Thread by @lucentile

theesa.com/wp-content/upl… -- If you want to read the document this article is about -- also, this new "don't link the article in the main tweet thing" means quote tweets don't catch the article link when you retweet. But, I'm here for you: dexerto.com/gaming/viral-s… x.com/Dexerto/status…

Also, for all the people saying "phone games don't count!?!!?!," here are the requirements to be a gamer. "At least one hour." That means someone who pops in to say hey to their guild once a week and runs one roulette in FF14 would count as much as someone doing raid prog.

The weirdest thing about this (blue is male, red is female), is that "skill and chance" is a single category. I guess they didn't want to ask people: "Yo, you gamble?"

Seeing *lots* of tweets like this that didn't engage with the report at all, just the Dextero tweet.

Look, the data here doesn't tell us anything -- and given a good chunk of men also prefer mobile... how do we know most men gamers aren't candy crushers?

https://x.com/TheCriticalDri2/status/1978017671166767416

I even get the criticisms of using the term gamer or the study -- but most of these people didn't even bother to find the report and just are gut reacting to the Dextero tweet.

But, these gut reactions of "lol, the Sims and Candy Crush aren't real gaming" isn't making an argument. This isn't trying to determine the level of gamerness, the "gamer score" or whatever -- this is just a binary: "Do you game" study.

If you think large, triple AAA studios are going to be "tricked" into thinking "well, this means that women are buying our games just as much as other people," you're wrong. They've got better demographic information than this at their fingertips.

If we want better data on "which gender are the real gamers," well, first, we'd need to define "what is a real gamer?" Do we remove all mobile players? What if someone plays the mobile FFT game religiously? Are they a gamer?

Would Tetris not count any more for a "gamer" since Candy Crush and similar mobile puzzle games don't -- or does Tetris get grandfathered in because it is older?

These are the sorts of questions you'd have to answer and explain to get a deeper "true gamer" sort of study.

Which is why we won't see that. We'll proxy it by "who watches Asmongold" and other big game streamers, looking at big games like Battlefield, MMOs, etc. Men likely, by the way, are a much, much bigger "true gamer" market. But that's not what Power of Play was trying to answer.

Here's the text of the study before the charts. Even Power of Play's introduction doesn't really talk about gender. People will try and use it to talk about gender, but the actual document itself isn't really making any major statements (unless it's buried somewhere I missed.)

I do like that Canada, and Canada: Quebec get two separate entries.

By the way, looking at the top three genres, combined with the "Favorite Device" for the United States... and it looks like mobile slop is probably one of the predominant ways Americans are gaming.

The only countries Puzzle isn't #1: China, India, Brazil, Mexico, United Arab Emirates.

In case you want the list of genres, these are the genre lists (orange is over 55, green is under 35; red is female, blue is male).

So, TL;DR? The study is just a binary check of people who play any game more than an hour.

People reading into it more than that, or misrepresenting it as more than that, didn't read the paper -- and you should ignore their commentary about it.

@threadreaderapp -- unroll please