I was flipping through Nick Yee's web site and ran across a rather surprising statistic from one of his surveys: half of people playing MMOs are the oldest child.

Insert the usual caveats here: this was a self-selecting survey in an unknown game (probably World of Warcraft) with about 3,000 respondents.

Also on the linked survey page are the observations that players are liberal and not religious. As a conservative Catholic, no wonder I have such a difficult time clicking with the people I play with. On top of that, I'm a middle child. Woe is me.

I invite folks to poke around on Nick's site. It's full of fascinating bits of information about MMO player demographics. Sadly, Nick recently decided to stop work on the Daedalus Project, which was the name of his long-running survey program.

 Intresting surveys. Expecially for the political aspect.

Interesting how it pretty much described me, oldest child, and not religious hmmm, well got to go log in my mmo...

I am the oldest child in my family.

oldest too.. but others in familly play mmos to some extend ..

there is no such thing as god or religion either..

I just crunched some stats after looking at average household stats, and either something very profound is happening here with the eldest child, or this guy is full of it and/or his methodology is highly flawed. Occam suggests the the latter, and I'm inclined to agree.

A) All players in china are the olderst, one child rule, and they make up most mmorpgs.

B) Oldest children are more likely to answer surveys.

Originally posted by JB47394

Also on the linked survey page are the observations that players are liberal and not religious. As a conservative Catholic, no wonder I have such a difficult time clicking with the people I play with. On top of that, I'm a middle child. Woe is me.

I feel your pain. Youngest and semi-religious.

The information on gender and age distribution was very interesting too.

Originally posted by Isamright33

A) All players in china are the olderst, one child rule, and they make up most mmorpgs.

B) Oldest children are more likely to answer surveys.

A. This is actually an argument that the data is flawed, as there is a choice for "only child". It could be that kids are so stupid these days they don't know what "only child is". It could be that in this ridiculous self-esteem fluffing world that kids purposely lie and consider themselves "eldest children" because "only" seems to  be "lacking".

B.  Why? Uusually the oldest child ends up with the most responsibilities and are less likely to have time for games.

That dude just does garbage studies, like his "liberal" verus "conservative" survey is so flawed I can only guess the moron is a sociology major.

Half are the oldest child, the other half aren't. Doesn't sound ground breaking to me.

Originally posted by skeaser

Half are the oldest child, the other half aren't. Doesn't sound ground breaking to me.

Half is actually a pretty big amount. 'Only childs' had their own category and even though there are many families with two kids, there are quite a few with more as well. So half is a disproportionally large amount I suppose.

I have a theory, though; Oldest kids are the ones who had to face that big nasty world alone, without 'example bro's and sis's' and with parent's still being overly worried and protective; they are more likely to develop a strong imagination by being forced to be independent thinkers. And they are more likely to develop an interest in cognitive past times, rather than outside, social activities because of that outside world being a little more intimidating to them.

But that is just my hunch as a firm believer of the huge impact things have on a person's character at an early age.

sweet im a minority, im the youngest of three

Well, I'm the oldest, and not religious. Don't really give a damn about politics. My younger brother does play a LOT more on MMO's than me... he's on WoW almost every hour of the day, where I typically spend around 2-3 hours on Lotro, if i do go on that day, which I don't always do.

Wow, oldest, non-religious.  I AM A STATISTIC.

im the youngest child actually.. hmm, what went wrong with me?

I'm the oldest child, but I tend to be very conservative and religious, however I can see how there would be a lot of liberals...it explains all the no life whiners

OOOOooooooOOOOOOOOOooooooOOOOOOO

I'm just kidding though. I don't want to turn this into a political/religious bash thread. It doesn't matter who you are in real life in MMOs. You are someone totally different and that's ok. That's the point of MMORPGs.

You can be whoever you want to be.

I am an only child, atheist, student, libertarian, so I meet 2 of the 4, not sure if you consider libertarians liberal or conservative.

The other ones are interesting too, I liked the one about how people build their characters.