We’ve covered the basic demographics before - age, gender, hours played per week (which really haven’t changed much over time btw), so here we’ll look at other player demographics. I’ve never really asked about birth order before and the results were somewhat surprising. MMO players seem to be more likely to be the eldest in the family than would be expected from chance alone. This may be a confound with something else that I’m not thinking of, but I’m not sure what it might be. Post a comment if you have a guess why this might be.

I also asked players whether they were full-time students, full-time home-makers, or retired. Given that the average female MMO player is slightly older than the average male MMO player, the difference in the full-time student category makes sense. The data also showed that about 20% of female players and 5% of male players were full-time home-makers.