
What Men and Women Consider Hardcore Gaming Are Not The Same - OberstKrueger
https://quanticfoundry.com/2018/08/01/casual-hardcore/
======
wgerard
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.

~~~
arkh
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.

If everyone is nice, no one really is.

~~~
ergothus
> 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.

~~~
arkh
Not really Stockholm syndrome.

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.

~~~
ergothus
> 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.

~~~
arkh
> I just don't get it.

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.

------
shubb
The choice of graph here is really bad.

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.

Two clear graphs are better than one bad one.

~~~
SiempreViernes
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?

~~~
ekiru
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).

------
beat
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.

~~~
emaginniss
"I don't shoot heroin directly into my eyeballs"

casual...

~~~
beat
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!

------
ajross
New candidate for Most Confusing Chart of 2018 right here folks:

[https://quanticfoundry.com/wp-
content/uploads/2018/08/overal...](https://quanticfoundry.com/wp-
content/uploads/2018/08/overall_casual_hardcore.png)

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.

------
erikb
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.

------
mabbo
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.

I hope someone is trying to do this.

~~~
belorn
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.

------
bytematic
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.

------
kitsy
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.

------
firekvz
This is wrong, even their entire concept of casual/mid/hardcore gamer is
terrible, you can't just define it like that.

~~~
arendtio
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.

~~~
watwut
"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.

~~~
arendtio
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).

------
cstrat
Came here to whinge about the choice of graphs, not disappointed that others
beat me to it.

------
droopyEyelids
I’d like to se this broken down by age, too. They refer to what terms mean to
“men” when i often wondered if they were talking to “boys”

~~~
emddudley
They do offer an "Age Report" which costs $2499:

[https://quanticfoundry.com/age-report/](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...](https://quanticfoundry.com/wp-
content/uploads/2016/02/Competition-Regression-Chart.png)

~~~
Timpy
I honestly thought you were joking. Their data presentation wasn't good, who
would pay this???

~~~
jdietrich
>who would pay this???

Enough people to keep them in business. If you're planning a major product
launch, $2500 for a market research report is pocket change.

------
rayiner
Warning: lies with bars that don’t start at 0.

~~~
mpweiher
Considering "0" in this case is the 50% mark and the graphs show equal
distances from that 50% mark this looks legit to me.

~~~
sophistication
The graphs start/end at the 20th/~85th percentiles rather than 0th/100th,
which makes the differences seem larger than they are.

~~~
marcosdumay
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?)

~~~
sophistication
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:

[https://quanticfoundry.com/wp-
content/uploads/2018/08/hardco...](https://quanticfoundry.com/wp-
content/uploads/2018/08/hardcore_comparison-650x326.png)

[https://i.imgur.com/P9M7AnR.png](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.

