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64% of Online Gamers Are Female
According to a report discussed on 1up, a new study by the Nielsen folks finds that more than half of the 117 Million U.S. online gamers are women. From the article: "The study's announcement release doesn't break down what games they're playing, though we expect sites like pogo.com, which feature a multitude of Flash-based games are rather high on the list. Even more surprising is how many older gamers are playing. While the teenage market dominates in numbers, the study says more than 15 million gamers, about 8%, are actually at least 45 years old."
My wife plays on pogo.com. Simple games, cute sound effects and characters, and a chat window. And they talk about kids and family. That's something I don't hear horny teenage boys talk about, so yes, they are mostly females.
Dunno about everybody else but most of the girls I meet in chatrooms and online games are guys playing as girls. Some of the rest are Dateline plants trolling for men, but that's not my thing.
Anyway, what's the Second Life slang for guys playing as girls? Gurlz or something?
Many actual Real Life(TM) girls play as male game characters so they won't get hit on or bothered.
I play mail and female characters in SL. The guy character gets left alone except by sex workers who want to sell him their wares. He's much like the real me and fairly boring to game with.
The girl character, who is not at all like me, has an incredibly active social thing going on and has accumulated dozens of friends without even trying. She's fun to play because she's so different from me. But she does get hit on all the time just because she appears to be female. It's common for complete strangers to walk up and make all sorts of rather forward comments.
My guy character gets none of that.
I have a new appreciation for some of the hassle girls go through.
Sig for hire.
I have a vague idea about how they conducted this study.
/s irc.efnet.org /j world-of-warcraft /say So how many of you guys are women?
1) www.mirc.com
2) install
3)
4)
5)
6) count the results
Seriously, though. I don't doubt these results at all, but I would love to see the figures of hours spent per week and compare it between the sexes. The results would surely favor men to be the biggest users.
So does anyone know how many female gamers we have in a game like World of Warcraft? I'm sure the numbers stated above are taken from flash based games and alike.
Full Tilt
Women playing online games at a greater rate than men makes sense to me. Every woman I've known, no matter how much she avoids video games in general, will play Tetris for hours on end. The flash puzzle games all over the web are exactly what women like to play. While men may be playing online, they're sticking to MMORPGs, FPS and RTS. And for the other figure mentioned: 8% of gamers being 45+ doesn't seem that outlandish to me. The first video games came out in the early 70's. A 45 year old today would have been 11 when Pong came out. The number of "old" people playing video games will probably see a dramatic increase over the coming years, about the time the Nintendo generation hits 45+.
Then Yahoo! Games and pogo.com are the only things stopping her from harrassing you for yet another crack for yet another Mah-Jong game.
I once knew a girl who spent tons of time playing.... Runescape. I tried it at her suggestion and decided that it was the most mind-numbingly boring thing I'd ever attempted. So why did she play?
"She was away from home, didn't know too many people, and probably used it as a social outlet." The preceding sentence is likely true, but it's also a gross oversimplification. It is not as though she had any respect for the people she interacted with in the MMO world: She said they were all "idiot teenagers." But then, this is a girl who freely admitted that many of her real-life 'friends' were people who were younger than she was or who she considered not to be terribly intelligent: She liked to surround herself with idiots so that she looked better to herself by comparison. Runescape was a convenient idiot-zoo for her.
Ditto. I know of women who spend hours EVERY evening playing flash games on MSN or Yahoo. Yet if you ask them, they don't consider themselves gamers and would never think of buying a retail game.