Gamertell

According to a recent article published in the SouthTown Star and written by GateHouse News Service, online gamers may have been wrongly stereotyped.

Of the 7,000 online gamers researchers interviewed who played EverQuest 2, a MMO (Massively Multiplayer Online game), they are not the overweight rotund teenage boys most people once thought they were.

Scott Caplan, an associate professor of communication at the University of Delaware, studied players along with colleagues from the University of Southern California and Palo Alta Research Center. The group shared their findings with GateHouse News Service during an interview where they said they found online gamers to be 31 years old and older, physically fit and mostly female.

Some of the information Caplan and his researchers were able to gather came from in-game surveys provided by Sony Online Entertainment from its large database of gamers who have played EverQuest 2 since its launch in November 2004.

There have been a lot of research done on the impact of video games since 1983 but Caplan claims that this particular research would mark the first of its kind in which a industry game corporation worked with a research team to perform a customer-based study.

Sadly, according to the article Caplan’s research team found that most of the gamers interviewed reported substance abuse and depression.

But due to stereotyping, my guess is the non-gaming community and parent patrol organizations would report that video games caused these gamers to consume drugs and depression.

Caplan’s findings and research papers can be found online as a PDF file at Wiley InterScience Journal.

Read [SouthTown Star] PDF [Wiley InterScience.com]