Additional Player Demographics

We've covered the basic demographics before - age, gender, hours played per week (which really haven't changed much over time btw), so here we'll look at other player demographics. I've never really asked about birth order before and the results were somewhat surprising. MMO players seem to be more likely to be the eldest in the family than would be expected from chance alone. This may be a confound with something else that I'm not thinking of, but I'm not sure what it might be. Post a comment if you have a guess why this might be.

I also asked players whether they were full-time students, full-time home-makers, or retired. Given that the average female MMO player is slightly older than the average male MMO player, the difference in the full-time student category makes sense. The data also showed that about 20% of female players and 5% of male players were full-time home-makers.

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I also looked into attitudes towards religion and social issues. As the graphs show below, religion tends to be fairly unimportant in the lives of most MMO players.

This trend is also reflected in the question about political leaning. Players were asked where they typically stood in terms of social issues, such as abortion, gay rights, and stem cell research. Most MMO players tended to be liberal-leaning, with female players describing themselves as more liberal than male players.

I also tried to see whether either of these two questions was related to class choice among World of Warcraft players. Differences only involved one particular class - Paladins. And while the difference was significant, it was also very small. Players who preferred to be play Paladins in WoW tended to be more conservative and religion tended to play a bigger role in their lives. Again, I want to emphasize that this was a significant, but small, difference.