~by Heidi
My preliminary survey is now closed (as of February 23), and I am examining the data from it in preparation for the “Media and Social Change” conference at Chatham University in April, where I will give a presentation. For purposes of this blog, I will discuss one finding per week here until the conference takes place.
What I sought to determine with my 10-question survey on SurveyMonkey was:
- The degree of overlap between people’s real-life genders, their preferred gender of character to play, and their preferred gender of NPC to romance in games.
- Why people romance NPC’s, what’s fun about romancing NPC’s, and what characteristics or qualities about NPC’s players think are attractive or unattractive.
- What games people play containing romance-able NPC’s and how important NPC romance is, overall, to their gaming experience.
I understand that SurveyMonkey isn’t the most scientific means of finding out more about people’s gaming behaviors. However, I’m not sure that games have metrics for this kind of stuff, and even if they did, they’d be proprietary, and there would be no way for a company to know for sure whether people who claimed to be male, or claimed to be female in real life, really are. This leaves us with self-reporting, which can be a risky thing.
In 1934, Richard LaPiere did a study to determine how closely people’s attitudes matched their behaviors. LaPiere traveled with a Chinese couple over the course of two years to some 251 hotels and restaurants across the US. In those days, there was a lot more bias toward Chinese people. During their visits to these establishments, they sought to test whether or not the Chinese people would be served. Six months after the travels, LaPiere sent questionnaires to the establishments, asking them whether they would serve Chinese people. 92% of the 128 responses stated that they would not serve Chinese people, even though they already had…six months earlier.
The importance of LaPiere’s study was that it showed a disconnect between people’s attitudes and behaviors, and pointed out flaws in self-reporting as a method of data collection. Barring actual game metrics that record players’ choices in-game, the best method we have available to measure players’ in-game behavior is self-reporting. One of the reasons someone might not give accurate answers is because they worry what others will thing of them. In order to encourage honesty, I made the survey anonymous. I don’t know whose responses belong to whom.
100% of my respondents answered the age and gender questions. The respondents were 52% male, 48% female, and ranging in age from 19 to 50 with an average age of 34. They seemed pretty evenly split along gender lines, and this pleased me. (I only used “male” and “female” as choices and realized later that I might have worded the question differently, according to how they identify, and might have offered other options than male or female. It is my intention to do so when I pursue further study on this topic.)
“Your survey made me a little uncomfortable,” laughed one 26-year-old male who had taken the survey. He was pleased that I’d kept it anonymous. I still wonder what his response might have been that made him uncomfortable.
When asked “Which gender character do you prefer to play as in a role-playing game?” the respondents’ answers changed a bit. 61% said that they prefer to play female characters, and 39% said that they prefer to play male characters. We can’t tell from just these numbers whether there are females playing males, or females playing females…these figures probably do include some examples of both. However, a very likely explanation for the difference in these figures is that some men like to play female characters.The assumption would be, from a developers’ perspective, that 52% of the respondents are male, therefore, 52% of males would say that they prefer to play male characters. That didn’t happen here. There’s a 9% difference which appears to be on the male side.
The respondents were asked, “What gender NPC do you prefer to romance?” Here’s where things get VERY interesting. The choices they had were male, female, either/both, or neither. 35% said they prefer to romance female, 14% said they romance male, 35% said they will romance either or both, and 16% said they won’t romance. This could lead us to a couple of conclusions:
- Over one third of respondents will engage in same-sex romance. This very well could be guys playing as girls and romancing girls because they like to see girl on girl. I expect that this does amount for some of this overlap. However, if we have 52% of our respondents saying they are male, and 70% will romance women AND/OR men, that means we do have some men who are experimenting in both directions. Whether they’re doing that as a male character or as a female character isn’t clear and I’ll seek to unravel that one with my next survey.
- Females make up 48% of the respondents, but only 14% prefer to romance male. This means that female players are also experimenting with gender in NPC romance fairly often.
- Perhaps players would rather not romance at all than romance a male…lol!
In conclusion, my survey has found that about 1/4 of players prefer to play as the opposite gender, and that there is even more crossover in terms of which gender NPC a player will romance. This is a finding I hope to expand on with the bigger survey, and get more responses for. 37 respondents is an extremely small sample pool. LaPiere warns that people’s attitudes do not match their behavior, but in this case, the answers were uncomfortable enough that I believe people (mostly friends and co-workers) were telling the truth and not just trying to mess up my data.
All We Need is Love 