Basically the graph is trying to show two things at once - the difference between the categories and the difference between each category and normal. For multiple variables.
By showing a lot of information on one graph, it becomes hard to see any particular pieceof information.
If you are trying to show a comparison between two categories, it's better to normalise those two categories. If you want to show that being far from the centre of the bell curve is more significant (which doesn't come accross on this graph at all by the way), then factor that in when you normalise.
I honestly don't understand what they are plotting:
> So for example, the 74th-%tile in Competition among Hardcore gamers means that the average Hardcore gamer scores higher on Competition than 74% of the gamers in the full data set.
But together casual and core make up 78 % of the sample, so that the some hardcore gamers must have scores lower than the "hardcore average". Those hardcore gamers only make up 4% of the total sample, which means that 0.04/0.21 = 0.19 -> 19 % of hardcore gamers score lower than the hardcore average!
That's so skewed an arithmetic average is clearly of little use, but at the same time they talk about percentiles, so I don't know what's happening here, did they take the sample average and pretended it's the median?
Aren't you assuming (probably incorrectly) that all hardcore gamers rated Competition more highly than all core/casual gamers?
I'm not sure how much less weird allowing for that makes things, but your reasoning for concluding that hardcore gamers with lower Competition scores than the hardcore average make up only 4% of the sample isn't valid.
For example, if half of the hardcore gamers (around 10.5% of the sample) are above the hardcore average and half below, that would put about 81% of the nonhardcore gamers (about 63.5% of the full sample) below the hardcore average and the rest above (about 19% of the full sample).
Agreed. It's relatively useless information without normalizing the differences by the variances (Cohen's d) or at least providing confidence intervals.
The graph starts at 50% where there is a thick line. It grows up and down until it contains the entire variation. The extreme values are not relevant.
It is a pretty standard format, and this "warning the graph does not start at 0" kneejerk is tiring. (What would you expect a graph with both positive and negative values should look like?)
If there would be no data point below/above 20/85, then it might be warranted to truncate it, but that's clearly not the case, in fact, by definition, there is 20% and 15% of the data respectively.
The bars starting from the median (50th percentile) are also a pretty meaningless visual indicator. E.g. the bars for competition visually indicate that men would be twice as competitive, but in the graph without the bar and including the 0th/100th percentile the difference is much less pronounced:
I find that especially damning as lots of these gamers are probably not familiar with statistics, so they might indeed draw extreme conclusions from these graphs merely due to the way it is represented.
If you look at the graph that shows motivations for hardcore gamers on men vs. women, there are very obvious design choices that are definitely lying. For Community vs Competition, 62% and 63% are both the same height, while there is a significant difference between the 62% and 61% of community.
For Power and Strategy, both are 61% but Power's 61% is noticeably lower than Strategy's.
The real differences are probably not as defined as this graph makes it seem it is as Community is basically the same but the 1% difference makes the graph look very off.
I agree. Much better questions would be about measurable things (e.g 'how many hours do you spend playing per week' or 'how often have you taken part in an organized tournament over the last year'). That different people use the same words for slightly different things is as new as the stone on the ground.
"how often have you taken part in an organized tournament over the last year" would measure whether you like competition. It does not even measure how much you play nor how much you are invested.
I think it is more useful to keep competitive and hardcore as two different words.
Indeed, it doesn't measure the same. The examples were meant more as an example how to ask questions that different people answer the same way (given the same situation).
> In our talk at GDC 2018, we explored what gamer motivations would look like if we defined “casual/core/hardcore” gamers using different assumptions—e.g., by self-identification with labels vs. by gaming frequency vs. by specific game titles they play. In this blog post, we’ll focus on the slice by self-identification with labels, but we’re hoping to cover at least one additional slice in a future post.
In other words, they're looking at a few different ways of defining "casual" and "hardcore", and one of the ways they're looking at is self-identification, which is an obvious and useful way of looking at these types of things in sociology. And as a bonus, we then get to do some interesting comparisons of how the different ways of categorising people overlap and differ (which they touched on briefly near the end when they noted that female EverQuest 2 players averages more hours per week).
> This is wrong, even their entire concept of casual/mid/hardcore gamer is terrible, you can't just define it like that.
That's quite a bold assertion. Do you have some sort of argument for why this is somehow uniquely an area where self-identification is an unusable way of classifying people, or are you just offended by their results?
Because it sure looks to me like you totally can use self-identification here. :)
Makes me think of my home... my son is a "hardcore gamer", by anyone's definition. He doesn't recognize his mother as a gamer at all, despite her spending 10-20 hours/week gaming. She's mostly doing puzzle games on her iPad, so that's not "real gaming".
So there's a fair bit of gender and cultural bias in the very idea of "gamer".
I don't play video games, myself, for the same reason I don't shoot heroin directly into my eyeballs. I know I have a problem, so I avoid the problem.
A few years ago, I had a medical problem (retinal vein occlusion) that had to be treated for a while with monthly injections directly into my eye. The drug used (Avastin) was originally developed for colon cancer treatment - it prevents the regrowth of tiny veins, which leads to a lot of very interesting uses.
So the day of my first injection, I went to a Rolling Stones concert with my spouse. And I don't care what sort of hardcore Keith Richards is, I'm pretty sure he wasn't shooting chemotherapy drugs directly into his eyeball before the concert!
I think that you will find that many women who play a lot of those puzzle games would dislike to be called "gamer" too. There is a lot baggage contained in that word and while young boy may see at as positive identification, older women is unlikely so.
I typically spend 40+ hours/week gaming. Literally a 2nd job. However, I don't even consider the time spent gaming in my definition of "hardcore" gamer. There are people who play 80+ hours/week that I would consider "casual" gamers by definition of how they play. They see games mostly as a way to kill time and might identify the activity with being a hobby, but not one they take "seriously" to any extent.
The thing that makes me "hardcore" is the amount of time I don't spend gaming - but learning about the game on a deep level. I typically have 99% of a games' wikipedia memorized. I can tell you nearly anything about any of the games I play off the top of my head. I'll know every mechanic, every bug, why the bugs exist, a summary of the lore. Depending on the genre, I'll know the best places to level at any particular level range, where every single enemy spawns (or whether their spawn is random), the damage output of every weapon in comparison to one another, how certain items scale, the frame data of certain attacks (eg: first hit frame, ending lag, if it has invincible frames, the number of end frames).
Casuals don't care to put in all this extra effort to know the game on a deep, often very mechanical, level. "Intermediate" players will read about it but still don't invest much time to it. "Hardcore" players know a game inside, inside-out, upside-down, mirrored, and can probably run through some levels blindfolded going off their memorization of the game alone.
A casual player can play SSBM for 30 hours a week without ever learning how to wavedash, L-cancel, chaingrab, wobble, (S)DI, amsa tech, moonwalk, shffl, platform cancel, slide cancel, soft B-reverse, or ledge stall. There is also a good chance they think I made up half of those words or just said some random things. They also don't tend to keep up with any metagaming - or if they do - they're never on the forefront of innovation for the metagame, but only ever (poorly) copying what they see pro players do without understanding why the professional player made their decisions. The casual player's mechanical knowledge about the game is lacking too much to effectively innovate because they don't really understand how the game interacts with itself.
My casual League of Legends coworkers' are all ranked Bronze/Silver because ranking in that game is almost entirely a measure of knowledge and only a very small part of it is skill - they all play the game far more than I do but I understand the game better than them and ranked among the top 1% of players (Plat1/Diamond5 range) when I played. They never cared to learn about the game itself - so never improved as players. Even after months and months of playing with them they never got any better at the game, even as their general "skill level" (ability to execute) was increasing over time. Certain games also lack depth - and are the games I consider targeted towards casual players. Most of those are mobile games like Angry Bird, puzzle games (eg: 2048, Candy Crush), or arcade-like games like Pacman, Asteroids.
So while I don't consider playing puzzle games on an iPad "not real gaming" it is also very much a sign of "casual gaming" - it's a time killing activity. Without knowing your wife, I have my doubts that she spends a significant time metagaming her puzzle games or researching the best way to solve the puzzles. This is partly because that would be counter-productive to a good puzzle and partly because there often isn't enough depth to a puzzle game to research about it.
My issue is that since all hobbies are time-killing activities that time ceases to be a useful measure. The majority of people who spend 10,000 hours doing something eventually become skilled or knowledgeable at that thing - but not always. If you remain poorly skilled and not very knowledgeable on a thing after 10,000 hours I'm going to assume those hours were spent "casually" and not with a lot of focus to learn and improve. In my view, if you only casually spend your time doing something that makes you a casual by definition.
We use all sorts of labels that have an implied threshold before people will apply the label to another person. In your own words, what are the differences between a master pianist, a pianist, and someone who can play the Hot Cross Buns melody? Where do you draw the line between "translator" and "can translate a few sentences between two languages"? Is anyone capable of swinging a tennis racket a tennis player? Is an advocate for homeopathic treatments the same as a doctor? If you answered "yes" to any of the above questions, if I said I handle high-frequency financial transactions for a well-known, international, multi-million dollar company is your first thought a cashier at a McDonalds?
For some reason gaming is somehow exempt in some people's minds. They apply the label so broadly that it may as well be meaningless.
Speaking as someone who has spent decades mastering a hobby craft (playing guitar)... first, if someone is involved in a hobby consistently at all, then the label applies. Terrible guitarists are as much guitarists as geniuses are. This is not to equate the players - only to equate the labels. You need something more precise to distinguish. My son is a hardcore gamer. My spouse is a gamer, but not a hardcore gamer. When more committed gamers say "That's not a real gamer", it's about exclusion and snobbery, not a real measure of anything else, including talent and skill (fwiw, my spouse would probably trounce you at her games). So be very careful when taking this position that you're being distinctive rather than judgmental.
Another thing I've observed is that people who have committed their 10,000 hours and become really, really good are often in doubt about their own abilities. That's because they notice things that less experienced people do not. After 35 years of playing guitar, I feel I know less about it now than I did when I'd been playing for two years. The sense of scope of what I don't know is overwhelming sometimes.
I also play guitar, I know my music theory, I can play chords on a piano, but if anyone asked me to play a song - outside of doing an improv. chord progression - I'd be able to do so. I still fumble trying to find the right notes quickly enough to play music. I feel it would be insulting to other pianists if I called myself a pianist - even though I play piano almost daily. My office has a grand piano in the lobby and I'm the first one in every morning by a few hours, giving me time to dabble with it alone.
Dunning-kruger doesn't prevent them from being able to explain things (even if not necessarily in "formal terms", there are plenty of talented musicians out there who don't know a lick of music theory!) or perform at levels that an unpracticed person could. Almost anyone who picks up a guitar could learn a basic version of Deep Purple or Ironman or the intro riff to Enter Sandman in a few hours, barring any physical limitations. But you're not going to be cranking out improv solos or a jazz chord progression without any practice whatsoever.
To ask again, in your own words, what are the differences between a master pianist, a pianist, and someone who can play the Hot Cross Buns melody? I personally feel there is an important distinction, if only to convey information accurately, between saying "I am a master pianist", "I can play piano", and "I am learning to play piano."
Some years ago, I taught an after-school chess club at my son's middle school. Now, I'm no sort of decent chess player at all, but I know the rules, and I know a little.
For the first day of class, I sent around a questionnaire, asking students to rate themselves as beginning, intermediate, or advanced. All of them, except my son, rated themselves as intermediate or advanced. I then played all of them at the same time, and won all of those games.
And I suck.
This really is a complicated question, though. First, perspective. Are you describing yourself, or someone else? Is there any sort of a formal rating system? (For example, a Bachelor of Science degree is a formal rating system.)
Take the guitarist example. Every guitarist I know, no matter how good (and I know professionals) is quite limited in what they can play. Neil Young can't play classical. Classical players can't play Neil Young, either! They might be able to get the notes right - by ear, even - but they'll lack feel, expressiveness, and tone. Measuring guitar, or many other forms of art, in terms of technique can be blindingly wrong. What's good guitar technique? Playing fast? Knowing a lot of scales? Piffle. Good guitarists can express what they want to express. Period. That's my measure.
So you see why I have a problem with the idea of "convey information accurately". I think it's philosophically wrong.
There are many grey areas when not using a 'formal' rating system (eg: college degree). But the formal system is rigged in that it isn't available to everyone - and is heavily biased towards those with the right pedigree or luck. Not to say nobody gets into college through hard work, just that it's skewed.
I feel most people are able to identify a good guitarist whether or not they like the music the guitarist plays. Even when the guitarist only plays with 1 string [0].
>For the first day of class, I sent around a questionnaire, asking students to rate themselves as beginning, intermediate, or advanced.
I blame your questionnaire for not defining the levels of play or being granular enough (1-10 scale). With those options I would assume "beginner" means "doesn't know how a knight can move across the board or the difference between a rook and a bishop", a 1 on a 10 scale. For example, I'm a "novice" chess player for sure - but not a "beginner" (some people may use these terms interchangeably), a 2 or 3 on a 10 scale. Assuming the students in the club knew the rules of Chess - it's not a surprise nobody answered "beginner"!
One of my favorite books on guitar theory, The Advancing Guitarist by Mick Goodrick, has a whole section called "The Science of the Unitar", about learning to play on just one string, as a way of thinking of the guitar differently.
To use your analogy, it doesn't take long in a conversation to tell if the person you're speaking with is well educated or not.
Ignoring the graphs, curious how much of this is just a response to community. Anecdotes abound, beware.
Even as an older (for gaming, anyway) white male, the community in some competitive games is just really unappealing - it basically reminds me of middle school, and I guess I'm not really into that anymore. Lots of things said just to get a reaction (e.g. racial slurs), lots of weird discussions about women, lots of puffed chests the second there's an opportunity to, etc.
I don't really have the time to be competitively good at any of these games, and the community kinda sucks unless you are competitively good, so it's kinda like what's the point? At least with rec sports the community is generally nice even if you're terrible (probably because you're in-person).
Sure, you can just mute people usually. But if you're muting everyone all the time, you might as well just be playing a single-player game. You can just play with friends, but that requires you to have friends who haven't also gotten sick of these communities.
Conversely, the community in games more oriented towards completion/design are usually great - because your success doesn't detract from someone else's, and they're not usually depending on you for their own success. Feels much more like a community.
Anyway, my point being that I wouldn't be shocked to learn that women (and likely people of color) feel the same way - once you're not really part of that core group of young white men, competitive games start feeling really unappealing unless you're just really into the game itself.
> I don't really have the time to be competitively good at any of these games, and the community kinda sucks unless you are competitively good so it's kinda like what's the point?
You could play with people on your own level?
> At least with rec sports the community is generally nice even if you're terrible (probably because you're in-person).
Really? Try playing pick-up basketball games if you are terrible. Even with rec sports, people play at their own level.
> Anyway, my point being that I wouldn't be shocked to learn that women (and likely people of color) feel the same way - once you're not really part of that core group of young white men
Young white men? Why are you being racist and sexist by targeting one group?
People don't play online games or recreational sports for "community". Seems like you are lonely and trying to make friends in the wrong places.
I play sports because it's fun and good exercise. I play video games because it's fun and mentally challenging. I don't play sports or video games for community.
> competitive games start feeling really unappealing unless you're just really into the game itself.
Then don't play it. Go play something else? Why are you complaining about it?
Maybe women on average don't like competitive games for the same reason women don't like other competitive sports like basketball, baseball, etc? Maybe, men and women are on average different and have different interests. Maybe that's why advertisers go about targeting men and women different? Maybe that's why movies, music, etc are differently geared towards men and women?
Or, maybe you could push your racist and sexist rhetoric and blame young white men?
My own experience feels different than yours like how friendship is different in some areas.
In the good community games usually things are not deep: people are nice but no one will really risk anything or inconvenience themselves for you.
In more "hardcore" games where everyone can be hostile and gain to fuck with you, finding people who help other has a lot more meaning. I'm used to play with a guild in multiple PvP oriented MMO: I know most of them will risk their hardly obtained gear to help. We have good relationships with some other guilds and know we'll all go out of our ways to help each other in different games. When you could kill new players, take their loot and camp their corpse, being one of those who don't but will help with some gear and tips can snowball months later. When you can scam and cheat people, getting a trustful trader reputation can mean a lot.
...this sounds incredibly messed up. The good people might be harder to find in a nice crowd, but the experience of finding them is much nicer.
I can see how a friendship forged in the face of assholes would feel stronger, but I dont think it would necessarily BE a better friendship. Way too easy to be bound with someone that is just LESS of an ass.
This sounds like "yay Stockholm Syndrome" more than "here is a safe and stable source of friends", but I'm really glad you shared the outlook because it certainly explains a lot of people. Wow.
GW2 (experienced at launch for 6 months): awesome game to create random groups as everyone gains from it. Hard to be an ass and you get nothing but maybe some sick joy from it. Honestly: I did not get any huge wholesome experience with anyone: get in zome event group, kill some NPC, do some WvW against anonymous people.
Darkfall Online: pure PvP game with player looting. Being a bad person was really rewarding. So it was always awesome to find legitimely good people and go kick some villains ass. Or help defend your neighbours city (who you're usually PKing all day and competing for mobz) against some other bigger imperialist. As being a PK give you something you get player killers. And if you enjoy playing the hero you just got ennemies with the same tools you have, non scripted and maybe smarter / better than you. Once you've experienced this kind of MMO it is hard to get the same highs from other games.
> Once you've experienced this kind of MMO it is hard to get the same highs from other games.
I really, truly, am trying to understand, so please bear with my slowness. I can see how it is really rewarding to find not-bad people in an environment that incentivizes really bad people. I don't see how that makes up for getting into such an environment in the first place, and certainly not why one would follow up the experience by seeking out similar environments.
People suck on average, so you want to give them every opportunity and incentive to demonstrate, so that you can find the "good" people? Note the selection bias - you're finding those people that are both NOT asshats but also interested in an environment that encourages asshats. Perhaps that's more rewarding than my habit of simply not having close friends at all, but it also seems far more punishing. Bland people can be exhausting, but evil people....they bring despair. To be in an environment that cranks up the frequency and demonstration of people getting joy from the misery of others...that sounds like a choice to endure needless pain and suffering.
[Pause for the irony of submitting that last sentence as part of an online discussion thread]
I just don't get it. Doubtless just a difference in personal tastes - perhaps someone being a jerk around me bothers me just a tiny bit more, and someone being nice around me thrills me just a tiny bit less - but emotionally I'm failing to wrap understanding around your stance.
My opinion only, I'm sure other people playing those kind of games will have other motivations. Those games are fun because (and it goes with the article) there is competition against other humans. If you don't get any pleasure in competing I can understand those games will never appeal to you.
The fact you can lose your gear or loot to other players add more stake to fights: when you win your brain is flooded with natural drugs. When losing you have even more drive to get back to your opponent. Fighting against humans feels a lot more rewarding, and usually if you lose it is not because of "some bullshit game mechanic on this boss": it means you have to get better (at the fight part, getting gear part, the diplomacy part to have more people to bring etc.).
First time you get killed in those games is when you know if you'll stick or not: either you say "fuck anyone can come and steal my items", or you think "ok, if I can ambush this kind of person with 5 people, we could get free high level gear".
On an individual or small group basis, there are good benefits to play a bad guy so you see a lot of them. And I think this kind of environment foster deeper relationships: in the hate direction but also in the friendship direction. You get higher highs and lower lows. But the experience is rarely bland.
With MMOs you also get the inter-guild level and that's when politics, diplomacy, spying come into play. The best are grudges and alliances spanning more decades and multiple games. The funniest is when old guard guilds which hate each other end-up allying against new-comers kicking their ass.
You get some of those kind of stories with PvE only games but not as much. I may be wrong but I don't know of a lot of guild created in a PvE game spanning multiple games.
> evil people....they bring despair
Unless you're one of those putting an end to them.
The BIAS here is to let people choose if they are hardcore or not, like the gender is wrong. There's an definition about hardcore, and people can't argue the definiton and what they define hardcore.
I was rather unimpressed with the test as well as the graphs. I scored myself low in every category because I find it hard to rate any one aspect high. I'm paraphrasing: How important are explosions? How important is competition? How important is exploring?
I can't rate any of these things high, in and of themselves. It requires a well balanced mix of things to make a great game. Breaking everything down to individual components makes it seem I am much less engaged in games than I am.
Setting aside the graph issues, the data is very interesting.
Much of game development for the triple-A space seems aimed at the hardcore male gamer demographic, whether intentional or not. Could a studio instead build a game that focuses on entirely different categories and as a result attract a bigger market that isn't being addressed?
Make a game that's fun, but focus on design, discovery, completion, fantasy. Don't discourage male players, but make a game that ticks all the boxes for most female players. Market it subtly for both genders, trying to hook female gamers.
Game studios are already focusing on different target demographics, it just that people tend to not see it because when a product change target demographic it also tailors (in a market competition way) all other aspect of putting a product to market and successfully earning profit on it. Those changes also effect how game studios compete against each other, and major developers for one type might be a minor actor in the other.
Triple-A games and block buster action movies has very many similarities. A lot of focus is on first day sales with flashy and short term advertisement that get concentrated to compete against the competition that tries to do the same thing. For some reason the young male with disposable income is a core demographic for this kind of product. In contrast Candy crush, Facebook games, romantic comedy and drama movies share a different target demographic of middle age women. If I remember right then production for that demographic has surpassed that of triple-A, with mobile games being a massive industry.
Why does marketing when targeting for men or women differ? Why does the purchasing pattern differ. I don't know and there are movie and game studios that do try to target all gender and all age demographics with the same product, using a singe marketing style and single platform. Maybe that works but lets not forget that game studios that targeting other demographics than young male with disposable income really do exist. They just don't call themselves triple-A, just like how a romantic comedy don't usually get described as a block buster. If I make a guess I would say it has something to do with marketing.
The female logic I can follow here: Once you play hardcore, i.e. more intense, just having a story will get boring soon. So they add other competencies.
It's a little confusing for me, why just playing skill competition shouldn't get boring for men as well. Adding story based components for a more indepth experience would also sound reasonable for me.
So I wonder if self-assessment is really a good way to analyse the behaviour here. It might be that men don't mention that they care about community/story as much, while actually they do as well when they heavily invest time and energy into a single game.
> In this chart below, the y-axis is showing the percentile rank of each motivation. That 50th-%tile line represents the average among the 350,000+ gamers who have completed the Gamer Motivation Profile. So for example, the 74th-%tile in Competition among Hardcore gamers means that the average Hardcore gamer scores higher on Competition than 74% of the gamers in the full data set.
I genuinely don't think there's anything useful that can be said here at all without knowing what fraction of gamers make up the different catagories. Beyond that, all we can say for sure is that "hardcore" gamers like gaming more. Ugh.
I've played almost every competitive pc game in the last decade and I've never came across one where when a female voice gets on the mic, the atmosphere of the game doesn't change. Not every individual match of course but dam, I would NOT want to be a female online gamer. Seperate note: I've been to LANs and the mood is quite different, it is unfortunate to see the gender divide and most competitive (semi-pro at least) guys really want to see that scene improve.
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[ 65.2 ms ] story [ 2018 ms ] threadBasically the graph is trying to show two things at once - the difference between the categories and the difference between each category and normal. For multiple variables.
By showing a lot of information on one graph, it becomes hard to see any particular pieceof information.
If you are trying to show a comparison between two categories, it's better to normalise those two categories. If you want to show that being far from the centre of the bell curve is more significant (which doesn't come accross on this graph at all by the way), then factor that in when you normalise.
Two clear graphs are better than one bad one.
https://imgur.com/a/wzbI7mC
> So for example, the 74th-%tile in Competition among Hardcore gamers means that the average Hardcore gamer scores higher on Competition than 74% of the gamers in the full data set.
But together casual and core make up 78 % of the sample, so that the some hardcore gamers must have scores lower than the "hardcore average". Those hardcore gamers only make up 4% of the total sample, which means that 0.04/0.21 = 0.19 -> 19 % of hardcore gamers score lower than the hardcore average!
That's so skewed an arithmetic average is clearly of little use, but at the same time they talk about percentiles, so I don't know what's happening here, did they take the sample average and pretended it's the median?
I'm not sure how much less weird allowing for that makes things, but your reasoning for concluding that hardcore gamers with lower Competition scores than the hardcore average make up only 4% of the sample isn't valid.
For example, if half of the hardcore gamers (around 10.5% of the sample) are above the hardcore average and half below, that would put about 81% of the nonhardcore gamers (about 63.5% of the full sample) below the hardcore average and the rest above (about 19% of the full sample).
https://quanticfoundry.com/age-report/
Here's a sample chart showing how "Competition" ranks by age:
https://quanticfoundry.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Compet...
Enough people to keep them in business. If you're planning a major product launch, $2500 for a market research report is pocket change.
It is a pretty standard format, and this "warning the graph does not start at 0" kneejerk is tiring. (What would you expect a graph with both positive and negative values should look like?)
The bars starting from the median (50th percentile) are also a pretty meaningless visual indicator. E.g. the bars for competition visually indicate that men would be twice as competitive, but in the graph without the bar and including the 0th/100th percentile the difference is much less pronounced:
https://quanticfoundry.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/hardco...
https://i.imgur.com/P9M7AnR.png
I find that especially damning as lots of these gamers are probably not familiar with statistics, so they might indeed draw extreme conclusions from these graphs merely due to the way it is represented.
For Power and Strategy, both are 61% but Power's 61% is noticeably lower than Strategy's.
The real differences are probably not as defined as this graph makes it seem it is as Community is basically the same but the 1% difference makes the graph look very off.
I think it is more useful to keep competitive and hardcore as two different words.
In other words, they're looking at a few different ways of defining "casual" and "hardcore", and one of the ways they're looking at is self-identification, which is an obvious and useful way of looking at these types of things in sociology. And as a bonus, we then get to do some interesting comparisons of how the different ways of categorising people overlap and differ (which they touched on briefly near the end when they noted that female EverQuest 2 players averages more hours per week).
> This is wrong, even their entire concept of casual/mid/hardcore gamer is terrible, you can't just define it like that.
That's quite a bold assertion. Do you have some sort of argument for why this is somehow uniquely an area where self-identification is an unusable way of classifying people, or are you just offended by their results? Because it sure looks to me like you totally can use self-identification here. :)
So there's a fair bit of gender and cultural bias in the very idea of "gamer".
I don't play video games, myself, for the same reason I don't shoot heroin directly into my eyeballs. I know I have a problem, so I avoid the problem.
casual...
So the day of my first injection, I went to a Rolling Stones concert with my spouse. And I don't care what sort of hardcore Keith Richards is, I'm pretty sure he wasn't shooting chemotherapy drugs directly into his eyeball before the concert!
Pardon the wall of text here...
I typically spend 40+ hours/week gaming. Literally a 2nd job. However, I don't even consider the time spent gaming in my definition of "hardcore" gamer. There are people who play 80+ hours/week that I would consider "casual" gamers by definition of how they play. They see games mostly as a way to kill time and might identify the activity with being a hobby, but not one they take "seriously" to any extent.
The thing that makes me "hardcore" is the amount of time I don't spend gaming - but learning about the game on a deep level. I typically have 99% of a games' wikipedia memorized. I can tell you nearly anything about any of the games I play off the top of my head. I'll know every mechanic, every bug, why the bugs exist, a summary of the lore. Depending on the genre, I'll know the best places to level at any particular level range, where every single enemy spawns (or whether their spawn is random), the damage output of every weapon in comparison to one another, how certain items scale, the frame data of certain attacks (eg: first hit frame, ending lag, if it has invincible frames, the number of end frames).
Casuals don't care to put in all this extra effort to know the game on a deep, often very mechanical, level. "Intermediate" players will read about it but still don't invest much time to it. "Hardcore" players know a game inside, inside-out, upside-down, mirrored, and can probably run through some levels blindfolded going off their memorization of the game alone.
A casual player can play SSBM for 30 hours a week without ever learning how to wavedash, L-cancel, chaingrab, wobble, (S)DI, amsa tech, moonwalk, shffl, platform cancel, slide cancel, soft B-reverse, or ledge stall. There is also a good chance they think I made up half of those words or just said some random things. They also don't tend to keep up with any metagaming - or if they do - they're never on the forefront of innovation for the metagame, but only ever (poorly) copying what they see pro players do without understanding why the professional player made their decisions. The casual player's mechanical knowledge about the game is lacking too much to effectively innovate because they don't really understand how the game interacts with itself.
My casual League of Legends coworkers' are all ranked Bronze/Silver because ranking in that game is almost entirely a measure of knowledge and only a very small part of it is skill - they all play the game far more than I do but I understand the game better than them and ranked among the top 1% of players (Plat1/Diamond5 range) when I played. They never cared to learn about the game itself - so never improved as players. Even after months and months of playing with them they never got any better at the game, even as their general "skill level" (ability to execute) was increasing over time. Certain games also lack depth - and are the games I consider targeted towards casual players. Most of those are mobile games like Angry Bird, puzzle games (eg: 2048, Candy Crush), or arcade-like games like Pacman, Asteroids.
So while I don't consider playing puzzle games on an iPad "not real gaming" it is also very much a sign of "casual gaming" - it's a time killing activity. Without knowing your wife, I have my doubts that she spends a significant time metagaming her puzzle games or researching the best way to solve the puzzles. This is partly because that would be counter-productive to a good puzzle and partly because there often isn't enough depth to a puzzle game to research about it.
We use all sorts of labels that have an implied threshold before people will apply the label to another person. In your own words, what are the differences between a master pianist, a pianist, and someone who can play the Hot Cross Buns melody? Where do you draw the line between "translator" and "can translate a few sentences between two languages"? Is anyone capable of swinging a tennis racket a tennis player? Is an advocate for homeopathic treatments the same as a doctor? If you answered "yes" to any of the above questions, if I said I handle high-frequency financial transactions for a well-known, international, multi-million dollar company is your first thought a cashier at a McDonalds?
For some reason gaming is somehow exempt in some people's minds. They apply the label so broadly that it may as well be meaningless.
Another thing I've observed is that people who have committed their 10,000 hours and become really, really good are often in doubt about their own abilities. That's because they notice things that less experienced people do not. After 35 years of playing guitar, I feel I know less about it now than I did when I'd been playing for two years. The sense of scope of what I don't know is overwhelming sometimes.
Dunning-kruger doesn't prevent them from being able to explain things (even if not necessarily in "formal terms", there are plenty of talented musicians out there who don't know a lick of music theory!) or perform at levels that an unpracticed person could. Almost anyone who picks up a guitar could learn a basic version of Deep Purple or Ironman or the intro riff to Enter Sandman in a few hours, barring any physical limitations. But you're not going to be cranking out improv solos or a jazz chord progression without any practice whatsoever.
To ask again, in your own words, what are the differences between a master pianist, a pianist, and someone who can play the Hot Cross Buns melody? I personally feel there is an important distinction, if only to convey information accurately, between saying "I am a master pianist", "I can play piano", and "I am learning to play piano."
For the first day of class, I sent around a questionnaire, asking students to rate themselves as beginning, intermediate, or advanced. All of them, except my son, rated themselves as intermediate or advanced. I then played all of them at the same time, and won all of those games.
And I suck.
This really is a complicated question, though. First, perspective. Are you describing yourself, or someone else? Is there any sort of a formal rating system? (For example, a Bachelor of Science degree is a formal rating system.)
Take the guitarist example. Every guitarist I know, no matter how good (and I know professionals) is quite limited in what they can play. Neil Young can't play classical. Classical players can't play Neil Young, either! They might be able to get the notes right - by ear, even - but they'll lack feel, expressiveness, and tone. Measuring guitar, or many other forms of art, in terms of technique can be blindingly wrong. What's good guitar technique? Playing fast? Knowing a lot of scales? Piffle. Good guitarists can express what they want to express. Period. That's my measure.
So you see why I have a problem with the idea of "convey information accurately". I think it's philosophically wrong.
I feel most people are able to identify a good guitarist whether or not they like the music the guitarist plays. Even when the guitarist only plays with 1 string [0].
>For the first day of class, I sent around a questionnaire, asking students to rate themselves as beginning, intermediate, or advanced.
I blame your questionnaire for not defining the levels of play or being granular enough (1-10 scale). With those options I would assume "beginner" means "doesn't know how a knight can move across the board or the difference between a rook and a bishop", a 1 on a 10 scale. For example, I'm a "novice" chess player for sure - but not a "beginner" (some people may use these terms interchangeably), a 2 or 3 on a 10 scale. Assuming the students in the club knew the rules of Chess - it's not a surprise nobody answered "beginner"!
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8H-67ILaqc
To use your analogy, it doesn't take long in a conversation to tell if the person you're speaking with is well educated or not.
Even as an older (for gaming, anyway) white male, the community in some competitive games is just really unappealing - it basically reminds me of middle school, and I guess I'm not really into that anymore. Lots of things said just to get a reaction (e.g. racial slurs), lots of weird discussions about women, lots of puffed chests the second there's an opportunity to, etc.
I don't really have the time to be competitively good at any of these games, and the community kinda sucks unless you are competitively good, so it's kinda like what's the point? At least with rec sports the community is generally nice even if you're terrible (probably because you're in-person).
Sure, you can just mute people usually. But if you're muting everyone all the time, you might as well just be playing a single-player game. You can just play with friends, but that requires you to have friends who haven't also gotten sick of these communities.
Conversely, the community in games more oriented towards completion/design are usually great - because your success doesn't detract from someone else's, and they're not usually depending on you for their own success. Feels much more like a community.
Anyway, my point being that I wouldn't be shocked to learn that women (and likely people of color) feel the same way - once you're not really part of that core group of young white men, competitive games start feeling really unappealing unless you're just really into the game itself.
You could play with people on your own level?
> At least with rec sports the community is generally nice even if you're terrible (probably because you're in-person).
Really? Try playing pick-up basketball games if you are terrible. Even with rec sports, people play at their own level.
> Anyway, my point being that I wouldn't be shocked to learn that women (and likely people of color) feel the same way - once you're not really part of that core group of young white men
Young white men? Why are you being racist and sexist by targeting one group?
People don't play online games or recreational sports for "community". Seems like you are lonely and trying to make friends in the wrong places.
I play sports because it's fun and good exercise. I play video games because it's fun and mentally challenging. I don't play sports or video games for community.
> competitive games start feeling really unappealing unless you're just really into the game itself.
Then don't play it. Go play something else? Why are you complaining about it?
Maybe women on average don't like competitive games for the same reason women don't like other competitive sports like basketball, baseball, etc? Maybe, men and women are on average different and have different interests. Maybe that's why advertisers go about targeting men and women different? Maybe that's why movies, music, etc are differently geared towards men and women?
Or, maybe you could push your racist and sexist rhetoric and blame young white men?
Many bad actors in competitive online gaming are middle/high schoolers.
In the good community games usually things are not deep: people are nice but no one will really risk anything or inconvenience themselves for you.
In more "hardcore" games where everyone can be hostile and gain to fuck with you, finding people who help other has a lot more meaning. I'm used to play with a guild in multiple PvP oriented MMO: I know most of them will risk their hardly obtained gear to help. We have good relationships with some other guilds and know we'll all go out of our ways to help each other in different games. When you could kill new players, take their loot and camp their corpse, being one of those who don't but will help with some gear and tips can snowball months later. When you can scam and cheat people, getting a trustful trader reputation can mean a lot.
If everyone is nice, no one really is.
...this sounds incredibly messed up. The good people might be harder to find in a nice crowd, but the experience of finding them is much nicer.
I can see how a friendship forged in the face of assholes would feel stronger, but I dont think it would necessarily BE a better friendship. Way too easy to be bound with someone that is just LESS of an ass.
This sounds like "yay Stockholm Syndrome" more than "here is a safe and stable source of friends", but I'm really glad you shared the outlook because it certainly explains a lot of people. Wow.
GW2 (experienced at launch for 6 months): awesome game to create random groups as everyone gains from it. Hard to be an ass and you get nothing but maybe some sick joy from it. Honestly: I did not get any huge wholesome experience with anyone: get in zome event group, kill some NPC, do some WvW against anonymous people.
Darkfall Online: pure PvP game with player looting. Being a bad person was really rewarding. So it was always awesome to find legitimely good people and go kick some villains ass. Or help defend your neighbours city (who you're usually PKing all day and competing for mobz) against some other bigger imperialist. As being a PK give you something you get player killers. And if you enjoy playing the hero you just got ennemies with the same tools you have, non scripted and maybe smarter / better than you. Once you've experienced this kind of MMO it is hard to get the same highs from other games.
I really, truly, am trying to understand, so please bear with my slowness. I can see how it is really rewarding to find not-bad people in an environment that incentivizes really bad people. I don't see how that makes up for getting into such an environment in the first place, and certainly not why one would follow up the experience by seeking out similar environments.
People suck on average, so you want to give them every opportunity and incentive to demonstrate, so that you can find the "good" people? Note the selection bias - you're finding those people that are both NOT asshats but also interested in an environment that encourages asshats. Perhaps that's more rewarding than my habit of simply not having close friends at all, but it also seems far more punishing. Bland people can be exhausting, but evil people....they bring despair. To be in an environment that cranks up the frequency and demonstration of people getting joy from the misery of others...that sounds like a choice to endure needless pain and suffering.
[Pause for the irony of submitting that last sentence as part of an online discussion thread]
I just don't get it. Doubtless just a difference in personal tastes - perhaps someone being a jerk around me bothers me just a tiny bit more, and someone being nice around me thrills me just a tiny bit less - but emotionally I'm failing to wrap understanding around your stance.
My opinion only, I'm sure other people playing those kind of games will have other motivations. Those games are fun because (and it goes with the article) there is competition against other humans. If you don't get any pleasure in competing I can understand those games will never appeal to you.
The fact you can lose your gear or loot to other players add more stake to fights: when you win your brain is flooded with natural drugs. When losing you have even more drive to get back to your opponent. Fighting against humans feels a lot more rewarding, and usually if you lose it is not because of "some bullshit game mechanic on this boss": it means you have to get better (at the fight part, getting gear part, the diplomacy part to have more people to bring etc.).
First time you get killed in those games is when you know if you'll stick or not: either you say "fuck anyone can come and steal my items", or you think "ok, if I can ambush this kind of person with 5 people, we could get free high level gear".
On an individual or small group basis, there are good benefits to play a bad guy so you see a lot of them. And I think this kind of environment foster deeper relationships: in the hate direction but also in the friendship direction. You get higher highs and lower lows. But the experience is rarely bland.
With MMOs you also get the inter-guild level and that's when politics, diplomacy, spying come into play. The best are grudges and alliances spanning more decades and multiple games. The funniest is when old guard guilds which hate each other end-up allying against new-comers kicking their ass.
You get some of those kind of stories with PvE only games but not as much. I may be wrong but I don't know of a lot of guild created in a PvE game spanning multiple games.
> evil people....they bring despair
Unless you're one of those putting an end to them.
BTW, there's only 2 gender.
I can't rate any of these things high, in and of themselves. It requires a well balanced mix of things to make a great game. Breaking everything down to individual components makes it seem I am much less engaged in games than I am.
Much of game development for the triple-A space seems aimed at the hardcore male gamer demographic, whether intentional or not. Could a studio instead build a game that focuses on entirely different categories and as a result attract a bigger market that isn't being addressed?
Make a game that's fun, but focus on design, discovery, completion, fantasy. Don't discourage male players, but make a game that ticks all the boxes for most female players. Market it subtly for both genders, trying to hook female gamers.
I hope someone is trying to do this.
Triple-A games and block buster action movies has very many similarities. A lot of focus is on first day sales with flashy and short term advertisement that get concentrated to compete against the competition that tries to do the same thing. For some reason the young male with disposable income is a core demographic for this kind of product. In contrast Candy crush, Facebook games, romantic comedy and drama movies share a different target demographic of middle age women. If I remember right then production for that demographic has surpassed that of triple-A, with mobile games being a massive industry.
Why does marketing when targeting for men or women differ? Why does the purchasing pattern differ. I don't know and there are movie and game studios that do try to target all gender and all age demographics with the same product, using a singe marketing style and single platform. Maybe that works but lets not forget that game studios that targeting other demographics than young male with disposable income really do exist. They just don't call themselves triple-A, just like how a romantic comedy don't usually get described as a block buster. If I make a guess I would say it has something to do with marketing.
It's a little confusing for me, why just playing skill competition shouldn't get boring for men as well. Adding story based components for a more indepth experience would also sound reasonable for me.
So I wonder if self-assessment is really a good way to analyse the behaviour here. It might be that men don't mention that they care about community/story as much, while actually they do as well when they heavily invest time and energy into a single game.
https://quanticfoundry.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/overal...
Even the explanation doesn't help:
> In this chart below, the y-axis is showing the percentile rank of each motivation. That 50th-%tile line represents the average among the 350,000+ gamers who have completed the Gamer Motivation Profile. So for example, the 74th-%tile in Competition among Hardcore gamers means that the average Hardcore gamer scores higher on Competition than 74% of the gamers in the full data set.
I genuinely don't think there's anything useful that can be said here at all without knowing what fraction of gamers make up the different catagories. Beyond that, all we can say for sure is that "hardcore" gamers like gaming more. Ugh.