Men may be the more stereotyped hardcore gaming gender, but a study of Everquest II players published in the Journal of Communication says that women regularly out-MMO men—but that women aren't as honest about the hours logged gaming.
Those findings back up a study from the University of Southern California published last year, which said that women played "more intensely" than their male counterparts. In hourly terms, according to Scientific American the women surveyed played EQII an "average of 29 hours a week, versus 25 for the males."
Hardcore players more than doubled those numbers, with women still in the lead.
But The Journal of Communication says that women tended to lie about (or lowball) their EQII addictions. USC's study said almost the same thing, and we're starting to see a trend here—Everquest II player surveys simply cannot be trusted.
Gal Gamers Geekier Than Guys [Scientific American]
Picture a gamer, someone who spends countless hours immersed in one of those online role-playing alternate realities. And what do you see? Is it a physically fit female closer to 40 than 14? If not, you may need to rethink your assumptions about geekdom. Because a study in the Journal of Communication shows that when it comes to dominating the virtual world, women are actually more hardcore than men.
Scientists conducted a survey of some 7,000 players who were logged on to a game called EverQuest II. And they discovered some interesting things. First off, the average age of the gamers surveyed was 31. And that playing time tended to increase with age. Which is also where the sex differences come in. The female gamers actually logged more time online: an average of 29 hours a week, versus 25 for the males, with the top players putting in 57 hours a week on the girl’s side, and 51 for the guys. What’s more, it looks like women are more likely to lie about how much they really play. The researchers found that the gals tended to lowball how long they spend glued to the screen.
So, never ask a women her age. Or how much time she spends defeating the dark elves to rebuild the world of Norrath.
I've been very supprised by the number of women playing eq2. Teamspeak is full of those dainty lil voices during the raids. Wouldnt go so far as to say 50% but it aint far off...
This is nothing new, its just more noticable now with teamspeak. I know at our peak size, The Corps was over 1/3 female membership and more than half of the hardcore fulltimers were women. I strongly doubt we were unique in that regard, in fact I think only Legion and FoH seemed to have predominantly male hardcore bases. All the guild leaders of raiding guilds seemed to be male, though, on Veeshan, successful or otherwise. Not sure what that was all about, though I know that there were raids being run by women in my guild, CoE, and a couple others.
War is an option whose time has passed. Peace is the only option for the future. At present we occupy a treacherous no-man's-land between peace and war, a time of growing fear that our military might has expanded beyond our capacity to control it and our political differences widened beyond our ability to bridge them. . . .
Short of changing human nature, therefore, the only way to achieve a practical, livable peace in a world of competing nations is to take the profit out of war.
--RICHARD M. NIXON, "REAL PEACE" (1983)
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, represents, in the final analysis, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children."
