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By Tamsin Osborne
BBC News
Picture a typical player of a massively multiplayer game such as World of
Warcraft and most people will imagine an overweight, solitary male.
But this stereotype has been challenged by a study investigating gender
differences among gamers.
It found that the most hard-core players are female, that gamers are healthier
than average, and that game playing is an increasingly social activity.
Despite gaming being seen as a male activity, female players now make up about
40% of the gaming population.
The study looked at gender differences in more than 2,400 gamers playing
EverQuest II.
The participants, who were recruited directly out of the game, completed a
web-based questionnaire about their gaming habits and lifestyles.
In addition Sony Online Entertainment, Everquest's creator, gave the US
researchers access to information about the players' in-game behaviours.
Gender bias
The results showed that, although more of the players were male, it was the
female players who were the most dedicated players, spending more time each day
playing the game than their male counterparts.
Lead researcher Scott Caplan of the University of Delaware said the result
demonstrated how out-of-date stereotypes can be.
"In many cases, stereotypes reflect what I would call a 'cultural time lag',"
he said.
"What we think about men and women and videogames may have been true 10 or 15
years ago, when there were mainly console video games or single-player games.
"But what were seeing now is that games become social, and as these online
games become communities then the attraction for that kind of behaviour might
increase for women," said Prof Caplan.
"I think a lot of our stereotypes are based on the way computer games have
been, rather than where they're going."
The pressure to conform to traditional gender roles might mean that some women
are put off activities seen as "masculine", whereas women who reject
traditional gender roles might be more likely to play MMOs such as EverQuest
II.
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.
"These are not people who are following strict gender stereotypes," said Prof
Caplan.
"I think that the game itself is right now a very non-traditional activity for
women, and so I think what you would find in this population are going to be
people who are in other ways less traditional than the majority population."
Consumer focus
Another unexpected finding was that the online game players - particularly the
women - were healthier than the general population, though this was drawn from
self-reported levels of exercise and body mass index.
Dmitri Williams, a researcher at the University of Southern California and a
co-author on the study, said one possible explanation could be that playing
computer games reduces the amount of time spent in front of the television.
"What we think might be at play is that it's not that games are good for you,
it's that TV is bad for you," he said.
"With television, what you get is an endless stream of commercials telling you
to buy things and to consume things, and what we think we're finding is that
when you remove all that consumption impulse you are probably less driven to
consume."
In games such as EverQuest II, players spend their time completing quests and
killing monsters, so it's possible that such in-game activities might influence
players in real-life, said Prof Williams.
"It could be that games inspire a more active lifestyle, instead of sitting in
front of a TV."
The study also found that men and women played computer games for different
reasons, with men more likely to play to win and women more likely to play for
social reasons.
Furthermore, a high proportion of women reported playing the game with their
romantic partner, supporting the idea that game playing is becoming an
increasingly sociable activity. The researchers say that this trend is
reflected in patterns of general computer and internet use.
"If you go back 20 years and talk about people using computers and the
internet, I think the stereotype would have been of a young male," said Prof
Caplan.
"Nowadays, if you look at MySpace and Facebook and all of the social uses of
the internet, the number of women who have it as part of their everyday life
has gone up phenomenally," he said.
"In the same way that the stereotype of a computer user has become more
gender-neutral, I think we'll see that with games too."