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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."
for those times when that bouncy night elf female isn't who you thought she would be !
Someone saying something positive about games? Someone is suggesting that healthy relationships can arise from gaming?
... but kids today go on the internet and I've seen the things on there--it's the devil!
We need to stop that. Those stereotypes and social stigmas are time honored and sacred traditions. If we lose those, the terrorists have already won.
I need to be able to say, "Well, at least I didn't meet my wife online!" in order to point out how obviously better I am than everyone else. I got drunk at a bar and knocked my wife up and that's how I became happily married. My son and his son are going to do the same thing if I have anything to say about it!
This is change & I don't like it. We need to stay as static as possible and prevent this from becoming the norm. Sure kids in my day listened to rock music and went to dances despite what our parents said
Someone get me Jack Thompson, we need a man of religious convictions that will secure the sanctity of this nation!
My work here is dung.
Epic Mounts, Part 1 and Part 2.
Now if only in-game avatars matched their users. I'm sick of going on dates with 40 year old men when I thought I was going to meet a 20-something "long cool woman in a black dress" (to quote the Hollies).
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing.
Well, my current data shows 12 - 13 million in the MMOGs I track, and there's probably that many again playing many Asian MMOGs that I don't track, so 24 - 26 million worldwide is in good agreement with their estimate of 25-30 million.
Bruce
The statistical difference between the percentage of males vs. females who have dated based on an in-game connection is of some interest.
It's much higher for women. The question is, why? A reasonable conclusion could be that more females participate in MMORPGs for social reasons than for pure gameplay. One question worth investigating is the ages of male vs. female players. Might it be that female players are generally older?
As one leaves school, one also leaves behind social opportunities for dating--most people find that it is a lot easier finding dates in college than at work.
Enjoy!
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
"As part of your eHarmony compatibility profile you will experience dungeon raids and other exercises designed to determine your true compatibility.'
"When Johhny cast the spell of Eternal Light and destroyed the dark lord I just knew he was the man for me!"
eHarmony MMPORG
I was surprised to learn that women flirt SO much more than men do online. And on the depressing side, I haven't really seen it, which either means they aren't flirting that much with ME, or they are and I'm too much of a clueless male to see it.
Then again, maybe the difference is explained by gender-biased definitions of "flirting". Maybe most guys think saying, "Wow, you've got a nice rack!" doesn't count as flirting, whereas maybe women think simply typing a winky-smiley-face counts as flirting.
Bruce
My girlfriend is a fire mage...
Mine too, and she's all about the DPS (and the more dramatic the mob's death animation is, the happier she is). I'd be interested in seeing a breakdown on what classes men and women are drawn too. My theory is that a lot of girls who game are using virtual worlds as an outlet for aggressive tendencies they can't or won't express in their real-world societal roles.
> Nick Yee, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Communication at Stanford University who studies
> online games
And you thought `media studies` students were a waste of skin...
Keep in mind, you only ever hear about the people who fail. Some of us can and have faked it for a very long time.
So to answer your questions... yes we can fool you, yes the 'victims' probably would mind, and yes pulling off such a feat requires a great deal of rational thought in order to succeed. Any more questions?
PS: Gonna have to go AC for this one... yeah, we live amongst you. Beware the cyber, uh, sex terrorists?
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."
All the oh-so-witty mangina and crying-game references aside, this is a very interesting article. And I think not that far off the mark.
My girlfriend and I (who met 7 years ago online but not in a MMOG) are heading down to the US next week to party with the folks we played EQ1 and now play WoW with. This is the third year for us, and the 4th year for the guild as a whole to hold an annual picnic. And ya know what? Its a blast, we don't just sit around re-hashing raids, or talking gear or skills, but actually find that we have this odd bond of trust and openess (likely due to spending countless hours together in somewhat stressful situations). We were really nervous the first year, but look forward to it even more each year. We are expecting from 40-50 people to show up this year, from all over the US (and us two from Canada). Quite a few of us are couples, yes, some are guys who play girls online (oddly most of them single), and there is not a large number of single women in our guild (but there is a few).
Going on means going far
Going far means returning
Ah yes, WoW. Where the men are men, and so are half of the women.
There is a married woman in my guild who is cheating on her husband with someone she met in my WoW guild. I feel really bad for the guy. It's not all roses.
- Vincit qui patitur.
MMORPG = Multiple Men Online Role Playing Girls
Blessed are the 1337, for they shall pwn the earth.
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?