GAMERS ARE NERDS, RIGHT?
Wrong, says a new study from the United States that has surveyed more than thousand people via the internet. The video game streaming network, Twitch, decided to put to the sword the age-old maxim that gamers are nerds and asocial beings. They’ve concluded that gamers are, on the contrary, more social, more successful and more educated than non-gamers.
Surprised? The devil may be in the detail. The study defines a ‘gamer’ as anyone who has played a game on a digital device over the last sixty days. So if you’ve popped onto your phone for a quick fix of Candy Crush for only a few minutes in the last two months, the study defines you as a gamer. A bit of a loose definition, one might say.
Regardless, different parameters were tested, and in almost all of them gamers scored higher than their non-gaming counterparts. For instance, gamers were more likely to agree with the statement: ‘My friends are the most important thing in my life.’ Gamers were more likely to be employed full-time, believe it or not, and they’re more likely to be living surrounded by people, such as family, friends or significant others.
Twitch’s vice-president of marketing, Matt DiPietro, said, ‘There’s this perception that [the community] comprises loners and rejects … and that couldn’t be more wrong,” he said. “We didn’t go in with an idea of what the data would show, but we knew what we thought the data would show, and it showed what we knew to be true.’
There may be a bit of confirmation bias in his statement, but at least now we know better than to cast all gamers with the ‘nerd’ brush.
