Gamers Get Girls?

Interesting thesis that they pose here. I'm mildly surprised that over 43% of americans over 18 are single, though. And certainly not all those gamers in a relationship would be in a relationship with someone they met in an MMO - I don't think the ratio of male and female gamers would be close enough to 50% for that.

There's certainly a lot of potential in an MMO game to connect to a lot of people and thus a bigger chance of meeting someone you can connect with, but knowing people only from online contacts without any real life contact is somehow a lot less substantial for me.

I also agree with Tal that long distance relationships don't really work, at least not in the long term. Though having a lot of contact (either through the internet or by phone or something similar) can make it a last quite a bit longer.

 

I read that debunked on a wow site if it is based on the same survey. The statistical sample is way too small or something: http://wow.joystiq.com/2012/03/23/debunking-the-wow-is-better-for-online-dating-than-dating-sites/

That said I have been playing WoW on and off since it was released and I personally know two couples who have met through WoW, one couple is married and one has a brand new baby. People do meet. I also know of countless short term flings.

The problem is that there generally are at least 10 men for every woman. I have also noticed that many of the women seem to live out some kind fantasy of being desirable building up what can only be called harems of drooling guys. They tend to be a disruptive part of online gaming sadly. The other side of the coin is that unless you thrive on getting all that male attention as a woman most online gaming communities are horrendously sexist. Women who come out as women often have to suffer quite a lot of harassment and unwanted attention.

My final point being until we start getting more women into these communities the gender disparity will skew any research. I am pretty sure that a vast majority of women who play online games have dated someone they met through them but not so much for men.

 

I'm not sure I'd want my girlfriend to be really into games.

 

According to the Wiki, 42% of online gamers are women.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_and_video_games

 

Isn't that statistic including games like Farmville, which is technically also a game that one plays online? I seriously doubt something like WoW has something close to that kind of percentage of women, though admittedly I have no numbers to back that up.

 

I doubt i would date a woman that plays WoW, though. I have too many oldschool standards...like Ultima 5.

 

I second joacqin's assessment.

I'm an ex-raidleader in a large, moderately successfull WoW guild and we had plenty of female players. I personally know of at least three couples that got started just because they happened to be members of our guild, and at least a few others that were couples due to other reasons - including the guild master and his wife. If anything, it was the single females that caused the most drama in the guild, just in the way joaq outlined.

However, our guild was of the rare kind built around a rather large core group of IRL friends. Also, we only ever accepted finnish-speaking members above the age of 18, so the player base was extremely homogenous compared to most any average guild out there.

 

Hmmm... Gamers Get Girls. In other news, blind squirrels find some acorns too.

In all seriousness, if we are to believe those statistics, specifically the median age of someone using online dating being 48, I think it's pretty obvious. Chances are if you're 48 and single, there's a reason why. Maybe you're ugly, maybe you have a terrible personality, or maybe you're divorced and don't want to go through marriage again (but wouldn't be opposed to dating).

On the other hand, people who are gamers tend to be younger, and they start at an age before people typically get married. So OF COURSE there will be more marriages - most people in the world eventually do get married at some point, and you're drawing from a pool of people who happen to be at a point of their lives when people tend to get married most frequently.

So of course there are more marriages among the gamer population when compared to the fuglies, wet dishcloths, and disgruntled divorced people populations.

 

Not so sure about that. In the US at least, according to US Census Bureau stats from 2009, there are more single persons aged 25 - 34 than married.



Source: Wall Street Journal

If younger is considered prime marrying age, it seems unlikely that these stats would go up as people get older. So clearly there are other significant factors at play here besides attractiveness, personality, and divorce.

 

No doubt people are marrying much later than before, but I still think the vast majority of people get married eventually. It's just that you're now seeing more people marrying in their 30s as opposed to their 20s. I don't know too many never-married people over 40 as an example. Certainly not more than half the people I know and/or work with.

 

Tal, I'm not sure what you mean by dating someone in WoW. I can understand roleplaying some kind of relationship (obviously actually roleplaying a relationship of the characters', not getting off vicariously under the excuse) and I guess that if people are in a long-distance relationship, they might as well play WoW for a date. Not that far from playing chess at a café offline, really, except at this point in my life, I'd probably prefer to spend so many hours a day working to earn enough to afford flight fares instead, but I do remember playing games with a special lady when I was younger. Unfortunately, that ended with a broken heart (and maybe more than one, some things you will never know), although not because of the games, and not at all uniquely in light of my entire romantic life, long-distance or not.

Divorce of parents has the potential to make children scared of marriage (while, by contrast, a sibling by the same parents may be out there proving he or she can get it right). Real property prices can be sky-high. For example, in Poland the country's average monthly salary would probably allow you to pay for 2 square feet of a modest apartment in a modest quarter in the capital city. Currently, even a high-powered earner would end up heavily indebted for getting some realty. And we also live in an egoistic generation. Materialism, going out for number one, opportunism... No wonder people prefer hooking, something they might even feel happier without if they tried. In my case, with perhaps twice the average (four times if I have plenty of contracts and work hard at nights), realty would still be problematic (post-Master's education has eaten a lot of money but I'm getting better) but I emphatically stress that I don't have a live-in girlfriend. At any rate, the reason I'll mostly likely have died without passing on the surname is personality and compatibility related. Given the course of my life so far and certain other circumstances, there are very few people we could relate mutually on that kind of level with and the odds are low.

As for gamers, at this day and age pretty much everybody has played something. Which is not that different from several years ago except now people are admitting it. Even the girls are gamers.

We've got problems in Poland too. We'll be down to 30 million in the country in my lifetime. Used to be 40. There used to be kids out playing, when I was younger. Now it's empty playing grounds. And forget prams. Well, maybe some. We still have 23.6 as the average marrying age for women and 26-30 for men.

According to my canon law professor, being single past your 26th year used to be considered old and make it easier to get dispensations from certain impediments due to difficulty finding a partner. Perhaps still is, actually.

Most of us are casual anyway. Well, maybe hardcore and maybe you personally would qualify as a pro, although not on account of your gaming skill. ;P

 

Wow, looks like I've lived in the stone age then. Well, I guess it comes down to semantics at that point. IMHO as far as people are in a relationship, you could say, a fortiori, that they are dating and as I said, meeting up online for a game isn't really different from going to a PC baang. Korean twitch kids actually go there for dates from what I've read.

Of course. I simply qualified the pro part in a lame attempt at a joke. Not sure I agree with wiki on that one, actually. IMHO, a pro is a guy who actually works, i.e. participates in tournaments in a professional league, gets sponsored and so on, although skill does matter (getting sponsored and competing at a low level, beatable by random people from the Internet, would be only technically professional gaming). A very skilled gamed with peer recognition, tournament participation, perhaps membership in a good clan etc. is, strictly speaking, not a pro, although he will be referred to as such sometimes, especially in gaming scenes where there aren't really pros (e.g. because there's no sponsorship and perhaps no official tournaments). He'd be "gosu" ("master") or a hardcore gamer, some of whom are better than some of the pros. Casuals would be people of mostly average skills, who do not play to increase their skill and then play even better but just to have fun, not necessarily newbies. So for example I belong in that category despite the countless hours spent gaming. Sunday gamers would not be casual, they're simply Sunday gamers. There is a marketing tendency to make us nerds into something more than casual (e.g. "casual" difficulty level below normal etc.) but that's a bit inflated and it's simply rather than Sunday gamers are not casual gamers, they are "less" than casual. IMHO what wiki talks about is a different thing, certainly a "casual game" (as a type of game, not a type of gaming) is different from casual vs other gamers. Where I said you could probably fit into the pro category, it was because it was hard to put you in the casual category for a number of reasons. But I guess anybody who can keep playing a difficult arcade game for hours or somebody who insists on finishing the BG saga on the highest difficulty level without ever reloading has the right to call himself hardcore and "above" casual. I'm pretty sure many of our posters here are this type of gamer.

As for the stuff on the poster, I don't really like what they concluded about uncertainty. IMHO being attracted by uncertainty is a destructive evolutionary behaviour that leads people often to act like lemmings in the relationship area (getting off on risk, going for "dangerous" types etc. being an extreme example of that). On the other hand, I'd say that a dating website is mostly one big pile of obvious unless you act consciously to counter that effect, which is possible. For example, you can definitely find a dating website enabling you to realise high expectations of conduct, class act etc. but basically everybody knows what you're there for. Typically, at its best it's like going to a singles bar and at the worst it's like a breeding ground for birds where everybody openly calculates, evaluates etc. In gaming, just like in professional or hobby or whatever other social circles, things happen more naturally. It's easier to have a normal conversation, spend some time, get to know someone who's not puffing up and parading his best feathers.

They're actually even probably right about greater honesty but I wouldn't bet my money on that; in fact, I'm not really sure how reliable this is. But the whole stuff with attraction being greater due to the fun, exciting and adrenaline-inducing adventures (while dopamine releases due to the "funness" of gaming as an activity) is a swampy ground. It's the adrenaline, the online persona – of the player himself or herself, let alone the fact people are largely in-character and the reception of the character mixes up with the reception of the player behind it (I'm pretty sure it would be possible for a dysfunctional nerd to fall in love with a female character created by another dysfunctional nerd of the wrong sex). IMHO all this stuff contributes to a poor chance of determining a meaningful relationship or a good match. Perhaps also because somebody who's already getting his dopamine from some other source may file to register properly the lack of dopamine resulting from normal contacts with the respective person. (While I wouldn't underestimate the positive, constructive effect of comaraderie on people's relationships; certainly it matters much if you've been able to rely on each other a lot for an extended period of time.)

 

Sheesh. How many compatible women do you need? I think the number of people any given person is compatible with is fairly low. But it's not like you have to meet 10 different women with a compatible personality type in order to get married. I would imagine the specific necessary number you're looking for is one.

 

I think Chev's just singing the blues. He'll be married with two kids four years from now.

 

Well in Australia (where I live) marriage is a contract. Less men are willing to sign away half of their assets based on the success of a marriage 'lasting', which is near insignificant.

 

Here there are two sets of laws. If you are married you share everything you have and everything you gain during the marriage unless you write a pre-nuptial. If you just live together without being married you share everything you have gained while being part of the same household but any assets you had before the relationship are still yours. So if you buy an apartment together with your girlfriend and you pay for it when you split up half is still hers but if she moves in to your apartment you bought before you met her it is yours. Or something like that.