The Average Sports Gamer, Dissected And Analyzed

There are many types of gamers out there, and each camp has their own views of the other. And some of it, is not very nice. Yet at the end of the day, pretty much everyone respects and loves each other. Despite coming from totally different worlds, the hardcore MMO player has much in common with the 2D fighting fanatic.

But the sports gamer is the redheaded stepchild of the gaming community. Almost no one "gets" them. Which might be the reason why Who are sports gamers? A large scale study of sports video game players, a study conducted by two members of the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab and one individual hailing from Concordia University, Canada, exists in the first place.

The study, conducted early last year, was based upon responses from 1,718 players who were classified as sports gamers. Respondents were at least 18 years old, with over 98% of them being male. The majority of them fell within the 18 to 24 age brackets.

The findings, which was recently highlighted by Polygon, uncovers some fairly unsurprising facts that are still fun to read, if only because of how they were extracted in the first place:

• In addition to playing sports games, other favorite genres include shooters (68.3%), action (59.4%), and action RPGs (50.1%)
• The least favorite genre was MMOs, just 16.4%
• Here's a shocker; very few of them played Facebook games, only 18%
• As for platform of choice (with overlap), 60.3% swore by the PS3, and even 60% prefers the Xbox 360, and 58% chose PC

That last bit is perhaps the most noteworthy; when one thinks of the average Madden fan, one things of someone relaxing on a couch, sitting in front a living room TV. Apparently that's not necessarily the case.

Abe Stein, who led the study, also noted that respondents gave "very private and emotional stories" when asked to relate a meaningful experience that occurred when playing a sports title. Again, the stereotype that such gamers are not nearly as sophisticated or intellectual when compared to their brethren are, like most, totally unfounded and without any real basis in reality.