Gamers In The UK - Statistical Revelations

Alice's Wonderland blog is a daily read, and today she's got a weighty piece of research for us to check out. Gamers in the UK - Digital Play, Digital Lifestyles is research into the gaming habits of 3,442 citizens of the United Kingdom. Results are broken down by age category, with some interesting revelations in nearly every group. From the paper: "At 82%, gamers still form a clear majority of 16-24 year olds. 81% are 'heavy' gamers playing at least once a week, which may explain why the majority placed videogaming second in their preferred entertainment list (watching TV now coming in first). There are also more 'medium' gamers (14%) playing only a few times a month, than the two previous groups. This age group is also the one with the lowest proportion of female gamers at 44% - is this an indication that the choice of games targeted at this group is less appealing to females?"

100% of 6-10 year olds play games?

[Orange Goblin]

Every single 6-10 year old? Yeah, right.

Re:100% of 6-10 year olds play games?

[faloi]

Actually... Given the way they defined gamer (anybody that has played any sort of video game on any platform at all in the last six months), it's a safe bet that everybody in that age range qualifies. After all, they might be counting the games kids play in schools to help with learning (dunno how common those are in the UK). Besides, all these statistics end up with some level of skew based on sample size.

Holy crap, my mom's a heavy gamer.

[Sage Gaspar]

Wow. They had a bunch of categories, but they made a poor decision about where to draw the "heavy" line. Let's see who's a heavy gamer:

My mom, who works twelve hour hospital shifts and hasn't touched a console since pong, plays a puzzle game on her computer a little bit every day.

I spend half my waking life on the computer playing some game or another.

My roommate spends about as much time as me on MMOs.

My friend down the hall picks up an RTS for an hour or two every week.

My sister whips out her cell phone at least once a week for some of those little puzzle things.

My uncle boots up a DOS space shooter for an hour or two every week.

Heavy usage should be more than once a week, and it'd be better based on raw hours than number of times. Someone screwing around with solitaire a couple times a week is different from someone devoting entire weekends to MMOs.