Playing with Someone (Part 2)

In the last issue, we saw that many players play with someone they know in RL on a regular basis - whether this is a family member, a romantic partner, or a friend. There's a related issue that we couldn't tease out from that last dataset. Specifically, it would help to know how many MMO players are in romantic relationships to begin with, and of those, how many are playing with their romantic partners. In a sense, this is the inverse of the question that was addressed in the previous article. It also helps us make more sense of the percentage of players who play with a romantic partner. For example, we know that about 25% of players play with a romantic partner. But of all the players who have romantic partners to begin with, do a low or high percentage of them actually play with their romantic partner? And we could ask the same question for parents who play with their children. For both these questions, we need to know the base rates for players who have romantic partners or children.

These are the questions that a newer dataset has addressed. About 80% of female players and 60% of male players are in a romantic relationship. On a tangential note, this gives rise to an interesting "singles" imbalance. If we assume an 85:15 gender ratio and the noted singles rate, then for every single woman in an MMO, there are 10 single men.

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Respondents were then asked whether their romantic partner plays the MMO they do, and if so, whether they usually play together or separately. Of the female players who are in a romantic relationship, about 50% of their romantic partners play with them on a regular basis. Of the male players who are in a romantic relationship, only about 20% of their romantic partners play with them on a regular basis. The most striking difference is that the romantic partners of female players are about three times more likely to play the MMO they play than the romantic partners of male players.

A large part of what we're seeing here is probably the "introduction" effect. Because a much higher percentage of female players are introduced to the game via their romantic partner, this increases the likelihood that a female player is playing with their romantic partner. The overall story is that not only are female players more likely to be in romantic relationships to begin with, but they're very likely to be playing with their romantic partner.

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The differences for players who play with their children was less pronounced. About 28% of female players and 20% of male players have at least one child. Of the male players who have children, about 11% play the game with them. For the female players, this was about 18%. It's interesting to note that the children of female players are more likely to be playing an MMO. I don't have a good explanation for this though. Any thoughts?