they were playing alone. This leads them to choose gaming with peers over gaming alone for the majority of their gaming sessions. Gathering evidence from the broader design space, formal and contextual interviews and systems diagramming we assert that:
If our community was able to have a stronger social network and a safe space around their hobby for PC multiplayer gaming, they would experience less toxic interactions overall while online and therefore have a more positive gaming experience.
We define our point of intervention as the inability to create a social community in our systems diagram, represented by a red star. With the creation of a strong network of like-minded and kind individuals in a safe environment, female-identifying gamers at UW would have access to other individuals who can relate to their struggles while gaming on a personal level and engage in conversations about how to handle negative interactions online. Members of this community could come together to help one another mitigate the harm done by gender stereotypes and strengthen their identity within the gaming community through the support of this social network.
To successfully intervene in this design space, we needed a physical model for our intervention. Through our interviews we discovered a similarity between all of the girl gamers we met with that would help guide our intervention; they all used Discord to communicate with friends they queued with in game. Because our interviewees used this interface, as well as the fact that Discord “was originally made to give gamers a place to build communities and talk” (Delfino, 2021), we chose this as part of our intervention in order to emphasize the social community we wanted for our girl gamers. Our proof of concept prototype took the form of:
A curated Discord server inclusive to female-identifying gamers at the University of Washington, who play multiplayer games. This Discord will provide these individuals with a safe space that consists of kind, non-toxic individuals that allows relatability, social connection and support in-game and outside-of-game. It will provide human resources that enable strength amongst individuals to diminish gender stereotypes and minimize toxicity in multiplayer games
This prototype provided the best intervention for the following reasons:
We created curated rules that are easily accessible to all members of the server and are put in place to create a safe environment for our community and enable those inside to maintain it:
An FAQ channel will provide our community with answers to any questions they might have regarding basic aspects of our server and community. This will allow for better communication among members as well as moderate the channels ensure that the same questions won't be repeated over and over that could crowd various channels. This could annoy members and make our environment less appealing and could reduce the ability of proper communication among members and therefore negatively affect community building. An FAQ allows for mitigation of these issues before they present themselves. The FAQ can only be edited by founders, and will be adjusted on an as-needed basis based on feedback we get from individuals in the server as well as observations of commonly asked questions that are not currently listed.
Members of the server can choose their server roles in the role selection channel. As shown in Figure 7, Carl-bot was created so that people can click on the emoji that represents the game(s) they play. People can pick up on multiple roles if they play multiple games. This allows individuals in the community to create an even tighter community within the larger server through connecting with people who play the same game as them. There can be potential channels for certain roles so people will not be overwhelmed by information regarding other games. These roles we created are for games that we believe are popular among UW students and we will add-more or remove-existing roles on an as needed basis relying on feedback from individuals in the server.
These roles are tied to specific gaming channels in the server. Once an individual chooses a role they will gain access to those specific text channels corresponding to the role the individual associates with. This allows for members to only see discussions pertaining to their specific games and are not overwhelmed with dialogs for games they don’t care for.
In order to evaluate the process of becoming a community member and understanding the usability of the Discord server, we used think aloud testing to gain user responses. We intend to share our server with our participants and have them go through the process of getting verified and reviewing the server. By utilizing this method, we aim to identify pain points in the verification process and overall impressions of the community server.
We interviewed 5 users for the think-aloud testing and got a lot of valuable feedback. During the test, we asked users to perform three tasks and we observed and took notes during the process. The first task we asked participants to do is to have them go through the verification process. The goal for this is to identify pain points in the verification process. In order to get community members, we need to ensure that the verification process is understandable and gauge difficulty in performing the steps. The second task we asked participants to perform is to go through the server as if they are new. We asked them to walk us through what they looked for, what they expected and anything that surprises them. The goal is to identify the community’s needs in a Discord server because people who use Discord servers for gaming have certain expectations of the channels. For the third and last task, we asked them the question: ”What would you do if you wanted to get into a game? Where would you go? What is the path you would follow?” We want to make sure that our server is easy to navigate and people are able to find what they are looking for in the server.
All of our users were able to perform the tasks without having us explain. This gives us confidence that our interface is easy to use and navigate. One user said that:
“One thing that I really like about the girl-gamer server that I think I would use is the rant channel. This is because there are many times after a game where I just want to go rant to someone but there isn’t really any places or people to rant to who I feel like would understand because obviously, I wouldn’t want to go to a Valorant server where the majority of the users are going to be guys.”
We also heard from another user that because the server includes people who play different games, it is hard to gather people based on game play. Rather, the user suggests, we should bond people through events that connect the UW community, because that is what we have in common. She suggests that events or activities that we organize do not have to be related to the games that brought the community to the server.
We used Google Forms to send out surveys on the server and to people who we know belong to the community. We used voluntary and convenience sampling due to time constraints and population limitations. We received 5 responses from our community members, who are all female PC gamers at UW. The link to the survey is attached in the appendix. We collected their email addresses to make sure that they are studying at UW. We also asked for their gender and the games they play in order to identify that they are a part of the community. We asked questions regarding the verification process, their gaming experience, usage and expectations of the server and if they have other comments. All of the responses were from verified community members. All of them agreed that the simplified verification process worked better. One person said that the server did not change their gaming experience, while three said maybe and one did not answer. Three people said that the server rules help foster a better gaming environment while one said maybe and one did not answer. Three people said that they would like to have in person events and two said no but would like online events. One person commented that she would want a report channel, where people can report toxic player behaviors and post the ID to alert the community.
After hearing more from our users, we decided to iterate our prototype in order to improve their experience. We found that many members of our community were uncomfortable with the verification process which caused many to join the server then leave without ever becoming members. In the past, we required members to verify by sending a picture of them holding their husky card and a note of writing “I want an inclusive gaming community” with their Discord ID. We learned that the complex verification process has deterred people from being a member. We then decided to change the verification process to be sending in a picture of their husky card and people can blur their student ID out if they want.
In addition, we added a report channel for users to speak about negative experiences online and warn other members about toxic players. The channel serves as a safe place for people to seek support and voice out for people who share similar experiences. Instead of being a server for queuing games, we wanted to build a support group for community members to share and care for each other. We think that people should be able to share their achievements and concerns whether it is in-game or outside of the game. By telling the community that there are people who understand the challenges that girl gamers face, we want to provide the social support that other gaming servers cannot.
We plan to organize online/in-person events for the community to get together and bond. Because from the survey response we recognized that some people like in person events while some only want online events, we think that it would be good if they rotate the format. We hope to start by holding online events like movie night or game night so everyone can get involved regardless of the games they play.
Our intervention in this design space focused on building a community-centered support system using Discord, a communications technology that we knew was commonly used by the female gamer community and would facilitate a quicker onboarding process. However, while we felt that this intervention would offer respite from toxic and masculine-driven online gaming environments, we recognize our limitations in building such a community within our time frame.
In order to verify that people joining the channel are all UW girl gamers, we ask them to send a picture of them holding the Husky card and a written note of their Discord ID. There are people who left the channel after reading about the rules. We believe that privacy concerns and uncertainty of how we will use the information may discourage people from verifying the channel. However, we still want to draw a strict boundary on who can join the community in order to create a better gaming environment. We understand that it is possible to fake the verification picture with some effort. We will kick people out of the server when we find people making up their identities.
Although we decided to be inclusive to girl PC gamers across three UW campuses, we will hold on-campus events at the Seattle campus. We understand that transportation may prevent people from showing up at the events. We also acknowledge that some people prefer online events over in-person events or vice versa. Therefore, we will try to come up with regular events based on how people vote either online or in-person.
Building a community is not something that happens overnight. Our intervention is reliant on the success of building and fostering a healthy safe environment for our community. To fully understand how we can do this effectively and efficiently, we need more time to see how the Discord allows these individuals to interact with one another.
The desk research conducted, as well as our design space, limited the issues we discovered to two genders: male and female. We acknowledge the fact that many of the issues that are discussed come from the gender stereotypes of “male” and “female” gamers, however we are aware of the gender discrimination this can bring up and do not want to trivialize any identities struggles with toxic gaming culture dye to their perceived gender. We attempted to address this issue to the best of our abilities by stating anyone that identifies with the community of “female PC gamers at UW” can join our Discord, but acknowledge the trouble this can put on individuals who cannot identify, choose not to identify, or adjust their identification of their gender. The goal of our Discord is to create a safe community for everyone who has experienced toxicity and harassment via video games online due to these gender stereotypes.
We considered other solutions to our design space but found our discord spolution provided the most benefit with least repercussions, some of our other ideas included:
We considered implementing a voice modifier so individuals in our community could now sound like males to enable them to have a more authentic gaming experience. This would move our point of intervention in our systems diagram to when our individual speaks out in game.
The Possible Pros:
Drawbacks:
We also considered a plug-in on your computer that gathers data from a database that contains reputable sources (proof with video etc) about what specific individuals were toxic in-game. This would be separated by game and store individual’s usernames in the database. So if someone has this plug-in installed, the individual would go to queue for a game and if they get in a lobby with someone who has been flagged as toxic in this database, there will be an alert that pops up on their screen warning them before they head into the game and giving them the option to exit the game with no penalty for doing so. This changes our point of intervention on our systems diagram to be at the “toxic-gaming environment” tab.
Pros:
Drawbacks:
While our Discord server is a prototype system for building a support system for a specific community, we invited and engaged with real participants whose stories and experiences validate the need for a space like this to exist. As students, our obligation to this project isn’t required to persist outside of this class. However, as researchers and as female gamers who attend the University of Washington, we feel a sense of responsibility towards this community, though we don’t yet know if it is something we have the capacity to continue leading.
Further adaptations of our design to address limitations, concerns and create a unique community include:
References
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