Increasingly more scholars have regarded the virtual worlds of massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) as a social laboratory, and have paid research attention to the online interactions between its large number of players. In the present study, we examine a widely observed real-life phenomenon gender homophily (i.e., people of the same gender flocking together) in this virtual context. Specifically, we investigate how collaboration networks in an MMOG (Destiny) are shaped by the adopted gender of the avatar characters. This focus is interesting, as avatar gender in video games is generally a choice that is less constrained than it is in real life. To investigate the effect of gender in online video games, while controlling for the effects of several confounding factors, we employed a technique called exponential random graph modeling. Mirroring how interpersonal relationships are often gendered in real life, and despite common phenomenon such as gender swapping, we found evidence supporting gender homophily in the MMOG environment.

中文翻译：

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一群羽毛的化身：通过指数随机图 (ERG) 建模揭示在线视频游戏中的性别同质性

越来越多的学者将大型多人在线游戏（MMOG）的虚拟世界视为社会实验室，并开始研究其大量玩家之间的在线互动。在本研究中，我们研究了在这个虚拟环境中广泛观察到的现实生活中的性别同质现象（即，同性别的人聚集在一起）。具体来说，我们调查了 MMOG（命运）中的协作网络如何由化身角色所采用的性别塑造。这种关注点很有趣，因为视频游戏中的头像性别通常是一种比现实生活中更不受约束的选择。为了研究性别对在线视频游戏的影响，同时控制几个混杂因素的影响，我们采用了一种称为指数随机图建模的技术。