A new issue of the Daedalus Project is out. Most of the new data focuses on the demographics of WoW players, emphasizing the relationship between in-game class/race/gender and RL gender/age/motivations.
Some highlights:
- Female players are older than male players. (link)
- Younger players prefer Rogues and Shaman. Older players prefer Hunters and Warlocks. Rogues and Shaman also score the highest on the Advancement (goals/achievement) and Mechanics (min-maxing) motivations. (link)
- Older players prefer Dwarves and Gnomes, who also happen to score the lowest on all achievement motivations. Gnomes score the highest on the Role-Playing and Customization motivations. (link)
- The RL gender distribution is 84/16. The in-game gender distribution is 65/35. 55% of female characters in the game are being played by men. (link)
I'm not as interested in WoW in particular as much as using WoW as an example of showing how RL demographics and personality factors map onto game variables - such as race. The WoW data provides one cohesive example of that.
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