With the rising popularity of esports, it is more important than ever to examine this male dominated sport along gendered lines. In competitive video game spaces, women are targets of harassment and toxic speech more often than men, leading to the need for coping strategies. This thesis looked at collegiate esports teams to see if men and women felt similarly about team culture and inclusion while playing on these teams. The hypotheses of this study predicted correlations between variables related to team culture, inclusion, and coping strategies along gendered lines. Results indicated that all players used gender masking the least of the all the coping strategies, women report using avoidance as a coping strategy more than men, team culture was positively correlated with inclusion, and that women feel less included on their esports teams than men. A discussion along with future directions followed and largely advocated for the separation of esports teams by gender to alleviate institutional access disadvantages that women have when playing competitive video games. / MACOM / Esports is the name for competitive video games. Esports are often played in teams, such as on games which require two or more players to collaborate for the common goal of winning. While gender and video games has been studied extensively, as well as on women in professional esports; however, women's influence on collegiate esports has not been studied as broadly, and this paper takes a culture-creation perspective on this topic. This study looked at three different variables: team culture, inclusion, and coping strategies for harassment. Then the survey was distributed to colligate esports players to see how these are impacted on gendered lines. This paper found that all players used gender masking the least of the all the coping strategies, women report using avoidance as a coping strategy more than men, team culture was positively correlated with inclusion, and that women feel less included on their esports teams than men. A discussion along with future directions followed and largely advocated for the separation of esports teams by gender to alleviate institutional access disadvantages that women have when playing competitive video games.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:VTETD/oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/119490 |
| Date | 21 June 2024 |
| Creators | Lane, Taylor Catherine |
| Contributors | Communication, Duncan, Megan Ann, Horning, Michael A., Tedesco, John C. |
| Publisher | Virginia Tech |
| Source Sets | Virginia Tech Theses and Dissertation |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | ETD, application/pdf |
| Rights | In Copyright, http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ |
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