From the Aula 2006 Joichi Ito talked about World of Warcraft. It called my attention how persistently he mentioned that the players in WoW are Kids.
I agree that ALL of us have a child inside, even that I do not think he really means that. Or I start to wonder about the age range in the term of kids. Because it is known that several of the players in Virtual Worlds are in there twenties and thirties. Well actually it is said that there are CEO’s that get in the game to play with their contra parts instead to play golf. But I shouldn’t go so far, I haven’t read about that. However, he said that he plays together with some of his friends and colleges (and for me he is not a kid). Then it wouldn’t be a good idea to stop thinking that these types of games are only of kids?!
Thank you for the link Andres! And yes, VW, will be sound more and more each time.
Do we know anything about the population of the players to say they are children, CEO’s, ages of 20-30 …? It would be interesting to know more about the players of online games, and probably somebody have done such kind of research.
However, I guess he was refering to the majority of the players, though I have no evidence. You can ask him 🙂
Hi Roman thanks for your post !
An answering, yes, the population of players is known. This information besides to be in the game environment, it is important to have it for different reasons as marketing and business.
However, it is matter to google only once. In here you can read a quite understandable and it seems reliable information regarding age of players. In which it is stated that in the virtual worlds, the “average age of 26 years old”.
As being young and well educated most of the players as it says as well, I wouldn’t be surprise to find CEO at all. Plus in order to have that average age, in order to cope with the to young ones, you should have more mature ones. However, as I said, that has been only for listening gossips, not reliable data at all. But for sure in VW are not only kids!
Some notes on the link and a paper therein referred. Yee (2006) has used a survey for the demographic study, users answered an html questionnaire. I wonder what would motivate them to answer truthfully. Although the average age was over 26 years, from the histogram the most frequent bin for male is 18-22, females were more evenly distributed (and making about 15% of the whole sample, shifting the average age up).
Interesting findings anyway. Thanks for digging the link up.