Don't buy this for a single second:
"Male players who were good at the game also tended to pay compliments to other male and female players"
In my time playing online shooters, (mostly Battlefield series on PC), all the top players are utterly rabid towards lesser 'talents'. Especially so with 'ace pilots', who are traditionally the ones who get to go 40 kills, 0 deaths in a round in their death from above machines, and woe betide any inexperienced gamer who decides to jump into Attack Chopper passenger seat with Ace Pilot, or worse still, jump into the pilot seat itself.
I remember in BF2, when the air vehicles really were an über force with a huge learning curve, that in the 'right' hands, just could not be dealt with by any of the available AA weaponry in the game, unlike the sheer volume of spammy AA weaponry in the game now, dumbfire rockets (which are helped towards flying targets by the AI) included. For those who don't remember BF2, back then, you couldn't spawn directly into vehicles. Instead, everyone had to make a run for it at the start of the round, and subsequently, 'queue' for their turn in the jet/heli. Naturally, queueing meant finding the precise hotspot for entering into the vehicle upon it's spawning, and spamming the E key, whilst scrapping with 3-4 other players who wanted in the same vehicle. Scrapping for a seat in the J10 would often entail:
- Pushing competition away from hotspot with avatar.
- Shooting competition in face. Not enough to kill them and be awarded with team kill, but just enough to incite them to do something rash.
- Collecting jeep, driving it at speed into players spamming E at jet spawn point, and bailing out from jeep just before it smashes into competitors for jets, either killing them (without getting awarded a TK), or they spawn into jeep as it carries them away from jet spawn point.
And if all else failed, an M95 sniper rifle to the head would deal with the gamer who dared beat you to the pilot seat, or better still, some C4 attached to the jet before it's take off, would allow the grounded pilot to explode the jet in mid air, at his leisure.
Because of the way that the Attack Chopper handled in BF2, the very top chopper pilots would choose to fly the thing alone, and seat switch between gunner and pilot seat. Back then, having the skill to make a hit with the TVM would generally result in a one hit kill on any armoured vehicle. Also, when the pilot seat was abandoned, the chopper would not plunge straight to the ground, but spin rapid 360° turns in midair, thus making it very hard to hit, whilst the crack pilot timed his TVM kills from the gunners seat. Gamers who excelled at this would always top the charts and dominate any map. They would also very likely kill any gamer who got in their way by wanting to jump in the gunner seat, by flying them over into the redzone for 10 seconds and killing them off, before flying away off to spend the rest of the round, absolutely pwning everything.
My point is competition brings out the worst in people and those who rise to the top, tend also to be the most competitive. This is true in any walk of life and I am sure many of you see how it tends to be all the absolute creeps and sell-out chameleon asslickers who tend to progress in the modern workplace, over those who are actually decent chaps. Or in your school days, generally the hardest kid in the school playground is also one of the meanest and cruelest kids in the school playground. I mean, the only way to get good at inflicting pain on another person is to practise it routinely, and what sort of personality wants to routinely inflict pain on another?
A flimsy report based on a fluffly study, that sets out to prove sexism, racism, homophobia etc, are the machinations of 'losers'. But even the most superficial glance through human history would indicate that all these '-isms' that have come to infest and dominate societies throughout the ages actually have their roots in the upper echelons (i.e. it all originally came from 'the winners') and are imposed from the top down. It just so happens than in this modern era, their is a new kind of '-ism' being imposed on us. Non-Identificationism. And that is particular form of -ism that this fadish article perpetrates, and which is all to readily swallowed by the mainstream.
