The Proteus Paradox Quotes

“As male characters level up and become more powerful, their bodies become better protected and covered. In contrast, as female characters level up and become more powerful, their bodies are uncovered and made more vulnerable. Thus, as women gain power, they are disempowered in another way.”
― Nick Yee, The Proteus Paradox: How Online Games and Virtual Worlds Change Us - and How They Don't

“Since the boom days of World of War-craft and Second Life, there has been a strange, stagnant lull in terms of virtual worlds. I think gamers and academics have kept wondering what would come next in either the online gaming or social virtual worlds spaces, but nothing has transpired to shift the attention from these two existing worlds.”
― Nick Yee, The Proteus Paradox: How Online Games and Virtual Worlds Change Us - and How They Don't

“Edward Castronova has argued that virtual worlds are “the modern equivalent to supercolliders for social scientists. . . . Virtual worlds allow for societal level research with no harm to humans, large numbers of experiments and participants, and make long term and panel studies possible.”
― Nick Yee, The Proteus Paradox: How Online Games and Virtual Worlds Change Us - and How They Don't

“Peter Steiner’s 1993 cartoon in the New Yorker captured the promise of freedom and anonymity that the Internet once offered: “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” But our era of big data—especially as more data are captured and at finer-grain resolutions—flips this premise around. Our behaviors online, in virtual worlds, and when using smart mobile devices allow others to make accurate inferences about who we are and what we like. On the Internet, everybody knows you’re a dog. And as marketers and advertisers compete over this growing flood of data, the facts they learn about each of us are likely to become more and more unsettling.”
― Nick Yee, The Proteus Paradox: How Online Games and Virtual Worlds Change Us - and How They Don't

“Falling in love in an online game is more similar to an office romance than finding someone in an online dating site. The love grows out of working with and getting to know another person.”
― Nick Yee, The Proteus Paradox: How Online Games and Virtual Worlds Change Us - and How They Don't

“Sexism isn’t a conspiracy that men carry out against women; it’s how we as a society treat men and women differently and shape how they should behave. It limits the life choices of both men and women, and it is sustained by both men and women.”
― Nick Yee, The Proteus Paradox: How Online Games and Virtual Worlds Change Us - and How They Don't

“women are more likely to experience guilt when they engage in leisure activities in the home. This conflicted sense of leisure is exploited quite effectively by advertisers. From body lotion to chocolates, from yogurt to spa treatments, products are often marketed to women as guilt-free indulgences—that just this once, they can indulge in something special without feeling guilty about it. Advertisements for men almost never employ guilt. But this trope reveals an important social message: women are normally expected to feel guilty about leisure and pleasure. The stereotype of gaming as a waste of time likely exacerbates this expected guilt and further lowers women’s desire to game.”
― Nick Yee, The Proteus Paradox: How Online Games and Virtual Worlds Change Us - and How They Don't

“Studies have consistently shown that women have less free time and that their free time is more likely to be infringed on by gendered expectations of housework and child care. Because these gender-stereotyped household responsibilities (some ever-present, others unpredictable) are co-located with leisure spaces in the home, women often feel less relaxed and more pressured even when they are ostensibly free.”
― Nick Yee, The Proteus Paradox: How Online Games and Virtual Worlds Change Us - and How They Don't

“Political theorist Langdon Winner argues that human artifacts embody politics—the things we build can implicitly regulate who does and does not belong.20 The fantasy worlds we build also have these unspoken rules. From the moment a woman steps into a gaming store or enters an online game, she receives cues that she doesn’t belong.”
― Nick Yee, The Proteus Paradox: How Online Games and Virtual Worlds Change Us - and How They Don't

“participants exposed to scantily clad female avatars were more likely to believe that women who get raped deserve it because of their perceived promiscuity. In virtual worlds, false stereotypes are being made true via play.”
― Nick Yee, The Proteus Paradox: How Online Games and Virtual Worlds Change Us - and How They Don't

“Where we did find a statistical difference was in character gender. Female characters had a much higher healing ratio compared with male characters. This disparity was a direct consequence of how players behave when they gender-bend. When men gender-bend and play female characters, they spend more time healing. And when women gender-bend and play male characters, they spend less time healing. In other words, when players in World of Warcraft genderbend, they enact the expected gender roles of their characters. As players conform to gender stereotypes, what was false becomes true. Thus, when players interact in the game, they experience a world in which women prefer to heal.”
― Nick Yee, The Proteus Paradox: How Online Games and Virtual Worlds Change Us - and How They Don't

“gender-bending among men is often an artifact of the sexualized female avatars, rather than an explicit attempt to explore gender roles.17”
― Nick Yee, The Proteus Paradox: How Online Games and Virtual Worlds Change Us - and How They Don't

“Not only are the gender overlaps large, but the gender differences are actually inflated at the outset. One danger of studying gaming populations (or any natural community) is that of bringing underlying biases into the data. The gender difference in achievement motivations is a good case in point. It turns out that age influences the achievement motivation more than gender; older players are much less interested in goals and competition in online games compared with younger players. In fact, the relation between age and the achievement motivation dwarfs the gender difference.”
― Nick Yee, The Proteus Paradox: How Online Games and Virtual Worlds Change Us - and How They Don't

“When the first professional computer programmers were all women during World War II, and only 12 percent of computer science degrees were awarded to women in 2011, it is clear that social factors play a significant role in who does and does not engage with computer technology. The gendering of computing technology is a recent social phenomenon, and we shouldn’t mistake the current disproportionate male presence in computer-related fields as reflecting an unchanging, innate, biological basis.6”
― Nick Yee, The Proteus Paradox: How Online Games and Virtual Worlds Change Us - and How They Don't

“Boys encouraged to play video games grow up to become men who are interested in making video games. Girls, on the other hand, are discouraged from playing videos games and do not grow up with the desire to create these games. The end result is that video gaming is dominated by male game designers making games for male players.”
― Nick Yee, The Proteus Paradox: How Online Games and Virtual Worlds Change Us - and How They Don't

“As sociologist T. L. Taylor has argued, these attempts to create games specifically for women are “reifying imagined difference[s]” between male and female gamers. Because the assumption is that gameplay motivations are the primary barrier for potential female gamers, the women who currently play video games are perceived as “the oddballs, the nonmainstream, the exceptions”—they are aberrant women who can’t tell us anything about real women.”
― Nick Yee, The Proteus Paradox: How Online Games and Virtual Worlds Change Us - and How They Don't

“Any player playing World of Warcraft can reach the highest level if he or she puts enough hours into the game. This game paradigm creates a powerful incentive to bypass the time sink. Instead of castigating the Chinese, we have to ask whether gold farming is simply a symptom of bad game design.”
― Nick Yee, The Proteus Paradox: How Online Games and Virtual Worlds Change Us - and How They Don't

“Taken to its extreme, the premise of gamification is that any task, no matter how tedious, can be made engaging and motivating.”
― Nick Yee, The Proteus Paradox: How Online Games and Virtual Worlds Change Us - and How They Don't

“Even if virtual worlds were tabula rasa, we are encumbered with a great deal of cognitive baggage. Our brains are hardwired with many mental shortcuts to help us make sense of the world. We simply do not have the time to carefully process every piece of information that comes our way. To cope with this inundation of information, our brains have developed automated heuristics that filter and preprocess this information for us. Thus, when we encounter new media and technological devices, we fall back on the existing rules and norms we know.”
― Nick Yee, The Proteus Paradox: How Online Games and Virtual Worlds Change Us - and How They Don't

“It’s easier to put warning labels on video games than to address all the very real social, cultural, and psychological factors that lead to gun violence.2”
― Nick Yee, The Proteus Paradox: How Online Games and Virtual Worlds Change Us - and How They Don't