Nature Leseul

So litagemini posted a link to this a few days ago.

As far as I can tell, this random blogger had a crappy relationship with her husband, decided video games were to blame for it, and went on to decide that "game widows" are a massive silent social phenomenon that she needs to speak out about. It's unclear what qualifications she has to make such a sweeping claim, but she has written a book on it. And there are some fairly sane voices that she claims have endorsed said book, so maybe she does make her case better there than she does in her blog, but the linked post and the others in her blog are pretty weak, based on badly flawed pop statistics and negative stereotypes about gamers that sound more like a rant about her husband's specific perceived flaws than about serious psychological research of the gamer population as a whole.

Now, the paragraph that jumped out at me from her "crunching the numbers" post is this.

If we’re talking Massively Multi-player Online (MMO) widows and widowers, it makes sense to work from the sales figures of the most popular MMO, World of Warcraft (WoW). According to a Blizzard Entertainment press release, there were 10 million people playing WoW as of July 2008. According to Nick Yee’s research, the average MMO player is spending 22 hours a week online. Of those gamers, 30.5% of MMO players are male and dating, 26.2% are female and dating, 33.1% are male and engaged, married or separated, and 60.3% are female and either engaged, married or separated. This means that there are more than five million adult female game widows either dating, engaged to, married to, or separated from a gamer who spends about 22 hours a week playing online, and about one and a quarter million adult men experiencing the same situation with a woman gamer.

Now, there's plenty wrong with using the statistics this way, primarily the fact that she tries to imply (both here, and in her later paragraph about PS2 sales and demographics) that anyone who is dating a gamer qualifies as a "game widow." litagemini has made a pretty good post about other specific errors made in the use of these numbers, and others cited in the article, so I won't go into that too much.

But what I want to point out is that 22 hours number. This blogger seems to be trying to suggest that 22 hours is a huge amount of time to spend on an activity, and anyone who spends that much time must be neglecting his girlfriend in order to do it.

Well, let's crunch some numbers on that topic. There are 168 hours in a week. Assume that the population of MMO players gets 8 hours of sleep a night, and works 40 hours (though the reality is probably lower in both cases). That's 56 hours of sleep, and 40 hours working, leaving 72 hours of leisure time. 22 hours is a bit over 30% of 72 hours. So, taking that (already flawed) 22 hour figure at face value, that would mean that the average MMO player is spending roughly a third of his free time playing WoW. Just a third.

Now, I would not consider a relationship in which someone spends a third of his free time doing something other than paying attention to his girlfriend "game widowhood." In my world, that's what we call a "healthy relationship."

And I'm tempted to argue that this is a symptom of a culture that is inundated with deeply damaging messages about relationships, and tends to make people feel like their partner (singular, of course) needs to involve them in absolutely every aspect of their lives, and that anything less is symptomatic of "commitment-phobia," if not outright cheating.

But when I think about it, that's really not even true. I expect that plenty of people spend a third of their time watching football, going drinking at bars, playing poker, going to beauty parlors, going shopping, and so on with "normal" activities, and yet you never hear anyone whining about "football widows" or "shopping widows." It's more just gaming in particular, and the fact that the negative stereotypes of games and gamers that many people in our culture still hold make people feel that if someone gets that excited about something that is "just a game," then something must be wrong.

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I do have to point out this sentence, from a fan letter this blogger received regarding her book:

I read an article awhile back on the front page of the [Seattle] Times about people selling virtual money – for those of us that are not gamers it seems so bazaar.

Given the level of literacy evinced by the rest of that quoted letter, that's probably a misspelling rather than deliberate cleverness, but it's pretty awesome in either case.