ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Media Psychology
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1601425
This article is part of the Research TopicThe Dark and the Light Side of Gaming (Volume II)View all 5 articles
Women as expert gamers: portrait of an understudied population
Provisionally accepted
- Université du Québec à Montréal, Montreal, Canada
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Very little is known about women who persist in competitive gaming environments and their unique characteristics. Thus, the current study aims to provide an initial portrait of these women. A subsample of 128 female gamers, selected from a larger internet survey, completed an online questionnaire assessing sociodemographic factors, gaming experience, motives to play, and mental health variables. Self-reported expert gamers were compared to casuals on these variables. Then, a backward logistic regression allowed to identify the best predictors of being an expert gamer. Experts reported higher gaming involvement and higher levels of specific gaming motives.Experts also tended to engage in specific game types and to report more positive outcomes than casuals. Finally, gaming involvement, competition motive, self-esteem, and game genre were the best predictors of group membership. This study highlighted several unique characteristics of female expert gamers, suggesting an important role of personal and environmental strengths, gaming involvement, and gender representation.
Keywords: Women, Competitive gaming, gaming expertise, self-esteem, Well-being, Gaming disorder
Received: 07 Apr 2025; Accepted: 21 May 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Hébert-Ratté, Dufour, Martel-Brosseau and El-Baalbaki. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Roxanne Hébert-Ratté, Université du Québec à Montréal, Montreal, Canada
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