Hot Button Issues

Quantic Foundry surveyed 1,127 gamers in 2015 to measure agreement with polarizing statements about games and gamers, covering topics such as free-to-play monetization, gender and ethnic inclusiveness, game quality, the legitimacy of casual platforms, violence, and the value of gaming. Responses were rated on an agree-disagree scale of one to five and analyzed by consensus, average agreement, gender difference, and correlation with age.

Gamers showed the strongest agreement that video games are an art form (mean 4.32), that online relationships can be as genuine as face-to-face ones (4.26), and that games teach valuable skills and life lessons (4.23). Inclusiveness in gender and ethnicity also drew solid support (3.85). Exclusionary or deterministic claims were firmly rejected: games should cater exclusively to men (1.17), women are biologically wired for only certain games (1.38), and men are inherently better at action and strategy games (1.59). Respondents also rejected the notions that games are mindless diversions (1.63) and that violent games are partly responsible for gun violence (1.61).

The most divisive statements, measured by standard deviation, were refusing to ever pay real money in free-to-play games (SD 1.30), whether Facebook games are real games (1.29), declining game quality (1.20), inclusiveness (1.20), and games being too dumbed down and casual (1.20). Opinions on these sat near the middle of the scale, while the male-only statement showed the highest consensus (SD 0.49).

Gender differences were mostly statistically significant but substantively small given the sample size. The clearest gaps were that women were more supportive of inclusiveness (t = 8.54), while men were more likely to agree that games are too dumbed down and casual (t = -8.49). Age correlations were generally weak. Older gamers were somewhat more likely to say Wii games are not real games (r = 0.26), while younger gamers were somewhat more accepting of kids playing mature-rated games (r = -0.14) and more likely to view games as art.