Female and on Facebook? Stick with FarmVille

A 40-ish woman playing Diner Dash on Facebook? Game developer Kabam says you are not its target audience, and created a survey to make its brand of role-playing game more attractive to younger men.

The study by social game developer Kabam, polled 1,412 people on their social gaming habits and found that 82 percent of "hardcore social gamers," defined as playing more than one kind of social game, also play games on video game consoles, according to the survey.While the survey did give some new information, such as people who play social games on Facebook or MySpace spend less time and money on video game consoles such as XBox and PlayStation, it seems to focus a lot on dividing men and women through social gaming. 

VentureBeat said the takeaway from the story was that it dispelled the myth that most social gamers were women in their 40s, but in reality the survey absurdly cuts the gamers up into "hardcore social gamers" and "casual social gamers" which has nothing to do with playing frequency. Instead the labels HSG and CSG are based on the type of games played, a cloudy concept that means each HSG also has to play a role-playing or "strategy" game such as "Glory of Rome."  The HSGs have an average age of 36.8 and are 55 percent male.

The CSGs have an average age of 46.4 and are 61 percent female, and this category is relegated to such girly games as Diner Dash, CityVille and Bejwelled Blitz. To us, it just seems kind of an arbitrary distinction -- almost as if Kabam wanted to court more young men and diss soccer moms, likely because it makes games for HSGs.

We would like to see less distinctions made between men and women on the Internet, and a study like this causes more division than enlightenment.

Contact Us