Young PhD candidate no n00b

MUN student Matt White explores gender gaps within the gaming world

By Emma Ornholt

Matthew White doesn’t just love video games, they’ve become his livelihood. The 23-year-old education PhD candidate — one of the three youngest in the country — has formulated his thesis around the educational abilities of role-playing games (RPGs).

White sees these types of games as learning tools, as especially in recent years gaming has started to be absorbed into the educational system. Many games involve complicated and highly developed plot lines, inspiring teachers to include them in their curricula, according to White.

“It’s not the brainless vegetation activity we previously thought it was…I think there’s certainly a place for video games in children’s lives” White said, in an interview with the Globe and Mail earlier this month.

In his research, White noticed that female students were much less responsive to the exercise than their male counterparts. His work attempts to understand the gender divide in the gaming world.

He disagrees with popular theories that proclaim women aren’t biologically inclined to game (due to supposed lower spatial scores on IQ tests), and that gaming is just not appealing to the women, as a rule.

White hopes to disprove this theory, and by extension, prove dwindling numbers of women in the gaming world may be due to a gender stigma in North America. He cites the example of Asian countries, where the ratio of male to female gamers is roughly 50/50.

“A possible reason for the divide in North America is from games being closely associated with male culture,” White said. “The exception to this was the Wii. The ratio of men to women playing it is equal. I attribute this to the controls used by Wii. As a wholly new tool, everyone who began to play it was a novice.”

White hopes to employ cognitive psychology in his approach. He will organize two focus groups consisting of females with no or limited experience with gaming area. He plans to set both groups to play World Of Warcraft for 12 hours over a period of three or four days.

One of these groups will play games with a standard game-play tutorial interface, while the other will feature computer-aided, sound-based instruction. White and a colleague will be designing the second system, and he says it will be similar to e-learning and job training tutorials. The goal of the experimental instruction method is to build the player’s experiences from the ground up.

“Games assume you already have experience, which can severely affect someone’s confidence.”

This study will measure the level of gaming difficulty for each, individual player. White hopes that this study will help bridge the gender gap as RPGs begin appearing as educational tools.

“It will give a player, especially a beginner, much more agency over the material.”

According to a news release, White will present at the Canadian Game Studies Association conference in Montreal in May.

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