Over the last year, there has been much contention about who actually playsvideo games and what they want from them. A new survey by games research firm Quantic Foundry suggests that much of the vitriol and factional conflict comes from marginal groups at odds with the majority of people who play videogames.
Taken from a sample of 1,127 people, about half of whom were regular played massively multiplayer online games (MMO), 66% of agreed or strongly agreed that video games need to be more inclusive in terms of gender and ethnicity. Only 14% disagreed or strongly disagreed, while 21% were neutral. 69.8% of respondents were men, and the average age was 36.7 years old, a slightly above the ESA’s average game player age of 35.
The survey also undermined a number of common assumptions about games and gender, with 91% of respondents disagreeing with the proposition that women “biologically-wired” to prefer certain categories of games. 98% of respondents rejected the idea that video games should serve an “exclusively” male audience, and 85% affirmed the idea that relationships begun through online games can be as “genuine” as those started through face-to-face meetings. A plurality of respondents disagreed with the proposition thatFacebook games aren’t “real games,” and 79% rejected the idea that Wii games aren’t “real games.”
Attendees play Electronic Arts’ Mirror’s Edge: Catalyst game during E3. Photographer: Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg
The findings are an apt capstone to the last year or so of aggression and abuse directed mostly at women and trans people for criticizing video games’ uncannily homogenous characters and play styles. There was little unusual or offensive about the critiques, and it was largely a reflection of individuals performing services for the benefit of the community that major developers and publishers weren’t. The narrative justification for antagonizing those asserting their right to exist and participate on equal terms in the video game community was built on fear of infiltration from outsiders, people interested in violating the fundamentals of commercial games through an agenda of nepotism and identity politics.
Quantic Foundry’s findings suggest this reaction was indeed reflective of a relatively small group within the wider population of video game players. In part, this is due to the fact that people often talk about the home console industry and the companies that serve it as metonymic with the entire form. As the Electronic Software Association has long enjoyed pointing out in its annual survey of game players, there are more than twice as many women over the age of 18 who play video games than there are boys 18 and younger. The average age of women players is 43, eight years older than the average male player. Though the survey regrettably doesn’t acknowledge trans people, the split between men and women is nearing an equilibrium point at 56% men and 44% women.
These statistics seem surprising in part because the console games industry often feels excessively male-centric, something that’s helped create an anomalous culture of desperate over-identification with a narrow and self-replicating set of experiences. There’s an economic logic underwriting all of this, with the console games industry’s profitability founded on the mania of abandonment, machines that have almost all been sold at or close to a loss in order to profit from games licensing. This has created a culture of perpetual doubt about the sufficiency of the present, something that needs regular proving through testimonial and the displacement of present needs toward future products—the unannounced game, the exclusive for a system you don’t own, the sequel that’s even better.
For years Activision has been the world’s biggest games publisher—though it was finally passed this spring by Warner Bros.—with annual revenue in 2013 topping $4.8 billion driven in large part by 25 million units of Call of Duty: Black Ops II. By contrast, developer King.com had more than 500 million installs of Candy Crush Saga but earned only $2.4 billion in 2014. Angry Birds has been downloaded more than 2.8 billion times over the course of its life, and 600 million times in 2014, reaching a group of players far beyond console favorites like Grand Theft Auto and Call of Duty, yet the company made only $169 million in 2014.
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