Ignoring the graphs, curious how much of this is just a response to community. Anecdotes abound, beware.<p>Even as an older (for gaming, anyway) white male, the community in some competitive games is just really unappealing - it basically reminds me of middle school, and I guess I'm not really into that anymore. Lots of things said just to get a reaction (e.g. racial slurs), lots of weird discussions about women, lots of puffed chests the second there's an opportunity to, etc.<p>I don't really have the time to be competitively good at any of these games, and the community kinda sucks unless you <i>are</i> competitively good, so it's kinda like what's the point? At least with rec sports the community is generally nice even if you're terrible (probably because you're in-person).<p>Sure, you can just mute people usually. But if you're muting everyone all the time, you might as well just be playing a single-player game. You can just play with friends, but that requires you to have friends who haven't also gotten sick of these communities.<p>Conversely, the community in games more oriented towards completion/design are usually great - because your success doesn't detract from someone else's, and they're not usually depending on you for their own success. Feels much more like a community.<p>Anyway, my point being that I wouldn't be shocked to learn that women (and likely people of color) feel the same way - once you're not really part of that core group of young white men, competitive games start feeling really unappealing unless you're just really into the game itself.
The choice of graph here is really bad.<p>Basically the graph is trying to show two things at once - the difference between the categories and the difference between each category and normal. For multiple variables.<p>By showing a lot of information on one graph, it becomes hard to see any particular pieceof information.<p>If you are trying to show a comparison between two categories, it's better to normalise those two categories. If you want to show that being far from the centre of the bell curve is more significant (which doesn't come accross on this graph at all by the way), then factor that in when you normalise.<p>Two clear graphs are better than one bad one.
Makes me think of my home... my son is a "hardcore gamer", by anyone's definition. He doesn't recognize his mother as a gamer at all, despite her spending 10-20 hours/week gaming. She's mostly doing puzzle games on her iPad, so that's not "real gaming".<p>So there's a fair bit of gender and cultural bias in the very idea of "gamer".<p>I don't play video games, myself, for the same reason I don't shoot heroin directly into my eyeballs. I know I have a problem, so I avoid the problem.
New candidate for Most Confusing Chart of 2018 right here folks:<p><a href="https://quanticfoundry.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/overall_casual_hardcore.png" rel="nofollow">https://quanticfoundry.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/overal...</a><p>Even the explanation doesn't help:<p>> <i>In this chart below, the y-axis is showing the percentile rank of each motivation. That 50th-%tile line represents the average among the 350,000+ gamers who have completed the Gamer Motivation Profile. So for example, the 74th-%tile in Competition among Hardcore gamers means that the average Hardcore gamer scores higher on Competition than 74% of the gamers in the full data set.</i><p>I genuinely don't think there's anything useful that can be said here at all without knowing what fraction of gamers make up the different catagories. Beyond that, all we can say for sure is that "hardcore" gamers like gaming more. Ugh.
The female logic I can follow here: Once you play hardcore, i.e. more intense, just having a story will get boring soon. So they add other competencies.<p>It's a little confusing for me, why just playing skill competition shouldn't get boring for men as well. Adding story based components for a more indepth experience would also sound reasonable for me.<p>So I wonder if self-assessment is really a good way to analyse the behaviour here. It might be that men don't mention that they care about community/story as much, while actually they do as well when they heavily invest time and energy into a single game.
Setting aside the graph issues, the data is very interesting.<p>Much of game development for the triple-A space seems aimed at the hardcore male gamer demographic, whether intentional or not. Could a studio instead build a game that focuses on entirely different categories and as a result attract a bigger market that isn't being addressed?<p>Make a game that's fun, but focus on design, discovery, completion, fantasy. Don't discourage male players, but make a game that ticks all the boxes for most female players. Market it subtly for both genders, trying to hook female gamers.<p>I hope someone is trying to do this.
I've played almost every competitive pc game in the last decade and I've never came across one where when a female voice gets on the mic, the atmosphere of the game doesn't change. Not every individual match of course but dam, I would NOT want to be a female online gamer. Seperate note: I've been to LANs and the mood is quite different, it is unfortunate to see the gender divide and most competitive (semi-pro at least) guys really want to see that scene improve.
I was rather unimpressed with the test as well as the graphs. I scored myself low in every category because I find it hard to rate any one aspect high. I'm paraphrasing: How important are explosions? How important is competition? How important is exploring?<p>I can't rate any of these things high, in and of themselves. It requires a well balanced mix of things to make a great game. Breaking everything down to individual components makes it seem I am much less engaged in games than I am.