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The PlayOn Group at PARC has been gathering longitudinal census data from several WoW servers. I gave a list of links to some interesting data points from the last issue of the Daedalus Project and I wanted to link to some of the more recent data that is available at PlayOn.
1) Check out this post on visualizing the social networks in WoW guilds.
2) When players leave a guild, they mostly do not seem to have a guild they are intending to switch to instead.
3) Of all guilds seen in a one-week period in June, 21% were not seen in a one-week period in July.
4) Of all characters seen in a one-week period in June, 46% were not seen in a one-week period in July.
I'm looking to gather some more visual data points of all the interesting social phenomema happening in MMOs. If you have any screenshots that fall into the following categories, please consider submitting them. Any images you submit will be credited to you if they are ever displayed on The Daedalus Project.
In particular, I am looking for the following kinds of images:
- Player Gatherings: protests, demonstrations, vigils, etc.
- Guild / Avatar Portraits: images of your guild (posed or not), or well-composed screenshots of your avatar
- Raid / PvP Combat: well-composed screenshots that show the chaos and intensity of raids or PvP combat.
- Strange Bugs: like the recent WoW Plague
- Others: any other screenshots that you think are interesting but don't fall into a category above.
Please send your screenshot as a JPG file. Screenshots that are well-composed and where the interface elements are hidden are much appreciated. Please note that there is a file size limit of 800k per image.
I got interviewed live on radio recently - an NPR station based in Seattle. You can see the program notes here. The program is available on their site as a RealAudio stream and a MP3 stream. They were in the middle of a pledge drive so there's a lot of fund-raising talk before the show actually starts on the stream. (If these links to the audio file are down, please email me to let me know.)
Greg Lamb from the Christian Science Monitor also interviewed me for an article. It was nice that he was willing to dig into deeper issues instead of being solely focused with the addiction angle like most other media coverage of MMOs.
I also just wanted to take this time to thank all of you who participate in my surveys. It's your responses that let me tell others what really goes on in these games. None of this would be possible without your help.
Players were asked two questions:
1) How much do you enjoy being in a leadership position?
2) Are you a guild leader?
Overall, male players find leadership positions more enjoyable than female players and younger players are more likely to enjoy leadership positions than older players (r = -.18), but this does not translate into any differences in actual leadership likelihood. Proportionately, female players are just as likely as male players to be guild leaders (between 14-16%). Also, there is no age difference between players who are and are not guild leaders. And among players who are guild leaders, there is no difference between male and female players as to how much they enjoy being a leader (p = .21).
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The disparities between desired and actual leadership are interesting. Even though younger, male players find leadership positions more enjoyable, this does not bear out among actual guild leaders. The shift in motivations is also intriguing. Perhaps we’re seeing the difference between group leaders and guild leaders - the former more likely to be chat/social-oriented and the latter more relationship management oriented. The next step seems to be to explore whether guilds with male leaders are different from guilds with female players in terms of guild size and casual vs. hardcore.
Over the years since I first put out the Norrathian Scrolls, I’ve read many reactions from the player base to the findings presented. On forums and message boards, some players draw out critiques that they argue invalidates the entire study. While some of these critiques are valid, their severity is often overestimated. More importantly, it may be hard for non-statisticians to understand why a valid critique may in fact not matter for many of the findings presented here at The Daedalus Project. In retrospect, I should have provided a primer to these potential weaknesses long ago, but it’s better late than never. I’m going to start with the more simple critiques and move onto critiques that appear harder to resolve.
Small sample size. Some players argue that a survey of 2000 gamers from a player base that numbers in the millions won’t show anything, but sampling is inherent to almost all surveys. Both the US Census and Gallup Poll survey less than 1% of the total US population. A small sample size in and of itself doesn’t say anything about the representativeness of the findings. Oftentimes, people on forums will say that a sample of 2k is unreliable and then they will go on to expound their own opinion. Please call them out on their sample size of 1.
Players can’t possibly be that old. Some balk at the finding that the average age of MMORPG players could possibly be as high as 26 and thus all other results must be wrong. Oftentimes, they claim that the average age must be closer to 18-22 because they always feel like they’re interacting with adolescents in the game. But industry reports have shown that the average age of video game players in general is 30, so the MMO average from the surveys is actually lower than the overall average.
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This is actually not the case. Let me show this with an example. We know that the real-life gender ratio is close to 50-50. On the other hand, we know that the gender ratio in MMOs is much closer to 85-15. Imagine that I ask MMO players to tell me their height in RL and I find that women are on average shorter than men. Is it the case that I cannot extend my finding to the real world because my gender ratio is significantly deviant from the actual ratio? Or is it the case that the validity of this particular finding isn’t tied to overall sampling representativeness?
We need to make something clear. While it is true that my MMO dataset would show that the gender ratio is 85-15 (incorrect, since the RL ratio is 50-50), what I am trying to show is that this is independent from the secondary finding (that there is a height difference between the two genders). In other words, it is very possible to find gender differences, age differences, differences between Alliance vs. Horde, and so on even though the overall sampling may be a bit skewed.
And these secondary differences are what The Daedalus Project is more focused on. To me, knowing the precise gender ratio in MMOs is not very interesting. What is more interesting are gender differences (or age, or personality differences) in game play behavior. Thus, the critique of an overall biased sampling, even if it did exist, may have a negligible effect on the bulk of findings at The Daedalus Project. In other words, even if the real gender ratio was 75-25, it would probably still be the case that male players gender-bend more often than female players.
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Match with data from other academic studies. Most of the key demographics variables match up well with other online survey studies of MMO players.
Griffiths, M.D., Davies, M.N.O. and Chappell, D. (2004). Online computer gaming : A comparison of adolescent and adult gamers, Journal of Adolescence, 27: 87-96.Griffiths, M.D., Davies, M.N.O. and Chappell, D. (2003). Breaking the stereotype: The case of online gaming, CyberPsychology and Behavior, 6: 81-91.
Match with company marketing data. Most of the key demographic variables match up with data provided in a marketing report on MMOs. A specific section on Sony’s EverQuest draws on data provided by SoE.
Source: DFC Report
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For example, from the survey data we were able to get the average achievement motivation of players who prefer different classes in WoW. From the PlayOn data, we were able to get the average time it take different character classes to make each level. The classes who score low on the achievement motivation (survey data) are also the ones who level the slowest (census data).
Of course, not every data point from the survey can be supported by the census data. After all, the census data can’t track RL age or gender information. Nonetheless, this congruence goes a long ways to showing that the survey data is able to reflect actual behavioral data in a real game.
On the other hand, there are no perfect methodologies. Every methodology comes with its strengths and weaknesses. But the weaknesses of a methodology must be understood in their proper context and scope. Thus, while some argue that the sampling bias invalidates the study, it in fact has very little to do with the bulk of the findings presented at The Daedalus Project. Furthermore, their critiques often miss the important point that there are seldom optimal solutions to many problems. It would be nice if we could survey all MMO players. It would be nice if everyone were willing to fill out surveys. But social science researchers are not omnipotent and the world is not perfect. Thus, sometimes the most practical and sensible way to answer a question isn’t perfect. But it would be unfair to judge The Daedalus Project against a perfect world of omnipotent researchers. Finally, there really isn’t that much empirical information about MMO players – who they are, their preferences, and what they do in the game. And here’s what I’ve always believed and what led to the genesis of the Daedalus Project. Knowing something is better than not knowing anything at all.
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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Bill is a 54-year-old firefighter for the US Forest Service from Oregon with 20+ years of firefighting experience. He plays EverQuest with his wife. He has a 51 ranger and a 47 rogue, but his wife says that “the rogue is more him”.
Alex is 19, a college student majoring in political science at ASU. He enjoys playing female characters because “little boys generally think you’re a girl and will be more lenient to you in bartering or just flat-out give you things.”
“Spark” is a 39-year-old computer scientist who specializes in security and works for a media and services company based in the Silicon Valley. She’s been gaming ever since Adventure on the mainframe around 1978, but only recently began playing an MMO - WoW.
Diane is 33, a professional mom from New Jersey. She got into Anarchy Online after a conversation with a fellow Lord of the Rings fan at a laundrymat. She considers herself as more of a role-player than a gamer. Her ideal game “would be one where role-playing was mandatory, that didn’t revolves around phat loot or grinding out levels in hack ‘n slash type way.”
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Karen is a 50-year-old field service technician from southern California. She services high volume digital products and has been in the industry for 25 years. An ex-boyfriend introduced her to UO. She currently plays EQ2 with a romantic partner.
“Mander” is 35, a strategic marketing analyst from Los Angeles. She never took typing classes but now that she’s played MMOs, she’s really fast on the keyboard.
Lynn is a 45-year-old teacher from Arizona. She began gaming with table-top D&D. She was invited to participate in EQ’s beta and became a senior guide. That was also where she met her husband. Lynn has fun spotting the fake women in MMOs - “It's actually pretty funny to watch...to see how men 'think' we are and portray it”.
Shawn is an army communications officer from North Carolina. He got hooked by UO after watching his fellow soldiers play during lunch and at night.
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Peter is 54, a garage owner who manages a small car repair workshop in Devon, UK. He says his interest in EQ, his first MMO, was “a natural expansion from playing Dungeons & Dragons”. He usually feels awkward when he has to explain what these games are all about to non-gamers, but he says he doesn’t care anymore - “I enjoy it and that’s enough”.
“Mausie” is 26. She describes herself as a “severely underemployed part-time student”. She’s playing Final Fantasy XI currently, but recently got a copy of EQ: Scars of Velious. Her reaction - “I have no idea how such a difficult, unpleasant-looking, and poorly-designed-GUI-having game such as that became known as EverCrack”.
Tim is a 25-year-old MBA student from Boston. He’s interested in going into the video game industry on the marketing side. He enjoys role-playing - “I always approach the game as a narrative, even if the story isn’t explicit”.
Claire is 35, a PC technician and digital photo restoration artist from Mountain Home, Idaho. She had lupus for 15 years and was unable to work. She says that “online games gave me a chance of socializing when I was unable to get out. It also gave me something to do to occupy my mind. I think I would’ve gone nuts without online gaming!”.
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David is a 41-year-old embedded systems programmer. He develops low-level software for embedded devices. He’s a single father of two - one just hitting the teens. Both his kids play MMOs - “I spent a lot of time finding a good guild that we can all be comfortable with … I worked to become an officer of the guild so that I can help keep the guild an appropriate place for my children”.
Dustin is a 22-year-old server and cook for a Mexican restaurant in Yukon, Canada. His first memory of gaming is playing a 5-1/2 floppy on an IBM machine. In MMOs, he says - “I always go for the thieving, conniving, back-stabbing characters … weird?”.
“Jen” is a 30-year-old doctoral student in music. A significant portion of her research involves analyzing the music of video games. She began playing MMOs “to prove to my fiancé how stupid the games were”. They’re still playing together.
Nancy is 32, a researcher in a pharma/healthcare company. Her husband works in the IT department in the same company. They have always gamed together, but recently switched to WoW after it became a common topic of conversation in the lunch room at work. Every Tuesday night, 20 of them from work play together with their Tauren alts. They call it “Tauren Tuesday”.
How many MMO players purchase virtual currency? And how much real money do they usually spend on virtual currency?
In a recent survey (N = 1923), 22% of respondents said that they had purchased virtual currency (referred to here in shorthand as RMT - real money transfer). There was a mild correlation with age (r = .11) and no gender differences. In other words, male and female players were equally likely to purchase virtual currency. A multiple regression revealed that none of the motivations were substantial predictors of RMT likelihood (r-squared = .04) - although within the weak model, the Relationship motivation was the best predictor.
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There are 3 main server types in current MMOs - PvE, PvP, and RP. The following are demographic and motivational differences among players with regard to server type preference. I was most interested in the differences between PvE and PvP servers.
Overall, players who prefer PvE servers are disproportionately more likely to be female while players who prefer PvP servers are disproportionately more likely to be male. There is also a substantial correlation with age - younger players prefer PvP servers (r = .28). A multiple regression showed that the Competition and Mechanics (min-maxing) motivations are the best predictors for PvP server preference (r-squared = .32), as would be expected. Together, this suggests that players on PvP servers tend to have a higher proportion of male players and also tend to consist of younger players.
This has an interesting effect on gender-bending rates. The higher proportion of male players increases the chances that a female avatar is being played by a male players. On a normal WoW server where about 85% of players are male, there is a 50% chance that a female player is being played by a male player. If we assume that 90% of players are male on a PvP servers, there is an estimated 68% chance (about 2/3) that a female avatar is being played by a male player.
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After the interview with Talon where the tension between casual and military-style guilds emerged, I was curious as to how many MMO players actually do have military experience. I asked respondents in a recent survey to indicate whether they currently are or ever have been in the military.
The MMO sample showed that about 17% of the male players and 5% of the female players have had military experience (including both veterans and active duty). This actually closely matches the US census information where about 13% of the population are veterans and .07% of the population are on active duty.
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Some players note the sheer tactical brilliance of players who have had combat experience and the benefit of having them to lead raid encounters.
I was in the Marine Corps for 3 years. I would say that at least 1/3 of my guild has been or currently in the military. I think that this probably gives us better organization when the guild leader/officers gives commands during a raid/pvp because people have been in the situation before and follow orders first and question them later. [WoW, M, 39]
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I served for a year in the Swiss military and I currently play with a friend who was in the US Navy. I would have to say that those in game that best understand tactics and how a group dynamic works best when everyone does their job are those that have some military experience. Taking orders is not something that comes naturally to most people. [WoW, M, 26]
Yes, I'm currently in the Air Force. Actually, the military made me take the game slightly more seriously from the point of view of a team player. It has made being part of a group easier because I don't question the moves or commands of the leader until after the battle/encounter. [EQ2, M, 22]
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So what does it mean when game spaces become military spaces? But, of course, this is exactly the reverse of what’s really happened. Gaming technologies (computers, graphics, networking) are technologies that all emerged from military applications (many during the WWII and Cold War eras). So it’s not the case that our current play spaces are becoming military spaces, but rather, digital gaming has always been deeply-rooted in a military logic that traces back to the Cold War - command, control, and conquer - even in fantasy worlds of elves and dwarves. It is that underlying logic that necessitates military structures of command and organization. And thus, the irony is that even as we resist military structures in play spaces, the deep-rooted military logic of digital gaming necessitates their existence.
The media oftentimes portrays video gamers as being anti-social loners, but past data has shown that many MMOs players were playing with their family or with their romantic partner. Thus, it was clear that a non-trivial percentage of MMO gamers were playing with someone they knew in real life - that gaming wasn’t always anti-social and wasn’t always simply virtual. And it was also clear that friends, romantic partners, and family members were the 3 main categories of people that gamers were most likely to play with. But because I had never asked all 3 at once, it wasn’t clear how much overlap there was. To that end, I finally got around to asking all 3 at once and that allowed me figure out the percentage of players who are and are not playing with someone they know in RL. All the following data relates to whether a player plays (on a regular basis) with someone they know in RL.
First, let’s start with the MMO players who play with their romantic partners. Overall, 25% of players are playing with a romantic partner. As we’ve seen before, and particularly because of the gender ratio in MMOs, female players are much more likely to be playing with a romantic partner than male players.
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There was a clear gender split though. Male players were more likely to be playing with their brothers, while female players were more likely to be playing with their sons. Woven into this is also of course an age difference. It is the younger, male players who are more likely to be playing with brothers, and the older, female players who are more likely to be playing with their sons.
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So even though some critics of online games focus on how ephemeral online relationships are, it seems that most players play with someone they know from RL on a regular basis. It also helps us see these online games as places where existing RL ties are being strengthened rather than simply places where only virtual relationships are forged.
School just started again for me. Lots of synergy with online games stuff recently. Over the summer, I worked at PARC and got to play with a lot of longitudinal census data. I am continuing to work a little part-time at PARC during the school year. As always, feel free to drop me a note here or email at contact@nickyee.com
How You Can Help:
- Post a message on your community forum or message board about the findings.
- Create a link to "The Daedalus Project": http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus/
- Add a link to The Daedalus Project in your forum signature.
As usual, your comments and feedback are most welcome. Any questions should be directed to contact@nickyee.com