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64% of Online Gamers Are Female

Posted by Zonk on Sun Oct 08, 2006 03:35 AM
from the good-news-everyone dept.
Entertainment Games
According to a report discussed on 1up, a new study by the Nielsen folks finds that more than half of the 117 Million U.S. online gamers are women. From the article: "The study's announcement release doesn't break down what games they're playing, though we expect sites like pogo.com, which feature a multitude of Flash-based games are rather high on the list. Even more surprising is how many older gamers are playing. While the teenage market dominates in numbers, the study says more than 15 million gamers, about 8%, are actually at least 45 years old."
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[+] Study Claims Men Play Female Avatars to 'Win' 266 comments
mytrip writes to mention a News.com article about the rationale behind male players playing female avatars in online games. The article says that, while some players are probably exploring 'gender roles, many just want free stuff. From the article: "Kathryn Wright, WomenGamers's consulting psychologist, earlier this decade found that 60 percent of male players who don female avatars, or on-screen personas, do it to gain an advantage in game play. An enthusiast with the online handle Jackpot649 nailed the zeitgeist in his response to the About.com query: 'I'm a guy, but if I gotta look at an avatar all day, I'd sooner look at a female avatar. Plus, people give you more free stuff.'"
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  • well... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Loconut1389 (455297) on Sunday October 08 2006, @03:37AM (#16353533)
    well, about 20% of those -say- they're women...

    • Re:well... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by dattaway (3088) on Sunday October 08 2006, @03:42AM (#16353553) Homepage
      My wife plays on pogo.com. Simple games, cute sound effects and characters, and a chat window. And they talk about kids and family. That's something I don't hear horny teenage boys talk about, so yes, they are mostly females.

    • Re:well... (Score:5, Funny)

      by OnyxIR (456300) on Sunday October 08 2006, @04:10AM (#16353633)
      My time on IRC has taught me a valuable lesson... On the Internet, all the men are men, all the women are men, and all the children are FBI agents.

      Dont believe the hype!

    • And.. (Score:5, Funny)

      by Channard (693317) on Sunday October 08 2006, @05:33AM (#16353857) Journal
      .. 100% of those 20% followed their survey reply with 'r U lesbAin? my PuSSy is hott 4u. wAnna cYber?'

  • Is this really true? (Score:5, Funny)

    by bangenge (514660) on Sunday October 08 2006, @03:40AM (#16353547)
    I think they just counted female avatars.

  • Yeah right. (Score:3, Funny)

    by SageLikeFool (547462) on Sunday October 08 2006, @03:47AM (#16353559)
    Just because 64% of the characters are female doesn't mean the people playing them are in real life. Like the old joke about IRC goes - The men are men, the women are men, and the children are FBI agents.

  • I bet it's true (Score:5, Informative)

    by joe 155 (937621) on Sunday October 08 2006, @03:48AM (#16353565) Journal
    In my house it's my girlfriend who plays games online the majority of the time. I hardly play online at all, but when I do it's on my DS or maybe a FPS; more indepth "proper" games (if there is such a thing). My girlfriend likes to play on gamerival on the simple little flash games where you just have to do very simple little word puzzles or arranging blocks.

    So it is believable, but it might not be how you think - I doubt they are running round fragging everyone they see, or playing WoW (although some might...)

  • Gamers? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by amirl (813941) <amir...levin@@@gmail...com> on Sunday October 08 2006, @03:49AM (#16353567)
    I guess they consider solitaire.
    • Insightful? Some mod *both* missed the joke and thought they might have done that (no: they only judged from online games).

  • 90% of gaming girls are guys playing girls (Score:5, Interesting)

    by RubberDogBone (851604) * on Sunday October 08 2006, @03:50AM (#16353569)
    Dunno about everybody else but most of the girls I meet in chatrooms and online games are guys playing as girls. Some of the rest are Dateline plants trolling for men, but that's not my thing.

    Anyway, what's the Second Life slang for guys playing as girls? Gurlz or something?

    Many actual Real Life(TM) girls play as male game characters so they won't get hit on or bothered.

    I play mail and female characters in SL. The guy character gets left alone except by sex workers who want to sell him their wares. He's much like the real me and fairly boring to game with.

    The girl character, who is not at all like me, has an incredibly active social thing going on and has accumulated dozens of friends without even trying. She's fun to play because she's so different from me. But she does get hit on all the time just because she appears to be female. It's common for complete strangers to walk up and make all sorts of rather forward comments.

    My guy character gets none of that.

    I have a new appreciation for some of the hassle girls go through.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by EotB (964562)
      Being in New Zealand and playing a Half-Life mod called Natural Selection at clan level showed me what a large and tight-knit community can be behind an online game. I had met about half of the people that I played with regularly in real life, and the rest I had spent a lot of time talking to over voice comms. Out of perhaps 60 people, 2 of them were women. Even if FPS' are biased towards male players, thats still pretty indicative of any non-MMO games that I've played.
    • I've found the fact you can change your gender by dropping a new body in from your inventory to be quite worrying.

    • Re:90% of gaming girls are guys playing girls (Score:5, Insightful)

      by syousef (465911) on Sunday October 08 2006, @07:37AM (#16354213) Journal
      I have a new appreciation for some of the hassle girls go through.

      Fuck this pseudo sensative snag bullshit. It doesn't matter to me now as I'm no longer single and failing one of us dieing I can see this relationship lasting. But oh to have had such hassles! Girls get lots of offers - many not very good ones, but some good - without having to work for it. Guys have to work very hard and often the girls go for good looking fucktards that treat them like dirt. (Yep men do this too - go for the bimbo that treats them like shit, but not as often, and the bottom line is it's much easier for a female to find a suitable partner, and they usually get a wide selection)

      So girls get hit on. If the guy's unpleasant how hard is it to say "fuck off and leave me alone you small dicked loser". Many guys will get the hint if dropped on them like a sledgehammer. There might be a little bit of unpleasantness back but few stalk based on one conversation. If a girl's in an environment where it goes beyond a few lewd comments she should get out. Only when that isn't possible is there a real problem. But there's a world of difference between being hit on and being assaulted.

      • If a girl's in an environment where it goes beyond a few lewd comments she should get out.

        Doesn't seem fair if the environment in question is, for example, where she works. Maybe it's just me, though.

        • Girls often (myself included) want to just "be" without having to worry about what to wear or having to leave someplace where we want to be just to avoid a situation that we didn't even start.

          We live in a pretty free society. You have the right to wear anything you want, subject to decency laws of the area/society of course. As soon as you step out into public, you should realise that the freedom to wear what you want, also has consequences. If you wear short skirts, you're going to get hit on, and most

            • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

              by deek (22697)

              The danger comes in when there are conflicting socially acceptable standards. For example, in Australian in recent years we had a spate of gang rapes in Sydney by a group of Lebanese muslims who were yanking anglo-saxon girls off the street because 'white girls are sluts and are asking for it'.

              In their little segment of society, women are expected to be covered with a veil from head to foot when in public or they are being deliberately provocative. It is unreasonable in their eyes for men to be expected to

    • It's a Nielsen survey. They don't just pull up a list of screen names and count how many appear to be female. The data is collected through a questionaire. It's still possible that people lie (as with any survey), but since the survey is not directly connected to online personnas, there's no reason for somebody to lie on the questoinairre even if they do play as a female for extra attention.
  • Where ever there is a questionable statistic, Slashdot is right behind it.


    PS. Isn't the higher number of male gamers one of the reasons people claim males are the majority in the IT industry?

    • Nope. The IT industry is a lot older than online gaming and it has *always* been male dominated.

      I've met precisely 1 female programmer in my life.. couldn't predict the percentage on that but it's 1%.

  • Definition Needed (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Jekler (626699) on Sunday October 08 2006, @04:32AM (#16353677)
    It really depends on how you define the term "gamer". To many people, a "gamer" isn't just someone who happens to play games at some arbitrary point in their free time, it's someone whose primary hobby is playing games. When they're not working, studying, or otherwise busy, they're reading about games, playing games, or otherwise involved in game-related activities (e.g. posting on game message boards, designing characters, planning on the next game to buy, etc.). I know a lot of women who play games, but I wouldn't call them gamers. Even though they play games, when they're not playing games they don't immerse themselves in game-related activities, they have a distinct separation between game playing and the rest of their life.
  • Real life vs Internet [gprime.net]

    fakegirl:Soo big boy, I..
    Red:You're not a girl!
    fakegirl:What! Ofcourse I am!
    Red:A REAL girl?
    bystander:Who's a girl?
    bystander:I like girls!
    Red:Shut up you!
    fakegirl:Yes, I am really a girl.. tee hee hee

  • How to conduct this study! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by eebra82 (907996) on Sunday October 08 2006, @05:01AM (#16353765) Homepage
    I have a vague idea about how they conducted this study.

    1) www.mirc.com
    2) install
    3) /s irc.efnet.org
    4) /j world-of-warcraft
    5) /say So how many of you guys are women?
    6) count the results

    Seriously, though. I don't doubt these results at all, but I would love to see the figures of hours spent per week and compare it between the sexes. The results would surely favor men to be the biggest users.

    So does anyone know how many female gamers we have in a game like World of Warcraft? I'm sure the numbers stated above are taken from flash based games and alike.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Pharmboy (216950)
      Would have been better if they actually LINKED to the study, instead of this lame 4 paragraph story that provided almost no more info than the /. summary.

      Pretty weak stuff to be on the front page of /. if you substantiate it with more data.
  • 64% of online gamers play Hello Kitty Island Adventure. Coincidence?
    • 64% of online gamers play Hello Kitty Island Adventure. Coincidence?

      Go buy World of Warcraft, install it on your computer, and join the online sensation before we all murder you.
  • Women playing online games at a greater rate than men makes sense to me. Every woman I've known, no matter how much she avoids video games in general, will play Tetris for hours on end. The flash puzzle games all over the web are exactly what women like to play. While men may be playing online, they're sticking to MMORPGs, FPS and RTS. And for the other figure mentioned: 8% of gamers being 45+ doesn't seem that outlandish to me. The first video games came out in the early 70's. A 45 year old today would ha
  • I knew i was spending to much time away from my pc ...

  • They're all playing Sudoku (Score:3, Informative)

    by tomhath (637240) on Sunday October 08 2006, @06:19AM (#16353969)
    The study isn't about RPG players; it includes games like crossword puzzles, Boggle, and Sudoku. So I believe the 64% number.

  • Not so bad (Score:3, Funny)

    by Digital Vomit (891734) on Sunday October 08 2006, @08:00AM (#16354313) Homepage Journal

    Okay, so you're saying that there's a 36% percent chance that the hot female night elf I cybered with last night was really a man?

    "With a name like 'Cryinggam', I figured she just needed a little comforting!"

  • On WoW, most sexilly claded female dark elves characters had (teenage) masculine voices whenever we got them on teamspeak ...
  • Given that the U.S. is such a major center of power on the Earth's surface, attempting to dictate reality for much of the globe, doesn't it alarm anybody that more than a third of its population lives such a large portion of their waking hours in deliberately false realities?

    --Which doesn't necessarily say much for everybody who isn't a gamer, given that something like 95% of the population are also TV addicts.

    Dream on.


    -FL

  • "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog [python.org]." - P. Steiner

  • Online gaming not gaming in general (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Aceticon (140883) on Sunday October 08 2006, @08:18AM (#16354385)
    Jokes about female avatars being all men aside, it's quite possible that this result is true. However this is only for online gaming, not gaming in general.

    Given that on average women tend to be more adept of social activities than men (at least that's my experience), it isn't surprising at all that women go for games where they are in contact with other people.

    In my long experience with online RPGs (from MUDs all the way to WoW and Guild Wars), women (as in confirmed women ;)) would spend a lot more time chatting than men (which tended more often to go exploring and slaying monsters).

    Online gaming is usually more appropriated to socializing (pretty much the only exception being FPSs and RTSs) than offline gaming (unless you invite your buddies over for a session of drinking and blasting each other out with RPGs ;))

  • If your mother's anyhting like mine... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by svunt (916464) on Sunday October 08 2006, @08:56AM (#16354561) Homepage Journal
    Then Yahoo! Games and pogo.com are the only things stopping her from harrassing you for yet another crack for yet another Mah-Jong game.
  • This should be tagged FUD. Its another useless study that tells us nothing. As its been pointed out repeatedly: No mention of hours played, games played, etc. The article even mentions that. From the article:

    The study's announcement release doesn't break down what games they're playing, though we expect sites like pogo.com, which feature a multitude of Flash-based, more simplistic games, are rather high on the list. Even more surprising is how many older gamers are playing. While the teenage market dominate

  • One-girl Case Study (Score:3, Interesting)

    by TerranFury (726743) on Sunday October 08 2006, @12:25PM (#16355859)

    I once knew a girl who spent tons of time playing.... Runescape. I tried it at her suggestion and decided that it was the most mind-numbingly boring thing I'd ever attempted. So why did she play?

    "She was away from home, didn't know too many people, and probably used it as a social outlet." The preceding sentence is likely true, but it's also a gross oversimplification. It is not as though she had any respect for the people she interacted with in the MMO world: She said they were all "idiot teenagers." But then, this is a girl who freely admitted that many of her real-life 'friends' were people who were younger than she was or who she considered not to be terribly intelligent: She liked to surround herself with idiots so that she looked better to herself by comparison. Runescape was a convenient idiot-zoo for her.

    • 90% of Online Gamers Are Fat Hairy Mail Truckers Pretending To Be Teenage Girls

      Yes, they're gross-looking postal workers, but are they chicks or dudes?

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