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."

Crazy chicks

[TiggertheMad]

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.

Maybe they'll start marketing to females?

[dylannika]

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...

Skip the article; read the actual report

[dirkdodgers]

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 [dmitriwilliams.com]

- The sample was self-selecting. The survey was offered to all players logged in during the sampling window.
- Self-reported gender: 80.22% male, 19.72% female, .06% declined
- 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!

REJECTED!!!

[TiggertheMad]

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

Re:How do I bad studied

[dirkdodgers]

This is true. The average player in this sample played 27 hours a week.

That's 3-4 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Re:Misleading headline

[perlchild]

According to TFA, they considered hardcore someone who played more than 30 hours a week and answered "I don't plan to quit". Males were less hardcore on the second criterion IIRC.

Re:Crazy chicks

[phoenix321]

It's not supply and demand, it's the genes :)

I once read that a ram will not attempt mate more than a couple of times with one ewe. The only way to make him mate again is to introduce an ewe B, which will yield an, err, prompt reaction. If ewe A and ewe B stay present, he will alternate between them, with decreasing frequency, but never actually go on mating strike again.

But then there's some fish, where the female will not mate until presented with at least two male specimen to choose from.

In terms familiar to all ye pirates: most species' males have SuperSeeding enabled by default and teh m0nogamy is a lie.