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December 12, 2005
Gender, Race, and Class
It's a little eerie how those 3 words have their own meanings in an MMO, but yet when you put them all together, you realize how much weight they carry over from the physical world. And it makes you wonder whether it's really possible to talk about fantasy race without it somehow always implicating race in the physical world. (Ah - but that discussion is for another blog)
Here's what we found in our data. The gender ratio is different for the Alliance and the Horde. There are fewer female characters on the Horde side. One out of three characters is female on the Alliance side. On the Horde side, it is one out of five. Our intuition is that fewer players choose to be female on Horde side because the female Horde characters are kinda ... ugly.
A more fine-grained analysis shows the underlying difference. The top 3 races with the most female avatars are Alliance races - Night Elves, Humans, and Gnomes.
The Daedalus Project data suggests that male and female players are equally represented on both the Alliance and Horde. This implies the observed gender differences are driven almost entirely by gender-bending. Given that players who choose Horde are more likely to be competitive and achievement-oriented than players who choose Alliance who tend to be more customization and role-playing oriented, this makes a great deal of sense. Of course, as many players point out, they gender-bend to have an attractive avatar to look at. Playing a female Horde character would defeat this purpose.
And we finish up with the gender differences by class.
Server Sample: RP (High), PvE (Medium), PvE (High), PvP (High), PvP (High)
Sampling Period: 10/14/2005 12:00 am - 10/30/2005 12:00 am
Sampling Resolution: ~12 minutes
Collection Method: Please see our earlier post to get a sense for how we collected the data on gender.
Parsing Method: The sample unit is each unique character. Each character was tracked across the server logs. Total playing time, lowest observed level, highest observed level, guild affiliation, and zones seen in were parsed.
Data Filter: See below
Sample Size: 90,961 characters with known gender
Posted at December 12, 2005 12:20 PM
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» Horde Hotties? from New Game Plus
Via Terra Nova, PlayOn has posted a study on gender, race, and class selection in World of Warcraft. PlayOn’s bloggers Nick and Eric say what I was thinking when I read the name of the study: “It’s a little eerie how those 3 words ha... [Read More]
Tracked on December 14, 2005 02:45 PM
Comments
"Given that players who choose Horde are more likely to be competitive and achievement-oriented than players who choose Alliance who tend to be more customization and role-playing oriented, this makes a great deal of sense."
Could you guys explain what you mean by this sentence? It doesn't seem to follow the preceding sentence at all.
Posted by: Sylvie Noel at December 13, 2005 07:13 AM
Interesting that 3 of the 4 most female classes (and the top 2) are the "dress wearers", that is to say the cloth armor wearing classes who have many chest pieces that look like robes (or dresses). Coincidence?
Posted by: Brent Michael Krupp at December 13, 2005 09:28 AM
Sylvie - Sorry for the confusion. The role-playing motivation is highly correlated to gender-bending, but I think my point was that there are reasons for why Alliance and Horde may have different gender-bending rates.
Posted by: Nick Yee at December 14, 2005 12:49 PM
"The Daedalus Project data suggests that male and female players are equally represented on both the Alliance and Horde. This implies the observed gender differences are driven almost entirely by gender-bending."Perhaps I'm misunderstanding the data, but if the Daedalus Project statement were true wouldn't there need to be a huge number of female players gender-bending as male characters on the Horde side to match your data? I kinda doubt there are, just as I've always doubted the validity of that Daedalus Project statement.
Posted by: Dellaster at January 1, 2006 07:22 PM
Call me slow. I just realized that you must be suggesting that players of the Alliance side gender-bend much more than those of the Horde side. If true, that could reconcile the data. But I still doubt the Daedalus Project statement. I'll need more proof than the bare assertion on that linked page. (Where was the data from? A small random or self-selecting set of interviews?)
Posted by: Dellaster at January 1, 2006 07:34 PM