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Average Gamer Is 35, Fat and Bummed
kamapuaa writes "According to a study published in the upcoming October issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, the average US video game player is 35 years old, overweight, and tends toward depression. Specifically, female video game players tended towards depression, while males tended towards large BMIs. While the study itself points to several conclusions, one researcher noted: '... habitual use of video games as a coping response may provide a genesis for obsessive-compulsive video-game playing, if not video-game addiction.'"
On the flip side, the Washington Post is running a story about the mental health benefits of playing video games.
Is it just me, or does anyone else think the mods intentionally replaced "Slashdotter" with "Gamer" in the title?
"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has it's limits" - Albert Einstein
Alex Trebek: This average Gamer Is 35, Fat and Bummed
Contestant: What is slashdot?
Alex Trebek: Can you be more specific?
Contestant: Who is Cowboy Neal?
Alex Trebek: Congratulations to our new Jeopardy champion!
Trolling is a art,
I'm under average!
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Video games as coping mechanism. That's an interesting way of looking at this. I found that when I played World of Warcraft, that's exactly what it was. It allowed me to cope with not having a girlfriend and deaden my emotions to the outside world. In that sense it became very addictive. I think it would probably be very similar to drinking alcohol or some drug.
It's funny because WoW is the only game that did that to me. I'm glad I stopped playing because now I don't feel like an automaton (gradually regaining my humanity), but I really feel bad for all the people who are like me who are still playing for that reason. I think WoW is a great game if you can just play it as a game to have fun, but I'm just not one of those people.
Funnily enough I can still play console games without any problems, they are not the same at all. Perhaps it's just pseudo social aspect, or the feeling while playing WoW that you are forced to grind (e.g. it's out of your control). An interesting thing that will probably be studied by psychologists for years to come.
I don't understand these studies about addictive gamers who are depressed, lonely, blah blah blah. Gaming, like watching tv dramas or sports or news, or listening to the radio or ipod, is simply a way to pass the time. Why gaming would make someone depressed makes zero sense to me.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
35, Fat, and Bummed? Or something close?
Out of 100 depressed fat 35-year-old gamers polled 99 turned out to be depressed fat 35-year-old gamers. 1 turned 36 while being polled.
Given the choise between Hitler and RIAA/MPAA I'd go for the first one - at least he knew when to shoot himself.
In order to self-identify as a gamer, you've got to have a certain mindset to begin with. "I play video games, and that's the most important thing in my life". When you're a teenager that's fine, since most teens don't exactly have the resources to go out and have a real life, but when you're 35, you should be at the point where your other dreams are coming true.
I play video games, a lot. I've spent hundreds of dollars on them this year and spent hundreds of hours in them. However, I don't self-identify as a gamer as such, because it's not the central tenet of my lifestyle, nor a major frame of reference for my personality.
The article doesn't tell exactly how they differentiate the two. If it's by self-identification, the problem I've already mentioned crops up. If it's by number of hours spent, it's a poorly designed study to determine the effects of video games, because it's simply axiomatic that if you are more introverted, you'll spend more time doing activities alone.
It's been a long time.
Specifically, female video game players tended towards depression, while males tended towards large BMIs.
Are the women depressed because their dating pool is made up of fat guys?
Or do we eat because our women are so depressing and food is our only solace?
*in a soft soothing mid-Western voice*
Remember folks to pay a visit to Slashdot: where the gamers are above average, the readers are fat and depressed and the women are nonexistent.
My work here is dung.
We keep hearing about how the average age of a gamer is around 30. It's surprising, but I can deal with that. Not unreasonable. Now 35? That's a little tougher to swallow, and a cursory look at the article shows why.
(Emphasis mine).
The study excluded kids. It's just adult gamers.
Still it's a little tough to believe that the average age is 35 unless there were few members of the study outside their 30s, or their definition of "gamer" is quite loose. They may consider going to Atlantic City and playing video poker a "gamer", but just because someone Skis once a year or so, are they a Skier? I know we want to count casual gamers, but we still need to exclude "irregular" gamers for the purposes of studies like this, or the findings are quite meaningless.
Touch everywhere, even when inappropriate.
Pissed off at the boss, need to vent? A bit of Gears of War will do the trick.
Need some exercise to burn off the pounds? A late afternoon set or two of Vertua Tennis will keep you slim and trim, baby!
Did someone cut you off on the commute home, Bunky? Time for some Need for Speed revenge, bitches!
Wife not giving it up lately? Create a character in The Sims that digs that back hair, homey!
that the survey wasn't national. They "analyzed survey data from 552 adults in the Seattle-Tacoma area. The subjects ranged in age from 19 to 90, according to the study, published in the October issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine." No offense to my fellow Americans in Seattle, but its not the happiest place with 226 days of cloudyness. The data might be a bit unbalanced.
I'm 38 dammit, and who the hell told you you could use my silhouette for the picture?
That this probably applies to movies, books, and several other ways that a person can blow off steam and escape from the day to day grind for a while without getting exercise.
Shock! Awe!
I thought I had seen obsessive escapist book reading before, then my wife got a kindle. Actually, I wonder if these addictions are not worst than many drugs. Afterall, reading is healthy and good, and nobody wants to bother someone reading a book. (nor do they usually want to be bothered)
Though, once you have spent all your free time reading for a month to the exclusion of household chores and social interaction.... well I doubt its much better or worst if its a video game.
-Steve
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
The traditional and popular answers for coping with depression ("get out more!") don't work for introverts. I would expect that introverts are overrepresented in the "gamer" demographic.
But I don't think it is loneliness that depresses this group. I suspect it is meaninglessness. existential crisis hits this kind of person pretty hard. Not only is life itself meaninglessness, but their life in particular is meaningless. Goals for goals' sake have no motivational power, so they lack drive to do much of anything apart from play their games. They go to work and perform your basic survival tasks out of rote habit. Such is the life of someone who can't find anything that is really exciting.
It is easy to say "well you lack drive, and that is what is wrong with you." The answer is rejected out of hand, since such people are clear-minded enough to see that the only reason they "lack drive" is because the meaningless bullshit that drives most people is precisely that...meaningless bullshit...and hence they simply can't get excited about it, even if they try.
You don't help such people by taking away their games and forcing them to go to dance clubs (or whatever). They just sit there, feeling alone in the crowd, and wishing they could be doing something more interesting than listen to air-heads blather on about shoes.
In my experience (anecdote. sue me.) study of psychology, physics, and philosophy keep life seeming interesting enough to be worth the trouble. I combine that with games, of course, because entertainment is important too. Also, I meditate (non-religious), but I realize that not everyone finds non-drug-induced altered states of consciousness to be as intriguing as I do.
I am going to say it is "ok" for people to be this way. If these methods of coping with depression don't work, then get a prescription for some mood-altering drugs. That is ok too. Just don't let people tell you that you are some kind of failure for having seen the valuelessness of the bullshit they proffer as being worthwhile.
Well, that _some_ people will play it as some great escape from a shitty reality, is I suppose true of anything else. Equally I know someone who' a workaholic to escape the rest of reality, and pretty much because work is the only place where he's appreciated. Other people go fishing to escape reality, or spend hours tuning their car, or whatever else.
On the other hand, I only need to look at my parents who took to WoW like to cocaine. And, you know, they're a lot over 35 and not exactly the stereotypical image of the lonely gamer or slashdotter either. You know, what with one of them being a woman, and both of them having gotten laid before (or I wouldn't be here.)
The other die-hard gamers I know, most are married, the majority are of average weight, and one is pencil-thin. Only one was obese, but the key word is "was." (Suspiciously, he started exercising after someone sent around a link to a study saying that the obese and smokers cost the health insurance less because they die a lot earlier;)
So I just have to wonder. Maybe they just saw that the average gamer was fat and depressed because the average person wherever the study was done was fat and depressed?
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Sigh... It's not just you--vast swathes of other people, certainly the majority of the Western world, are ignorant of basic statistical concepts, just like you (no disrespect!). A sample size of 500 is almost certainly big enough for this kind of study.
For any given sample-extrapolation experiment, you can calculate a "conservative" sample size that will be "big enough" to meet your criteria for confidence level, confidence interval, etc. I just Googled this guy up, if you want to play around with some values, to see how big of a sample you need if you want to extrapolate to a population of 300,000,000:
* http://www.surveysystem.com/sample-size-formula.htm
(PROTIP: It's smaller than you think.)
Wikipedia has an explanation of what/how/why, but I'll warn you ahead of time, unless you already took a stats class and just need a refresher, you won't understand (no disrespect!):
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sample_size#Estimating_proportions
For those too lazy to FTFL (no disrespect!), it takes somewhere around 1,000-2,000 sample members, if you want to get a 95% confidence level and a confidence interval of 5%, given a p/q split of ~ .5/.5. So assuming these researchers did their math correctly when they formally stated the results of their significance tests.
(NOTE: I'm NOT saying the study is valid--that's a whole 'nother Oprah. I'm just making a general statement about how big of a sample size a study needs to obtain a certain amount of probabalistic reliability.)
I guess most people didn't catch the significance of Andrews University...
Two of the study's coauthours (Wendi Kannenberg, Gary L. Hopkins) are from Andrews University Institute for Prevention of Addictions. Andrews is a Christian university run by a denomination which doesn't accept evolution. I've spoken to a prof from their biology department, apparently it's a bastion of the Intelligent Design movement. (Here's a book published by Andrews University Press).
I'm not saying that proponents of intelligent design and those around them are incapable of doing serious scientific research. I'm thinking this might partially explain what feels like an anti-gamer bias.
The joys of crowdsourcing...
The opinons expressed are those of the voices in the author's head and are not necessarily those of the author.
I am 33.
Actually, sad to break this to you, but just about everything you do in your free time is simply "passing time." Whether it's watching TV, playing a game, chatting at the pub, going mountaineering, tuning your car, reading a book, going to the theatre, or whatever else. There's a reason it's called a "passtime". Get it? "Pass" and "time"? Ring a bell yet?
So, yes, unless you spend every waking moment _working_ on something, then yes, you too are just "passing time" a lot.
And by "work", I mean as in you actually expect to sell it or otherwise get a tangible return on investment, and primarily for that return on investment. If it's just one of the intangible and impossible to measure benefits used as excuses for why your hobby is better than his, sad to break it to you, but it's still just a hobby. You're still doing it to pass the time.
So get off the high horse, drop the snotty self-importance, and realize that yes you too pass the time. Waiting to die or something? Then why do you try to project that idiocy on others?
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
The sample set is exclusively 19-90 year olds living in the greater Seattle area.
Do people younder than 19 not play video games? This was a very sloppy study, probably a small survey done over the phone or web, and no, 500 is not a large enough sample size to draw MEANINGFUL correlations.
Unless they amend it to - Average Seattle ADULT gamer.
Depressed gamer chicks are hot.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
Everyone has SOME form of escape in their lives. Some are just healthier than others. Personally, I think videogames are pretty mild compared to the dangers of SOME forms of escapism.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I'm unsure if the majority of the people who tag stories just don't know what "correlation does not imply causation" actually means, or if this is just another case of mass not RTFAing.
"Correlation does not imply causation" means that if A correlates to B it does not mean that A causes B. But if it's a statistically strong correlation in a well designed experiment then _something_ is causing the relationship. Perhaps A is causing B, perhaps B is causing A, or perhaps some third factor is causing A and B to show up together.
This study, like many others that have been slandered with the tag, seems to be pretty careful about its terminology. The only reference to a possible causation is actually of the reverse, "One interpretation of the findings, researchers said, is that among women, video-game playing 'may be a form of "digital self-medication."'"
In another place they state "While the study helps 'illuminate the health consequences of video-game playing,' it is not conclusive, its researchers say, but rather serves to 'reveal important patterns in health-related correlates of video-game playing and highlights avenues for future research.'"
So not only do they state that it's a statistical correlation and not conclusive proof of causation, they also give specific examples to show that they're considering other possible relationships besides A causing B. Is the "corellationisnotcausation" crowd just not going to be happy until scientists stop doing research altogether?
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
Well, for example how about the fact that the obesity percentages are not the same across the globe.
In the USA, US, as of 2007, 33% of men and 35% of women are obese. (And another third are "only" overweight.) In the EU, where I'm looking at my gamer friends I described in that message, (depending on the country) you're getting between a third and a half that many obese people. E.g., to pick a comparable year, in 2006 in the Netherlands there were only about 12% obese men and about 10% obese women. Germany actually is the heavy-weight of Europe (pun intended) and slightly out-edges even the USA in percentage of "overweight" males, but at a quick googling seems to be at only 13% outright "obese", again as of 2007.
So there you go. It seems to me like all their study found was that the average gamer is the average person in that place. They look at the gamers over there and see a lot of fat ones, I look at the gamers over here and see a lot of people anywhere between fit and a bit overweight.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
In other words, US gamers are typical of the general US population, such that
- most (60%ish) are overweight
- they are far more likely to be depressed than counterparts from almost every other country
- the average age is about 35
He did mention location bias from sampling people all in seattle. I think there are far more problems with survey methodology we don't know about. I never trust surveys that don't print the survey they used with the results. How do I know they weren't leading questions. What did they do to deal with controls vs the average population? There are many questions that could be asked of most surveys that will never be answered. Many of them could entirely change the results of the survey so It is difficult giving them any credence at all.
:( you make it sound like almost facts.
95% confidence level my ass
35 year old sedentary American:
Eats a processed diet, high in frozen dinners, pizza, fast food, and soda.
All of which (in the US) contains high levels of High Fructose Corn Syrup
Over-dependence on which upsets serotonin levels
which blocks the neurochemical precursors to feeling "full", encouraging over-eating and weight gain (and profits for food manufacturers, which in turn continue to lobby for corn subsidies)
Serotonin imbalance also leads directly to depression and insomnia.
When you're too fat to get out the door and too unskilled and alienated from society to engage in social functions, really there's not a lot to do aside from game, eat, and post comments to slashdot.
In other news, summary very closely describes me save that I am 32, not 35. And I don't have a flatscreen monitor. D:
People willing to trade their freedom of expression for temporary entertainment deserve neither and will lose both.