Here are my thoughts and comments related to me my research on videogames and culture.
Bryan-Mitchell Young aka jccalhoun


Archives

 

Recently, a paper was published that found that female characters in everquest are sold for less than male characters. Here are a couple of posts I made on slashdot about the subject:

According to the study on Everquest, about 84% of EQ players are male, while 16% are female. So as others have pointed out, this would expain why male characters are more valuable, men want to play as men.

The same study says that nearly 48% of men have a character that is female, but nearly all of them spend most of their time playing as a male.

I've been thinking about this since this article was originally posted. The common sense explanation holds true, most EQ players are men, so male characters are more in demand.

However, on further contemplation, there are a couple of other things going on here. Looking at the original article reveals that only about 20% of the characters for sale are female, thus that should make up for the difference in demand. But if this makes up for the difference in demand, we need to think of other reasons why female characters sell for less.

Some possibilities might lie in looking at the whole process of buying and selling a character in the first place. It seems to me that the process of leveling up a character just to sell it seems something a bored teenaged boy would be likely to do, rather than a)teenaged girls or b)older people of either gender.

Then there is the question of who is buying these characters? beyond the reasonable assumption that most of them are male, what kind of men are they? It seems that someone who would buy a premade character is looking for a sort of status item, a vanity character so to speak. Sounds like some mid-30's former business major to me.

Anyway, it seems that this fact that female characters sell for less than male has more to it than it would first appear, and it would be neat to seem a bit more research done on the buyers and sellers themselves, rather than just what they buy (of course our possessions speak volumes about our identity, but that is another post...).

posted by Bryan-Mitchell at 11:43 PM

 
test
posted by Bryan-Mitchell at 10:58 PM

home

First-Person Shooters Aren't Like Movies and That is a Good Thing --A paper about why Shooters aren't like films and how comparisons to them do a disservice to what Shooters are.

That paper was presented at the 2002 PCA under the title "More Than Moving Pictures: Developing New Criteria For Designing and Critiquing Computer Games. The presentation version can be found here. The handout I distributed can be found here.

Identification in First-Person Shooters

Flow in Multi-player FPS gaming (.rtf file)

my reviews

here are a couple of reviews I wrote for joystick101.org

Mark J. P. Wolf's The Medium of the Video Game.
Arthur Asa Bergers Video Games: A Popular Culture Phenomenon.