Women Over 40 Biggest Online Gamers

Ooby writes "MSNBC and Reuters are reporting that women over 40 are the biggest online gamers, according to a study conducted by AOL. What's even more interesting than being outnumbered by middle aged and older women is this: 'More than a quarter of those women, the survey found, play their favorite games between midnight and 5 a.m. Women in the poll tended to favor word and puzzle games.' I thought that was prime time for FPS kids."

Comments

Re:The common stereotype

[*weasel]

Exactly - when they include puzzle, card and word-games in your 'online gaming' survey, they're going to get results that are going to be used disingenuously.

This is analogous to suggesting that women play the majority of 'games' in real life, because the number of female Bridge clubs vastly outweighs the gender seperation in professional athletics.

The qualification of 'online game' to begin with is the problem.

No-one would likely argue that there is a gender distribution in free low-tech online games roughly consistent with population distribution overall.

The interesting question of 'women in games' is: why aren't women playing console games, massmogs, multiplayer strategy/fps/rpg/etc?

Truly, what end does this survey tell us? That women aren't afraid of the computer or the internet? Did anyone ever assert that being technophobes is responsible for the gender gap in commercial gaming?

Simply, there are more people playing poker on yahoo games alone than are playing counterstrike. There are vastly more people who play games on AOL than all massmogs combined. The male-dominated games become statistically insignificant when the net is cast this wide. Particularly when they obviate distinctions between gamers willing to pay for games, pay monthly for games, and deal with 3d cards and driver updates to play online games.

Again, the only questions that are interesting are: where are the women in commercial online gaming, and why aren't they showing up?

and this survey answers neither.