Slashdot Mirror
Study Debunks Gamer Stereotypes
Ars Technica reports on a recent study by Ipsos MediaCT which evaluated gamers with respect to a large variety of social parameters. Among their findings: "55 percent of gamers polled were married, 48 percent have kids, and new gamers — those who have started playing videogames in the past two years — are 32 years old on average." Also, "In terms of hard dollars, the average gaming household income ($79,000) is notably higher than that of nongaming households ($54,000), but the value of the gamer as a marketing target can be seen in a variety of ways. 39 percent of gamers said that friends and family rely upon them to stay up-to-date about the latest technology." The press release for the study is available at IGN.
Especially the household income note. While many of us may not see it that way, games are a luxury. They're more likely to be found in a higher income household.
I guess you are one of the married ones... :)
You have numbers to back that up? These studies show again and again that those presuppositions are NOT in fact true, that gaming is not any longer a pre-college thing so much as an adult pass-time.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
Where's the data from?
Since my wife is the market research manager for Latin America for a 'Fortune 500' company, I am quite familiar with Ipsos. They do all sorts of market research, and are among the best in their field. Of course without seeing the actual design of the study neither she nor I can comment on how accurate the information is, but knowing how this company works I assume they are not pulling numbers out of their backsides. They usually don't, unlike other market research firms I could mention.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Actually, unless any of those retailers actually did a proper study, you're probably just seeing selective confirmation at work. Selective confirmation works like this: if you really want to believe something, you'll notice all the confirmation, and conveniently forget all the counter-examples.
One prime example of this is, well, all the "women can't drive" machos. Everyone of them can tell you a dozen anecdotes where some woman was driving only 60 in a 50 zone and "holding up the traffic". Everyone of the them is swift to hand-wave an excuse as to why it doesn't count or is just normal, if you point out a guy doing something even more stupid. But the funny thing is, last I saw a statistic from an insurance company (you know, the guys who tally up the accidents because they pay for them and have to adjust their premiums based on it), the average woman caused only _half_ as many accidents per mile driven as the average guy. Actually the absolute worst category isn't the women, it's the very young guys who drive like it proves their penis size. So that skewed perception doesn't actually match reality.
Which is why we do studies and polls, and don't rely on what Jack who works at GameStop remembers offhand.
Additionally, retailers... which retailers? Did you poll all of them? Or what?
Because for example the biggest games retailer in the USA is WallMart, not the mom-and-pop franchises that all the kiddies hang around. For every kid that hangs around EB Games all day and maybe buys a new game every two months, there'll be several moms and pops who get their stuff from WallMart and move on. And a bunch of other people get their games from electronics supermarkets like (at least here) Saturn, MediaMarkt, and the like. You won't see hordes of kids hanging around the aisles there. And I doubt that any given employee at such a big store has the time to hang around and see who takes what off the aisles.
So if you're using some games-only shop as your source, you're looking at a prime representation of the Biased Sample fallacy. What you see is actually just saying what kind of people hang around their shop, not a random sample of gamers as a whole.
It's like having a poll on Slashdot and concluding that 90% of the population are computer-savy nerds, and 50% run linux on the desktop. Or like having a poll on Sony's site and concluding that 4 times more people have a PS3 than a Wii, and 5 times more have a PSP than a DS.
Actually that "firsthand knowledge" is skewed again. Especially during the peak of the "games are for children only, and women never play games" mentality, a lot of people and especially women pretended to buy their games for a non-existent kid. Just because that seemed like the more socially acceptable kind of thing.
So unless said employee actually followed that guy/gal home and saw who's playing the game, it is _not_ first hand knowledge of it. It's at best an pretentious ass trying to defend a stereotype.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
"there's no question that gaming has very much become more a social activity than a solitary one"
I wonder how old is the guy who made that comment. When I was a kid, video games were mostly a social activity. I don't remember going much to the arcade alone and most console games were fun only when played against someone else or at least trying to beat his high score. With games like Baseball or Sea Battle for the Intellivision there was no single player mode at all!