Slashdot Mirror
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."
Literati is HUGE between midnight and 4am Central Time. It's packed, and words like "nodosity" (109 pts. yay, me.) fly across the board.
Of course, I'm nowhere near 40 -or- female, and prefer CounterStrike, but hey, gotta stimulate the brain once in a while, right?
Truck driver, plumber, Linux systems engineer.
i know a bunch of old ladies that are addicted to Pogo.com, Yahoo games, ect...
Man, that explains why that choad who keeps kicking my ass at CounterStrike uses 'MrsRobinson' as her handle, and keeps making off-the-wall references to Botox and estrogen therapy while she's fragging my ass into oblivion!
"The survey was conducted online with 3,613 respondents between mid-December and mid-January, the company said."
I guess they forgot to mention that the survey was only open between midnight and 5 a.m. during that period and placed only on webpages containing word games and puzzles?
My 76-year-old mother has been a gamer for years, since she got her first Atari game console. When I helped her set up her new eMac a couple months ago, one of the first things she had me do was transfer all her old classic games over from her old Mac. She likes puzzle and card games the most, but she's been known to play blow-em-ups as well.
No sig? Sigh...
I tinhk you misunderstood what they mean by "biggest".
-------
Support Indy Music. Buy
What percentage of the overall survey participants were women over 40? Because these findings state that a higher percentage of women over 40 play games daily than the interviewed men or teens. So if in their survey of 3500 people there are only 100 women over 40, but most of them play games all the time, it doesn't mean that they outnumber the men or teens. It just means that, if women over 40 are online, or gamers, or computer literate (we don't know what the universe of the survey is-- did they interview everyone in a games forum somewhere? Call random households? Send email to people with AOL accounts?) they're very likely to play wordgames in the wee hours of the morning.
Be careful with statistics. Especially if you're trying to figure out if you're outnumbered [yet].
Do something about world hunger. Click here
My first thought was, "Woah" until I read the article. The first thought that comes to my mind when someone says "gamer" is someone who plays an FPS or RTS, but with "games" defined in the much broader sense, this is less shocking (although the late hours are somewhat of a surprise). Plus, most computers can play these games without the latest hardware or fastest connection.
Maybe it's because women over 40 are the only ones gullible enough to be using AOL? :-)
Here come the flamebait mods!!
--------
This isn't the sig you're looking for. Move along.
AOL. I have no idea exactly how it was conducted, other than "online", but I'd be surprised if they surveyed people other than AOL users. Sure, AOL is the biggest ISP, and you'd expect a large number of gamers, but the truly hardcore would have moved off AOL a long time ago and gotten broadband. So what are you left with? The casual gamers for whom low latency performance is not an issue (i.e., people playing at yahoo games). So it's not surprising that it's mostly women in that sample group...
and smell the coffee. There is a huge game community on the internet that has nothing to do with frags, and it's bigger than the frag-oriented community. Friendlier too. And literate. Th3y can sp311, and form complete sentences.
For some reason, women love the Sims games. More than likely, they're up at all hours running their little Sims' lives.
I guess that keeps them from running our lives, though. </flamebait>
Overrated / Underrated : Moderation
here
so it wasn't run through AOL, but an outside firm, which probably got a more representative sample.
But, there's lots of interesting statistics to go through. such as "Nearly Twice as Many Adults Have Played Internet Games for More than Eight Consecutive Hours than Teenagers"
I'm not sure if it's statistically significant, but a 50% gamer ratio at a sewing class has gotta mean something!
#man woman
segmentation fault - core dumped.
Middle-aged women have always been playing card games, bored games, etc. Now they don't play scrabble with the neighbors, they do it with strangers on the internet.
Real gaming is interesting to me because it's something new, or at least a significant transformation. There's nothing surprising or interesting about learning that middle aged women are taking their solitaire games online. Yawn.
But there is another kind of evil that we must fear most... and that is the indifference of good men.
Coolest "non-gamer" online game:
isketch, which is basically Pictionary in an online/chatroom setting. It picks a sketcher, gives 'em a word, and then awards points based on who gets it first. I love games that are creative as well as addictive.
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
women over 40 are the biggest online gamers, according to a study conducted by AOL.
..
Most serious gamers wouldn't be on AOL, and most likely would be on a local ISP or some type of broadband.
What's even more interesting than being outnumbered by middle aged and older women is
Not really, since the study is skewed by only surveying AOL'ers who tend not to be or use AOL for online gaming. AOL online gamers may mostly be middle aged women, but that doesn't mean all online gamers are mostly middle aged women.
It would be like doing a study in a urban area, like say Detroit and from those statistics trying to prove all of America is a ghetto. It just doesn't fit.
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."
of course, because male or female, old or young, if they wanted to play a FPS, MMO, etc they would migrate off of AOL to a local dialup where they would get better bandwidth, or more likely to a broadband connection
Attempt to do this study to comcast, speakeasy, roadrunner, etc and you will end up with the typical 18-30 year old males being the most common type of gamer. It would be interesting to see the genre breakdown though.
Picture middle aged women everywhere yelling "200 Frags Per Hour, woohoo!"
/^([Ss]ame [Bb]at (time, |channel.)){2}$/
The survey itself was conducted by Digital Marketing Services, a joint AOL/MARC Research company that does online opinion survey research. Although online polls suffer from various biases, the OpinionPlace.com polls use pre-interview demo weights to help reduce some of those skews. (Though my doubts are not, of course, dissipated by their reassurances.)
Finally, candidate for "most disturbing graf" must be this:
-Watchful Babbler (where's that damned account password?)Biggest Online Gamers
Great, so they are old, but do you really have to call them "fat," too?
Wheeeee
Earn 20,000,000,000 FREE hours of AOL! Before you can sign on, please just fill out this short survey. The information you provide will help us better serve you!
1. Compared to men or teens, how much time do 40 year old women spend playing online games?
o 0-10% More
o 11-20% More
o 21-30% More
o 31-40% More
o 41-50% More
o 51-60% More
2. Are 40 year old women, on average, more likely to play online games than men or teens?
o Yes
o No
o Note Sure
3. Do 40 year old women convert their online relationships into real-life relationships, if they in fact have any online relationships?
o Yes
o No
o Note Sure
4. Are you a 40 year old woman?
o Yes
o No
o Not Sure
5. Have you or do you plan to respond to this survey?
o Yes
o No
o Not Sure
6. If you answered yes to the above two questions, do you spend less time watching TV or movies, reading or being physically active because of your online game play?
o Yes
o No
o Not Sure
o I did not answer yes to the above two questions
o I'm not sure if I answered yes to the above two questions
7. Who is conducting this survey?
o Services for Digital Marketing
o Digital Marketing Services
o Marketing Services, Digital
o Marketing Digital Services
8. When do you prefer to play online games?
o Midnight - 1:00 AM
o 1:00 AM - 2:00 AM
o 2:00 AM - 3:00 AM
o 3:00 AM - 4:00 AM
o 4:00 AM - 5:00 AM
9. Which of the following cities strikes you as most "game happy:"
o Chicago and New York
o San Francisco and Orlando
o Atlanta and Boston
o Paris and Berlin
10. (Last question) How many people are responding to this survey?
o 12,214
o 15
o 1,243
o 7,654
o 3,613
11 (We lied) This survey was conducted between:
o Mid-December and mid-January
o Early December and early January
o Late December and late January
Upstairs Dog, Downstairs People.
"The survey was conducted online with 3,613 respondents between mid-December and mid-January, the company said."
But while we are playing our fps games (ad free), the women are online playing their web based games and suddenly this window pops up asking them to take a survey. Of course the it's going to be a little biased.
AOL got opinionplace.com to do the survey for them. Now if you look behind the BS that opinionplace and AOL throw at you about how "scientific" their data is, go to the opinion palace webpage and check out their FAQ. They give people AADVANTAGE miles for every survey they fill out. What are AAdvantage miles? They are American Airlines miles used twards getting a discount on flights.
This skews the data in all sorts of wierd ways, starting with the people taking it are the types who would sign up for such programs on the internet. Not to mention, how many 15 year old males care about Frequent flyer miles? Hell, how many savvy internet users would give their personal information up for some survey scam?
The conclusion drawn from this survey should be "Women over 40 are more likely to have gator installed on their machine and participate in stupid online surveys for some minimal payoff".....ok maybe that was a bit harsh....
If there is one truth about statistics in general, it's that if you play around with the numbers enough you can make surveys say whatever you want.
I play a lot of bridge on-line, and while you're right that players can mostly spell (when the occasion arises), I think they're just as bad when it comes to complete sentences.
Most conversations go about like:
hi all, need 1 more?
wlc
glp
wdo, gtp
sry p
Which is about as verbose as most other online games I've participated in over the last 8-9 years. (God, has it been that long?)
--Jeremy
Jesus was a liberal
Twenty-eight percent of them play games between midnight and 5:00 a.m., considerably more than men or teenage game-players.
Well, yeah. Midnight to 5:00 a.m. is pr0n time for those other demographics.
--Jeremy
Jesus was a liberal
The late night going-to-bed-at-dawn players aren't the FPS kids. It's the people who go that far out of thier way to avoid them.