I came across a batch of really neat stastistical data recently that is very important to what I do for a living, which is get paid to know a lot about online gamers, especially the hardcore gamers that play mostly first person shooters.

This survey was massive and I won't go into it in great detail, but suffice it to say that it was packed full of really interesting data about the habits of FPS gamers, both PC and console. But there seemed to be one glaring problem I had with it. The first thing the survey said (crap, here comes Richard Dawson) was that it polled X male gamers.

Now I want to say right off the bat that I am not calling "gender bias!!" At least not accusatorially (Mirriam-Webster is failing to tell me if this is actually a word or not). It's a well-known fact that most women just don't play first-person shooters.

Or is it?

See, this is the problem I have with this survey. That "fact" is the first thing to pop into my head as justification for surveying only male gamers. But is it a fact? The truth is, I can't remember when I last saw a survey that polled gamers, male and female, and showed the breakdown of male and female FPS gamers. It's a commonly accepted belief in the gaming industry that we don't play them (with a few exceptions, of course, like myself), but when has the industry last proved this to be true?

This survey went into disgustingly beautiful detail about the breakdown and demographics of FPS gamers, telling me everything but how often they go to the bathroom each day. And yet right from the starting line, it failed to start at the broadest scale it could have possible started with by including female gamers.

This bothered the statistician in me. It was like hearing someone say, "I'm going to learn about what cows like to eat. But since everyone knows that only brown cows eat, I'll only ask brown cows the questions." Admittedly it's more commonly known that few women play FPS games than it is non-brown cows that don't eat, but the principle is the same. In recent years, it seems that more and more women are getting into FPS games. Halo seems to have done the most when it comes to attracting female gamers; so many guys are talking about how it's one of the few games their girlfriend enjoys playing with them in co-op mode. That doesn't mean that the numbers have risen significantly, but when was the last time we actually saw those numbers? Who has done a survey on it? I haven't seen it, and I feel pretty sure I would have seen one had it been done.

This survey could have very easily set out to show that this basic assumption was true (or maybe even not true), and thus set itself on the proper scientific path toward breaking down a demographic. They could have even possibly done interesting analysis with the data, but even if they weren't interested in that, the survey's data would have been far more grounded to me if I'd seen it start with "X gamers polled -> 98% male, 2% female -> Of the 98% male..."

So in the end, I'm not really bothered by the obvious bias against female gamers — even though I haven't seen a survey taken looking for the data I want to see, I'd bet money that the numbers aren't significant enough to have affected this survey much at all. But it bothered the scientist in me. Scientists do employ first-order assumptions; it's common in astronomy and astrophysics to make an assumption when doing models, for instance, in order to simply your first approximations toward a solution. Then you refine your model from there in order to get rid of the simplified situations and get closer to a real-world situation.

But this is a case where this first approximation just wasn't needed. I would have loved to have seen the data on how many female gamers participated in the survey had they included them in it. So next time, survey people, no assumptions. Start with the cleanest knowledge slate you can and go from there.