Video Game Player Stereotypes

Are video game players all male, fat, agressive bastards? This article dwells deeply into testosterone playing ground! ESA in USA has made a survey on the profile of the average gamer.

ENTERTAINMENT SOFTWARE ASSOCIATION (ESA), whose members are "guilty" for 90% of the $7 billion in entertainment software sales in the U.S. in 2003, and billions more in export sales of American-made entertainment software has made a survey about the profile of typical American video game players.
Its results are somewhat different from the usual public view on people who love to play video games.

"Computer and video game players spend more than three times the amount of time exercising or playing sports, volunteering in the community, reading, or engaging in religious, creative, and cultural activities than they do playing video games."

THE ARTICLE ALSO DISMISSES THE OBESITY GUILT that is often beeing used as a con argument in debates about the influence of video games on youth. The question is, is this just an attempt made by the industry to "soften" the public view on video games and gamers, or is the general public view simply too "hard"?

FOLLOWING THE TRAIL OF THIS RESEARCH and visiting the official ESA web opened more interesting, and sometimes unexpected statistical facts, like, 39% of people who play computer and video games are women and 41% of game players are over 35 years old. So, parents like to play games too. That could explain a lot about the state of the world if the "violence" argument con-gamers gladly push was true.

Video games perfect scapegoat for aggression

NEXT INTERESTING READ CAME FROM the "Games & Youth violence" section. For some time now, video games turn out to be a perfect scapegoat for every agression act that happens involving young people. Apparently that is quite different from the opinion experts have on that subject.

"At present, it may be concluded that the research evidence is not supportive of a major public concern that violent video games lead to real-life violence."
-- Washington State Department of Health: Office of Epidemiology

and another interesting fact everyone seems to forget when they speak
of those evil gamers:

"On September 25, 2002 33 media scholars, historians, psychologists, and games researchers filed a brief with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit opposing a law that bars minors from video games containing "graphic violence." The scholars' brief states that most laboratory experiments and other efforts to prove adverse effects from media violence have yielded null results."

So, are we all doomed to start flipping someday, take our favourite Gauss rifle and start shooting on neighbours dogs because they kind of look like zerglings?
Follow up on this discussion on our forum.

Links
gosugamers.net - Gosugamers forum thread
yahoo.com - Yahoo article
theesa.com - Official ESA site