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Girl Gamers More Hardcore Than Guys
TheClockworkSoul writes "Scientific American reports on a study published this month in the Journal of Communication, which found that women who engage in a role-playing game online actually commit more time on average than the male players do. The authors surveyed 7,000 players logged in to EverQuest II (PDF), and found that the average age of the gamers surveyed was 31, and that playing time tended to increase with age. Interestingly, however, the female gamers not only tended to log more time online (29 hours per week versus 25 for the males), but were also more likely to lie about how much they really play."
Have you ever been in a store with a girl? It's like raiding, grinding and looting all at the same time. And some innocent low leveler always get killed.
And when the correct time comes, they stab your back and run away with your epic drop.
There is previous evidence of this..
To do list for Windows
They don't lie, they just doesn't count the time customizing the color and clothes of their characters which is probably 20 hours a week.*
Here goes my Karma, down the drain. Should have used the post cowardly !
* My girlfriend used to do that a lot in everquest and maple story... Actually.
Obligatory, of course, but everyone knows there are no girls in MMORPG's. The only RPG's a girl has been known to play, EVER, has been Final Fantasy, and they all claim that Sepheroth is pretty.
Girl seeking WoW player
Anyone left in EQ is hard-core by definition. Why didn't they study WoW?
Media that can be recorded and distributed can be recorded and distributed.
-kfg
Oh, not that kind of hard core.
That's okay. Just call them hon, talk about how hard core they are, and hit on them. When they get mad, they get distracted, and when they're distracted they're sloppy. Then when they lose tell them they play like a girl. Recommend you wear a groin protector if you're going to try this in person.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Whodathunkit.
The authors surveyed 7,000 players logged in to EverQuest II
female gamers... were also more likely to lie about how much they really play.
Hmm. Using a survey to determine how honest people are. Nice.
Having used the Internet, I'm willing to bet not all of them were honest about their true gender either.
Which really begs the question; is it better to date a gaming girl or a 'normal' girl?
Having dated and then married a gamer girl, I can say from experience that a non-gamer girl will never drag your ass out of bed at 6 am on a Saturday morning to work on leveling alts with her.
I suppose it's like any relationship, a mixed bag.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
And now we know why, they are all in the games.
And considering my own voice chat experience in MMO's, I am not all that surprised. Some seem to spend more time in game socializing.
But I have been told several times not to reveal their gender to others, or that they didn't want to use voice chat in PUG groups.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
There are girls who game, and who game quite extensively. I would call myself one of those girls, and I easily log 20+ hours a week playing. Granted, my friend set is probably a little skewed since we're all females in either engineering or CS, so I won't comment on the numbers of girls that exhibit these traits. That being said, maybe game marketers will wake up and realize that we do play, and that we do invest a lot of time into it and maybe they'll actually try to start marketing to more of us. We're just as happy to plunk down our cash for a game. And we're probably more likely to plunk down extra cash on "accessories" and other non functional goodies to make our characters look good...
kdawson must be on vacation.
Of course more girl gamers are going to be more "hardcore" than male gamers. Why? Because its not as socially acceptable to casually play hardcore games as a girl. For example, if a guy says "I play WoW" most people would shrug it off, whereas it could be a lot more damaging socially for a girl to say that they played WoW. Because of this only girls who really like WoW and similar games will really play them and for males most of the time they aren't as "hardcore" because there is a lot more males who play and some are casual and some are hardcore. Females would almost all be hardcore gamers.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Try EVE to balance it out -- I'm pretty sure that that's more male-filled than slashdot even (in a fleet of 500 there was one girl on voice chat; if there were any more out there on text chat they were at least hiding it...)
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
I think girls are not by society designed to be as interested in tech-stuff/games like men. When some of them play games, they often do it as a substitute for a social life (like many males). There are more guys playing, and many more casual male gamers. If girls were by society's design as interested in gaming, there would be more casual female gamers, making the average time spent lower.
i once was with a group of women who all tried to get me on WOW.
women encouraging men, what has the world gone trough? (lol)
i don't understand MMO's, paying anything extra for playing online is a useless deal and they can keep their crap.
if i buy a game i bought a game, i ain't going to pay on top of buying a game!
Just because girls waste more time on MMOs on average than boys doesn't mean they're more 'hardcore' gamers.
I think it's because guys tend to drink more when they game. They pass out while the girl keeps gaming and eating chocolate.
The key part to note is that they only included a single game which fits very cleanly into a single genre. All it tells us is that female gamers play EQ2 more on average than male gamers. It's also a bit of evidence towards the same for MMORPGs in general. However, it's ridiculous to from this conclude that female gamers amongst the (much, much) broader gaming community play more than males.
Errrm umm .. time spent and wasted != hardcore, it just means they spent more time..
Casual gamers spend hundreds of hours and frequently thousands of dollars trying to fetch the latest purple unicorn vanity pet .. vs spending 100s of hours engaged in group raid ? which is more hardcore? this is a retarded article and theres really no way to even begin to cover the failings in these comments :)
This isn't surprising based on the type of game studied. Women are social animals and MMOs provide a convenient medium for socializing. After playing WoW for about a year (my first MMO) and getting to raid with a guild, I came to the conclusion that, in actuality, WoW was less of a game and more of a very feature-rich chat client. However, the gaming aspect is important to draw in and keep a population base that is necessary for the socializing to occur. With each successive MMO that I've tried out, the same issue remains: how well you do in these games, in terms of collecting epic loot and such, depends 90% on your willingness to engage in idle chatter, and as long as you're not completely incompetent as a player the other 10% is covered. OTOH, if you demonstrate immense skill by, for example, soloing an elite quest designed for a group of people at your level, you still only get the same reward you would have gotten in a group. The fact that you aren't really rewarded for skillful play pretty much makes "hardcore MMO" an oxymoron. In a raid, your group as a whole must demonstrate skill in order to receive rewards, but the rewards within the raid are determined by one's social rank and has nothing to do with their role in the raid's success. In other words, females devote more time and effort into what hardcore gamers would refer to as casual gaming. To put it another way, if you have a top 10 score in Bejeweled (and I have no doubt that a good portion of top 10 Bejeweled scores are held by women), that alone would not really make you hardcore at all. It would just make you a, shall we say, casual extremist. Which is also how I would describe veteran MMO players.
Yeah, and I'm a girl, too. Especially when I get to enter my gender in online forms. ....
@sopssa
The stats are probably fairly accurate, though. Yes, I have been shopping with girl(s). And yes, it is HARDCORE.
Inversely, perhaps males are more likely to realize they're addicted to an MMO and stop. :p
Additionally, this is inherently a biased sample, since it (1) only samples 1 game, and (2) only samples MMO game players.
Become more obsessive, addicted and take interaction more personally.
Seems the games are more 'targeted' to induce addiction rather than a recreational escape.
Add in the "personal touch" and social networking and you have a revenue stream, like alcoholic beverages, gambling, smoking ect.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
You're forgetting MMORPGs are for casuals. Beat Ikaruga without using up any continues, then you can call yourself hardcore.
and women don't masturbate as much as men, neither do they have the same sex drive. yeah, rite.
Nerds in mom's basement might be females playing female WoW characters. Sorry, totally interrupted the meme and narrative.
Housewives.
Most female players I've known have been housewives, and were able to put so much time in compared to their spouses because their spouses were out working.
I used to be at home during the day because I worked at a newspaper where our hours were 8am to 8pm Mon, Tues, Fri, 8am to 6pm Weds and 8am to 12pm on Thurs so always had Thursday afternoons and Friday off as that's when the paper went to print. On those Thursday afternoons and Fridays I recall many times speaking to female guild mates who were in their mid to late twenties and early thirties playing because they'd done the house work and had nothing else to do. They'd play for hours in the day and continue to play with their partner when their partner got home.
MMORPGs are mainstream. Shmups are hardcore. Come and talk to me again when you find girls who can one-credit Ikaruga.
Circumcision is child abuse.
I'm no expert on this, but couldn't the 4 hour difference be explain by people (men) who only play for a little bit and quit? I would think that there would be less casual women gamers since a woman playing computer games reflects on their "geekiness" more than a man. So there's more attrition among men since the women don't try in the first place? So what would be interesting would be a comparision against hardcore men and hardcore women, and see if there's a difference there.
I see Scientific American has about as much to do with science as the History Channel does with History. "60 second news?" I see the author didn't spend more than 60 seconds reading the report.
Contrary to the article's implication, players in the sample were still overwhelmingly male, and while female players were more likely than male players to be "hardcore", numerically there were still more hardcore male players than hardcore female players.
There are a number of datapoints in the study that are interesting:
http://dmitriwilliams.com/LFGpaperfinal.pdf
- The sample was self-selecting. The survey was offered to all players logged in during the sampling window. .06% declined
- Self-reported gender: 80.22% male, 19.72% female,
- Self-reported as being employed: 66.29% of females, 79.84% of males
- Self-reported sexual orientation: Female: 14.15% Bisexual, 2.28% Homosexual, 6.4% Declined; Male: 3.64% Bisexual, 3.37% Homosexual, 3.6% Declined.
- Self-reported played with a romantic partner: 61.52% of females, but only 24.77% of males
What I found more interesting was that as many as 22% of female players were lesbian or bi-sexual, far more than in the general population. This was not mirrored in male players.
I'll speculate that females playing more hours than males is in some part accounted for by the 13% employment gap reported between males and females in the sample.
As to whether to believe the better than average self-reported BMI and exercise numbers from the women in the survey? What, women misrepresent their weight online? Unheard of!
Oblig. nitpick: if you dated and married a gamer girl, then you CANNOT say from experience what a non-gamer girl will or won't ever do. You'd have to have dated and married a non-gamer girl (actually, all of them) in order to make that blanket statement.
Nitpick denied. I can accurately make that statement without having married one or all girls who are not gamers.
As the act of compulsively leveling alts in a MMO is the act of one who belongs to the set of female persons that are labeled a 'Gamer Girls', there exists no such person who can engage in this activity without being a gamer girl. Hence, a girl who does that must be a gamer.
QED
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Hmm..
Since when did they start putting PC's in the kitchen?
or
They have to be hard core to be cooking and gaming at the same time!
or
They should be cooking up my dinner not characte..oh forget it
never mind :P
I have to return some videotapes...
"andfatter" is not deserved coming from /., home of the neckbearded basement dwellers.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your politician, and hitting them?"
Last time I checked, "hardcore" didn't mean "plays games a lot"; it means that you don't spend all of your money on "pet games" and "style-games" and "generic sports games" and instead spend it on games that are, as the hardcores call them, "good". "Good" games include things like Smash Bros., Bio Shock, Metroid, Metal Gear Solid, The Legend of Zelda (especially Ocarina of Time and Twilight Princess), and other games that require a lot of skill and time. Just because girls play a certain online game more than males means they're more "hardcore"? Did they take the "genre" of the game into account? No? Then how the crap does this pass as being scientific?
"Our country is not nearly so overrun with the bigoted as it is overrun with the broadminded." -Archbishop Fulton Sheen
If guys spent any more time playing games, they'd not have time left over for their wank sessions. There are only so many hours in the day. Priorities.
Camping on quad since 1996.
so those are girls trash talking, not whiny little 10 year old boys.
I just can't take "girl gamers" seriously because unfortunately, rule #1 of being a girl gamer is to make 100% sure that EVERYBODY knows you are a girl. I'm sorry, but WHY does it matter? It doesn't! Oh wait, except if you beat the guys, they MUST know they were beaten by a girl! And if you get beaten by the guys, hey, it's OK! You're just a girl!
And of COURSE the girl gamers WANT all the added attention from the male misfits whose only hope of interaction with the opposite sex is only going to happen behind the veil of online gaming. You girl gamers say/pretend you don't, but you really do want it, or else you wouldn't follow the aforementioned rule #1 of being a girl gamer. And 100% of girl gamers follow rule #1.
The only girl gamers I can take seriously aren't girl gamers. They're just gamers. They don't need for everyone to know they are girls. They don't need for ME to know they are girls. They just game in a gender neutral fashion. While I sincerely applaud any females who may be gaming in said manner, I doubt that any more than .00001% of female game players are really "just gamers" and not "girl gamers".
This is everquest they surveyed. It's bee known for at lest 5 years a lot of housewifes play EQ and EQ2. EQ has for a long time been the last bastion of hardcore social MMO gaming, like the MMO's of the 90s (yes they did exist). I'm not surprised the people who play a lot on EQ2 are female, the males would have moved on to the shiny new but less social games. I would wager a survey of WoW would be the much less so, along with The Lord of the Rings Online, Lineage II, Age of Conan, Final Fantasy XI, Dark age of Camelot, Aion, etc. With maybe Eve being split a little more evenly for hardcore players.
I think what is going on is that women are behind men in terms of gaming and social acceptance. As I've grown up I've watched video games grow from something for "nerds" in to a mass form of entertainment for everyone. It went from being a thing seen as mostly for kids to something that many adults play.
When I started playing games, as a little kid (I got an NES when I was 6), it made me different from most people. My friends also liked games, but then my friends were geeky like me as you'd expect. It was seen as abnormal to like to play games like this. Most kids didn't want to. It was a source of teasing from other kids that I'd rather play video games than whatever their chosen activity was.
However, by the time I hit university, game system were pretty common. The frat boy types in the dorms had game systems and sat around playing them frequently. It had become an accepted thing more or less. It was surprising to nobody that I played video games, though I certainly played a lot more than most. I had grown up as a gamer and was (and am) "hardcore."
Now games are extremely prevalent. Those of us that have grown up gamers are adults, and many have kids. Those kids are exposed to adults playing games from the start. It is just another part of life, like TV.
So the point of all this is that in like 3 decades of home gaming, it has gone from a small segment of geeks, mostly children, to being acceptable for the larger population. What I think you find though is that the people who started it 2-3 decades ago are much more hardcore. Gaming struck a real chord with them which is why they did it even when it was unpopular. This doesn't change, they still like it. I sure do. I am still a hardcore gamer and imagine I always will be. I rarely watch TV not because I hate TV but because I like playing games and I only have to much free time what with having a job and all that.
BUT it seems that women are behind the curve.
This I also observed. I knew essentially NO girls who played games when I was young, and even in college it was fairly rare. Now I know quite a few. Not nearly as many as I know guys, but it is not so surprising to find a girl playing games.
So, it does seem that women are 5-10 years behind men in terms of social acceptance of games. Thus it comes as no surprise that more of them are hardcore. The more casual types tend to come in more and more as it becomes more acceptable. The people who are interested to some degree, but no more than they are interested in other forms of entertainment. They come on as they feel it is a socially acceptable thing to do. The hardcore types don't care, they like it and will do it regardless of what people think.
Hopefully, the trend of acceptance continues. Hopefully, men and women continue to realize games are another great way of entertaining yourself if you like it, and we reach a point where no matter what your age, gender, etc it is "normal" for you to play games if you like to.
Nerds who play eve are to nerds what nerds are to normal people.
Since you established that they lie. How much can you trust what they put under the gender option?
Isn't there an inherent sample bias in asking only EverQuest players?
Playing time increases with age? - EverQuest is an old game, and it's players tend to drift towards the hardcore. Anyone still playing it must be really into it. Younger players will probably be turned off - either by the older graphics or the fact they could be playing WoW instead.
As for the differences between genders, we have to remember that we're not polling the general population. Women gamers who are still playing EverQuest are slightly more hardcore than male players. This might tell us nothing at all about women in general. In fact, I'd bet these stats aren't exactly representative of normal people, or even necessarily "normal" hardcore gamers.
I'm sure I could go on, but there must be some stats nerds who can go to town on this sort of headline...
Joseph Farthing
http://josephfarthing.com
The summary and article misspelled "evercrack" ;)
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
Am I the only one that thinks 29 (or even 25) hours per week spent on an online game is grossly excessive?
The pretty ones are out scoring guys, so the ugly ones might as well score some gold at home ;)
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
My wife has been playing all night since I got home from work. She is more hardcore than me. Sometimes I feel complete overload. Computers and code all day at work, games at night. A wife who plays. Life in a tiny city apartment. Where is reality anymore? Sometimes I prefer drinking or just listening to music.
Don't hit on me you silly boys!
GRRL GAMERS FOR EVER XD
http://check.animeblogger.net/2008/12/
Its simple and obvious
There are many societal / peer pressures against being a gamer (for good or bad, I'm not trying into that debate). These pressures are multipled many times for girls.
Hence only the *really* obsessed girls end up saying 'eff it' and gaming away.,
QED
side note: I once dated a gamer chick, ended amicably, but I always suspected she was really a lesbian
Don't know about all that, but when the girl's get into something, they really get into something! My missus, nice as pie, would say boo to a goose, works as a teacher, but when the sun goes down and the kids have been packed off to bed, she lets loose on Sauerbraten FPS and she's like a banshee, possesed by some evil force! She never plays while the kids are around, glad too, they wouldn't recognize mummy when she's in full-on killing-spree, deathmatch mode! I tried playing her once and got my ass whipped for 45 mins solid. Something to do with women having far greater small motor skills, ideal for gaming!
Maybe I'd have a character who doesn't have to run around scantily clad with huge breasts. These are things we do complain about (and are reasons some of my other female friends won't start playing).
I mentioned earlier in this thread that my wife is a gamer. She likes playing games using sexy looking female avatars. You can complain that you don't like your characters sexualized, but you shouldn't assume that women in general are put off by it. That would be inaccurate as me claiming that all women like sexualized avatars simply because my wife likes them.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
More like bored middle aged housewife gamer.
That's what I don't understand. I mean a large number of games aren't marketed to any major extent. They send out copies to be reviewed and maybe buy some banner ads, but they don't do TV spots or anything. Of those that are marketed in a larger fashion, most seem to be marketed as, well, games. There isn't a gender bias I can see. It is just "Here is a game where you can do X. Look at the pretty graphics. Buy it."
I guess I don't see what is needed here. Do women need things specifically targeted at them? Must the ad say "Hey ladies, this is a game for you,"? That doesn't seem to be useful because it only acts to segregate. It says "You girls aren't good enough for most games, here's a special one for you." To me it seems that the message needs to be that games are for everyone, all games. Your gender doesn't determine what you can do for fun.
I'm honestly interested in what you think they need to do to market to women. What about current game marketing fails? What sort of thing is needed to attract women?
Interestingly, however, the female gamers not only tended to log more time online (29 hours per week versus 25 for the males), but were also more likely to lie about how much they really play."
Q: How much time do you spend playing per week?
:\
A: About 29 hours.
Q: Really?
A: No.
have harder time than men giving up alcohol too.
Well, I think everyone has missed the underlying theme here... It's obviously stating that female gamers are slightly less efficient than male counterparts resulting in a need to spend approximately 16% more time to acquire the same level of 1337ness.
My Fiancee and I both play Warcraft and she spends about twice as much time on it as I do. She has even been known to be "sick" and call into work to play. I have asked her several times about her playing time and she drastically understates how much she plays. I am not sure if she is intentionally fudging the numbers or if she does not realize how much she plays. However I feel blessed for having found a gamer future wife so I know she will not nag at me for "playing that stupid game again."
"The two most abundant elements in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity." -Harlan Ellison
You could role a male character? After all, as a male I am forced to run around in bulky all concealing armor with muscles that would have me collapse under my own weight.
And as for marketing, if you look at ads in magazines aimed at females, you see the same if not more skin then in lad's mags. Hell, some got more nudity on the cover then playboy.
A box like for Mass Effect with a male hero in all the ads (despite the fact that you can play a female) who is that aimed at?
I think giving the results (I see quite a few female gamers) that the marketing is actually working pretty well. The women who want to game are already gaming despite of everything. The women who don't, don't want to.
Yes, MMO's have the big boobies, but if you can focus for a second beyond the jigglies, then you see that 1 set of boobs is often accompanied by 2-3 sets of muscles. Look at the trailer for WoW (original) and count the females. Count the females showing cleavage in the Dragon Age trailer vs male muscle build few male gamers possess.
And if marketing were to focus more on girls, then would that not drive others away? How exactly would a gender neutral let alone a female friendly ad for a game look like? And wouldn't it drive the male audience away? Trading one customer for another is not what marketing is about.
Remember, if you didn't like the marketing for a product and bought it anyway, then they lost nothing. The only way to stop sexist ads is top boycott the products. And I think they will then just say "oh see, no girls buy games, so why should we aim for them as an audience".
Rock Hard Place
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
That's why they have more time logged. I've dated both gaming, and nongaming types of females. Non gamers, moot point... Gamer girls = constant questions, tons of manipulative gameplay when they're logged in, with anyone willing to make their gaming experience easier. And if nobody is there to do it, they whine and take it out on you... :D
So yes, I could see this article being completely true, females spend more time in the game, because it takes them longer to do what guys achieve in less time.
Not being sexist, but you have to consider WHAT is happening, in that time they're logged in, not that more = better.
That's like saying
Girls are more hardcore at $ex because they 'do it' longer.
Well, is that considering hookers? :)
LOL you can't even read correctly, so how about you shut the fuck up?
Commiting more time to something does not mean "they're better". I believe you misread the article? It says "Girl Gamers More Hardcore Than Guys" Notice there is no question mark... And above all else, I have to agree with someone else that says "Where's the science?" Given it's coming from a "Scientific American" reporting source.... But oh wait, it's written by a girl... Hmmm maybe in her office, because she's put more time into "writing", she is more of a "hardcore writer" than the other people there. Who needs science anyways right... ;)
How could they tell the females were lying about the amount of time they were playing? Were their mouths moving?
...my wife went nuts on Fallout3 and Oblivion. probably logged 200plus hours between the two.
Get Virtual.
The only thing is when they are not raiding or questing they seen to like to chat a lot in pst. Also, a lot more verbal on vent than most males. I think it has more of a social aspect to female players. For the most part, they are good players so meh..