New Stats on Female Gamers Shatter Myths
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We (and to any men that are reading this, I use the words “we” and “us” to indicate women here, but you can keep reading) know that there are a lot of things that some unenlightened men just don’t seem to get about women and gaming. For instance, more women play games online than men (though that includes games like Farmville), and we buy more console games in a given year than men do.
But has anyone done a really recent study about women’s gaming habits? Not really. Well, not until Lifetime decided to (for those of you who don’t know, Lifetime is a “women’s” television network in the U.S.) do their own study titled, “She’s Got Game.” They surveyed 1,000 women on their gaming habits, and talked to a pool of men and gaming CEOs (this latter group…perhaps not the best people to ask right now?).
What did they find? As far as women as a whole, they found that 76% of us do game in some way. We might not all be “hardcore,” but most of us play something. That by itself challenges quite a few stereotypes. After that, rather than only look at women as a whole, they opted to split us up into five groups that fall into different places on two axes based on motivation for gaming: Investment, and desire for social interaction. For instance, an “immersive” female gamer would be on the low side of social interaction, but on the high side of investment. A small graph follows that both explains it and lists the groups.
The rest of their findings indicated things that aren’t horribly surprising: Women like to play alone, are fairly competitive, and play more frequently than men (which makes sense, since if you’re playing a more casual game, it’s really easy to jump in and out).
Lifetime has a whole slide show to illustrate all of their points. I’ve taken the slides and put them into a Flash slideshow below. Click “Play” to watch, and if you need more time for each slide, just pause it until you’re done, and then move on to the next slide.
How do you feel about these results? Do you see yourself fitting into only one category, or do you fit more than one? Me, I’m just an Immersive, but I think that I can also be a bit of a Minder if I’m busy and don’t have time to get fully into a game.
Lifetime will be sharing the results of this survey with marketers and advertisers as well as using them for their own social games.
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