Who Plays Video Games? You May Be Surprised

With the release of Teens, Video Games, and Civics, the Pew Internet and American Life Project did what it could to undermine the stereotypes and preconceived notions that a lot of people have about who plays video games. According to the report, gamers are anything but solitary, surly, anti-social, basement-dwelling, pizza-eating adolescents incapable of socializing. No, they're just good kids looking for a good time.

Adding fuel to the stereotype game player fire, Dmitri Williams, an assistant professor at the University of Southern California, conducted his own survey of 7,000 Everquest II gamers, and guess what--he discovered they didn't fit the gamer stereotype either. In his paper Who Plays, How Much, and Why? Debunking the Stereotypical Gamer Profile, Williams reports that there are more players in their 30s than in their 20s (the average age was 31), and playing time increased with age. Moreover, while women were only 20 percent of players, they spend more time in the game than men. (According to Sony Online Entertainment, EverQuest II players average about 26 hours per week.)

For the first time in online game research history, Sony Entertainment actually gave Williams and his co-authors--Nick Yee of the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) and Scott Caplan of the University of Delaware--access to the game data. Yee is a member of the PlayOn Group, a research group at the PARC that explores the social dynamics of Massively-Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs). His role involves parsing and analyzing large data sets from longitudinal in-game census snapshots.

Gamers who participated in the survey, which spanned two days, earned a "Greatstaff of the Sun Serpent," a keepsake created specifically for the survey, in exchange for participation. Everyone who logged in during the recruitment period was offered the same prize.

-- Jonathan Erickson
jerickson@ddj.com

Posted by Jon Erickson at 02:16 PM  Permalink