So the first thing I decided to do was look at Steam and Steam user profile pictures. The easiest ones to gather are of course, friends.
Outcome
As I started compiling the rather long list of profile pictures, I decided to sort them into groups of male and female players while doing so. Why? I wanted to see if the disparity between the number of male and female players or active group participants on Steam was really that huge. Not surprisingly, the percentage of females in this compilation is about 8%. Or perhaps surprisingly. I thought I was friends with more girls who played video games than that....
Well, at this point I've finished adding all the pictures. Now is the time to sort them. Since it looks like a good bunch are video game characters (no surprise there), I will separate them into a group. Interestingly enough, only the male players have posted a video game character as their profile picture.
These are all the categories of sorting. And this is where things get interesting. There are five people who have no profile pic, of which only one is female. The majority of profile pictures are actually pictures of some subject, not a landscape or symbol. Of the 50 people, only 7 of them had a landscape-symbol profile picture, and all of them are male. There is also a tendency towards pictures of fictional things. Of the remaining 38 pictures, only 7 of them were based in "reality", of which only 4 were people and only 2 of those four actually showed the user. Another interesting thing of note is that the majority of profile pictures were not of video game characters. Only 9 of 38 "subject" profile pictures were actually video game characters. The majority actually goes to anime and cartoon characters, of which there were a whopping 16 of. There were in fact some pictures that made it into both categories though. It seems both males and females express some sort of caution with profile pictures on Steam, only 4% of the selection here contained the user's face. The lack of female profile pictures might have something to do with the fact that a lot of female gamers tend to stick to their own circles to prevent discrimination and are less likely to have public profiles that are easily accessible, or participate in Steam groups. This type of community is also game-centered, and as such pictures of fantasy, video games, and anime are more likely to be profile pictures than "real life" pictures. The question is why the lack of symbols, but perhaps that has something to do with the psychology behind the idea of a profile picture. Even if the players try to maintain a form of anonymity, a profile picture implies that there is some sort of subject, a character. This makes it less likely that a player will use a symbol, because then that player is identified with that symbol and its meanings. Having some "character" as a profile pic makes it seem that the person behind the account is real, and not a bot. Pictures of video game characters and anime characters give insight into what kind of games the player might like, or what genre they like (in terms of anime). Mostly because a person would probably have to like the character or scene or symbol they are using if that picture is to represent them. Showing what things you like, despite the lack of an actual face to the user behind the account, is just as important, and still says a lot of things about them -even if you can't tell anything about the gender, age, or location of the person.
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