Surprising Gamer Study: Avatar Gender Preference Remains Unchanged for Over 20 Years -- And Very Few Female Gamers Choose Male Avatars

Here’s a fascinating new report on avatars and gender from longtime game culture researcher Nick Yee, based on a survey of nearly 3,000 gamers. Nick’s topline takeaway is that 1 in 3 men prefer to play as female avatars, which is more than many might assume.

Two other learnings stand out to me even more:

Avatar gender preferences among players have remained basically the same since Nick started studying questions like this during the peak of Everquest -- over two decades ago! This despite the fact that MMOs have become much more mainstream since then, attracting many millions of players where they once only drew hundreds of thousands.

“This implies that whatever is causing this to happen (for both male and female players) has been consistent for the past 20 years,” Nick tells me, “so it's a function of some stable sociological dynamic and/or how we've been making games/avatars for the past 20 years. 

“Back in EQ days, I think it was easy to imagine that this phenomenon was idiosyncratic to MMOs, because the genre was more niche back then. But perhaps the MMO findings were always pointing at deeper, stable findings given that much of MMO mechanics and the live services model is now everywhere.” (In other words, online games like Overwatch and Fortnite also have heavy MMO features.)

Nick’s other standout finding: Very few females want to play as male avatars. Seriously few:

In a typical core PC/console game, there would be 230 female players —175 prefer female characters, 21 prefer male characters, and the remaining 25 have no preference… In the most extreme example of a game that is only played by women, only 9% of that player base would want a playable male character.

Emphasis mine! This despite the fact that female gamers/avatars consistently experience harassment from male players. “Going undercover” as a male avatar would be an easy way for them to escape that abuse, but most females still prefer to have a female avatar.

Nick tells me he’s still pondering that result:

“I was wondering that too and I'm not sure. But I think this implies the factor driving this among female players is so strong that it's partly suppressing the desire to avoid harassment. Because I think if we saw a high percentage of women wanting to play male characters, we'd all just nod at the harassment explanation because it would seem like a totally reasonable explanation.”

Definitely deserves further study! In any case, the takeaway for game developers is pretty clear:

“Don't assume that only female players want playable female characters,” as Nick puts it. “Conduct market research in your target audience/genre to check these generalizations.”

Much more on Nick’s consulting site, Quantic Foundry.

Photo from New World Notes' 2017 post "Overwatch's Female Userbase Twice As Large As Other FPSes, Reports Nick Yee Of QuanticFoundry -- Here's Why".

Comments

[Kaylee West]

I wonder how these findings fit in with Yee's (and even earlier, Bartle's) taxonomy of player motivation?

[Wagner James Au]

Nick's taxonomy is pretty much expanded from Richard's version:

https://quanticfoundry.com/2021/08/05/character-gender/?fbclid=IwAR0j0sgTRTAIa2NC6ds5-OX3rE5GAibat-FhyIlxfFC9yWQZLMCuwDTdHjE#post/0

[setr]

My reasoning for playing as a female is quite simple... Cosmetics is really the only thing gender actually affects in most games, and its trivially clear the superior gender. They always have better outfits/models.

[George Djorgovski]

I wonder whether there is a difference between the action-based games (that would be most of them) which tend to involve fights and destruction, and the games and virtual worlds that are mostly social platforms or creative environments (e.g., SL, Sinespace, Opensim, Minecraft, etc.). Yee probably has the data to answer that.