Today's the second day of New Media Consortium's New England conference.
We led off with a session on gaming, led by Ruben.
I began with a blitzkrief presentation on alternate reality games, racing through the genre at top speed. The audience was intrigued and mystified. Not terrified, alas, which is probably an artifact of time limitations. ARGs are still new to education, if this is a good sample.
Marc Prensky spoke to complexity in gaming, using the anticipated Spore as an example. This is a crucial point for those whose recollection of games is restricted to smaller ones.
Constance Steinkuehler presented on massively multiplayer online games. She used Lineage as her main example, which is refreshing for an American audience, emphasizing the richness of MMOG worlds, their economic and demographic heft, and functionality. She undertstood MMOG play as construcivist, and argued for the importance of modding as production, rather than consumption.
Nick Monfort returned us to interactive fiction.
Discussion came next. One question: what are the demographics of MMOG players?
IGDA Online Games Quarterly has a roundtable discussion on that very question:
Chris: Although there were a number of games released during 2004 that helped to shift the profile of an 'average' MMOG player, the majority of MMOG gamers are late-teen to twenty-something males who play for more than 20 hours a week.
Won Il: In Korea, the player profiles vary greatly according to genre. South Korea has a very healthy user pool of players in their early teens or even younger. As for gender, males occupy 70~80% of the MMOG gaming population and for more casual games, our user base ranges from younger school children to men and women in their thirties.
Bill: In China players are usually male, teens to early 20's, at least a high school degree. Good demographic data on Chinese gamers is hard to come by, though the general consensus is that the Chinese MMO population is 85+% male, and skews younger than the US. One notable Chinese characteristic is that there is a population of players who are unemployed and actually play these games for a living, earning several hundred US dollars per month trading in virtual goods and currency.
Robin: Well, Second Life is not your average MMOG! Our users tend to be a widely diverse group. Nearly half are female, the average age is just over 30, and a large percentage (about 20%) are from over 50 countries outside the US, with the UK and Canada having the largest non-US representation.
Matt: There really is no "average" MMO game player. As far as we can tell, other than being mostly male (although far more females play MMOs that almost any other game type), our demographics go all over the place. Of course because we are a computer game, our average player is around 18-34 years of age, but we do have lots of children and older players as well. It's a hard group to pin down.
Posted by: Steven | October 08, 2005 at 15:30