I was shocked the other night when watching my standard nightly news to hear “new study reveals the average gamer is 35, fat, and bummed”. I didn’t get a chance to hear the whole story, so I looked up the article here on MSNBC:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32463904/ns/technology_and_science-games/
I gotta admit, I was amazed. This new study by the CDC (Center for Disease Control) suggests that gamers are introverts who use gaming as a social support system. Women use it to enhance their moods, essentially using gaming as a coping mechanism.
“Female video-game players reported greater incidents of depression and “lower health status” than women who do not play video games researchers said, while male players reported a higher BMI and more Internet use time than nonplayers.”
“An implication of that, researchers said, is that “habitual use of video games as a coping response may provided a genesis for obsessive-compulsive video-game playing, if not video-game addiction.”
The most interesting part of this survey to me is that it was conducted in the Seattle-Tacoma because our media market is the 13th largest in the nation and we have the highest internet-usage of anywhere in the nation.
Here are my thoughts on this article: I would be interested to know what other areas of the country (like LA, New York, etc.) may have similar results to our small metro area. Honestly, I did not read the entire article written by the CDC, so I do not know how thoroughly they did their research. Could the depression reported be linked to other specific Pacific NW problems (Seasonal Affective Disorder for one)? Our internet usage is directly proportionate to the amount of IT jobs we have around. What about people who don’t have to be on the internet all day for work purposes?
Who fits the mold of this study?
I’ll go first: I’m 23, 5’5″, 130lbs (on a good day), a self-proclaimed extrovert, and have no clinical signs of depression. I use social networking sites to communicate with friends, but I also have a life outside of those sites. I play video games on average less than an hour a day (depending on which game is/coming out).
Readers!? Thoughts? Impressions? Are you a fat, lazy, depressed slob too?
