Men: Now a Minority in PC Gaming.

[Floppertje]

I'm going to have to agree with most people here that more specifics are needed. After all, what the discussion is about is not 'do people play games' but 'are people part of gaming culture', so if you want to conduct a study to contribute to that discussion, THAT is what you should be measuring. There's nothing wrong with playing farmville, bejeweled or wordfeud, but if you want to know what percentage of people who identify as gamers are women and you measure that by asking 'have you played a game in the last 6 months', your study is poorly operationalized.
Why not do a bunch of case studies? Pick a couple of titles, do surveys amongst the people playing it and see what percentage of them is female. Yeah, it doesn't say anything about gaming as a whole, but since no-one can agree on what that is in the first place I hardly think it matters.

P.S.: this is not me yelling at social scientists for doing agenda studies (like some people here...), I don't even think there's anythign wrong with scientists wanting their studies to do some good (whatever they think that is), I just want it to be good science.

 

[prpshrt]

Was in a world event for GW2 and had to use team speak to listen to instructions. Most of the people speaking on there were women so not very surprised. Hooray PC gaming!

 

[Napoleon_XIX]

while surely true for farmville, i dare anyone to boot up red orchestra or wargame:RD for example and come up with more than two females players after a day of looking.

This ^

Or Battlefield, or Endless Legend, or Starcraft II, or Team Fortress 2, or Dota 2 or hell even Dragon Age... OR literally any actual videogame-- so, strike off the apps, bejeweleds, farmvilles and so on.

Search each player base in each game for a day and turn up anything like 50/50.

Actually, let me save you some time with the conclusion you'd spend a day reaching: it's nowhere near 50/50. It is a figure so far away from the right ballpark that the people who live there don't even know where the right ballpark is.

You might be interested in http://www.joystiq.com/2014/10/27/report-men-play-more-mmos-fpses-women-rule-mobile-rpg/ ~1/2 of RPG payers are women.

But of course that doesn't matter, since one can always redefine a 'proper game' to be those primarily played by males. For example, I could claim that video games are not 'proper games': most video games do not have the same player-facing complexity as, say, D&D. Thus, I can claim that video gamers are merely 'casual', and shouldn;t be counted as 'real' gamers.

 

[Revolutionary]

I'm sorry I just don't think that Farmville counts as a PC game. Some of the methods and choices of this survey are questionable.

 

[Candidus]

while surely true for farmville, i dare anyone to boot up red orchestra or wargame:RD for example and come up with more than two females players after a day of looking.

This ^

Or Battlefield, or Endless Legend, or Starcraft II, or Team Fortress 2, or Dota 2 or hell even Dragon Age... OR literally any actual videogame-- so, strike off the apps, bejeweleds, farmvilles and so on.

Search each player base in each game for a day and turn up anything like 50/50.

Actually, let me save you some time with the conclusion you'd spend a day reaching: it's nowhere near 50/50. It is a figure so far away from the right ballpark that the people who live there don't even know where the right ballpark is.

You might be interested in http://www.joystiq.com/2014/10/27/report-men-play-more-mmos-fpses-women-rule-mobile-rpg/ ~1/2 of RPG payers are women.

But of course that doesn't matter, since one can always redefine a 'proper game' to be those primarily played by males. For example, I could claim that video games are not 'proper games': most video games do not have the same player-facing complexity as, say, D&D. Thus, I can claim that video gamers are merely 'casual', and shouldn;t be counted as 'real' gamers.

I won't be changing the goalposts. They're set firmly where they are: phone games, most tablet apps and facebook games aren't videogames. They're electronic social or casual games. They have more in common with Monopoly and similar boardgames than anything else.

That other study, going through its methodology, also includes mobile games and social games. Call me again when a study finds that half of all gamers in any genre are female without including mobile, social, app or facebook whatsoever.

 

[Riotguards]

so with the source i found that it links to 3 different articles (and one direct link to a survey)

the first link (http://www.joystiq.com/2014/10/27/report-men-play-more-mmos-fpses-women-rule-mobile-rpg/)

while it gives a number there is no clear indication as to how many people were tested (a minimal of 1000 people out of 100 million is a very small number regardless)

PC all (including social), is a very unreliable study, why include all games including social (bejewelled, facebook games, etc) and since the methodology doesn't imply anything that suggests a required amount of time of playing games then it could include people like my mum (who play's solitaire)

furthermore the the way they collected the data is not present (or i never saw it) so with that in mind we can assume hey might have asked 500 men and 500 females, or 1000 gamers of slip gender gap

the DATA it is acquired from however is very sketch and i question how they got it, to look at the survey you have to invest $2000 (and i'm not going to bother looking at the sample since it'll be missing some key points and required me to sign up, etc)

the DATA comes from a survey done on MMO's which while it is a huge market does not mean the entire market and there are huge gaps between male and female players on specific genre, etc


so overall this first link is a dud, poor research on top of questionable research material


http://www.mcvuk.com/news/read/more-women-than-men-play-games-in-the-uk/0138488

the second link source is based on the Internet Advertising Bureau UK (IAB) (no link)

the study was out of 4,058 British residents out of a total of 33.5 million British gamers (so its a tiny tiny fraction of study material)

the main reason why more women are playing games is stated as

This growth is driven by the popularity of trivia, word and puzzle games

so by that logic very casual games, which they don't specify the total amount of time spent so again my mum is a gamer by the survey's logic

so again this link is a dud, it doesn't have any methodology in collecting and since it provides no source itself i can only speculate that its wrong


http://www.theesa.com/facts/pdfs/ESA_EF_2014.pdf

last link and its already been debunked

i've said about this being bad but i can't be bothered writing a list again

 

[Something Amyss]

lol wat? This is not a opinion poll. This is objective information that is being gathered here. Surveys need a large sample size, have you never done a scientific survey before?

I have, and you're talking nonsense.

Also, how can bad methodology be representative?

Did you miss the part where I said you were free to question the methodology? Like, seriously, don't ask me questions that run contrary to what I wrote. It's either dishonest or ignorant, and both are a waste of time.

You know, just cause guys are now 49.8% I wouldn't exactly call them a minority.

Are you parodying something? Because that would be the definition of a minority.

 

[Something Amyss]

So when "SJWs" posts studies like this they are false, cherry picking and serving an agenda, but when GGers post the same studies they are proof that men are actually getting shafted in gaming? Yeah, seems legit.

When has GG ever employed a single standard?

 

[Napoleon_XIX]

Sorry about the link: it was broken by punctuation, and I've now fixed it.

As for sample size, see the sample sizes used for political polling (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_next_United_Kingdom_general_election): they tend to be ~2000. If that suffices for 6 political parties, I would suspect it will suffice for 2 genders.

I think we have two major differences of opinion:

1 - methodology: fundamentally, one has to either pay up (i.e. their business model), or take their method on trust. I have no reason to suspect that they would be using a dodgy method. However, it is a matter of trust, about which we could argue all day.

2 - definitions: I think a lot hinges on how one defines video games. I do not believe that the platform is important (after all, an iPhone is probably more powerful than one of the early consoles), and would choose to define a video game as any game that is played on a computing device. If one adopts a more restrictive definition, one can get rather odd cases: if I sit down for a game of Caravan within Fallout NV, do I immediately stop playing a video game (by the logic that Solitaire is not a video game)?

EDIT: wrong Fallout

 

[small]

i love how people outright dismiss people who arent "hardcore" enough for them, who dismiss people who play casual games on facebook and their phone or tablets. all the while forgetting it seems that at one point ALL video games were casual style games you now find on a phone or facebook like space invaders, missile command and pacman.

hell people breaking records on missile command even today make the news.

as for the survey itself. get over yourselves, its a good thing gaming is becoming more universally accepted and embraced

 

[Duster]

As long as this means I have a higher chance at dating a gamer, I got no complaints.

Go women!

It might mean that if it where even remotely valid data.

 

[Silvanus]

It might mean that if it where even remotely valid data.

Out of interest, is it the sample size you find objectionable, or the inclusion of "social" games, or some other issue entirely?

OT: Not sure why people are saying the study's use of "PC games" should exclude certain PC games, as if they're not PC-gamey enough. There is no minimum of hardcore-itude that a game must possess before it qualifies as a PC game. It is a PC game if it is a game played on PC.

 

[Duster]

It might mean that if it where even remotely valid data.

Out of interest, is it the sample size you find objectionable, or the inclusion of "social" games, or some other issue entirely?

A multitude of reasons, one of which is that they put league of legends down as an mmo. it's a 5v5 arts. It also has a ton of users(i'm sure riot gave them the inflated player count including their twitch tv viewer bots). If they allow a blatent oversight like that to skew the data it's not likely the rest of the data is entirely valid.

 

[Ieyke]

Bullshit.
While I certainly believe there are more and more women playing all the time, and I know there are TONS of them, there's just no remote chance they outnumber guys. At least not yet.

Unless maybe they're counting Facebook games - in which case they're social games, primarily designed for playing on phones, that you can also access on PC.
I can play SNES games on PC. That doesn't mean they should count as PC games.

Look. The majority of my friends are women.
Basically all of my friends are geeks and gamers.
I'm surrounded by literally HUNDREDS of gamers every day.

Guys ABSOLUTELY outnumber the ladies as PC gamers.

 

[Nobuoa Schniell]

Shit like this is the reason why big game developers aren't weighing in on the whole Gamergate issue. They know who their demographics are, because they have actual market analysts on their team. They don't need random sites, gaming enthusiasts, or self-proclaimed intellectuals telling them who's buying their games. They know. And it damn sure isn't a bunch of Farmville players. People get so caught up in the whole "who is a gamer" thing that they miss the entire point. Sure, call yourself a gamer if that makes you feel special. It still won't mean you're going to be catered to in the next Call of Duty. There is a massive separation between the style of game found on facebook, the style of game found on mobile, and the style of game one could consider "core" (honestly we call it console a lot, even referring to PC games). And the development plans along with the core demographic is as different as night and day between them. That's why, despite all the back and forth bitching between "gamers", developers are going to continue making games as they have been. Because their demographics haven't changed.

Really, the only thing a study like this does is give ammunition to feminists and those that want to argue for more female representation in mainstream games. But the ammunition is a dud. You can use it all you want to try and convince other gamers that *insert gender/social group here* deserve to be catered to more, but developers know their demographic. This shit means nothing to them. And the reality of it is that it's not going to change, not unless the real demographics shift. Sorry if certain people don't feel represented enough in mainstream games, but unless you can prove to developers that it's worth dropping millions of dollars to make a game that caters to you, or spend thousands of dollars in additional assets and voice acting to put X type of character into the game, it's not going to happen. Game development is a business first and foremost.

 

[Beliyal]

Well, an almost 50/50 split is hardly making one group a minority (if we take the "50.2% of PC gamers are women from the survey).

Either way, I don't mind. And I don't mind the inclusion of mobile games either. Surely, those new to gaming have to start somewhere and mobile games are a good way to be introduced to the medium. I'd say that with proper marketing, all those mobile gamers (women, elderly, children) have the potential to tackle "proper" gaming one day. That'a s good thing in my opinion. But even if they don't for any reason, I won't have anything against it. Some people don't have the time or the will for more hardcore games and I understand that perfectly. They have games for themselves and I see no reason for them to be excluded. After all, mobile market is not exactly niche these days.

I think that casual games are important, since not everyone is equally willing to just jump into demanding new experiences, especially because they are expensive and require decent computers which many people don't have. But games on tablets and smartphones are nice, easy to approach, easy to get and don't require constant attention. It's a good way to be introduced to moving pixels on screen. Many games that got all of us started on gaming were just the same, only we now see them as gaming classics.

As for why women like RPGs? Probably because they give us the option to customize our character (making it female probably holds an important place there) and offer a variety of supporting characters, branching stories and a lot of different stuff to do. FPS' are somewhat singular experiences that will attract people interested in one specific thing, especially if that thing is similar to toys we buy for little boys (guns, soldiers, action heroes). It's probably why men are more attracted to them, because they are usually marketed to men in the same ways action heroes toys are.

 

[144_v1legacy]

EVEN IF this statistic has a bunch of qualifiers, or dubious according to whatever reasons you may have, don't belittle it.

Having this statistic is still a step forward. It's still better progress to be claiming the playing field is level, semantically, and hope that reality may reflect it shortly. Sometimes, people behave based on statistics and not the other way around.

 

[JoshuaNorton]

The numbers are grossly misrepresented. Typical journalism again.
Women play farming games on Facebook and their smartphones. That's what it's about.
They're still far, far way from playing Dragon Age, Mass Effect and so on. That's too hardcore for them.
Yeah, Dragon Age is too much of a hard core gamer game for them! I know, right?
I know my sister. It's me who pushed her towards gaming after all. Casual games is all she plays. If you removed casual games from the statistics, you'd still see heavy bias towards men.
That's why companies go out of their way not to get involved in the Gamergate debacle. The know that speaking out would rile up their male audience which they make their most money from with titles such as CoD, Assassin's Creed, Far Cry and so on.
If the statics were different, they'd immediately speak up against all the supposed misogyny going around, believe me.