Posts by date
Posts by category
- Announcements (2)
- Findings (26)
- Study Methods (4)
- Uncategorized (1)
-
Recent posts
Recent comments
- Shirley on More Demographic Details
- virtual.jess on Character Race When Gender-Bending
- Borderlad on Character Race When Gender-Bending
- Borderlad on Respecs
- Borderlad on Character Race When Gender-Bending
- Borderlad on Changing Guilds
- Lawrence DuBois on Character Race When Gender-Bending
- Lawrence DuBois on Dungeon Deaths
- Lawrence DuBois on Deaths from Falling
- Lawrence DuBois on Achievement Categories
The Statistics of Hugs
August 26, 2010 | Nick Yee
Data source: Core data set of 1040 participants. RW gender and age gathered from survey. Emote metrics gathered from the Armory.
The Armory provides a count of how many times certain emotes have been used by each character. We’ll focus here on hugs. Unlike damage dealt, the ability to emote is not constrained by character level, so in this case, we calculated the sum of hugs across all characters a participant listed (instead of the max).
The chart below shows the differences by region and gender. We see that US players hug more than HK+TW players (p < .001), and that women hug more than men (p < .001). What’s somewhat eerie about this data is the ability to quantify something as ephemerally fuzzy as hugs—for example, the data allows us to say precisely that in the US, women hug twice as much as men. There was also a significant positive correlation with age (r = .09, p <.001). Older players hug more than younger players.
Unlike our other findings so far that focus more on in-game combat and leveling metrics, this data really hints at the ability to use VWs to study social phenomena (that isn’t instrumentally functional in the game context). More importantly, the data show that demographic differences do reveal themselves in terms of social behaviors in a virtual world.
posted in Findings
Comments (17)
August 26th, 2010 at 12:29 pm Posted by Sinnh
Fascinating results actually. I’m kinda sad to learn that my main has only given out one hug her entire life, and that was just to get the Make Love, Not Warcraft achievement. I don’t think I like what that says about me lol
August 26th, 2010 at 2:10 pm Posted by Claudia Hoag
I’m missing something here, which 3 emotes?
Hugs, kisses given? What about hugs/kisses received?
I don’t hug. Well, I do /hug and /kiss my husband sometimes when we play together just to earn some brownie points (with him). I do /flirt more. And I’ve done /love on some critters just because the husband kept telling me to.
“C’mon, it will give you an achievement.”
“Why do I want an achievement?”
“Just select the bunny and do /love”
(then I do it) *Surlygurly loves the bunny* (or something like that)
“Can I kill it now?”
“Sure.”
(I kill the bunny.)
August 26th, 2010 at 2:53 pm Posted by TheatreElf
I missed /hug being an animated emote in EQ2. It just wasn’t the same impact to just read the emote. I petitioned since launch to have it animated but they never would. IMO it killed a very good social dynamic. Since EQ2 is virtually dead, I don’t play it any more.
August 26th, 2010 at 3:35 pm Posted by pasteurized
what about /highfive
August 26th, 2010 at 4:04 pm Posted by Thais Weiller
/highfive and /cry. It was a common legend in my server that TK/HK cried more often, but I played little with players from there.
August 27th, 2010 at 3:58 am Posted by Bonnie
Excuse me…. EQ2 is dead? I have to laugh… hard!… since I’m playing EQ2 every night lately, and haven’t been playing WoW in the last few weeks (it bored me stupid after awhile). I never saw the /hug emote actually demonstrated visually in EQ2, but I haven’t seen it demonstrated visually in WoW either. I think the /kiss emote in both games is rediculous, but I do give hugs in game fairly commonly. Much to my amazement, last night in the “not at all dead” EQ2 game, a man (and I know he was male because he was in voice chat as well) gave ME a hug first. *boggle* I agree with the findings here though. Females demonstrate more affection in game than males do.
August 27th, 2010 at 8:42 am Posted by Gealach
If you do analyze other emotes, I’m sure you’re aware there are different motivations: the achievement someone mentioned above for love is one example. Also /flirt and the one for telling a joke… I always do them a bunch when I create a new race just to hear all the different versions. Then sometimes when I’m bored waiting for a group to get moving… You picked a good one for this study though I think. Can’t think of a reason to /hug someone other than to show affection.
August 27th, 2010 at 8:44 am Posted by Tyler
What does this data look like at the level of avatar gender? Do female avatars (not necessarily female players) hug more than male avatars?
If female avatars hug more than male avatars, might we see that RL males playing female avatars hug more than RL males playing male avatars?
August 27th, 2010 at 11:17 am Posted by Nick Yee
@Claudia Sorry for confusion. We meant just “hugs” instead of “3 emotes”. Fixed that typo.
@Tyler That is a good question. The pattern in the graph looks the same for character gender. The gender-bending question gets much more complicated though because it becomes confounded with time spent playing that character (i.e., it may only look like women hug less when gender-bending because they spend less time in male avatars). So we need to figure out a way to control for it. We’ll get back to you on that.
August 28th, 2010 at 9:23 am Posted by Morbash
My highest social emote is Cheer with 450. Hug is at 79. This is on my f Orc (my main & my ‘learning teamwork – instances and pvp’ character).
Checked my older character (my first to 80 – my ‘learning the general game’ character) that’s f Dwarf and the Cheers still higher, but more Hugs than my Orc. I’m 35 F IRL.
August 28th, 2010 at 9:27 am Posted by Morbash
But I think I need to add that I have ALWAYS done /cheer more than any other emote. Even in my long lost love – Everquest.
August 29th, 2010 at 12:55 pm Posted by Some link love | The 'mental Shaman
[...] latest Stats from PlayOn show us some very exact figures of ‘hugs’ in game! As they say, this [...]
August 30th, 2010 at 9:41 am Posted by Claudia Hoag
@The ‘mental Shaman
Very excited to see all those links/content on women playing, sexism etc. Thanks!
August 30th, 2010 at 1:30 pm Posted by Craig Smith
Very nifty. Were there emotes that didn’t show a pronounced age or gender bias? Something everyone does relatively evenly? Thanks.
August 30th, 2010 at 1:33 pm Posted by Nick Yee
@Craig /wave was the most evenly distributed by age and gender. /cheer had the same gender & age effect as /hug.
September 30th, 2010 at 9:51 am Posted by Rochmoninoff
I wave a lot, dance occasionally, salute every once in a while.
But almost never hug!
We have a running joke in my guild about man-hugs.
To me this is such an obvious gender behavior difference that it hardly needed to be investigated. But the data was readily available so why not?
October 27th, 2011 at 10:30 am Posted by Lawrence DuBois
Wow, this was a very interesting study. I’d be interested to see statistics on other emotes from /kiss and similar “fuzzy” ones to well-known common ones like /silly, /dance, and /flirt. Especially to see how the one category compares to the other.
Post Your Comment