No offense, but wasn’t the gamer stereotype debunked by like 10+ different studies in the last 5 years?

This is about as shocking as the “OMGz GuRLz PLAY VEDAEO GAEMS!” revelation, but every couple of months someone feels they need to put a study out on this subject.

I didn’t conduct the survey so no offense taken but as I said “none of it is eyebrow-raising”.  Instead of financing new studies they should research the research - save themselves time and money.

“Perhaps in support of this the survey revealed an unusually high level of bisexuality among the women who took part in the study - over five times higher than the general population.”  <—From the article.  I suspect most of the people who checked “female” on the gender question either thought it was funny or were referring to their character.

I’m not sure.. if it was any other game, I would be more skeptical.

Why is it hard to believe 40% of everquest gamers are female?  I probably would have felt the same way before I started playing WoW, but not any more.  I read the % of females playing mmo games is higher than any other type of game.  A good number of the women playing are on during the day after they take their kids to school and get everything done around the house they need to.  Almost half the people in my WoW guild were females in their 30s-40s, and a lot of them played with their husbands/boyfriends.

I don’t doubt that MMOs attract more female players than other genres (apart from web puzzles etc) but it’s not 40% females.  Surveys that we’ve run on this site and worldofwar.net suggest that too. Yes, not all the people who play those games come to the site but a damn sight more than 2,400 of each community do and have gone on to complete the surveys and we’re lucky if the % of females hits 5%.  That could suggest that both sites appeal to men more than women, that more men than women use community sites anyway but even allowing for that it wouldn’t put it at 40% of the population being female.

I go to Blizzcon each year and was at WWI and again, maybe 5% of attendees were female and a few of the couples I met the guys had brought their GFs along for company with a promise to do some shopping/sight seeing on the days following the events, so I’m sure that wasn’t an uncommon reason for some of the small number of women being there. 40%, not on your nellie.

Sips coke and takes bite of pizza. Someone should do a survey like this for the ARPG and FPS genres aswell. Would like to see the statistics on thoses.

We have to keep in mind the selection pool was composed of gamers who like to spend time in a fantasy world roleplaying themselves as someone else. So maybe there is a higher percentage of ‘lyers’ as subjects. I think a lot of people would not have a problem with lying, even though their personal information is not going to be linked to them. Just my opinion.

I also disagree with Elly in the article. 40% female sounds about right to me. *shrug* Just make sure you don’t make the mistake of assuming all people are HARDCORE gamers though. In that case, you may still find more male players there, although that’s changing too.

This is all just part of an old stereotype, as old as “geeks are overweight and socially inept”. It’s about time we drop it. The most amazing geeks I’ve met have been socially skilled and targets of envy (since they both had that and the intelligence, and often the looks too), from my experience and high exposure to geeks.

Maybe EQ gamers aren’t healthier though, that sounds a bit odd. What I do believe is that there isn’t a major statistical significance in terms of lifestyle though. Why should a gamer not care about his/her body? We’re all humans, we’re all influenced by society. It’s just that some game more than watch TV or movies. I don’t see that as leading to a worse lifestyle in general.

Good point Stillman, that’s one thing that could have happened in this survey to skew the female % figure.  People do strange things.