[DoctorEldritch]

Hello Legion Gamers!

As the month of Women in Gaming is approaching the end, I wanted to share a curious study that Forbes reported on back in 2019: it would seem that women over 50 play more than men do.



It is from 2019, so does not take into account the time when we had to stay at home, and I would think that change would affect the numbers, but still.

Forbes article, however, only reported the statistics with very little exploration of the reasons why this is happening. Personally, I am not sure, maybe women over 50 are more susceptible to game marketing? Or maybe, for women over 50, if they have kids in late 20s or early 30s, that would put their kids in the first age group (18-29), and playing with them may be a point of connection? Would be nice if that was the case, but it does not explain why women over 50 play more than men.

Assuming this statistics is still correct, does anyone have ideas about why this could be?

[Saka]

@DoctorEldritch I think women are often attracted to very casual games in browsers and mobiles and a large part of the retired players could be there.

I remember many years ago my mum's coworker was checking on her carrots and cabbages in FarmVille during the breaks. 😊

[DoctorEldritch]

@Saka True about casual preferences, that may be the case.

Though I am not sure how the research defined "gamer", as those who play on a PC and console only, or those who also play on mobile as well. Of course, both are gamers, but depending on how researchers phrased it, the results can be very different.

"Often" is another ambiguous word, for how often is "often"? Playing FarmVille during breaks like your mum's coworker and playing 2 hours every day on PC after work are (subjectively) both "often", but different kinds of "often".

The results often depend so much on what definitions the researchers use...

[Saka]

@DoctorEldritch Pewresearch stated this:

Overall, 43% of U.S. adults say they often or sometimes play video games on a computer, TV, game console or portable device like a cellphone. But there are substantial differences by age and gender
So I would assume that they consider mobiles as well.

I am not sure if session length matters that much, there are many adults who would like to be able to play for a longer period at a time but responsibilities don't let them. Also there's no telling what happened to the carrots once the coworker went home, I never asked. 😅

[DoctorEldritch]

@Saka I wonder what they mean by "U.S. adults", how many of those did they ask exactly? There is a difference if they asked 1000 or 10.000 people, and even then it would be hardly representative. I hope they took it into account when thinking about the sample that they used to draw conclusions.

That is true, these days there are so many games and not enough time. Same with books and series and other interesting things to do. I try to work around the problem by being extra selective about my games. But that means I spend a lot of time researching about them before trying, which is a bit counterproductive. 😅

[Saka]

@DoctorEldritch I dug a little bit more. The answer is here: https://www.pewresearch.org/social-t...t-methodology/

Most of the data in this report are based on 3,930 respondents who participated in both the March 13 to 27, 2017, and April 4 to 18, 2017, waves of the panel. The margin of sampling error for the full sample of 3,930 respondents is plus or minus 2.8 percentage points.

[DoctorEldritch]

@Saka Thank you for this, it was very illuminating, though now I have even more questions for the researchers about the choice of methodology. A sampling of error within the sample is small, but that does not mean that sample that size is representative, and the method of collection may not be the best at capturing this specific data. Not to mention it is only limited to the USA, which is but a part of the global gaming community.

Then again, it is good that this topic is becoming a subject of research and works well as an indication of interest and as a first step in the right direction. I hope more research projects like this will be conducted as time goes on.

[Saka]

@DoctorEldritch The methodology is usually going to affect the obtained results, so anyone more serious about their research will disclose it.

As for USA being just a slice, I agree. Unfortunately, I don't think it is easy to conduct a survey like this globally. Probably easiest way would be to aggregate results from different regions.

[DoctorEldritch]

@Saka There is an ongoing joke in the academic community that only subpar research ends up in web-based journals. This is true because proper journals have a much more thorough and detailed selection process, with the methodology being one of the main things they look at.

It is fine if research is publicized online, most of them are, but there should be a reference to a properly established journal there. If that part is missing, that alone is enough to raise suspicion about the quality of methodology and research as a whole.

There are exceptions, of course, but as a general rule of thumb, I want to say it works.