 |
 |
|
The Pew Internet and American Life Project has just published a survey of kids aged 12-17 about their videogaming habits. The big surprise is that 99% of boys in that age group play videogames. Wow. Who knew that one in a hundred boys didn't play videogames? I would have pegged the number at something more reasonable, like one in a million.
Some other surprising findings:
* The most popular genre is racing games (74% of the kids said they played them). The least popular is MMOs (21% of kids played them).
* Half of all the boys surveyed picked as their favorite game something M-rated (mostly Halo 3).
* The game mentioned most often when kids were asked to name their top three games was Guitar Hero.
* I'm going to quote this next part since it's uh, a little strange:Black and Hispanic teens are more likely than white teens to play fighting games and survival horror games. White and Hispanic teens are more likely to play rhythm games than black teens. White youth are more likely to play MMOGs than black teens (but not Hispanic teens).
Overall, it's an encouraging survey. There's an attempt to give it a positive spin in terms of how gaming can be a social activity and a way for parents to relate to their children. The bad news is that kids who comment on message boards are more likely to be engaged politically. If you've ever perused the discussion forums at IGN or Gamespot, you know this bodes poorly for the future of our country. Just imagine those guys actually voting.
You can download the survey results here.
Frakjack
Welcome to Eureka
Carter's Car Dodge
By Greg at 12:12 PM ON 09/17/08
The breakdown by race doesn't give any information that can be properly analyzed because there is no cross referencing and some odd assumptions.
One good cross-reference would be an economic breakdown of those surveyed as compared with race. Economics would probably be a better indicator of habit and correlation than race, but because of unequal racial distributions, the appearance that race matters would tend to mislead people.
Cultural aspects, such as religion and philosophical leaning would also most likely come before any racial considerations.
Many statements on the report have odd assumptions implied. Is it good to be political or involved in civic activities? That is a moral judgment. If a parent doesn’t know what games their child is playing, how will he/she know? So how can they properly answer the question? And because the method of acquiring respondents was via random dialing on the telephone, how might this demographic of people slant the data? My family uses nothing but cellular phones, we don’t have a hard-line in our home so we would never be surveyed, so my family’s demographic is skipped. When I did have a hard-line I would hang up on calls like this.
Research should always be presented with the raw data because data can be messaged to fit pretty much any agenda you want it to follow. People shouldn't discuss and argue a researcher/scientists findings, they should be discussing and arguing about the data. Findings are opinions about data. Researchers or scientists may be great at collecting data, but when it comes to interpretation, they work from their own limitations just like everyone else.
By Tom Chick at 5:35 PM ON 09/17/08
Greg, did you look over the survey? I seem to recall there was an attempt to address the economic breakdown of the families. At any rate, great comments. Thanks so much for posting those.