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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.
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.
And don't forget how many nerds in their moms basement are playing a female WoW character and think they're pretty.
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...
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
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 :)
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"
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.
No, no girls play RPGs... but a lot of 30-something stay at home mom/housewives whose children are now off to school during the day and are bored play them obsessively.
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 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!
When I was in high school, we took part in a mandatory survey. It ranged through sex, drugs, and alcohol. I answered honestly, but I was talking to people afterwards that blatantly lied. Well, unless they really believed how many alcoholic drug addicted whores we had in school (no, we didn't have many). Surveys are as honest as the people taking the results would like to believe.
I think about that every time there is a story on the news about how young girls are having sex with multiple partners, and how wide spread drug use is among high school students. None of them care what they said on an anonymous survey.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
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?"
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.
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.
Welcome to the internet. Where men are men, women are men and children are FBI agents.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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.
Well, maybe they realized that they'll spend 40+ hours a week staring at their character's buttocks. Be honest, if it was you, would it be a male Tauren or a female Elf?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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?
When I was in high school, we took part in a mandatory survey. It ranged through sex, drugs, and alcohol. I answered honestly, but I was talking to people afterwards that blatantly lied. Well, unless they really believed how many alcoholic drug addicted whores we had in school (no, we didn't have many). Surveys are as honest as the people taking the results would like to believe.
I think about that every time there is a story on the news about how young girls are having sex with multiple partners, and how wide spread drug use is among high school students. None of them care what they said on an anonymous survey.
Ya I remember giving us those surveys too.
I was a good kid in high school, didn't drink, smoke, party, or get laid (too busy playing Nintendo. 8bit). I told them I drank on a daily basis, had rampant unprotected sex, stole stuff when I felt like it, and smoked like a chimney... in addition to my cocaine and heroin habit. After class I talked with my other geeky friends (we all hated drugs because Nancy Reagan told us to, and knew that smokers were the Devil) and they had all done the same thing. The next day most of the people I knew who were "good" and "clean" kids admitted to lying and saying they did some kind of drug, or were sexually active when not, etc. None of it was arranged, but when we had the teachers tell us a dozen times how it was all confidential 100% we went to town. Turns out most of the "bad" kids, actually lied and played down their "bad" behavior... I personally think because they were more street-savvy & knew better than to trust a teacher who said something was confidential (often confidential just means they won't tell anyone except your parents, the cops, the other teachers, etc.)
Two months later there was an emergency school board meeting. The local media was in an uproar. A week or two after the meeting the Superintendent came to each class, handed out slips of paper with a couple boxes on it. It read "On the last survey, how honest were you?" We then had a few options that we could check one or more of along the lines of "Completely honest, Small exaggerations, Didn't admit to everything, Mostly lied, etc.". After they tallied the results, 70-something % indicated they lied about pretty much everything, and less than 5% said they were totally honest, and 99% admitted to "slight" exaggerations or omissions.
So a week before the end of the year they gave us another survey, pretty much the same as the first one but re-worded, but this time each had a "tracking number" on it, and when we finished we got the same slip about how honest we were, also with a tracking number. This time the results were that nobody ever had sex (including the girls that were pregnant or already had kids), always used protection, never did any drugs, didn't smoke (including the kids that smoked WITH the teachers out back) etc. And 99% reported being 100% honest on the survey.
Final analysis: Kids will lie like hell just to mess with you when they think there are no repercussions... but will lie even harder to avoid punishment if they think there could be repercussions.
Teenage rebellion and surveys don't mix. :)
My honest good answers were honest. Well, except for the sex. ;) I had plenty of that in high school. And the Nintendo was involved. A bunch of people come over to play, and I'd sneak away with the prettiest girl, and do everything we were told not to. :) "No mom, we were playing Nintendo all night". :)
All the real partying came later, when I could actually afford it, because I had a real job. There's a good reason when I take the purity test, I always score the least pure in any group that takes it, unless they lie. The purity test becomes a "Damn, I missed that one.", and again take the prettiest girl(s) into the next room to lower my score a little more. Well, sometimes not into the next room any more. I gave up being shy when my score dropped below 50%, which also helped on the "have you had sex with people watching" type of questions. :) Still, I'll never accomplish a true 0%, because animals, kids, gay stuff, and dead people aren't something I'd be willing to do. The rest of it? Why not? :)
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
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.
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
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!
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?
I always was a female blood elf, to be honest :)
And to add to that, even that only with a relevant name made some players always msg and ask if I was a girl.. Kind of understood girl gamers pain.
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.
Almost sounds like you are in a feedback-loop with the purity test. How low can you go. ;-)
New things are always on the horizon
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? :)
It's a fun exercise. I'll let you know if I my store ever stagnates. :)
It's not a race to get to the bottom though, I take pleasure in every new experience. Well, except some of the BDSM stuff. Some of that hurts. It's a lot easier to give than receive there. At least I got rid of some of the ickier ones when I was young, like "have you had sex with a fat chick?" :) No more fat chicks for me. :)
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
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... ;)
From your comment, I already know your score. 99% pure. You only scored on "seen a dirty magazine" and the masturbation questions.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
...my wife went nuts on Fallout3 and Oblivion. probably logged 200plus hours between the two.
Get Virtual.