Video games have become a major manifestation of digital innovations in a digitized contemporary society. However, the societal implications of the diffusion of video games into society are dealt with shabbily in existing information systems research. With this study, we want to make a first step to close this gap by looking at intergroup contact between males and females in video games and subsequent effects on prejudice (specifically sexism). Therefore, we build our study around the social

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... ntity approach and the contact hypothesis from sociology and social psychology. Accordingly, we propose four different forms of indirect intergroup contact having different effects on prejudice: 1) positive human, 2) negative human, 3) positive avatar, and 4 ) negative avatar intergroup contact. Within the paper we illustrate the theoretical background, our methodological approach, and give a short outlook.