New Daedalus Project report on roleplaying
(Visited 6648 times) Game talk
Jun 112006
The latest issue of the Daedalus Project is out. Key statistical findings this time:
- 60% of people say they have roleplayed, with no significant age or gender differences.
- Females are more likely to create background stories for their characters.
- Females are also much more likely to have other people’s characters in their backstory.
- They’re also more likely to roleplay with larger groups.
- Regular roleplaying (like, once a week) seems to be something around 1/5 of the playerbase does, and it skews older somewhat.
- 12-17 year olds don’t roleplay near as much as other age brackets.
- 80% of females and 60% of males have flirted with another player.
- No gender and age differences except for 12-17 year old males, who flirt less (this is not news 🙂 ).
- Women are significantly more likely to have developed romantic feelings online — half them ports having done so, versus less than a quarter of the men.
- The females are also far more likely to actually tell their crush about it.
- 29% of females in an MMO have dated someone they met in an MMO, versus 8% of males. This is apparently a big rise over the last time that Nick Yee asked this question.
As usual, there are essays, player submitted stories, and so on as well.
8 Responses to “New Daedalus Project report on roleplaying”
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Those gender differences in relationship questions could be highly related to the numbers of males and females playing, right?
I know that they say there’s a huge market in older women gamers, but, to my knowledge inside of the MMO genre, we’re still talking a heavily male dominated social space. So if you have 10 guys and 3 girls, and one of those girls dates one of those guys, you have 10% of males being involved and 33% of females.
In my experience from Lineage 2, I would say a fairly high percentage of the females (there aren’t many) have become involved with men online. I know of at least three situations where players have traveled internationally to meet the other half of their online relationship. Some other games have significantly higher percentages of female players, but you’re still limited by the fact that there aren’t enough single gals in the world for all the single guys.
I was surprised to learn that women flirt SO much more than men do online. And on the depressing side, I haven’t really seen it, which either means they aren’t flirting that much with ME, or they are and I’m too much of a clueless male to see it.
Then again, maybe the difference is explained by gender-biased definitions of “flirting”. Maybe most guys think saying, “Wow, you’ve got a nice rack!” doesn’t count as flirting, whereas maybe women think simply typing a winky-smiley-face counts as flirting.
Bruce
Very good point …
Or maybe males just assume that the female av with whom they’re chatting is piloted by a male and therefore there’s NO QUESTION
Or you have 100 guys and 30 girls, and 1 of those guys is dating 10 of those girls. This might explain the demand for more character slots. 😀
haha 😀
Maybe, but most relationships I see develop through voice chat on ventrilo, often getting some alone time in a private channel 🙂
Very few people have strictly in-game relationships through PMs, and if they do it’s usually not taken very seriously by the people in the relationship or the people around them.
This is a bit off topic, and probably should be the subject of a separate thread, but since the issue of voice-chat has come up, what do people think of the effects of using the likes of Ventrilo/Roger Wilco/Teamspeak in MMOs?
As a player, I find that being in a group when all the other people are using voice-chat is a lonely experience indeed, and for developers it must sometimes be a pain, as it destroys any attempt at limiting in-game communication to more “realistic” types…
So, if 60% of players report that they’ve roleplayed, and 1/5 of the players do it regularly, does that mean we can finally stop acting like roleplayers are a radical fringe group of vaguely disturbed fruitloops? 😉
Lobosolitario wrote:
(Almost) all new MMORPGs will have voice chat built in. It ain’t gonna get better for you.
There was a dicussion on Mud-Dev about this around 12-18 months ago. I don’t think the archives are alive right now though, so you probably can’t see the discussion. The net result was that there were two camps, “for voice chat” and “against voice chat” (mainly because of role-playing and anonymity issues).