Graphs and tables can get the point across quickly, and averages make it easy to summarize thousands and thousands of people. But the tradeoff is losing that sense of individuality and the wonderful granularity of who MMO players really are. I've been asking respondents to give me short profiles of themselves and I just wanted to share a bunch of them as another way of showing who plays these games.
What these short profiles do get across is the diversity of people who we bump into in MMOs. Pick any 4 of these people at random and think about the last time you were in a 5-person group. There aren't many places in real life where such different people work together, but it happens all the time in MMOs.
Amelia is a 31-year-old self-proclaimed "computer nerd" from San Diego. She does graphic design as well as database architecture. She started playing WoW after her boyfriend introduced her to the game. Her main is a Dwarf Paladin. She's tried playing Horde, but she finds Horde players "a bit too aggressive".
Dawn is 29, a customer service rep for auto loans from Charlotte, NC. She's played EQ for 5 years and met her husband from EQ. She's recently stopped playing EQ but still "loves her druid".
Alex is a 17-year-old high school student from California. He's been playing MMOs since he was 11 when his father brought home a copy of EverQuest. At the age of 11, he was admitted to a high-end guild and took part in 8-hour raids.
Emre is 27, a grad student and lecturer in communication science in Berlin. In SWG, he's a female Imperial pilot. In WoW, he's a "holier-than-thou Human Paladin".
Al is a 60-year-old project manager for EDS working on a Continental Airlines project in Houston. He started gaming in the 80s with table-top D&D.
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