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Love In The Time of Warcraft
Via Edge Online, an article at the Wall Street Journal talking about the process of finding love in an MMOG. From the article: "Nick Yee, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Communication at Stanford University who studies online games, found in a survey earlier this year that 29% of women players and 8% of men said they had gone on to date someone they met in a game. He says the games are filled with scenarios that shed light on players' personalities. A risky raid on a dungeon, for example, can reveal whether someone is a team player. 'These are trust-building exercises,' he says. Players 'are constantly having to make decisions like, Do I run out and save myself or help the others survive?' Situations that reveal so much about someone's character are less common in the real world, he thinks. Yankee Group, a Boston technology-research firm, estimates that MMOGs, which can be played simultaneously by thousands of people using the Internet, are played by 25 million to 30 million people world-wide."
my guess:
1000 women play WoW
29% of this measn 290 of them have dated
3625 men play WoW
290 men to date the 290 men = 8%
it's probably the huge sausage party atmosphere that keeps this statistic so seemingly off balance.
Ermm... I think it's more that the overwhelming population of online gamers are probably male. There just aren't enough girls to go around.
Women can find dates online way more easily than men mainly because we're a lot less common. We're also the ones answering requests for dates rather than asking, and some of us have a hard time finding a nice way to say no. If guys were rare and had to deal with countless girls begging for dates, we'd probably see the statistic swing the opposite way.
Incidentally, I haven't dated anyone that I met on World of Warcraft, but I have gone out with a few guys that I met via MUDs. Nothing ever came of it, though -- I prefer to meet men in real life, but I'll give online guys a chance from time to time.
If more and more of their life experiences are drawn from a fantasy world, what set of morals and ethics will they be learning from?
As opposed to? I can experience more "life" from my house than most people experience sitting wasted in a bar all evening. Working with friends and teammates to take down a giant boss is more of an accomplishment to me than hiring a tour guide to take me to the top of Mt Everest.
The higher percentage of women is due to their lower total numbers, and is not attributable to either sex lying about it.
This means either...
Only 8% of the men are smart enough to know how to score a date through WoW so far, and are doing it multiple times...
21% of the women are dating each other!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
While his work is very interesting, it's important to understand something about Nick Yee's methodology. He bases his results on surveys. He advertises the surveys via his site and others and by email, and whoever wishes to can drop by to complete them. This means that the surveys are likely not representative of the population as a whole, but are biased to the hard-core types who participate in the "meta-game" of forum trolling. In this particular case, it seems possible that people who are interested in social issues in games were more likely to complete the survey, possibly exaggerating the results. Personally, I find his numbers on this to be implausibly high. How many people do you know who have dated a friend from an on-line game? What are the odds that that person you're playing with is reasonably nearby, of compatible age, and actually the gender they claim to be? How on earth, then, do we get to nearly 1/3 of female players participating in real-life dates with people they've met in-game?