World of CasualCraft, Part 2

So it seems I wasn't entirely clear about what I was looking for in my last post. Although I wanted to answer chaoticgood's statement about my WoW friends being more sexually active than your typical nerd, I wanted to go about it in a different way. What I wanted to show was that the kind of person who would play WoW is possibly more likely to be the kind of person who enjoys being in a social setting, and meeting new people. I know that isn't true about everyone (I know someone who played WoW and suffers from social anxiety), but I think compared to games such as Counter-Strike or Starcraft, World of Warcraft is more likely to attract a more social-minded audience.

Again, I need to add more disclaimers, correlation is by no means causation (so going out and buying WoW isn't going to get you laid!), my sample is biased, I am only looking at whether someone has lost their virginity rather than whether they are currently sexually active (which does make a difference).

So for anyone that missed it, since it kinda got eaten when I tried to post it, my "results" were:

Total WoW-friends: 63
Total assumed to have had sex: 45
% of total: 71.4%

Total non-WoW-friends: 75
Total assumed to have had sex: 34
% of total: 45.3%

I would do t-tests and stuff, but I'm kinda lazy, you can see the difference is quite large. I'd also like to emphasize that the sample was of gamers, so this doesn't indicate that non-gamers are less likely to have had sex than WoW players (which everyone seems to assume is untrue, I wonder if anyone has done a study on that...)! So going with these results, what are some of the reasons that could explain this?

As chaoticgood mentioned in a comment, WoW tends to be more of a social game, and this may attract more social-minded players. So rather than a game that prompts a "LOL, n00b, I pwned you" attitude, WoW and other MMOs tend to be a game where you build up a character and join a community to accomplish goals. While it's not impossible, it is quite difficult (and for most of your journey it will be lonely) to do a lot of the things in the game without having other people.

I read somewhere that WoW has a higher female:male ratio than most games, so perhaps it has a higher pick-up potential. I think one of the factors that caused a bias is that WoW is one of the games you can bring your partner to. MrMan5.5 and I have tried playing a few games together, but WoW seems to be the best game that we can actually play together. When we try to play TF2 together, we usually get separated, or one of us gets auto-balanced to the other team. When we played DotA/HoN together, it seemed like we spent more time in different lanes because of our different playstyles.

The reason for the title of this post though, is that WoW seems to be a really casual game now. It took me hours of practice before I managed to even make it to gold rank in Starcraft 2, and probably years of practice before I was half-decent at DotA/HoN. It seems that WoW doesn't have that great a skill curve. Sure, if you want to be gladiator, you need to be incredibly skilled, but to do normal stuff, it doesn't seem that way anymore. In vanilla WoW, healing seemed so much harder, because mana management was actually an issue. Now I heal without even looking at my mana bar. I joined Chris and Brookiee's ICC group one night, and they had managed to get to Lich King, the last boss. The warlock in the group was a complete moron, and yet he managed to get to the last boss of what is currently the hardest instance in the game.

It seems that in a game like WoW, where you can be carried by gear, and gear drops from trees, it attracts more of a casual playerbase. So people who prefer doing things on weekends that don't involve sitting in front of the computer may prefer playing a game that you can play for a few hours a week. I know that it seems weird for an MMO to be a casual game, but at the moment, you can play a little and still do reasonably well. Gone are the days of having to farm a lot each day in order to keep up.

Thoughts? Suggestions for more research? I would like to do a study on gamers and sexual activity, but I don't think anyone would answer me, because it's a bit of a dodgy question!