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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."
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.
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.
:). I normally get up at 7 on the weekends, she's up by 5:30. Sometimes I ask her to wake me up at 6 so I can get an hour of gaming in, and she has no problem doing that.
Now that I got that out of my system... my wife (a non-gamer) will wake me at 6 AM for a variety of reasons, occasionally for a very nice reason
Honestly, I think it's healthy for me that my wife is a non-gamer... because otherwise I'd game far too much. I think it'd be too easy to fall into a routine of hours of gaming nightly if she was going to game along with me (with kids and studying and other hobbies, 2-3 hours a week is my limit).
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
I don't know that I buy that. I've frequently heard that as an issue but is it really? I see two major flaws with that argument:
1) Many, MANY games don't feature oversexualized women. You have games like Civ 4 or Need for Speed that don't really feature humans in any significant way. They are based around other things. Also, other games feature fully customizable characters. This is rather popular lately. YOU control how your protagonist looks, including gender. Games like Oblivion where you can be what you want to be. Still other games have women as just more characters. Mass Effect is a good example. The protagonist can be either gender, and in both cases is a strong, capable soldier (as that is the story) and other women and men on your team are likewise. So it seems that while there are some games that feature women only as sex objects, there are tons that don't.
2) Have you looked at men in games? They get the same treatment. I look at myself, being pale, a bit thick around the midsection, wearing glasses and I see few male game heroes anything like me. Generally they are extremely muscular, have rugged good looks, and often as not favour clothes to show that off. They are not designed to say "This could be you!"
So I'm really not sure I buy this argument. If that was the issue the solution would seem to be to just not buy games like that and buy the ones not like that. However the claim seems to be that because there are some games like that, women are put off by all games. Well there are some TV and movies like that, yet women are clearly not put off by TV and movies.
I think the issue is more simply making games to appeal to everyone, not trying to make games of men or women, but also for society as a whole to accept gaming as a more acceptable form of entertainment for women. Now by that I don't mean just men deciding they are ok with it, I mean women have to as well. I think a large part of the problem is that women have this idea that being a gamer isn't socially acceptable. That is the sort of thing they must get over themselves, nobody can really do anything about it.
Show me a mix of character types, not just one skinny, large breasted woman wearing little more than underwear. (One game I will never look at, and know virtually nothing about because of this is Evony).
Advertise the social/team aspect more. I believe someone earlier in the discussion mentioned they would like to see a study in time vs progression in male vs female players. It is possible that women play for different reasons. I personally see no need to be the first/strongest in the game world, but would rather have fun playing with others. I am not saying this differentiation is clear cut across the gender line.
And my pipe dream is to be able to play a game like Halo and not get hit on or screamed at because I'm a girl on voice chat. I don't go on there to hit on guys or scream at others, why should I have to deal with that? I won't even wear a headset anymore. I'm not sure how developers or marketers would be able to address this issue, but it does hamper my enjoyment of some games. I am well aware that I am not the voice of every girl gamer out there (nor am I necessarily even consistent in my own views of games since I quite enjoy DOA beach volley ball) Big boobs aren't always a deal breaker, but lets have some choice?