These things snowball and push the Overton window. That's what.
No, this is just trolling.
Stating/doing something controversal to grab attention and hopefully backlash to then ask for help and donations. That has been Anitas shtick for years and now that institute, fully aware how controversial she is, to do the same thing.
And of course it works and we got this thread.
Just ignore it.
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As for the study itself, it does provide a lot of interesting numbers but is in many cases imprecise when describing methods and some of the numbers seem quite fishy (it seems like far more then 100% of characters are killed if one takes the statements as true. There is obviously something off with how they count. They also make statements about details of minor characters that should generally never be accessable in the game). But there is still a lot of good information.
The discussion of the numbers at hand is atrocious, at least in one case openly contradicting the listed numbers and in many others quite far fetched.
Calling it a study of online gaming and then getting nearly all the data data from a couple of twitch streamers and not adressing the obvious sampling problems in even a single paragraph is poor form. But at least it also has the questionairies.
Another strange decision is, while acknowledging that nearly half of gamers are female, only men/boys got asked and there is a lot of focus on how online gaming is a space of men/boys interacting with other men/boys. Female friends only appear in a single question of the whole questionairy.
So while the study certainly does have some value, it is not actually good. But it is also not pure bait or provokation. Numbers are always welcome and you can use those where the methods are clear well enough.