What Men and Women Consider Hardcore Gaming Are Not The Same

Also, the y-axis is totally off. I zoomed in and drew black lines from the top of each of these bars (60%, 61%, 62%, 63%):

https://imgur.com/a/wzbI7mC

Agreed. It's relatively useless information without normalizing the differences by the variances (Cohen's d) or at least providing confidence intervals.

Why not? It needs a definition, just for the context. You don't have to like it, but it can certainly be defined that way.

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.

> In our talk at GDC 2018, we explored what gamer motivations would look like if we defined “casual/core/hardcore” gamers using different assumptions—e.g., by self-identification with labels vs. by gaming frequency vs. by specific game titles they play. In this blog post, we’ll focus on the slice by self-identification with labels, but we’re hoping to cover at least one additional slice in a future post.

In other words, they're looking at a few different ways of defining "casual" and "hardcore", and one of the ways they're looking at is self-identification, which is an obvious and useful way of looking at these types of things in sociology. And as a bonus, we then get to do some interesting comparisons of how the different ways of categorising people overlap and differ (which they touched on briefly near the end when they noted that female EverQuest 2 players averages more hours per week).

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

That's quite a bold assertion. Do you have some sort of argument for why this is somehow uniquely an area where self-identification is an unusable way of classifying people, or are you just offended by their results? Because it sure looks to me like you totally can use self-identification here. :)