What the fuck is going on in here?

We're comparing completely unprovable statistical numbers to see which one can beat up the other.

Bitches don't know bout Elder Scrolls cause they too busy in da kitchen making me a sandwich!

Sunday the wife said she wanted to get some new motion dance game. Not sure if it's a Kinect game or MOVE game. She plays Hearts on MSN and shit like that but not console games so this was kinda interesting....

Wife: Honey, I want that new Dance Game, (insert name of latest motion dance game here)
Me: If it's an XBOX kinect game we don't have the room.
Wife: "...I'll make room"
Me:

I thought they were too busy making you eat them without the courtesy of finishing you off afterward.

I think she's gonna make you move out and get rid of all your stuff in order to "make room".

1. She already made me get rid of a lot of my stuff.
2. I'm cool with movin' out.

Yeah, but does she knows what an ES game is?

http://grabstats.com/statcategorymain.asp?StatCatID=13

"% / percent of all game players that are women. Forty percent of all game players are women. In fact, women over the age of 18 represent a significantly greater portion of the game-playing population (33 percent) than boys age 17 or younger (18 percent). "

Same page shows 190 million households with nex gen game consoles (whatever that means).

Not sure how that translates to different genres and gaming platforms, or even Skyrim/ES awareness, but women are a big part of the video game industry.

I'm a woman and I play video games. I have Skyrim loaded on my computer and will be playing later tonight. My husband is playing Skyrim on his laptop next to me. I'll guarantee that he likes this arrangement. I'm the guildmaster of a pre-launch SWTOR guild (10 days!), and I played WoW for 6 years. I was in an all female Mechassault/Halo/Halo 2 clan back in the day. I enjoy watching football. I also love to buy shoes, watch romantic comedies, and Project Runway. I know I'm definitely an anomaly: none of my real life girlfriends play video games like I do, however, my SWTOR guild has several women in it from our old WoW guild. 10 years ago it was pretty rare to find other women gamers, which is why I think we stuck together like we did. I've noticed a big shift from that over the past few years, especially with the younger generation.

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/MV397Ov-w4s" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

I always wonder how those kind of statistics are obtained, because "playing games" can include a ton of different things. If it was a survey that simply asked "do you play games?" it could include things like playing Facebook games or playing games on the iPhone which add to that count considerably.

Things like World of Warcraft and the Wii greatly expanded the video game audience to the mainstream though so that a lot of women and households probably can say they play Wii Sports or Dance Central, but I'm still not sure if the average Mom that might have a Wii also knows what Elder Scrolls are

Nice try, but not quite. That 40% does not mean what you're attempting for it to mean. The IGDA does say that 40% of gamers are women, but that's due to the fact that more than 70% of the people who play "online casual games" (Farmville, Bejeweled, etc.) are women. When you average that with the fact that less than 20% of the traditional game audience is female then you come up with that "40% of gamers are women" statistic. Which is sorta bullshit, since even my mom, who only ever plays a little solitaire and minesweeper on her PC, would be counted as a "gamer" under that statistic.

Instead, try this; how many women do you see perusing the shelves at a Gamestop or the videogame section at a Best Buy, who aren't looking for a gift?

I think the only argument "for" the women tally that made sense thus far is significant others. If Skyrim sold 3 million copies, what percentage of those guys have significant others? It only takes 33% of them to be attached to get to 1 million. That seems high, but that's also not counting female gamers, or people that just are aware because of marketing.

1 million seems high, but could be realistic.

I wasn't attempting to say anything. I just provided a link and a couple relevant quotes. (Though I would point out that a lot of guys probably play solitaire and minesweeper on their pcs too.)

But given the penetration of gaming into the marketplace, even if only 20% of the RPG market is women (and I seem to recall reading that women tend to like these less competitive, puzzle solving type games) then it's more than likely that more than 1% of US women are aware of what an Elder Scroll game is, unless you are going to take the position that only 2% of US men know what an Elder Scroll game is.

I've been in the same guild/alliance for about five years now in Guild Wars and I know that quite a few of our members have been female. And we've been through quite a few different guilds what with us being an alliance leader guild and many of them were female too. And a lot of women tend to be a bit quiet about their female status in gaming due to the remarkably high and virulent amount of sexism still in gaming which means that there are more out there than it might seem like.

Why assume that someone's SO would know of the game they're playing? My SO doesn't know what SkyRim is, just that I'm playing some game. And the few of my married friends that have SkyRim, none of their wives know anything of it other than just another videogame. And they don't inquire because they really don't give a shit.

Yeah, I agree again. I think there are a lot of girlfriends and wives out there that don't really care or pay attention to what the men play. My girlfriend wouldn't no either, outside of a couple big titles like Call of Duty or Street Fighter.

What the hell is Guild War?

(it goes to my point, but I'm not joking either)

Think World of Warcraft, but with no monthly fee (you just buy the initial game). They've sold over 6 million copies of the game (active player data isn't released by the company, but the numbers are down now as they are focused on developing GW2 for release next year.)

Speaking of WoW:
http://www.shacknews.com/article/580...0-female-world

"In a chart comparing the PC game usage of females and males aged 25-54, World of Warcraft was the most-played "core" game for females, with over 428,621 unique female players estimated in December 2008.

The statistic is even more impressive when considering that an estimated 675,713 unique male players of the same age group logged into World of Warcraft during the period, indicating that the WoW gender gap may not be as large as some imagine."

The above data came from this report: http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/...40609_fnl1.pdf

Which had this interesting chart in it:
(It's a pdf, so I had to screen shot it to post just the chart)



So Minecraft/Solitaire get played alot by males too, which probably holds true for most other video game types. While I'm sure the actual male vs female percentages vary widely from game type to game type, I'd say that estimating that women make up at least 20/30% of any particular game type is a pretty fair estimate.

The stuff I'm posting is meant more as an exercise in "do women really play video games" than in whether more than 1% of the female population is aware of Skyrim, by the way. As I implied earlier, I think that number kind of depends on the total number of people who actually are aware of Skyrim, and if that number is less than 2% of the total population, then you would likely be correct. Though if that number is higher than 3% of the population, I'd say you were likely wrong.

I dunno. If you're dropping 60+ hours into a game, isn't she bound to ask at some point what you are playing?

If they're black, unless it's Asian porn, she won't care.

And how many men at Petco aren't buying birdseed??? I mean the number has to be

no, never happened yet.

Sometime my wife reads on the couch while I play, or she plays Words with Friends or Plants v Zombies on her Iphone and she'll look up and ask me questions about what I am playing.

Her: You sure do lots of running around with nothing happening
Me: Yeah, but it sure looks nice doing it doesn't it?
Her: Yeah but don't you get bored?
Me: Yeah but..*Dragon screech* *rumble* *rumble* Oh sh*t
Her: (laughing) You are going to die aren't you
Me: Yeah (Kicked the Dragon's ass)

That's what I was getting at. Maybe I'm just odd. My wife will ask on occasion what I'm playing and I tell her the game name and not a general "just gaming."