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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."
well, about 20% of those -say- they're women...
I think they just counted female avatars.
. o O ( TwO hEaDs ArE mOrE tHaN oNe... )
Just because 64% of the characters are female doesn't mean the people playing them are in real life. Like the old joke about IRC goes - The men are men, the women are men, and the children are FBI agents.
In my house it's my girlfriend who plays games online the majority of the time. I hardly play online at all, but when I do it's on my DS or maybe a FPS; more indepth "proper" games (if there is such a thing). My girlfriend likes to play on gamerival on the simple little flash games where you just have to do very simple little word puzzles or arranging blocks.
So it is believable, but it might not be how you think - I doubt they are running round fragging everyone they see, or playing WoW (although some might...)
*''I can't believe it's not a hyperlink.''
I guess they consider solitaire.
You can't get there from here.
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.
It really depends on how you define the term "gamer". To many people, a "gamer" isn't just someone who happens to play games at some arbitrary point in their free time, it's someone whose primary hobby is playing games. When they're not working, studying, or otherwise busy, they're reading about games, playing games, or otherwise involved in game-related activities (e.g. posting on game message boards, designing characters, planning on the next game to buy, etc.). I know a lot of women who play games, but I wouldn't call them gamers. Even though they play games, when they're not playing games they don't immerse themselves in game-related activities, they have a distinct separation between game playing and the rest of their life.
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
64% of online gamers play Hello Kitty Island Adventure. Coincidence?
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+.
.. 100% of those 20% followed their survey reply with 'r U lesbAin? my PuSSy is hott 4u. wAnna cYber?'
I knew i was spending to much time away from my pc ...
The study isn't about RPG players; it includes games like crossword puzzles, Boggle, and Sudoku. So I believe the 64% number.
Yeah, and those 10 percent are just pre-pubescent boys whose voices haven't broken.
Mother, do you think they'll like this sig?
Okay, so you're saying that there's a 36% percent chance that the hot female night elf I cybered with last night was really a man?
"With a name like 'Cryinggam', I figured she just needed a little comforting!"
Modern copyright is theft of culture from everyone and it retards the progress of the useful arts and sciences.
Woe are the times when FPSs are considered "in-depth" games.
Jokes about female avatars being all men aside, it's quite possible that this result is true. However this is only for online gaming, not gaming in general.
;)) would spend a lot more time chatting than men (which tended more often to go exploring and slaying monsters).
;))
Given that on average women tend to be more adept of social activities than men (at least that's my experience), it isn't surprising at all that women go for games where they are in contact with other people.
In my long experience with online RPGs (from MUDs all the way to WoW and Guild Wars), women (as in confirmed women
Online gaming is usually more appropriated to socializing (pretty much the only exception being FPSs and RTSs) than offline gaming (unless you invite your buddies over for a session of drinking and blasting each other out with RPGs
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.
How many surrealists does it take to screw in a lightbulb? A fish.
We live in a pretty free society. You have the right to wear anything you want, subject to decency laws of the area/society of course. As soon as you step out into public, you should realise that the freedom to wear what you want, also has consequences. If you wear short skirts, you're going to get hit on, and most likely pretty aggressively. That's a consequence of what you wear.
What you wear will affect how people treat you. You can wear almost anything you want, but you should know that it will affect others. If you dress up attractively, then expect to be attracted to. Isn't this just common sense?
If the attention of others curtails your freedom to wear what you want, then welcome to the myth of being free. Perfect freedom is only possible if you do not interact with anyone. We give up freedom as soon as we step outside the door onto the footpath.
I'm not saying that badly behaved guys shouldn't be responsibile for a bad situation. I'm just weary of girls who complain about bad attention, when they're attracting them like magnets with what they wear. I'm sure that you, as a GoddessOfDeath, does not suffer this affliction, what with the scythe and black flowing robe and all.
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