The Proteus Paradox Read Online Free PDF

different researchers across varied games and over the past decade have consistently found that players’ average age is around thirty, with some players as young as eleven and some as old as sixty-eight. Only about 20 percent of these online gamers are teenage boys. Online games appeal to a broad age range. The majority of online gamers are adults in their twenties and thirties. Other findings show that many online gamers are leading normal adult lives outside of games. Fifty percent of online gamers work full-time, 36 percent are married, and 22 percent have children. 4
    Some player profiles gathered from my online study of more than fifty thousand players in the Daedalus Project illustrate the diversity of online gamers. Al is a sixty-year-old project manager working on a commercial airlines project in Houston. He started gaming in the 1980s with
Dungeons and Dragons
. Emre is twenty-seven, a graduate student in Germany. In
Star Wars Galaxies,
he plays a female Imperial pilot. In
World of Warcraft,
he’s a “holier-than-thou Human Paladin.” Jane isforty-six, a criminal defense lawyer from Ohio. She plays
EverQuest
with four people in her family. And Claire is a thirty-five-year-old computer technician and digital photo restoration artist from Idaho who has suffered from lupus for fifteen years and is unable to work. “Online games,” she reports, “gave me a chance of socializing when I was unable to get out.”
    While there is a broad age range among online gamers, the gender stereotype is currently true. Only 20 percent of players in this game genre are women. We’ll dive deeper into the possible causes of this significant gender difference in chapter 6 , but this statistic makes clear that online games are currently more appealing to men. Despite this bias, the overall demographic composition of online games is diverse. In addition to high school students, there are college students, early adult professionals, and homemakers in their thirties, as well as war veterans and retirees. In some online games, a player group may span a sixty-year age difference. Teenagers who may feel a lack of control and agency in their everyday lives are suddenly able to work with adults as equals or even their superiors—something that almost never happens in the physical world. The stereotypical association of video games and teenagers is not only false but hinders our ability to understand how online games can be positive social spaces for younger players. 5
    Relatively few studies of online gamers outside the West have been conducted. These studies are also complicated by the fact that different online games tend to be popular in different regions—it’s often not clear whether differences are due to culture or that particular game.
World of Warcraft
’s global appeal was unique in this sense and provided a way to compare demographics using the same game. Between 2010 and 2012, my colleagues and I gathered survey data from more than three thousand
World of Warcraft
gamers frommainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, the United States, and many countries in the European Union. We found that online gamers in the European Union closely tracked the demographics of gamers in the United States but that gamers from the Chinese countries had a very different profile. Their average age, twenty-two, was about ten years younger than online gamers in the West, with the majority of the Chinese players between the ages of twenty and twenty-four. There were also slightly fewer female players than in the West; 15 percent of the Chinese players were women. More research will be needed to understand what factors are responsible for these demographic differences, but these findings suggest that we need to be careful when extrapolating findings from Western gamers to gamers in other regions. 6
    Given the largely adult profile of online gamers in the West, studies on their typical play patterns reveal just how