Men: Now a Minority in PC Gaming.

[Raikas]

I find it amusing that in the threads where people talk about not wanting to call themselves gamers, posters come in saying "If you play games, you're a gamer!", and then in a thread like this there's post after post that essentially say "but not if you play Farmville!" or whatever other casual game people like to laugh it.

And the complaints about mobile games are even more laughable - do people not realize how many of those games were the hardcore games of the 1980s? Or 1990s? The level of snobbery is ridiculous.

 

[JoshuaNorton]

I find it amusing that in the threads where people talk about not wanting to call themselves gamers, posters come in saying "If you play games, you're a gamer!", and then in a thread like this there's post after post that essentially say "but not if you play Farmville!" or whatever other casual game people like to laugh it.

And the complaints about mobile games are even more laughable - do people not realize how many of those games were the hardcore games of the 1980s? Or 1990s? The level of snobbery is ridiculous.

It's because we want girls to play CoD with us. Farmville is just horrid, man.
What's wrong with it to ask that they get on our level and play with us?

 

[Teoes]

snip

That's what I was referring to in my reply in that other thread. It is amusing.

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.

It's a good thing females are all too stupid to work computers, right? Otherwise some of them might see your post and get angry! Although I wouldn't be able to understand why; I mean, women, right? There's no way they could handle our deep and complex hardcore games. And as for all that "supposed" misogyny, well I don't know what those folks are on about.

 

[Gorrath]

People who play casual games are just as much "gamers" as those who play CoD. This arbitrary distinction in who gets to be called what is, frankly, stupid. However, it is not arbitrary to differentiate between different kinds of gamers and their habits. Calling 50.2% of gamers female is fine. Don't much care really. I've never been particularly caught up in the sex of the other people who enjoy my hobbies. I also like knitting and scarpbooking and I can tell you which way those statistics skew with regard to the usual sex of the participants. None of that friggin' matters.

Some people would argue that we need more diversity in gaming because the audience for games is more diverse than what people might expect. This is, I think, a complete fallacy. The diversity of an audience shouldn't be the determining factor of whether what is created for that audience is diverse. I wouldn't care if 98.62% of gamers were cishet white males who drive Jeeps; games should be diverse because games are more interesting when they are diverse. All of this bickering over who actually counts as a gamer is utterly pointless. Not to businesses, of course, but to me as a person who enjoys video games as a hobby, it just does not freakin' matter.

 

[CaitSeith]

Do you remember when "The death of gamers" articles popped up? Pass me the popcorn...

 

[michael87cn]

Does it matter? No.
Have I ever met a girl gamer? No.
Have I ever met a male gamer? Many, many, many times.
Is the thread title click bait? Yes.

If all these girls really are playin' the vidja gamz, where are they? Why do they hide the fact? Why don't they socialize like everyone else in real life? Maybe a lot of those 'girls' are g.i.r.ls.

Either way, doesn't matter at all. What kind of point is there to prove here?

 

[CaitSeith]

Mobile gaming included in PC gaming statistics? Sounds legit... *sarcasm*

Why it isn't? They are very different platforms with very different architectures and requirements to play.

 

[McElroy]

It's a truth, but not the truth. Y'know. For example, I could be talking to someone and mention that I'm primarily a PC-gamer and s/he would then tell me s/he plays on the PC too. Naturally I'd ask what games and if the answer is Solitaire, Candy Crush, and Bubble Witch Saga I simply couldn't lump the two of us together as proud members of the Master Race. While (maybe even more than) 90% of women I know (and are about the same age as me) would go to that 50.2%, the few that come the closest to being PC-gamers play The Sims every once in a while. I know a few console-gaming women, though.

For something non-anecdotal: in a Finnish survey they asked if people played video games for more than two hours per month and the split was about 60-40 in favour of men. The study is called Pelaajabarometri, if you know Finnish and want to check it out.

 

[Phourc]

Amusingly, according to the US Census ( http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/00000.html ) 50.8% of the US population is women. So that would mean that the pc gamer demographic still isn't an even slice of that apple pie yet, even including (dry heave) social gamers.

Still, .2% over half is technically the majority (even if I'm reasonably sure the margin of error in the study is at least half of that) so the scare-title is *technically* correct, haha.

 

[subskipper]

I think it is a fantastic thing that so many want to play games. I do not give two shits about their gender, sexuality, race whatever. I mean like, really. At all. There's absolutely nothing wrong with being a "social gamer", whatever that means. I care about gaming with people. Some are nice, some are rude, some are obnoxious, some are fascinating, some are 'meh'.

 

[Westonbirt]

Farmville is a video game in the same sense as throwing a ball against a wall is sport.

 

[HalfTangible]

50.2% out of 1000.

That's 2 people.

TWO. PEOPLE.

(EDIT: well okay, 4 people if you count the 2 men down from the probably 49.8%)

The margin for error is 3-4%.

This entire survey's results could be the result of a TYPO.

 

[upgrayedd]

Subscribed for Shitfights.

I guess more casual games like the last of us will be flooding the market.


Stay strong Otaku brothers, if we band together they wont take our dark souls away from us </3

 

[Skatologist]

I suppose the glorious PC master race is now a matriarchy. How's those apples taste?

 

[JediMB]

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

Not a sociopolitical minority, but it's literally a statistical/numerical minority.

 

[ryukage_sama]

Given their definition of "PC", I'm not surprised. I don't think Mobile should be lumped under PC, browser based games played with a mouse and keyboard sure, but not Iphone and Android games. I get that smartphones are personal computers, but video game consoles can also be described as personal computers and they aren't categorized as PCs.

It's also weird that they don't have a categories for video games that are neither RPG or FPS. Enough people play MOBAs like LoL, so why not just list them as their own genre?

 

[deth2munkies]

People questioning the methodology: there is not enough information. All we have is multiple surveys over the span of 1 year with sample sizes of 1000 or more. People somehow seem to think it's just a 1000 person survey when it's clear that's not the case.

Several valid criticisms on why the results aren't clear:

1) Genre lines are ill defined: "casual" games are lumped into strategy and RPG category, LoL is an MMO for some reason, etc.

2) There is no question about online gaming. Online gaming is usually what we associate with the gamer culture and there are plenty of single player RPGs. There's no reason to believe that women make up anywhere near half of the online gamers, only that they play games, which has never been controversial.

3) There was no question about self-identification as a "gamer". People who go on message boards like these and discuss games, or that discuss games in their personal lives with their friends, or even attend conventions and get-togethers for the purposes of discussing or celebrating games are VASTLY different from people that play an hour of Farmville a week. The survey equates "people that have played games" with "gamers" and that's not anywhere near the case.

4) No usage statistics. We have no idea what the questions about how often people play games lead them to be included in the "game playing" category. If it was "has ever played a game before" it makes the survey more suspect. Problem is we don't know.

Don't get me wrong: I'd personally love more women to enjoy the things I enjoy because common ground breeds good conversation and friendship. The problem is in this highly gender polarized time, there's always the temptation to distort statistics to fit a narrative that you want to tell (see the "gamergate is empirically about harassment" "study" that is so bunk in its methodology it's insulting). That and the statistics in this particular study attempt to show a commonly held belief is untrue in spite of many rational reasons people hold for it being true in the first place, necessitating increased skepticism.

I hope the people who did this study (SuperData Research) come forward with a comprehensive report on their methods that helps us understand this a bit further.