UPDATED 09:56 EDT / NOVEMBER 23 2011

NEWS

Study: Gamer Girls Who Play Online Enjoy More Sex

If you’re a woman, a video gamer, and enjoy online gaming chances are you enjoy more sex than your non-gaming counterparts. At least that’s what a study run by Harris Interactive on behalf of GameHouse according to this Forbes article on the subject entitled: “American Women Who Play Online Video Games Enjoy More Sex In The Real World.”

Amid the stunning discoveries amid this survey which cast a net over 2,132 adults, of the 55% of the online gamers in the survey were women; and among them women who play online games get laid more often than those who do not at 57% verses 52%. So, ladies, its time to get your groove on, because online gaming appears to be sexy!

Aside from the gender-stereotype smashing statistic of over-half of the gamers being female; other interesting revelations fell out of the study.

Of women who play online games 86% are likely to socialize on social media sites verses only 71% of those who do not. This is probably in light that many casual online games are integrated with sites like Facebook and Google+ and casual online gaming companies like Zynga make bank on this fact. Hopefully they’re keeping in mind that more than half of their potential audience is women (for an industry that has been traditionally male dominated in both perceived audience and gender-typing of the output.)

“Maybe if we all watched a little less TV and played more games online, we’d all be having a little more sex,” said Matt Hulett, CEO GameHouse, a division of RealNetworks. “Joking aside, this survey matches up with our internal data that women are widely embracing online games with 63% of GameHouse players being women. It’s nice to know that females who play online games are happy–both in their relationships and even in the bedroom.”

It looks like women who play online games are also more likely to be in relationships and are happier with the relationships they’re in. Over 64% of the online game playing women stated that they were married or living with their partner; and of those, 71% counted their current relationship as satisfying. On a scale of 1-10 (with 1 as not satisfying and 10 as completely satisfying) those seventy-one percent rated 6 or higher.

Girl gamers don’t seem to be at all less likely to be active than their non-online gaming counterparts. Since I suspect most online gamers find themselves seeking games to wind down after the daylight hours (when most people are active outside) this would probably jive with the stat that of the online gamers, 61% tended to play in the evening between 8:00 pm – 11:59 pm.

Statistics and studies like this may be fun, but this one suffers from the flaw of having a small sample size compared to the total number of online gamers (after all World of Warcraft boasts over 10 million subscribers worldwide, no small number of those are in the United States) and it also isn’t based on a probabilistic random sample. As a result, we can’t really use these results to say much more than a broad sweep of how the culture shakes itself out.

However, it does lay bare any idea that women aren’t majorly in the gaming scene—just perhaps oddly underrepresented in the advertising and the media related to it.

The power of surveys to highlight cultural highs and lows, and a video

We’ve seen other studies of how World of Warcraft wealth is distributed (the top 1% of Azeroth owns almost 25% of the wealth, after all.) These sorts of surveys give an insight into the world behind the virtual curtain and let us peons on the ground—some of us who play online games—a bird’s eye view of what it might be like out there.

And here’s the latest MMO Anthropology on the Forbe’s article and it’s implications for the gaming scene:


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